Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Four: The Dog

The old woman's name was Elizabeth Cummings, and her dog was a fifteen-year-old basset hound named Charley. Hawk had to take Elizabeth's word on this, and on her comments about the dog's temperament. The dog seemed to be eighty percent open sores. Under normal circumstances, Hawk would be horrified at this sign of bad animal husbandry, because a casual glance would assume mange, and sanity would prevent someone from getting any closer. But she had the dead squirrel in her bag. She'd handled its crisping fur and brittle skin, and she saw the same thing happening to the dog.

Happening. It was an ongoing process.

The dog was still alive. His chest rose and fell, and his owner sat beside him. At the start of the drive, she'd made noises about sitting beside him so she could put his head in her lap and tell him he was a good boy. But the dog's every movement cracked open yet another wound in its pelt of brittle skin, and a touch was an unthinkable assault to something so frail. At the start of the drive, though, the dog was still trying. He'd pick his head up, and lymph had oozed a stain where his cheek had rested, and he'd lick his owner's fingers with a rapidly degrading tongue. After about five minutes of driving, the dog stopped responding to Elizabeth's words. His chest rose and fell, first with increasing distress, and then with a more distressing shift. Agonal, that was how doctors would describe it. Funny. Usually medical names were safely incomprehensible, as if our brains insist we cannot be killed by a thing that sounds like pretentious onomatopoeia. You could call it glioblastoma and imagine the shapeless enemy curdling within your skull as some odd species of ferret. But agonal breathing perfectly captured that moment when the gentle slope downward becomes irreversible.

He breathed maybe another two minutes like that. A rise of the chest more mechanical than willed, and an immediate fall. The last sparks of a doomed brain. When he stopped, it was with the strangest rustle, like the crackling snap of frost. Elizabeth made a truly awful sound, and her daughter began brushing her mother's white hair back from weeping eyes.

"Okay, Mom. Mom. He's gone. Charley's gone." The daughter said, exhaustion clear in her words and posture. "We need to get you to the hospital, now."

The daughter did not seem to reach Elizabeth, and she turned in desperation to the strangers. Her mother did not to seem in much better shape than her dog. She was still moving and her skin did not seem to be crisping as the dog and the squirrel and the grass all had. But her hands had a strange sheen to them, something part of Hawk wanted to call dry, and another part, shiny. Hawk had just enough insight left to understand, she really saw neither; there was something else going on here, something more horrible that her brain was struggling to domesticate. The rest of her consciousness seemed to be eaten alive by fear, devoured to the rind.

Alex reached across from the driver's seat and grabbed her hand. He gave her a tight squeeze and met her gaze through the rear-view mirror. His focus was steady. She knew the glint in his eye. He was about to lie his ass off to someone who didn't deserve it at all.

"Hey, Liz? I know you think Charley's vet can get him the best help, but I know somebody up at the main hospital. Somebody who is..." He hesitated. Alex had come to Sedona as an up-and-coming con-artist recognizing a target-rich environment, which meant as a gainfully employed human who cared for his fellow man quite a bit, he regarded most of Sedona's New Age community as a sack full of his ex-colleagues, with a few lost islands of people who really do mean it. Hawk didn't know why Alex had Liz filed in the "really means it" category. Maybe it was something he'd seen in her house, or yard; he could hang an entire man's life on a nail over their door.

"He does things with Crystals," Hawk said. Crystals were a safe bet. Everybody did things with crystals.

"Oh." A pause. "But...he's a medical doctor?" Liz said.