Something to Curse About Read Online Free PDF Page A

every day for walkies, along with a half-dozen other small dogs. I’d already cleared the dog walker—not that my client thought the other woman guilty of anything except a momentary lapse of attention.
    The dog walker, Eileen Smith, had stopped at a coffee shop’s walk-up window, and looked down while leaving the window to discover Princess missing. The dog either slipped her collar, or someone helped her do it, because it remained on the end of the leash.
    Why they didn’t use a harness, I couldn’t guess. Those were safer for dogs with itty bitty necks.
    Miss Headley had brought Princess’s royal purple doggy bed with her, and both Nick and Leglin took the Chihuahua’s scent from it. Neither had any luck trying to track her though. Too much traffic in the area where she’d disappeared. At least I’d gotten my first look at Nick as a wolf. I’d missed out on the only other time he’d changed due to being a little emotional after seeing myself sacrificed and realizing precognition had joined my other abilities.
    He was a large wolf, covered in fur the same dark brown as his hair.
    We’d basically gotten nowhere, and I really wanted to find the little dog. The city had been having some trouble with organized dog fighting. There’d been a big story on it a couple of months back, when someone found chewed up canine bodies, mostly small ones, dumped a few miles outside city limits.
    The larger dogs had lost their fights, and the reporter said the others were “bait dogs”. I’d gotten sick reading the explanation.
    I didn’t understand how anyone could look at a cute, tiny dog like Princess, and then deliberately throw her in the jaws of an abused, aggressive, much larger dog to be torn to pieces.
    Of course, I can’t understand why anyone would want to abuse animals anyway, regardless of size or type.
    With a deep sigh, I closed the folder and set it aside, wishing my tracking ability would kick in. Most of my abilities didn’t work just because I wanted them to. I’d put in enough practice with teleporting that it almost always worked.
    Practicing didn’t mean success with my other abilities. My pyrokinesis and cryokinesis—fire and ice—worked about seventy-five percent of the time. Telekinesis—moving things around, including people—was one I had to block constantly, if I didn’t want stuff near me to start floating or zipping around. Fortunately, my telekinesis has a limited range of influence, not more than about two dozen feet, and I can’t lift a car or truck more than a few inches off the ground.
    My empathy and telepathy were on all the time too, as far as receiving went. My other abilities—the ones I needed to help solve cases—tended to appear when they felt like it. Fortunately, they felt like it often enough to be useful, or I wouldn’t have my job.
    At a tap on my office door, I looked up to find Mr. Whitehaven. “May I come in?”
    “Sure.”
    He did, closing the door before gingerly settling into one of the two chairs in front of my desk. My boss is eight feet tall, and the chair complained in response to his weight.
    “Are you alright?”
    “Yeah, I’m okay.” Whitehaven’s never judged me for my PSTD-related episodes. He’s always checked with me after any he’s aware of, but he doesn’t tend to push. The boss and Damian are two people I can talk to when I feel a need to talk. They’ve both seen some awful things. Not much shocks them.
    It’s not like I can talk to my parents about my flashbacks or nightmares. Mom’s name isn’t Sunshine for nothing, and while my dad dealt calmly with my first case, he’s in advertising and doesn’t even watch scary movies.
    I’ve never felt right burdening them with the horrors retro-cognition tends to leave me with. They’d both listen and try to help. I have no doubts on that score. But they don’t really live in the same world I do, and haven’t experienced the crap that comes with it.
    Which is good, in my book. I don’t