Avalon: Companions

By Andy Free

Avalon: Companions is a love story and a mystery. Avalon is an alternate world to Earth, a sister world that only a few can reach. Those few are the "Hidden Folk" of Icelandic legend, an ancient and secretive race with beginnings far back in Earth's prehistoric times.

Avalon: Companions is a story of conflict between peoples driven by an ancient hatred and terrible fear that has never been appeased. Dan Monroe and Claudia Chantal battle to save humanity from a deadly threat, a virus far more dangerous than the Black Death plague virus.

Time is running out. The virus is already here on Earth, seeded by a faction of the Hidden Folk that is highly skilled in the darker side of genetic engineering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483577128

Book preview

telling.

Chapter 1

Tempe, Arizona, Present Day

It is evening in the Arizona desert. The sun has just set and the western sky is full of colors. In the foreground, the low desert is a patchwork of trails, some made by animals, some by four-wheel drive vehicles. A white Chevy van drives slowly down the largest trail, swaying and bouncing. The driver looks at a display on his wristwatch frequently. He stops the van, backs up, looks at the display on his watch, and then backs up again. He gets out of the vehicle, still looking at his watch, and starts walking slowly to the east, maneuvering around small patches of scrub and cacti. His watch emits a series of beeps. Speak, says the man.

Class 4 dormant world gate, 100 yards, east southeast, Kapitan Steiger. The voice from the watch is synthetic and female.

Analyze, says the man with excitement, continuing in that direction.

Protected. Obsolete code. Shielded, but well over minimum detection levels. Probable Reformist technology.

Really… says the man, stopping for a moment and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He is very tall, very strong, blonde, with chiseled features and high cheekbones. His eyes are like chips of blue ice, the deep blue of glacier compression ice. He looks like the ultimate Aryan, but his genetic code is actually rather far from human normal. Why do you think it’s Reformist technology?

Very similar to transport technology stolen by Reformists in Dark Angel Outpost, Earth side, three years ago, says the watch.

We hunted them all down, protests the man. We recovered all the stolen components.

That’s true, Kapitan, but they apparently were able to decrypt the central processor coding before they were captured and must have forwarded many terabytes of classified information to other Agent cells. Too many code sequences in this unit are identical for it to be random chance, replies the watch. Its processors have been programmed for a certain amount of diplomacy.

 After a moment, the man continues walking east-southeast, skirting a large patch of cholla cactus. Can you subvert the gate without alerting the Reformists? he asks.

Easily.

How long?

Two minutes, fourteen seconds to code level two. The man smiles and shakes his head. Just ten years before, his best code breaker would have taken more than twelve hours to decode a Class 4 gate. He finds it amusing that the watch looks exactly like a cheap sport watch – to make theft less likely – but has computing power of hundreds of trillions of calculations per second. For all intents and purposes, he considers it to be a self-aware intelligence of high order. Place me on the boulder ten feet ahead, to my mark, the watch continues. The man does so, removing the watch and passing it over the surface of the rock in a spiraling pattern. Mark, says the watch. The man lays it on the rock.

Nanofiber tendril length insufficient to reach main processor. Can you remove the rock? I do not detect any antipersonnel devices at this stage. Steiger sets the watch aside and lifts the rock. It weighs over four hundred pounds. He moves it without apparent effort. A large cavity is exposed, about three feet deep, showing signs of excavation lasers. Steiger passes the watch over the cavity floor in a spiraling pattern. Mark, says the watch. Retreat fifty feet until I call. There may be an antipersonnel explosion hazard at this stage. Lie down with your arms shielding your head. The man does so.

A little over two minutes later, the watch says Completed. Safe to approach.

Gate status? Steiger asks.

Usable now. Transaction log subverted. If you wish to test, code phrase is as follows: ‘freedom for all 12147 alpha,’ end code phrase. Set return parameters in standard Earth units. Current destination is in Southwestern Avalon.

The man laughs at the code phrase. Typical Reformists! How sentimental. He looks around for other vehicles or people in the area. There are none. Then he says Addressing gate: Freedom for all 12147 alpha, open gate.

A synthetic male voice replies Active. It seems to emanate from the ground. Steiger can feel the voice as a vibration under his feet. A slight shimmer appears over a flat rocky area nearby, then disappears.

What is your destination? asks the man.

