Oberon's Meaty Mysteries: The Purloined Poodle Read online

  Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries: The Purloined Poodle

  Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Hearne.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2016 by Galen Dara.

  All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2016 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  Electronic ISBN

  978-1-59606-810-0

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1:

  The

  Boxer

  Humans always miss the essential politeness of pugs. They see the smashed face, the eyes in a perpetual state of panic, and their tendency to freak out if you try to clip their toenails, but they don’t understand why pugs get along so well with other dogs. It’s the way their tails curl up and away from their asses, making them easy to sniff when you meet them for the first time. It’s a great first impression. There’s nothing more friendly than an easy-access back door.

  In fact, the dogs you have to watch out for are the ones who don’t want you to sniff their asses. That always means they’re trying to hide something. And I say that because a good whiff of the back end tells you everything you really need to know about a hound. I’ve told Atticus this five billion or million or hundred times, I don’t know which is right, but it’s a lot. But even when he does his Druid thing and shape-shifts to hound form, he refuses to inhale the wealth of information found at the rear exit of any dog we might meet, and that makes no sense. He’s got the same filters in his hound nose that I have that keeps the stink from making you sick. Those are the filters that allow us to find out what else is going on in the stuff we smell, whether it’s a fire hydrant or a tree or a French poodle’s cute curly derriere. I guess he’ll never get over his human prejudices about asses.

  I shouldn’t judge him, though. He gives me sausage and snacks and belly rubs, and it’s not like I don’t have prejudices either. I mean, for one thing, there’s cats. For another, I think Chihuahuas are the clearest evidence we have for alien life on earth. And then any dog who tries to face me and won’t let me check out his backside? Yeah, I think that’s shadier than a walk in a cemetery.

  I ran into one such shady customer at the Alton Baker Dog Park in Eugene, Oregon. We live in the Willamette National Forest now near the McKenzie River, but Atticus takes me into town every so often so I can see other dogs besides Orlaith, and he can get things like bad coffee and worse donuts—he calls them sugar bombs. He always buys a newspaper full of ads for luxury automobiles too, but he says he reads it for the articles.

  Whenever I walk into a park all the other dogs are like hobbits saying, “It comes in pints?” because they’ve never seen a hound as big as me before. They either get real excited or real scared. Or real yippy, like some of the small breeds who don’t think I should be allowed. Yorkshire terriers don’t care. They bark at me every time.

  Boxers are all kinds of fun to play with, so I was excited to see one at the park. We usually get along great. I even passed by a pug who practically backed up to me by way of introduction to go meet the boxer. But this guy—I knew it was a guy because I could see from a distance he hadn’t been neutered—growled at me when he thought I got too close. I wagged my tail and let my tongue hang out to let him know I was friendly. He still had his teeth bared and barked at me a couple of times to tell me to back off.

  That’s when I realized that this boxer wasn’t playing with anyone else. He’d been standing alone by a spruce tree for a reason. I looked around to see if I could spot his human, but no one seemed particularly interested. Atticus was sitting on a bench reading his newspaper full of disasters. There were some other humans scattered about, some standing alone and one couple, but none of them were paying any attention to the others except for the couple. They were in conversation, the man talking and the woman looking concerned. Everyone else had their arms crossed and were all looking at their dogs, making sure they didn’t get into any fights. Except no one was looking at me and the boxer.

  I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to play. I lowered my front half and kept my tail in the air, wagging, a clear signal that I was friendly and just wanted a chase. I woofed at him, nice as could be. But the boxer was kind of like Tybalt, this Prince of Cats Atticus was telling me about. A duelist looking for an excuse. His hackles raised and his growl got meaner, showing me teeth. That wasn’t right. It was such a nice day.

  I called to my Druid through our mental link. His voice answered in my head.

  What is it, Oberon? I’m trying to read.

 

  Please don’t. Just walk away.

 

  And it wasn’t. The boxer lowered his head and charged. If I tried to run he’d have a shot at my legs. But my head was already as low as it could go—he didn’t have a shot at my throat. I had one at his, though, and probably thirty pounds on him. So I wasn’t scared. Not even a little. I mean, it’s a bona fide, certified fact that I am hashtag-blessed in the fighting department. Because I’m an old dog who’s learned plenty of tricks that my faithful Druid taught me.

