A Feral Darkness Read Online Free PDF

herself all the same. It was the stranger bark, one Sunny seldom used; all the world was a friend by her definition. Brenna jammed a nightshirt over her head and a sweatshirt over that, and stumbled into a pair of excessively well-worn jeans—one of these days she would put her foot right through the seat of them—and hopped back down the hall slippering her feet.
           Sunny stood with her nose shoved up against the back door jamb, snuffling noisily enough to inhale all of outdoors through the narrow crack. The hackles of her short, slick coat raised a dark line at her shoulders and down her spine; she didn't even look up as Brenna entered the cold room, hugging herself and wishing she'd at least taken the time to grab up her vest. She pulled the sweatshirt sleeves over her knuckles and peered out onto the porch.
           She had forgotten to turn the light off, so all she saw was the glare of the bare bulb against the shiny enamel paint and pitch darkness beyond. But Sunny growled, a low monotone warning that Brenna couldn't recall ever having heard before. "Shhhh," she said absently, not particularly expecting a response, but Sunny shushed all right.
           "Gone?" Brenna looked down to ask her.
           But Sunny cowered at her feet. She whined, and her eyes showed white, and then she bolted away from the door and ran circles around the room, her claws scrabbling in her usual graceless galumphing stride and her tail tucked so tightly to her belly that she didn't even appear to have a tail at all.
           "Sunny!" Glancing from the bewildering dog to the starkly empty porch and back again, Brenna would have reached for her, tried to calm her—
           But then she felt it herself.
           A whisper of dire gibberish in her ear, a cold brush of fear down her neck...
           She slapped a hand to it, but this was no bug to brush away—it tickled down her spine and curled her toes and made her recently freed breasts feel tight and naked and exposed against the cold T-shirt. Behind her, Sunny crashed into her own crate and dove blindly inside, heading for the corner where she hid her face and whined.
           Brenna clenched her jaw to keep from doing the same, clenched it till it ached, and still there was nothing on the porch but a pair of old mud boots and the wispy remains of last summer's potted impatiens. She made her arms into an X in front of her chest, and her fingers peeked out of the sweatshirt sleeves to grasp the material at her collarbones, kneading it without thought, her own hands mindlessly seeking to comfort herself. Whispers and tickles and fear and a blind, groping invasion of —
           Of nothing.
           It left as abruptly as it had come.
           Brenna gave a little laugh, sharp and bitter. "This job is getting to me," she told Sunny, ignoring for the moment that Sunny had no reason to let "this job" drive her into a crate and turn her into a whimpering ball of Redbone Hound. "I need more food and less caffeine. Definitely less caffeine." And she went in to cut up the sub and pop tonight's portion into the microwave after slathering on more of her favorite specialty mustard than she probably should have. By the time the microwave dinged at her, she had a Sprite ready to go and had stuffed a few carrots in her mouth to assuage the inner voice that kept wanting to clamor about vegetables. Heck, there were tomatoes on the sub, weren't there? And onions—those should count for something.
           A glance in the dog room showed her that Sunny had not moved, and she squelched the strong impulse to coax the dog out of the crate and soothe her. Sunny wouldn't come out until she was good and ready, and dragging her out would hardly create a soothing effect.
           Brenna took her meal into the den—dark paneling left over from the seventies, a sagging couch she'd known all her life, her father's recliner, bought specially