Southwestern Avalon, cup valley, currently clear of sentient forms of any consequence, says the gate.

Transmit me, then return me in one minute, says the man.

Agreed, replies the gate. After removing chip tech and other electromagnetics, walk toward active area. The shimmering reappears briefly. The man removes his watch, car alarm control, and wallet and sets them under a small bush. Gate transfer would destroy the magnetic coding on credit cards. The watch remains silent, since there is no point, and much possible risk, in revealing its presence to the activated gate unit.

The man walks toward the active area. Bright colors appear around his outline, like chromatic aberration in a bad camera lens. He disappears, and reappears in a place that is either an unimaginable distance away or no distance at all. One minute later, he returns, clothes slightly damp from light rain in Avalon. The colors flare around his outline, and then subside. Gate, deactivate, he says.

Deactivating, says the gate. The man picks up his watch, replaces the rock over the cavity, and retrieves his wallet and car alarm control. He returns to the van.

Once they are alone again, the watch asks, Have mission parameters changed?

The man thinks for a moment, and then says, There are now additional parameters. We’ll have to find out why Reformists would put a gate down here and what they intend to do with it.

What about Claudia Chantal? Do you think she’s involved with the gate? And what about the tie-in with Dan Monroe?

I think there’s a link there. She seems to be high enough in the Reformist organization, at least in Arno Karmundsen’s cell, to be involved with a gate project like this. But I don’t know why she would have taken Monroe’s class at the University.

He appears to be susceptible to women. We’ve considered that route in the past, as you know, based on his early years in Avalon.

He was wild then, true, but he’s no fool, said Steiger. I wouldn’t underestimate him for a second. I consider him the single most dangerous Moderate, with the possible exception of Manandan Caerlynsson, or High King Oberon himself. Monroe hates us and everything we stand for. I doubt a romantic liaison would change that.

Could he be a Moderate with Reformist leanings? They might hope to recruit him with a beautiful and intelligent woman like Chantal.

I don’t know, says Steiger with a sigh. We know very little about her, but what little evidence we have suggests that she is very capable. We don’t have a clue as to why she’d be in Tempe, except for the tie with Arno and the gate. Getting involved with Monroe would seem to be extremely risky if she is involved directly with the gate project – he’d have strike teams out here sifting the desert sand for clues and interrogating Reformists. He’s the most thorough agent I know, and very loyal to the High King.

He covered his trail to Arizona amazingly well, says the watch. Triple redundancy and multiple false trails. It was pure luck that we found him.

True, says Steiger. Cost Accounting is going to flay me alive over the search costs.

You are only 80% over budget, says the watch with what Steiger suspects is dry humor.

Steiger sighs again. We’re stretched so thin over here I was worried about getting everything done in time as it was, and now we have this world gate to investigate. Where are the plans for the central processor? How widely have they been disseminated?

It does create multitudes of unpleasant possibilities, says the watch. Gate transfer opens up hundreds of worlds to human colonization, along just the few known hyperdimensional arcs. Knowledge of gate power sources opens up many powerful related technologies as well.

Contact an interrogation team and get them over here immediately, says Steiger. We’ll need more than the original strike force to handle this investigation of the gate. We can’t delay the virus seeding or scheduled terminations.

Contacting… says the watch. A few moments later: Negative, Kapitan. It will be at least a week before they can arrive. I forwarded an override request to Stormwing Command, but I’m not optimistic.

Scheiss! says Steiger. He sometimes curses in German when he is really angry, an affectation he learned from his leaders. Don’t they realize we can win or lose the war right here, right now?

There is news of Reformist incursions in the eastern United States and Europe, Kapitan Steiger, says the watch carefully. I received an update when I linked for the override request.

We wondered why they were pulling out of Canada and Russia, but we couldn’t find out where their new focus areas were in time, says Steiger in a calmer tone. They must have someone smart and effective in charge for a change. I wonder who?

There are rumors of a command change, but nothing definite is known yet.

So what about the gate? asks Steiger. Its location here makes no sense to me. Southwestern Avalon has been pretty much deserted a long time, by all three major groups.

It would be a good place to hide, though travel on that side would be slow to get anywhere worthwhile, says the watch.

Maybe they’re just storing it here temporarily. How hard would it be to move a gate like this one? asks the man.

