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

. . doesn't care.

What she cares about is that his shrine was a healing shrine. That he favors dogs, that the shrine, even
after all this time, is littered with representations of them. And that the right-side pasture has some of the
other things she's been able to make sense of in that articleтАФthe wide, cold creek that runs deep in all
but the driest months, a hill rising on one side of it to hold not only the area's biggest oak, but a tiny spring
as well. The tiniest of springs, really, a damp spot that the ground downhill reabsorbs practically before
the water has a chance to join the creek, but a spring nonetheless.

She wonders briefly if her own God, her assigned God, will thunderously disapprove of her intent.

But then, He's had His chance, hasn't He? Hasn't she said her prayers to Him, over and over? And did it
stop her mother from sayingthose words about her cherished old hound, only moments ago? Or her
brother from making fun of the dog's aged movement?

She smears the drying tears from her cheeks and runs her hand down the dog's soft ear. Maybe Mars
Nodens will listen. He is not likely to have heard a more heartfelt prayerтАФnowor then.
***



Four Years Before Now
They come in the middle of the night, breaking fences in a final night of tearing up pastures with the
knobby tires on their growling ATVs. Drunk, getting drunker, they spin doughnuts in the wet spring turf,
spitting out chunks of sod in their wake. Picking pastures without stock because they somehow have
sense enough to know that damaging or losing stock will take them over the line from wild young men to
criminals.

But they are mighty wild.

They pick a spot up against a creek too deep to cross, heeding a darkened house in the distance. A
young woman lives there, they know, but has been gone this summer, working several jobs as if the extra
income will somehow be enough to keep her father alive. She is an odd girl with amazingly long hair, the
one who has an uncanny way with dogs and an unsettling way of looking through a man as though he's
not even there and it wouldn't matter if he were. But she is not home, and her pastures belong to them.

They settle in for a time to swallow the beer they've brought, shaking the cans, popping the tops to soak
themselves and the hillside beneath the spreading oak. They don't notice that they trample the grave
markings of the old hound who lived longer than anyone had ever thought possible. They don't notice the
sudden stillness of the night around them, or that even as they drink, they often glance over their
shoulders, looking for that which they feel but cannot see.

Not a benign feeling, for in this place of power they have not thought to call upon things benign. Instead
they call upon aggression, building the strength and ego of the one who will shortly present himself for
army basic training. They call upon braggadocio, chest-thumping stories of prowess, and dark promises
of manly revenge for those who have recently wronged them. They spill beer from can and bladder, and
when they find the struggling remains of a rabbit they roared over in their ATV frenzy, they spill blood.