Page 8 of Black Dog

As if he could sense her arrival, Ram turned just as she was coming into the kitchen. He was wearing a ridiculous Santa’s Helper apron she’d given him the year before and couldn’t possibly have been more handsome. There was nothing more romantic than an apron-wearing knight with a spatula in his hand and a sexy smile on his beautiful mouth.

“How much longer?” The twins said, almost in unison.

Ignoring that, Elora said, “Happy Yule,” and gave Ram a holiday-commemorative kiss.

“I’m thinkin’ we should do Yule more often.”

Helm stumbled in wearing jeans with a red plaid shirt and no shoes. “Pancakes?” he said. “I get the next one.”

“Do no’!” Aelgale rose up with the hotheaded intensity that her father had been infamous for in his younger days. Her twin, Aelgavain, said nothing, but glared at her brother. “We were here first. Right, Mum?”

“Maybe you were here first,” taunted Helm, “but I’m the guest of honor.”

Gale looked incredulous and sounded flummoxed. Her face turned pink just before she said, “You’re no’ a guest of anything. You’re a dick face.”

“AELGALE!” Elora didn’t have to pretend to sound scandalized.

Ram turned away so that none of his children would see him trying to control laughter. “Helm,” Ram said calmly as he slid one pancake on each of two plates and set them down in front of the twins. “Stop provokin’ your sisters.”

Helm smiled wickedly at the girls, first one, then the other. “They’re the ones gettin’ fed. Seems to me they’re provokin’ me with bein’ first.”

“Great Paddy,” Ram said as he flipped two pancakes on the griddle.

As he set the two perfectly round and golden pancakes on a plate for Helm, Elora said, “Has anybody seen Blackie?”

Charlie Sweeney had shaken Jack awake when the sky had begun to lighten to gray. “Come on. We got a job to do. And a long way to go.”

Jack nodded. He didn’t have to get dressed. He’d slept in his clothes. It was too cold to strip down and he wasn’t the flannel pajamas sort.

Charlie handed him a cup of tea and day-old bread and indicated they should stay quiet and not wake his mother.

While Jack consumed the meager breakfast, Charlie wrote a note to his mother that simply read ‘Happy Yule’, and left a handful of cash with it. He didn’t like tearful goodbyes or questions about when his mum would hear from him next.

They slipped away shortly after sunrise on Yule morning. The ground was covered with a fresh dusting of snow. The air was still, but it held the kind of damp cold that went straight through clothes and settled in bones; the kind of cold shivers and teeth-chattering are made of.

Charlie pulled into the curve of the lane at the bottom of the hill where the Hawking farm sat looking proud and pristine. Jack didn’t want to get out, but Charlie insisted.

Charlie knew dogs.

He knew the family would let the dog out to do his business early in the morning. And he knew the big German Shepherd would notice two strange men and come to investigate. Chances are good that, had they realized that particular dog belonged to members of the royal family, they would’ve kept driving.

Charlie had spent years working for Owen Moran. It wasn’t the kind of relationship that could rightfully be called employment, but Charlie’s finances, or lack thereof, depended on pleasing Mr. Moran, the dog fight promoter.

Dog fighting might be viewed by many as the cruel pastime of a sordid underbelly of society. But Moran didn’t give two shits what people thought about his business. It was lucrative and tax free. At least the way Moran did it. It would be hard to imagine a practice more barbaric, but such things didn’t concern him. He was a practical man and it was a living. End of story.

He moved the fights around, never more than one night in a single place. Kept law enforcement on his payroll and was careful about his clientele.

The dogs were collateral damage, but he didn’t care about that either. Once they were swept up into Moran’s dark world, their fate was sealed. There would be no happily ever after. They would live in solitary, cramped lockups until the inevitable fight that killed them or left them for dead.

Occasionally Moran was able to buy a dog cheap or get one for free from a family that wasn’t prepared for the responsibilities that come with owning one of the breeds on the restriction list, the kind of dog that held the potential to be more dangerous than a loaded gun.

He pocketed the cash and moved on to arranging the next secret-location fight. To Moran the dogs were transactions that might as well have been inanimate. Since he’d never experienced empathy for others of his own kind, it would have been surprising if he’d had any feelings to extend toward the animals he used.

Jack and Charlie were two of the ‘suppliers’ Moran used to continually provide replacement stock. Moran gave them a tidy commission when a dog was approved. It wasn’t enough to make them rich, but it was an easy enough, set-your-own-hours job description with enough compensation to keep them interested.

Like Moran, the two thieves had no sympathy for dogs, which was a plus in their line of work. They didn’t take any particular pleasure in causing suffering. They just didn’t care.

Blackie had trotted toward the hill, nose to the ground as he took in the scent of everything in nature from the minerals in the soil, to the footprints of the longhaired sheep, to the stray dog that crossed the property during the night. When he reached the three-sided barn, where the sheep went for shelter on cold nights, he veered away toward the enclosed north side of the structure and sought out one of his favorite spots to fertilize.

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