To a more useful trafficked area? Very hard with this unit, because the shielding is poor. The original theft in Dark Angel outpost did not include the Class 4 shield generators. Distortion matrices are mapped and monitored near all major Avalon entry points, as you know.

I wonder if they were just testing it here, and working on developing their own shielding technology?

That would make sense, says the watch. Or they could give it to the humans as is, and they could mass produce it.

There’d be no stopping them then, with the way humans breed, says the man with disgust.

True, says the watch. That has always been the danger of artificial gate technology.

But why wouldn’t the Reformists have given it to the humans already? Why put it out here and leave it dormant?

A delay in the testing, perhaps, or being busy with other projects. Or internal disagreement over whether to release the technology, or when, or to whom.

They are known for that kind of disagreement, especially when it comes to advanced technology, Steiger agrees. Many of them want to be known as benevolent lords of creation, not as former benefactors supplanted by their pet creatures. The man looks out over the evening desert, and shudders at the thought of humans on Avalon and the other worlds, breeding. Always breeding. Filthy vermin! All the more reason to release the Pale Horse virus now, he says. That is the code name of the genetically engineered virus that he and others are getting ready to release. It is the most vicious variant among hundreds of engineered viruses, hundreds of times more contagious and lethal than the AIDS virus. Steiger has personally tested it on captives. He is very glad that his own mixture of DNA makes him immune.

True, says the watch. Likelihood of successful human escape into the known worlds is much greater now that gate technology is partially dispersed. Pale Horse may be the only way to stop that now. Perhaps release of the trigger chemical should also be moved up. Lethality control of the Pale Horse virus is almost perfect, making it the biowarfare weapon of choice. After incredibly fast spread and initial infection without significant symptoms, the virus stays dormant in the system of normal humans and is virtually undetectable until a trigger chemical is released into the environment. Then, the resulting epidemic among those exposed to the trigger chemical makes the Black Death look relatively mild in comparison. Steiger knows that those who control the trigger chemical will control the Earth with pinpoint control. Perhaps some vermin slaves would be useful, here and there, living in constant fear of an agonizing death.

Forward a message to General Styrix, for his eyes only, requesting earlier release of the trigger chemical with supporting reasons, says the man grimly, looking like an Aryan angel of death. Steiger starts the van and drives toward Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. Airports are excellent vectors for viral infections. Along the way, he attaches a patch to his coveralls with the name of the cleaning company that Sky Harbor airport uses. He has patches for major airports in three states.

Message sent, says the watch.

Chapter 2

Phoenix, Arizona, Present Day

Dan Monroe had broken into PowerTech’s main R&D building in Phoenix. Admittedly, breaking and entering was not part of his cover job description as a research University professor. He wondered how much latitude the concept of research had. Probably not enough to convince a cop, he thought. But officer, I was working on groundbreaking and entering research… I guess it’s the breaking and entering part they’d take exception to.

PowerTech was a government subcontractor working on power generation systems, or so they said publicly. Monroe was pretty sure that they were learning technologies that his organization – his secret employers, not the University – wanted stopped, because he had found evidence of deuterium and radioactive isotope shipments to this location, as well as certain telltale hardware components like million-gauss magnetic field coils. Certain avenues of fusion research are harmless blind alleys – in other words, all the ones publicly known so far. Other avenues are more promising, and Monroe’s job was to stop them. Not that his secret employers had anything against cheaper electricity, but there are related technologies after basic fusion that worry them a great deal, things that would be likely to start wars in multiple worlds. Hence the existence of the Watchers – the informal name of Monroe’s part of the organization. Though in this case, he thought, I am doing a lot more than just watching, and that could get me killed or thrown in jail for a long time.

Monroe was standing on the far side of a tight corner in the basement of the facility, where the route the security guard followed doubled around a large vertical ventilation duct, an afterthought not part of the original layout, installed when a larger air conditioning system had been put in. The guard’s schedule of rounds was normally changed randomly every hour by a subroutine in the PowerTech central computer system. Unfortunately for the guard, Monroe had hacked into the system several days ago and now had control of the scheduling routine. That one hack into their system had told him everything he needed to know about PowerTech – except for one crucial thing. It turned out that they were smart enough to keep their most secure files in a stand-alone computer in a vault with no Internet or local area network connection. Monroe had decided to break into the vault and find out what PowerTech was really up to.

