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“Give us a minute,” Beth murmured to Doc Jane. “Will you?”
“Yes, of course. Take all the time you need. We’ll make arrangements for the vet.”
That door opened and then re-shut, the fighters’ voices flaring and cutting off sharply, as if the assembled expected some sort of report about how he was handling the bad news—because they’d know the grim update already. They’d have read all the no-doubt grim on Jane’s face as she’d entered the room.
Wrath dragged a hand through his long hair. “They won’t be able to do anything for him.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If that’s what it is. Hemangiosarcoma isn’t treatable. Like, chemo doesn’t work. They can remove the spleen, but it’s a blood cancer. In the endothelial cells and the vessel walls. He might well have a tumor on his heart, too. It goes there.”
“Wait, what—how do you know all that?”
“You think I haven’t been preparing myself for this? I researched the most common causes of death in goldens about a month after he came into our lives. I just never thought it would be this soon. It’s too soon. It’s not right. It’s too—”
When his words got choked off, he thought, Nope. Not doing this again, ever.
Even if he spent the rest of his nights banging into walls and tripping over ottomans? Even if he fell on his goddamn face and knocked every shin he ever had, it was better than this. Anything was better than this.
“Maybe you’re wrong.” Beth cleared her throat. “Like Jane said, we need a vet, a good one. And then we’ll see what they can tell us.”
“He has been logy. For the last week, come to think of it. He didn’t want to play ball the other night at the Audience House. And Fritz said he didn’t like his dinner—”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Wrath nodded, but not because he found any merit in the sensible advice; he nodded because he didn’t want to be a total prick.
“I’ll apologize to Jane,” he muttered under his breath. “For talking to her like that.”
“You’re upset. She’ll understand.”
Bending back down, he put his mouth right next to George’s ear. “Papa loves you,” he said softly.
As George lifted his head and nuzzled Wrath’s cheek, he thought maybe Beth was right. Just because he’d voice-commanded a load of shit into Google and listened to a bunch of things that killed golden retrievers didn’t mean he’d manifested this—they had found something, though. Hadn’t they. On the spleen.
Silent killer. The kind of thing you didn’t know about until the dog bled into its heart and collapsed into lethargy without a lot of warning.
“What about Payne?” Beth asked quietly. “She’s been known to heal.”
“I already thought of that.” Wrath shook his head. “Her gift comes at too high a cost. She used it on some human up in Leczo Falls a couple of months ago. She cured him of Alzheimer’s and was flat on her back for eight weeks. Even the Sanctuary didn’t help her. We need her up on her feet and able to fight if Lash is back in town.”
There was no reason to turn his tragedy into a burden for the whole household.
“Talk to me,” Beth said.
He looked in his shellan’s direction, but couldn’t bear it even in his blindness, so he refocused on George. Feeling the animal’s ribs expand and contract under his dagger hand in a shallow pump, he choked out, “I just wish I’d had him as a puppy. If I was only going to get a couple of years with him… that time was too precious to waste.”
* * *
In downtown Caldwell, in a neighborhood where more than half of the walk-ups were uninhabited and the others uninhabitable, Devina stood in the middle of a potholed street, her stilettos planted on the rim of an oily black stain that smelled like baby powder and dead animal. The substance had sunk into the cracks of the asphalt as if it were a sealer, the gloss reflecting the cloudy sky.
Her lover had been here.
And where had he gone next, she thought as she looked outside of the yellow crime scene tape. The flimsy length had been strung in a square around the trunks of four dead trees set into cutouts in the parallel sidewalks, a highlighter pen drawing attention to nothing that had been focused on for very long. Yes, the police had responded to a shooting here, at least from what Jer’s squawking communicator had informed her. But unlike in the suburban part of town with that retail break-in, the CPD wasn’t sparing much of their workforce on this decrepit block.
No doubt shootings were a dime a dozen down here, and the surprise was that the disturbance had been called in at all.
Assessing the busted-out, rotting apartments that ran the street filled her with disgust—although not for Lash and the fact that maybe he was in one of them right this very moment, hiding from the daylight. Shit, she wished she could feel that kind of haughty disdain for him. No, she hated the humans who had built this up, and the ones who had let it fail, even though none of that cast of characters had any bearing on the fact that her one true love had been in this shitty zip code, for a time.
