I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to the presence of gruuaa—or how sharply I’d notice their absence. How much heavier and more ominous the air was without them. I didn’t like the sensation that Hix had buried her face under my hair at the back of my neck, the way an unhappy dog will put his head under your arm.
I was feeling the armydar more strongly again, like the return of a fever you’d hoped had gone away for good. I could guess that Takahiro was feeling it too. It was nearly six o’clock, so time we went home and looked for Val. (And Mongo, who was used to coming with me to the shelter, and would reach the destructive stage of tragic mode soon.) I was carefully not thinking beyond that point.
What was I expecting Val to do? He couldn’t stop Takahiro from being a werewolf, or being stressed out by the armydar, and he couldn’t shut the armydar down. And two nights ago he hadn’t even known he was still a magician. Whatever that meant. For the first time since all this began—since meeting Casimir, since really talking to Val for the first time, since Hix, since the Copperhill cobey—I remembered that Aunt Gwenda’s house was called Haven. She’d told me when I was still really little that its name had originally been Witchhaven. They’d changed it to just Haven after they cut the magic gene out of everybody in Newworld—and witch became a word you didn’t use in polite company. (If you had to say anything, you said magician.) At the time my interest level in this information was a degree or two below “do you want a peanut butter or roast beef sandwich for lunch?” But I’d remembered it. I also remembered my mother saying, irritated but also uncomfortable, to my dad, as we bumped down the long narrow driveway after a visit to Haven, that one of the reasons she loved him was because he was so normal. I wondered if I counted as normal any more. Val didn’t.
I finished Florrie and put her back in her run. She sighed, shook herself all over, and collapsed on her bed. I envied her. I picked up my algebra book and went to look for Takahiro and Jill. Maybe it had just been time for the gruuaa to all go do—something. The stars and the weird wind and everything were their version of the late bell at school.
The three of us met up and headed back to the office to sign off with Clare. I was clutching the algebra book like it was my last friend, and while Hix had looped herself around my neck again I still felt that most of her was curled up under my hair. “You didn’t take your algebra book up to the kennels, did you?” said Jill.
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” said Jill.
Takahiro was walking more and more slowly down the little hill to the office and the front gate. Jill was giving him the same worried looks that I was. “What happened with the gruuaa?” she said. “They all just kind of cleared off about a quarter hour ago.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Um—what did you see?”
We were walking so slowly she had time to think about it. “It was like being caught in an electric storm,” she said finally. “I think my hair sizzled. I didn’t like it.”
When we got to the office building the Family were lying over all available surfaces. It was after public hours so the barrier gate was open. Most of the dogs rolled immediately to their feet and came over to say hello. Bella was tall enough that Takahiro could pet her without bending over—although Jonesie had the answer to that one by rearing up and putting his front feet on Takahiro’s stomach. Jonesie is a Staffie cross—Staffordshire crossed with Sasquatch—and he wants you to know he is a dog of power and influence. The cats withdrew to the far side of the room and hissed.
“Off,” said Clare, making a grab at Jonesie. She glanced at the cats, clustered at the far end of the bay window and making a sound like a nest of snakes. “I guess you’re not kidding about cats not liking you,” she said. “But the dogs are making up for it, aren’t they?” Jonesie was back on all fours, but his place had been taken by Athena the greyhound, who, with her feet on Takahiro’s chest, was licking his face. Clare sighed, but Takahiro was (gently) pulling Athena’s ears and Athena, not a big tail wagger, was wagging her tail. I could see him unstiffening, but as Clare went off to raid the cash box to pay us, Takahiro looked at me and said softly, “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Do what?” I said, but I knew. Where were the gruuaa? What else had happened?
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance—no,” said Takahiro. “I could just sleep on the couch.”
“No,” I said. “But we can take some of them with us. Clare’s got lots of spares.”
“What?” said Jill. “You mean in my car?”
“We’ll take the ones who don’t throw up,” I said.
“Oh, thanks,” said Jill. “I’m so relieved. Why are we taking them with us?”
“The gruuaa are all gone. All but Hix.” Jill’s eyes rested on my collarbones. She nodded.
“And the armydar—makes Taks, um, sick,” I said, conscious of Clare maybe being in earshot. Gruuaa could just be a weird teenage word. Werewolf she’d hear. “The gruuaa were kind of holding it off.”
“Sick,” said Jill. “Okay. And it can’t be good news that they’re gone either, right?”
Clare came back and shoved some money at us. “I need a favor,” I said. “I need to borrow some of the Family.”
“Borrow?” said Clare. “You know I’d let you adopt any of them in a second. Half a second. Adopt two and I’ll throw in a free set of steak knives. Adopt all of them and I’ll help you build the fence.”
“Ha,” I said. “I’ll take it up with Mom. But right now I need to borrow—several of them. Er. The big ones.”
She looked at me. “You know I trust you,” she said. “But . . .”
“The armydar,” I said. “It’s making Takahiro sick. Having critters around kind of—damps it, you know?”
She gave Takahiro a sharp look. In the office light he again looked grey, and it was like he’d lost weight just in the last few hours. He didn’t have any weight to lose. His face was all sharp angles like a connect-the-dots in a kids’ coloring book. She looked away again, at the Family. Several of them were picking up that there might be something going on. Jonesie, Bella, and Athena were looking from me to Clare and back again.
“Actually I do know,” said Clare. “I was thinking about sleeping on the sofa here tonight because the buzz in my head isn’t nearly as bad here as at home, even though it’s only the far side of the pony field.” The shelter stood on what had once been the orchard of Clare’s family’s farm. She lived in the old farmhouse.
She looked at Takahiro again and he smiled faintly. “Okay, since it’s you, hon,” she said to me. “But . . .” She stopped. “Who do you want? We’d better do the paperwork. We’ll just have a lot of ‘rehoming was not successful’ later. I’ll give you some dog food. And a blanket to put on the back seat. The big ones? I hope it’s a big back seat.”
“It’s pretty big,” I said.
Jill sighed, and went off to fetch the Mammothmobile.
One of Takahiro’s hands seemed to be welded to the top of Bella’s head, which was a good beginning. I also chose Athena and Jonesie and Dov, a Newfie cross who looked like a medium-sized bear, and Eld, which was short for Elder Statesman because that’s what he looked like, if elder statesmen were ever mastiffs. But the jowls and the look in the eyes were dead-on.
I was signing everything and Clare was dragging out a large bag of dog food when Majid came strolling in from whatever havoc he’d been creating outdoors. He looked around interestedly, twitching his tail. He took in the windowsill full of hissing, fluffed-out, bottle-brush-tailed cats and spurned them, as he usually did. Whatever was going on, he wanted his (un)fair share. He went straight up to Takahiro, lay down at Bella’s feet, and began purring.