Monroe knew from the programmed schedule change that the guard would be there in about three to five minutes. He was in perfect position to surprise the guard, who he had observed to be right-handed when he hacked into security camera footage. Right-handed people, Monroe knew, tend to look more toward their right side when turning a corner to the right. The lighting in this area was also unusually dim, particularly in this part of the corridor where the ventilation duct blocked the illumination from the closest light fixture. And it probably wouldn’t help the guard’s ability to protect himself that Monroe had stretched a trip wire across the narrow corridor at ankle height where it was nearly impossible to see. Monroe practiced deep breathing and waited as patiently as he could.

He thought about Manandan Caerlynsson, his mentor and trainer, who some people would call his handler – though the relationship was far more than that – and smiled. Manandan had always berated him for his lack of patience when he was training Monroe. Dan, if you were a predator, you’d starve to death, he’d say. You’d get all jumpy and eager and scare the prey away. Manandan, if you could see me now you’d be proud, Monroe thought. I’m king of the jungle. He thought of his students at the University and what they would say if they could see him right then, and almost laughed out loud. Gee, Professor Monroe, why are you waiting to mug a security guard in a top secret facility? And what’s with the ninja suit? Monroe thought about his response. So what’s the problem, kids? Can’t I have outside interests like a part time espionage hobby? And it’s not a ninja suit, it’s a dark colored fleece pullover with a hood and black jeans.

A couple of minutes later the guard came by. It was the lean, fit one, not the overweight older guy, not that it mattered much. As the guard tripped over the ankle-height wire, Monroe grabbed him easily from behind in a military chokehold. The guard was more proficient at infighting – better than Monroe expected – and tried to hit him with his elbows, but Monroe twisted his torso away and kept the powerful hold in place. The guard’s strikes quickly lacked force as he ran out of oxygen, and a few seconds later he slumped in Monroe’s arms, unconscious. Monroe used the guard’s keys to open a nearby supply closet, trussed him up in duct tape – this stuff is so useful, he thought – and checked the guard’s pulse. Strong and steady… good. Monroe took the guard’s keys, magnetic swipe card, and radio and headed for the vault, logging in to the check stations along the way. They were at set time intervals apart and an alarm would trigger if they were not activated on schedule.

One of the problems he had considered in this break-in was how much high tech gear to use. He had a supercomputer watch – though far beyond current military technology on the Earth, they were pretty much standard issue for agents on all sides, in terms of the Watchers and their enemies – because they were unobtrusive in most cultures and were incredibly useful. But he didn’t really want to use the watch to completely neutralize PowerTech’s systems. He knew that there would be unavoidable physical evidence giving PowerTech good time estimates of how long he was inside the facility. If they realized there were people out there like him with gear that made their military-grade systems look like children’s toys, all kinds of smart and nosy military security experts would get called in and the Watchers’ work would become much more difficult. So Monroe had to figure out a way to break in and get what he wanted that looked as if it were possible using normal human technology. Ideally, they would think that a competitor had broken in to steal their secrets. He had brought several clues to mislead them in that direction.

He used one of them at the vault, a fiber optic bridging device adapted from a competitor’s commercial unit. Monroe used it to reprogram the vault door circuits to accept two swipes of the same card as if they were separate cards. Normally, both guards’ cards had to be used at the same time along with simultaneous retinal scans. He had removed some rather elegant code from the original security program, replacing it with a version with a clumsier subroutine, and then hacked in past the new subroutine. He had even found a way into their security backup system and changed the backup copies of the security coding too. It would look to even a careful investigator as if a long standing weakness in the original program were at fault – ineffective syntax in the retinal scan code module that had allowed a hack.

The heavy vault door locking bolts thudded open and Monroe pulled the door open. It was heavy but moved easily on hinges that must have had roller or needle bearings to move so smoothly. He checked his watch, using only its usual function of telling time. Four minutes down. Four to go with the three-minute grace period after the last swipe card station. Looking good. That was when the other guard decided to chat into his radio. Hey Bert, how’s it going? Want to get coffee after your round is done?

Monroe coughed into the microphone and said, Sure in a muffled voice.

Boy, your allergies sure must be acting up! You sound terrible, he said.

Monroe coughed again and said Uh huh.

Okay, he replied cheerfully. See you in a few.

