"Doranna Durgin - A Feral Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

someone else worry about the bills," they'd say, her father with loving protectiveness when he was alive
and her motherтАФnow and thenтАФwith the assumption that she couldn't handle the load. "Russell will tell
you." And Russell would. "Can't see you doing the accounting for your own business," he would tell her,
and of course he knew, what with his partnership in the small carpet and flooring store in Brockport.
"You haven't got a single class under your belt outside of high school."

True enough. But not how she'd wanted it, either.

She clipped the Sheltie's nails and pulled the muzzle off; just the thinning and a little trimming to go, and
he'd be fine with that.

Feral dogs. A pack of them. What was that all about? She worked in a suburb north of Monroe City,
but lived fifteen minutes northwest of that, between Lake Ontario and the city. Definitely ruralтАФbut
generally tame. A handful of coyotes, not as many stray cats as there used to be, lots of small farms no
longer supporting anything but a handful of cows or horses, plenty of farmland owned in modest lots but
leased to larger operations. Her own place had taken that role over the years, and even now the old
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north pasture was in corn for Bob HasklyтАФthe lease paid her winter's heating bills in the old farmhouse.
But the right-side pasture, hilly and divided by the creek, had only ever been pasture and still was.
Maybe next summer she would get another horse; right now the field was fallow, recovering from some
hard grazing from Emily's last batch of cattle.

Plenty going on in her part of Parma Hill, but never had feral dogs been any part of it. Nothing more than
your basic random stray, half of whom seemed to find their way to Brenna for feeding and grooming
before Brenna passed them along to the local animal advocate group for placement.

"Brenna, you in there?"

Think of Emily, and Emily arrives.

"Be out in a moment," Brenna said, taking one more pass through the Sheltie's thick ruff with the thinning
shears and then shaping the result. She stepped back to give him a critical eye, found a tuft she'd missed,
and tucked him under her arm to step into the tub room and turn off the last dryer. The Cocker behind it
gave her a bright and manic eye. "Best you change your attitude," she told it, and went out to the counter
area to stash the Sheltie in one of the two open-wire crates stacked for finished dogs.

"What's up, Emily?" she asked, reaching for the charge slip and doing a quick calculation of the extra
time she'd spent on the mats.

"In town for project supplies," Emily said. "As usual. Those girls go through crafts like they were born to
sell little-old-lady cutouts for people's front yards. You know, the kind bending over with all their
pantaloons showing."

Brenna stopped writing to look up. Emily, with her honey-blond hair drawn back in a hasty ponytail, not
a trace of makeup on her slightly too-wide, slightly too-large blue eyes, looked back at her quite
seriously, but there was a trace of humor hiding at the corner of her mouth. "Solemnly swear," Brenna