  I lunged up to meet his charge but kept my head down, butting him right in the nose with the crown of my head. Nothing for his teeth to chomp onto, really, and it stunned him, got rid of all that momentum. It also left him wide open for a swipe across his muzzle. That woke him up and he remembered he was a boxer and supposed to be good at this. He was good at it; he raked me with his claws a couple times, got a chomp on my shoulder when he couldn’t get my neck, but I gave as good as I got. In fact, I recognized his pattern of attack and used a move that Atticus taught me, some kind of martial arts thing modified for hounds. The principles remained the same: Redirect your opponent’s force to defend yourself and defeat him. So when he raised his right leg and came at me with a haymaker, I lunged inside of it, brought my left up underneath his shoulder, trapping his leg in the raised position, and just fell over to my right, taking him with me in a body slam—except that he went down first, and his throat was right underneath my jaws. He struggled and I clamped down a bit to let him know I was serious.

  Atticus got into his head after a few more seconds and he calmed down, going still. I let him go and backed away as Atticus and the couple came running. Other humans were calling their tiny hounds and going home, worried that their pets would become collateral damage.

  The boxer had some scratches, maybe some tiny teeth marks, and I had the same. No big deal. But worried people always take their time reaching the same conclusion. They need a nice healthy panic first.

  The woman was a blonde of the chemical kind. Atticus told me one easy way to spot them was to look to see if the eyebrows matched the hair and hers weren’t even close. I wondered if maybe she had a wig on. I think her skin was tan or maybe she was a darker-skinned human—I have trouble telling the difference because hounds don’t see the same colors humans do. We can see yellow and blue and hints of other things, but most of it is shades of gray, especially the stuff between red and green. I had a hard
time figuring out why Atticus insisted that a red ball—a dark gray to me—was a different color than the green grass it rested on, which was almost identical to my eyes. She had on running shoes that looked way too clean and tight dark leggings with a bright blue stripe on the calf. I’m not sure what the leg stripes signify—it’s something I see more of lately. I know when humans have yellow stripes on their shoulders it sometimes means military rank, but maybe this leg stripe means she’s super-fast compared to other humans. She was certainly faster than the dude she’d been talking to, and she smelled like lemons and dead flowers in that artificial soapy kind of way, plus a whiff of those vegetable dog snacks that Atticus calls “hipster doggie chow.” Yuck.

  The guy she outpaced huffed a bit, straining to keep up, and he shouted something that sounded like “algae” and then “stop,” but that made no sense at all because we’d already stopped. That couldn’t be the boxer’s name, could it? Who would name their hound after stuff that scums up the surface of ponds and swimming pools?

  He was kind of pale and dark-haired, his cheeks all blotchy from excitement or anger or some weird human disease, I don’t know. But I liked him already, because he wore a T-shirt that said “Remember the Cant,” a reference to a science fiction show on TV called The Expanse, and he smelled like real sausage and a continuing struggle with foot odor that he was losing. He and the woman scowled at me—they clearly thought I was a bad dog—and then huddled around the boxer as Atticus came over to check me out.

  Ah. You’ll be fine.

 

  So what happened?

  Atticus looked doubtful so I had to press him.

  Atticus shifted his eyes to the boxer while he petted me, and after a few hours or minutes or whatever it was he said, You’re right. He’s upset about something.

  My human turned to face the couple and said, “I think they’ll be all right. Nothing a bath won’t fix.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” the man said. “Did you see what started it?”

  “My hound wanted to play and I guess your hound wasn’t in the mood.”

  “Ahh. Not surprising. Algy’s been temperamental lately.”

 

  Yes, but not what you’re thinking. It’s short for the British name Algernon.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Atticus said. “Any ideas about what might be bothering him?”

  “Well, it’s like I was telling her—oh, I’m sorry. This is Tracie Chasseur, and I’m Earnest Goggins-Smythe.”

  “Pleasure. I’m Connor Molloy,” Atticus said, because that’s the name he was using then. He goes through names the way I go through chew toys. “Chasseur? Is that Swiss?”

  “It’s eighteenth-century French Huguenot,” the woman said, an edge to her voice that suggested she was offended. Maybe she didn’t like being mistaken for Swiss. Or maybe she just didn’t like Atticus. That happened sometimes. I mean, I’ve seen people try to kill him before they even say hello, which I’m pretty sure is impolite among humans if not outright rude. He just has that effect on some folks.

  “Right, as I was telling her,” Earnest said, “Algy was shot with a tranquilizer the night that Jack was abducted, and ever since he’s been irritable.”

  “Wait—who was abducted?”

  “My Grand Champion standard poodle, Jack. And he’s not the first Grand Champion to be kidnapped—dognapped, whatever—in this area.”

