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Well, at least that meant somebody hadn’t shaved it to torture it. And it probably didn’t have mange.
“Okay, then. You gonna let me touch you, bud?”
The dog shivered and whined, but didn’t back away or growl.
I took that as a good sign and slowly reached out to at least do a cursory check for injuries by running my hands over its body, starting with the head. That’s a thing vets did, right?
Not that I had any idea what the fuck I was doing.
The dog let me touch it, and I was surprised at how soft the brush of hair on its head was, and I had the most absurd desire to play with it—not at that precise moment, of course, what with the murder scene and the blood and the dumpster full of reeking trash, some of which smelled like it might have been actual shit.
I carefully ran my hands along its back, feeling the muscles shaking under my fingers. When I went to touch its legs, it backed away again with another whine, although I wasn’t sure if that’s because it didn’t want me touching its legs because they were injured or because it had just had enough of me.
What had possessed the dog to jump in here injured in the first place—
“Hey, doggo, was something trying to hunt you? Did you jump in here so it couldn’t smell you anymore?”
I got another whine, although this one sounded less upset and more curious.
The damn dog is a shifter, I reminded myself.And probably is actually trying to communicate with you, you dumbass.
“I tracked him here,” Doc pointed out.
“Yeah, well, that just means that whatever was tracking him wasn’t an orc.”
“Or another shifter,” Doc replied.
“Or that. So what? Ghoul? Vamp?”
The dog whined.
“They had a vampire hunting you?”
Whine.
“Why?”
The dog stared at me.
“You do know dogs can’t actually speak in words, right?” Doc asked, sounding amused.
“As you so eloquently reminded me, this is not a fucking dog.” I looked at the creature in question. “Are you?”
Another whine, although this one had a timbre I couldn’t quite follow.
“Stop scaring the poor thing, Hart,” Doc admonished me, and I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Doc has that effect on people—he can absolutely make you feel like you just shat in somebody’s pie.
“I’m not scaring it,” I muttered.
“Yes, you are,” came the response, and, when I looked over at him with a scowl to ask how the hell he could possibly know that, he tapped the side of his nose.
Fucking orc senses. It was one thing to be able to smell shifters or blood or whatever it was that had led him to the dumpster. But the big green asshole could smellfear. Literally. Hell, maybe that’s what he’d smelled that had led him to the dog in the first place.
I sighed. “Look, pooch. I’m trying to do my job here. And my job is figuring out who killed our victim, andyou, my hairless friend, are covered in blood. If it’s yours, we need to get you to an ER. If it’s hers, then I want to know what you know. And if it’s both, we start with option A and move to option B.”
The dog stared at me with giant eyes, and its body trembled under my palm.
I felt like a complete dickhead.
