I gave a little growl of irritation and Pia licked her lips nervously. “Dr. Barrow?” For a moment, I was so annoyed by that tentative voice and posture that I just wanted to take her down. Next thing I knew, I was weaving on my feet, light-headed and confused. Pia was behind me, whimpering anxiously in the back of her throat as she tried to prop me up.
“Stop whining, I’m perfectly all right,” I said, and then everything went black.
TWO
I woke up on the abused couch that had taken shelter in our back office, the stink of ammonia burning my nostrils.
“Better now?” My boss was capping the glass vial of smelling salts which he’d been waving under my nose. Trust Malachy to have the appropriate Edwardian remedy on hand. I rubbed my nose, trying to get rid of the pungent residue of the ammonia fumes.
“I’m awake.”
“I’d call that better.” Malachy passed the smelling salts to Pia, who was standing behind him. I had a vague sense that they’d been discussing me a moment ago, and that I’d just missed some crucial bit of information.
Reflexively, I touched my face, checking for my glasses. Still on my face, although everything was a bit blurry. “What happened?”
“You passed out in the examining room. How do you feel?”
I took stock of myself: All my clothes were still on and I felt more or less human, though none too pleased with myself. My vision had cleared, though.
“I’m good now,” I said, trying to sit up. “Whoa, head rush.”
“You might want to take it slowly,” said Malachy. “You gave yourself a bit of a knock on the head going down.” He had a clipped, Home Counties accent, the patrician features of a Roman senator, and the unruly tangled black curls of a Portuguese water dog. Some of our female clients wondered why he didn’t cut it, and I explained that a certain amount of ostentatious eccentricity is the hallmark of the British upper classes.
“How about giving me a hand, then?”
I felt his bony arm come around my back, and wondered who had gotten me onto the couch. I had about three inches and twenty pounds on Pia, and while Dr. Malachy Knox was a lot of impressive things, physically, he wasn’t up to lifting anything larger than a Siamese.
“Okay,” said Pia, cheerleading from the sidelines, “swing your feet over, Dr. Barrow. Great. How’s that feel?”
“I’ll let you know when the room stops spinning.” For someone who’d been human for less than a year, Pia had adapted amazingly well to life on two feet. I still had trouble believing that the shy young wolf I’d met last October was now a high-functioning young woman. Granted, Pia still didn’t understand why most women colored their lips and eyelashes, and her approach to food was to consume it as rapidly as possible. Still, this made her seem more like a recent immigrant from some impoverished traditional society rather than a recent convert to our species. Part of the credit for Pia’s transition went to Jackie, her former owner, who had worked intensively to train Pia to sit at the table, and not under it.
Jackie, for her part, refused to acknowledge her role in Pia’s transformation. “You’d be surprised how little I had to teach her,” Jackie had said. It seems our canine companions understand more about human language and culture than we imagine.
What Jackie had never expressed overtly was how much she disapproved of what Malachy had done to her favorite wolf. Like my mother, Jackie didn’t particularly care for Homo sapiens. Nobody knew what Pia thought about the enormous changes in her life—she wasn’t offering her opinion, and I, for one, was a little afraid to ask her.
I realized that I had been sitting up for a full minute now, and my head had stopped spinning. “I do feel better,” I told Pia. “Thanks.” I tried to look the younger woman in the eye, but she kept averting her gaze. Now why was she acting so strangely around me all of a sudden? Most of the time it was Malachy who had her running scared.
Pia cleared her throat. “Can I get you something, Dr. Barrow? Water?”
“No, I’m fine. And what’s with the doctor business? I’ve said you can call me Abra.”
“Sure … Abra.” She gave me a poor excuse for a smile, and I had to fight the urge to shout, Stop that cringing, woman!