Whew, Monroe thought, didn’t need that. He removed the solid state hard drive from the vault computer and put it in his waist pack, then closed the vault door and left the facility, using the swipe card along the way. At the north end of the building, he had to deviate from the guard’s original programmed route. He knew that as soon as he used his swipe card and keys to get outside, the other guard would be alerted by a central monitor and might get curious.

What’s up, Bert? Those high school punks get into the secure parking lot again? he asked over the radio. I hate that guy. Cheerful and alert. Damn.

Uh huh, Monroe replied.

Can you check what’s up with camera 4? he asked. It’s not panning the way it should, misses the whole north end of the lot. I’ll do an override on your next swipe.

Sure, Monroe said. Of course camera 4 isn’t panning the way it should. I took care of that before I came in. He lifted aside the chain link fabric where he had broken in to the complex and put it back in place. He ran north through the landscaped area, tossed the radio, keys, and swipe card in one of the small landscaping ponds – wishing the resident koi fish the best of luck with the new security gear – and soon he was running through the scrub trees north of PowerTech’s complex. Behind him, Monroe heard an alarm klaxon. The other guard only had so much latitude to depart from security protocols, and must have finally triggered the alarm, either becoming suspicious or perhaps thinking they needed backup when his partner missed swiping in again. Nice chatting with you. Sorry, gotta run.

Monroe had borrowed a used car dealer’s vehicle, a red 1997 Camaro. He had read somewhere it was the most stolen kind of car. Might as well stick with the most stolen kind of car, he had decided, because why reinvent the wheels? He put the waist pack with the stolen hard drive on the passenger seat. He pulled off the dark fleece pullover, leaving a white T-shirt underneath. He knew that the least likely police approach route to PowerTech – because of distances to local police stations and normal patrol routes – was through a large residential area to the northwest. He stayed on the side streets, using a circuitous route he had memorized. He had not brought his portable GPS, since it might provide some records that law enforcement or Homeland Security could use against him if things went badly. Along the way he took off his supercomputer watch and set it on top of the hard drive. Decrypt files, analyze and report.

A few minutes later the watch beeped. This was a standard precaution before it would speak. Sure, Chronus, go ahead, Monroe said.

Files only 95% decrypted so far, Dan, said the watch in its reedy male voice. Based on the 95%, it’s almost certain that all avenues of research at PowerTech are harmless. The deuterium and the various isotopes in the shipments we tracked are used in an apparently promising variant of the Telworth-Yamada-Nguyen dirty start interphase transform that leads eventually, as you know, into various time-consuming and fruitless speculations. Do you wish to dispose of the hard drive on this trip, or can we keep it?

Yes, I’d rather dispose of it – too incriminating if it were found with us.

The reason I ask is that the 5% of files that I have not been able to decrypt completely will take a substantial amount of time to process. They were shredded with a military grade algorithm but the configurations were set wrong, so they missed some file slack and some sectors are only partially destroyed. Still, the many of the file fragments are severely degraded and will take time to decrypt and cross-correlate.

Can you just copy them all and work on them later?

Yes, although there is a slight risk I might miss something that looks like junk data but would have been relevant.

Well, go ahead and copy what you can and then shred the drive.

Okay, Dan, will do.

That’s good news about the blind alley PowerTech is working on, Monroe said with relief. Anything interesting happening back there now?

Two police units are there based on radio transmissions. No transmissions relate to you, this Camaro, or its license number. They keep talking about a suspect… wait, there’s more… they found the security guard you locked in the cabinet. Chronus chuckled. You have now been upgraded to a ‘perpetrator.’ Heck, that is what I always thought of you. Definitely a perp.

Could you just restrict yourself to being a supercomputer and not a super smart-ass computer? Any physical description of me now on the police radio?

Nope, nothing at all except ‘adult male, possibly armed.’

So how come there was so much encrypted chatter going on between PowerTech and its subcontractors the last several weeks? Do you think they were expecting a break through?

Yes, I think they were. The emails and data files I decrypted bear out that they thought they were getting close to a workable commercial fusion reaction. Chronus paused, and then said, Here’s something interesting in one of the file slack areas… there’s a tie in with San Diego State and a researcher there… checking his background on the Internet… he’s Russian, Dan, and he’s connected with a lot of the people we have been watching! Chronus showed every evidence of enjoying the chase, and his ability to cross-correlate apparently unrelated facts was one of many things that made him very useful in Monroe’s part time line of work.