  Tracie shook her head and crossed her arms. “I can’t believe it’s happening. They’d better not come after my English setters.” I turned my head around to search for her hounds. I hadn’t seen any English setters when I came in—ah, there they were. Feather-coated white hounds with blue belton markings playing around with a black lab in the opposite corner of the park, with one nervous human looking on. “If your wolfhound there is a Grand Champion I’d be careful.”

  “Oh, no, he’s not,” Atticus said.

 

  I know, Oberon. I’ll explain later.

  “Beautiful hound, though,” Tracie said, and I decided I could forgive her for smelling like lemons. She’d have to do a lot more than flatter me to make up for the vegetable snacks she fed her hounds though. That was borderline cruelty. But even more cruel was to be separated from one’s poodle. I wanted to know more about Earnest’s tragedy.

 

  “Tell me more about what happened to your poodle, Earnest,” Atticus said. “You said his name was Jack?”

  “Yes. His full name is Jack Frederick Oscar Worthing Chasuble Wilde.”

  “Oh!” Atticus gave a smile and a little laugh, which he always did when he was trying to be charming. “I see you’re an Oscar Wilde fan.”

  “Lots of guys named Earnest hate him, but I like him.”

  “So your boxer, Algernon, is named…?”

  “Algernon Oscar Bunbury Moncrieff Wilde.”

  Dang, no wonder he shortened it to Algy.

  Their names are mashups of characters from Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. You have to have really long names to be registered with the AKC.

 

  Knock yourself out.

 

  You mean Slab-O’Beef?

 

  But you’re Irish.

 

  Oberon, do you even know what a Huguenot is?

  I ventured a guess based on what the word kind of sounded like.

  I got a mental snort for that so I must have guessed wrong. And then I had to catch up with his conversation with Earnest. Atticus has this ability to use different headspaces when he wants, which I don’t really understand except it means he can talk to me mentally while carrying on a different conversation with someone else.

  “Is Algy a Grand Champion too?” Atticus was saying.

  “Oh, no, he’s just a love.” Earnest smiled fondly at his hound and rubbed his head. “Traumatized, but strangely content at the moment.”

  He did look content sitting there, his tongue lolling out and all the aggression gone from his muscles. That was because he had a Druid in his head and that can be relaxing.

  “So whoever pulled this off came prepared for Algy there. They wanted your poodle—but just because he’s a poodle or because he’s a Grand Champion?”

  “I think it’s the Grand Champion title, because of the rash of abductions we’ve had recently.”

  “This is happening a lot?”

  “All throughout the Pacific Northwest,” Tracie said, then looked at Earnest with a frown. “It started with Julia Garcia’s Italian greyhound up in Tacoma, didn’t it?”

  “No, she was second,” Earnest corrected her. “First was Ted Lumbergh’s Brittany spaniel out in Bend.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.”

  “And after them went the French bulldog way up in Bellingham, and the Airedale terrier in Hillsboro. Then Jack was next.”

  “Incredible,” Atticus said. “Are the police on this at all?”

  Earnest shrugged. “We’ve tried to get them involved, but it’s pretty clear that they don’t care much. They don’t even think it’s the same person doing it. They think they just ran away, because dogs do
that. Except these aren’t somebody’s rowdy mutts. They’re Grand Champions, the most highly trained, pampered hounds in the world. And the fact that Algy got shot with a tranquilizer dart is pretty big clue that someone besides me was involved in the whole thing. It’s probably how they did everything—shoot the dog and lay him or her out, then there’s little or no barking, no owner woken up, and it’s all done quiet and in the dark.”

  “Wow. But why?”

  “Only reason I can think of is breeding. It’s not someone trying to eliminate their competition in the shows or it would be the same breed every time. Someone is just after the money.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What money?”

  “Grand Champions command top dollar in stud fees, so if you have a few of them, you can make a decent living, I suppose.”

 

  If somebody has a bitch and they want her to have the best puppies possible, they pay someone else who has an excellent hound to come over and get her pregnant. That’s a stud fee.

 

  No, I would be the one who gets paid. But it doesn’t matter because we’re not going to do that.

 

  Definitely not. I disagree with the ethics there.

 

  Yes. And besides, you have Orlaith to consider.

  As soon as I said it I realized it was only sort of true. Hounds aren’t monogamous like most humans are. We don’t get married or even think about committed relationships, which makes a lot of human dramas pretty silly to me. But Orlaith is the only other hound in the world I can talk to, which makes her special, and I think it would be rude to hump this deerhound or that Great Dane while she’s pregnant with our puppies.