Avenging Angels by Mary Stanton

the middle of all this craziness and not somewhere else? The feeling passed her by as quickly as it had come, and she said, “Actually, they belong to me. In a way. I’m taking care of them for a friend. I’ll come out and take them on home.” She got up and set her purse on the desk.
    “It seems very odd that you would have brought them here.” Tully’s voice was cold.
    “Yes. I apologize.” Then with more confidence than she felt: “They’re quite well trained and wouldn’t hurt a soul. I apologize again if they scared anyone.”
    “They aren’t doing anything,” Barrie said with a reassuring smile. “But my poor Ciaran is terribly allergic. And anything that affects his voice is just fatal . And it’s even little dogs. We had the most darling little poodle that we had to get rid of. It came on,” she added wistfully, “rather late in life.”
    “I understand completely,” Bree said, although the image of the great Ciaran Fordham sneezing his head off was somewhat at odds with his aristocratic composure, and made her want to laugh. “I’ll take care of it right now.”
    “And you should really come out and see to your guests, Tully,” Barrie said. She had a remarkable voice, Bree thought. Light and rather bell-like, but very clear, so that the words carried easily on the air.
    “All right, we’ll all go.” Tully stood up. If she was disappointed at her failure to raise her husband’s ghost, it didn’t show. Barrie was the first to leave, then Fig, then Danica. Bree followed Tully halfway out the door, then said, “Sorry, forgot my purse,” and slipped back inside. She walked over to the desk, reached for her purse, and felt the cold, cold swirl of a fetid wind.
    Help me, the voice cried. Help me! I want to go home.
    Damn, Bree thought. So he is there, after all.
    “Bree!” Tully’s voice from the hall was sharp and imperative. “You are going to take care of those dogs, aren’t you?”
    “I’ll be right there.” Bree slung her purse over her arm. The faint outlines of the desperate hand faded into nothing.
    “Damn it all,” she said to the empty air. “Can’t I get just a little bit of time off?”

Four
    Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
    —Shakespeare, Henry V
     
     
     
    Bree made her excuses, turned down an invitation for drinks with Anthony Haddad, apologized again for the dogs, and left Antonia at the party. Miles and Belli sat where she had left them, underneath the mullioned windows on the north side of the house. She realized, as she stood on the brick pathway and waited for them to accompany her home, that the windows were those of the office where Russell O’Rourke’s hand—and presumably, the rest of him—waited to snatch at her peace of mind.
    Belli took up her position at Bree’s right, Miles at her left. “I suppose,” she said aloud as she turned to walk back to her town house, “that I should thank you for saving my bacon a few days ago. And Sasha’s, too.” Her last case had featured a spectacular spray of bullets. Belli’s intervention had been quite welcome.
    No response. Not a twitch of an ear or a brief wag of a tail, much less a mental message of the Sasha kind. (Most of the time, she knew what her own dog was thinking, or thought she did, which amounted to the same thing.) She didn’t have a clue about these two. They just paced along six feet to the rear, golden eyes watchful, the “tick” of their claws a faint distraction in the silence, a pair of animated Fu dogs.
    “There’s a good fifty pounds of that Iams dog kibble left,” she said over her shoulder. She looked both ways across Broughton before she crossed to the park. The street was empty, almost eerily so. All the churchgoers had gone home, and the carillon itself was still. A cold wind swept up from the river, and she shivered a little, wishing she’d thought to bring a light jacket. November