What’s his name?

Andrei Lebetsevsky. He’s had recent contact with Mikhail Odgurodov.

Good old Mikhail, Monroe said, my favorite ex-KGB physicist, if he really is ex-KGB. Who else does Lebetsevsky know? Wait a minute – I know this guy – Phyllis told me about him, mentioned that he was a new researcher they had brought in to give their Physics Department a bit more oomph.

Chronus rattled off a few other names in Lebetsevky’s circle. Most were familiar. Sounds like Lebetsevsky has the right background and connections to be a risk. So what’s the tie-in with PowerTech?

From what I can tell so far, he is trying to interest them in a possible new fusion reaction he discovered involving phased particle mirroring. He’s being crafty and just gives some hints in his emails to them… not a lot of details.

Still, that sounds worrisome… do you think he could have stumbled on a third order interaction? That could be used to develop gate technology.

That would be very dangerous and destabilize the political situation rapidly, it’s true… I don’t see anything to rule it out, Dan. There are a couple of harmless avenues he could be pursuing, but I am getting a bad feeling.

Peculiar though this talk of feelings sounded, coming from a glorified wristwatch, Monroe had learned to trust Chronus’ hunches. His quantum state processors were so advanced, and so far beyond current human technology, that like most Agents, Monroe considered Chronus to be a self-aware intelligence in his own right. Good thinking, Chronus, we’ll have to pay Dr. Lebetsevsky a visit very soon. If he really is working with third order interactions that would definitely be enough to start a war.

Monroe looked at the neighborhood they were driving through. The houses were upscale, with nice landscaping. Some sprinklers were going and some little kids were running through the spray and shrieking with laughter. He imagined something like a Xenoid-class hypership cluster-bombing the neighborhood. There were various factions he knew of that, if they knew gate technology were potentially loose in the world, could have gunships from Central American secret bases strafing these homes and these very children within about an hour. None of the projections Chronus had run over the years looked good – if the technology Monroe was looking for got out into the world, every single scenario ended up in a World War III situation. The key was to prevent the technology getting out in the first place.

Thanks, Chronus. Good work! Monroe drove to Metrocenter mall and parked the Camaro. The south end of the parking lot had no traffic, so he changed out of the loose-fitting black pants behind a dumpster. He put the fleece pullover in a paper bag and threw it in the dumpster. He put on blue jeans and a red polo shirt. He left the car unlocked with the driver side window rolled down. Perhaps some enterprising thief will steal it and muddy the trail even more.

 He walked a circuitous route and checked his back trail several times. No pursuit. He threw the solid state hard drive – now unreadable junk – in a big storm drain along the way. He heard a plunking sound. Probably runoff from sprinkler systems, he thought. His car was on a side street about a half mile away. He drove home to Tempe and was there by 9:00 PM as promised. Hey, he said to his girlfriend Claudia, I’m home. She was wearing pajamas with a little bunny rabbit print and looked really cute. Her strawberry blonde hair was tousled.

Hey you, she said. How’d the study group go?

Really well. Got everything done on schedule. He felt a little guilty lying to her, but he wasn’t about to confess to being a secret agent just yet. Another little white lie to throw on the big pile of little white lies that is my life. He kissed her. He loved Claudia’s mouth. Wide, full lips. Great teeth. Slight overbite that she’s embarrassed about, but he thinks is cute. A good kisser. Yum, he said, after a moment.

Yum, she replied, grinning. Feeling frisky, doc? she asked, looking up at him, green eyes shining.

Decidedly so, he said in an English accent.

Ooh, she said, veddy good, sir.

Allow me to take a shower first, he said.

Certainly, she replied. Cleanliness is next to sexiness.

Is that how it goes? he asked.

In my book of proverbs, it does.

 I salute your proverbial wisdom. Max, his Golden Retriever, ran in the doggy door right then and woofed at him. He started to follow Monroe upstairs.

No you don’t, Maxie, said Claudia. Shower. He knew what that meant – banishment from the master suite for the duration. Dejected, he turned around and galumphed down to the first floor. He thumped down in front of her with a loud sigh. Poor baby, she said. His tail began to wag. She knelt down and patted him on the head.

Chapter 3

Monroe was singing his fool head off in the shower. Max was howling eerie dog harmonies outside the bathroom door – apparently he