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Another huffy growl.
“He wasn’t wrong?”
Chuff.
“But you just…” I stared at him.
He turned his head pointedly so that he was looking at the closed laptop sitting on the side table.
It took me a minute. “You want me to google it.”
Chuff.
Well, at least I felt like we were making communication strides. I sat up and pulled over the laptop, then noticed most of my pizza still sitting on my plate, so I picked up a piece and ate it. It was mostly cold. I didn’t care, both because I didn’t really have much of an appetite anymore and because cold pizza is just about as tasty as hot pizza.
I opened the laptop and typed inAztec dog.
And suddenly found a whole bunch of articles and pictures of dogs that looked more or less like my mostly hairless friend. Several of them had tufted crests of fur on their heads, some had weird scruffy comb-over-looking-things, although some had no hair at all.
Scrolling down found me articles on the animal’s history, and I clicked on that. It told me that the dogs had been believed to help ferry the dead to the underworld in Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec peoples, and were associated with the Aztec god Xolotl. Which explained the weird name, which was apparently a portmanteau—yeah, I can use fancy words as long as they aren’t Aztec—of the god’s name and the Aztec word for dog, ‘itzcuintli.’
I looked down at the dog. “I can’t say this,” I told him.
He cocked his head to the side, studying me with his one brown eye.
I turned the laptop around and pointed at the picture of the god. “Zo—Sho—lotel.”
I swear to God that fucking dog laughed at me.
“You can go fuck yourself, doggo. Just for that, I’m calling you Snoopy.”
He kept making that funny chuffing snort.
“Scooby-Do, then.”
The sneaky bastard reached over and stole a piece of my pizza.
“Okay, that’s uncool, Lassie. You got your own pizza.” He had admittedly eaten all of it already, while I still had three—two, now—slices left.
Meeting my eyes, the little bastard bolted the pizza.
“Well, I can’t fucking say Sho-lo-tel, so we’re not using that,” I told him.
He regarded me blandly.
“How about Anubis?” I suggested, since that was the only other dog-headed god of death I could think of. And I could at least say it.
He kept staring at me, then sighed and chuffed.
“Anubis it is, bud. At least until you either shift back and tell me what your name actually is, or I find you somehow. Deal?”
Chuff.
He started eyeing my pizza again, and I sighed. After everything I wasn’t really all that hungry anymore, anyway. “Go ahead and eat it.”
5
It took approximatelyfive minutes for everyone in—and a few people not in—the precinct to learn that my dog’s name was Anubis. Or, more accurately, to learn that the shifter-pretending-to-be-my-dog’s stand-in name was Anubis. It was still fucking with my head, and I called him ‘bud’ and ‘doggo’ about ten times more often than I called him ‘Anubis.’
