Devoted(67)
They had hardly gone any distance north from the roadblock before an ambulance appeared ahead of them, in the southbound lane.
As it shrieked past, lightbar strobing, Kipp clenched his teeth and repressed a howl, though his ears were ringing painfully.
After another minute or so, a second ambulance came flashing and wailing, this one from behind them, heading north.
Pulling off the pavement to let the vehicle pass, Ben said, “Lassie helped people get out of trouble, but I have this feeling you’re leading me straight into it.”
After returning to the pavement in the wake of the ambulance, they had not gone far when a large white house, ahead on the left, drew Kipp’s attention.
He popped the safety-harness release with one paw, slipped out of the restraint, and stood with his forepaws on the console.
He craned his head forward, staring at the house.
Even at this hour, the place blazed with light at most windows.
The boy waited in that house full of light.
The unique boy.
The boy who could send on the Wire.
Kipp was not a barker, but he barked. He barked and barked at the house, and he barked directly, urgently in Ben’s face.
“Hey, take it easy. Are you telling me this is the place?”
Kipp stopped barking and wagged his tail as fast as he could.
Although he slowed the Range Rover, letting it coast, Ben seemed hesitant. “There’s a patrol car in front.”
So Kipp barked and barked again.
“All right, okay, whatever.” Ben turned left, crossed the southbound lane, and pulled into the driveway.
The sight of the police car and the memory of the ambulances alarmed Kipp. Maybe the boy had been hurt.
Switching off the engine, opening his door, Ben said, “You better wait here while I check this out.”
As Ben exited the Rover, Kipp scrambled onto the driver’s seat. He leaped through the open door before it could be closed.
He wasn’t being disobedient. Ben wasn’t his master any more than Dorothy had been.
They were companions. That was how things were between dogs of the Mysterium and their people. If they had people. If they weren’t alone, as a few were.
Nevertheless, because he was still a dog and always would be, he regretted that a higher duty to the anguished boy required him to leave Ben with even the temporary perception that his instructions were not valued.
Wind thrashed through the woods and across the yard, scented with squirrel and rabbit and raccoon and fox, with pine and cedar and woadwaxen and golden sedge and wild mushrooms clustering in the rotting trunk of a fallen tree.
The porch steps boomed hollowly under his paws.
A policeman at the top. Another coming out of the open front door.
They cried out as Kipp dashed, tail tucked, between their legs and off the porch and across the threshold.
A woman in the foyer reeled back and cried—“No, stop!”—as if Kipp were not what he appeared to be but were instead a wild beast of ill intent.
Drawn as if the Wire must be on a reel that pulled him in like a helpless catch, Kipp could only whine meekly to reassure the woman as he raced to the stairs and bounded up them.
The woman charged after him, as did one of the officers, but he was far faster than they were.
71
The high redoubt in the great tower at Castle Wyvern was a refuge of the mind, not the body, a place where Woody Bookman came and went without ever really using the stairs or a door. He was there when he needed to be and gone when he was ready to be home again.
On this occasion, however, he found himself clambering up from the bed of reeds and scrambling to the door as he heard the thunder of footfalls on the spiral stairs. Overcome by an excitement that he couldn’t explain, he threw back one great iron bolt on the heavy timber door, a second bolt, and a third.
As he stepped across the threshold, he found himself sitting up in bed, in his room in the Pinehaven house, as through the door came a panting dog, a glorious golden retriever.
Be not afraid. I’m here, I’m here!
The voice issued from the dog’s mind to his, as if by an act of telepathy in a story.
The retriever sprang onto the bed and threw itself against him, so that Woody fell back on his pile of pillows, laughing.
Good boy, good, the dog declared. You’re safe now. I’m here now. We are family now.
72
Megan had heard Woody laugh before, but the cause of laughter had never been clear. It often seemed to arise from some internal cause, some private observation, never from something amusing that happened and that she could share with him.
When she rushed into his room and saw the boy overwhelmed by the dog, embracing the dog and laughing, her heart was snared in such a tangle of emotions that she could have laughed, could have wept, should have been able to step away from her fear in the wake of Lee Shacket’s arrest, but she couldn’t do any of that. Woody was happy, and the dog seemed harmless, but the dog had teeth, and she thought of what Shacket had done to that poor woman, to her face, and fear would not relent.
The deputy who entered the room immediately after Megan didn’t know what to do, either. He asked if this was her dog, and she said it wasn’t, and he asked if it was a neighbor’s dog, and she said she didn’t know. They stood there, uncertain of what needed to be done, and the boy’s giggles and the dog’s apparent delight seemed to argue that nothing needed to be done, that all was well.