Page 1 of Rejected Hollow

1

Chapter 1

Wren

The dog's name was Bruno, and he was dying, and he was very, very frightened about it.

They'd brought him in at twenty past two, a German shepherd with a gray muzzle and a back leg that bent the wrong way, wrapped in a tartan picnic blanket that smelled of someone's car. The driver who'd hit him had stayed, which was more than most did. He'd stood in reception dripping rain on the linoleum, saying he just came out of nowhere over and over like it was a prayer that might work backwards.

Dr. Adeyemi had taken one look at the X-ray, said a word she'd have fined me for, and gone to phone the owners. That had been twenty minutes earlier. Now she was asleep in the back office with the phone still in her hand, because she'd been on since eight the previous morning, and I was alone in Treatment Room Two.

The pain relief had taken the edge off Bruno, but not enough. He was thrashing so much that the cannula in his foreleg kept pulling. Every time he moved, the broken leg dragged, and every time it dragged, he screamed.

That sound.

I'd never gotten used to it.

Anyone who claimed they had was lying or shouldn't have been doing the job.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, big man. I know."

I put my hands on him.

I couldn't explain what happened when I did that. I'd tried. At college they'd called it a good manner with nervous animals. Marion called it my knack. Daniel had called it my party trick, in the voice he used for things about me he found faintly embarrassing, which by the end had been most things.

What it felt like, from the inside, was this. I put my palms flat on a terrified animal, one on the chest, one on the neck, and I breathed slowly, and I hummed. It was just a low sound in the back of my throat, really, like the noise a fridge made at night. But somewhere under my hands, something that had been clenched in him let go.

Bruno's ribs shuddered once. Twice. Then the thrashing stopped.

He looked up at me with those clouded brown eyes, and he sighed, the long, rattling, whole-body sigh. His tail thumped once against the steel table.

"There you go," I whispered. "There you go. Good boy."

The fluorescent tube above us buzzed and flickered, and I didn’t like the smell of chlorhexidine mixed with wet fur and blood.

There was nobody else in the room. Just me and a dying dog.

I put my hand back on Bruno's chest and kept humming. His breathing slowed. The pain was still there, I could feel it in the tremor under his skin, but it wasn't in charge anymore. He was just a tired old dog lying on a warm blanket with someone who wasn't going to leave.

I was glad I could be that someone to him.

The owners arrived at ten to three. A man in his sixties and his wife, both in coats thrown on over pajamas, both with that particular gray stillness people had when they'd already heard the news in the car and were hoping they weren’t true in the end. Dr. Adeyemi, awake and composed as if she'd never closed her eyes, explained everything to them gently. The fracture. The internal bleeding. His age. What would be kindest.

The woman nodded and nodded. The man looked at Bruno, lying calm and quiet under my hands, and said, "He's not even scared."

"No," I said. "He's not."

I stayed. I always stayed, if the owners let me. The woman held the dog’s head and told him he was the best boy in the whole world. The man held his paw. I kept my hand on his side and kept humming, very quietly, under their voices, and Bruno went the way you'd want anyone to go. Warm, and not afraid, and with dignity.

Afterwards the man shook my hand in both of his and said, "Thank you, love. Whatever you did. Thank you."

When they'd gone, Dr. Adeyemi leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded and looked at me with her tired, clever eyes.

"You know you should be doing the full course," she said. "Not the trainee schedule. The veterinary degree. You're wasted on night shifts, Wren."

I laughed. "Nobody's wasted on night shifts. Night shifts need people the most."

"Maybe. But you could do so much more."