Chapter 3 #2
Still, those dogs sounded an awful lot like wolves—at least to someone who’d grown up in upstate New York. And they served as the perfect soundtrack to the “ancient Scotland” BBC documentary I’d apparently stumbled into as I walked toward the cottage’s dimly lit front door.
The door was unlocked, just as Iain said it would be. And walking through it gave me the feeling of having exited a time machine with the dial set firmly to “the future.”
So much for the old-timey vibe I’d sensed during my drive through the village. While Iain’s cottage appeared to be a few hundred years old on the outside, it was modern as all get out on the inside.
I tapped the light switch closest to the door, illuminating an open plan living room with stylish, upscale furniture in every direction I looked.
A large flat-screen TV hung above the fireplace, and three different video game consoles sat on its mantle along with several framed pictures of Iain with his brother and father.
None of him with his mother, though, I noted.
What had she done to get cut out of his life so thoroughly?
I wondered about Iain’s relationship with the Italian-accented woman whose calls he never returned as I made my way down the narrow hall off the main living area.
Only one door stood open, and voila, it turned out to be the one that led into my boss’s home office.
Inside, I found another standing desk, but this one was made of dark oak without technology to raise it up or down.
He’d attached a white sticky note to the desk’s right-corner front edge.
THUMB DRIVE was written across it in bold, black Sharpie.
I furrowed my brow. The note—written in Iain’s distinctive all-caps handwriting—was very clear. But the space above the note was empty.
And even more alarmingly, there was a large cage sitting just under the desk’s right edge. It resembled an oversized dog kennel, like the ones they’d set up in the hospital for the therapy dogs when they weren’t “on duty” and visiting patients.
There on the cage’s metal floor, I could see the thumb drive, its USB port gleaming in the low light. It must have fallen in there from the desk.
But unfortunately, the thumb drive wasn’t the only thing in the cage.
A huge, silent wolf stared back at me with silver eyes that seemed to glow in the room’s low light, and the thumb drive was lying halfway underneath its front paw.
“Okay, what the hell,” I said out loud.
I started to reach for my phone to call Iain, but then I remembered …he was camping. Which meant I was on my own. In his cottage. With … his wolf.
Crap!
I crouched down in front of the cage, a wave of fatigue crashing over me for reasons that had nothing to do with the overproduction of white blood cells currently killing me before I got the chance to live a solid twenty-five years on this Earth.
I tell you, I used to not believe in reincarnation. But now I really had to wonder if I hadn’t seriously effed up in a past life. I mean what other executive assistant on Earth had ever found herself in a situation like this?
I stared at the creature, and he stared back at me.
And man, I must have been some kind of brainwashed by my billionaire boss. Dutiful-to-a-fault me actually began to reach out for the thumb drive—before I came to my senses and yanked my hand back at the last moment.
“I’m not doing this. I’m not doing this.
I refuse to stick my hand in a cage with a freaking wild animal,” I told both the creature and myself.
“I mean, what’s your dad going to do? Fire me for refusing to retrieve the thumb drive from underneath the paw of his pet wolf?
I mean, who keeps a wolf as a pet anyway, then just conveniently forgets to tell his assistant about it?
If anything, this thumb drive mess is all his fault. So, nope, nope, I’m out!”
I start to stand up out of my crouch, but then the wolf does the strangest thing.
He whimpers and pushes the thumb drive toward me. Then he bows his head, and gazes up at me in a way that I immediately recognized as the universal canine language for “pet me, pretty please.”
Aww! Maybe this big guy wasn’t a wolf after all. There was a chance, I’d been so startled that I overreacted, and assumed “wolf” when really, he was just one of those dogs that only looked like a wolf. Like a malamute or a husky.
A really, really huge husky. But just in case, I’ve gotten this situation all wrong, I insert the tips of two fingers through the cage bars and gingerly patted the maybe-not-a-wolf on top of its huge head.
In response, Mr. Trust Me I’m Not A Wolf affectionately pushed his head into my fingers, as if to say, “See? I don’t bite. You should pet me some more!”
I laughed, and with a little maneuvering, I pushed my whole hand in just past my wrist between the thick wires of the cage to carefully give him a full-handed pet.
A noisy metallic clang suddenly rose into the air. It was his tail, I realized. He was wagging it so hard, it created a drumming sound against the cage’s back wall.
“Oh, my gosh, you like pets, don’t you?” I said with another laugh. “I bet your dad doesn’t give you any love at all. Poor thing.”
Honestly, the wolf-dog didn’t seem scary at all, anymore. But I was here on a mission, I soon remembered.
I stuck my other hand through the cage to retrieve the thumb drive. “Okay, just a few more pets, but then I have to—”
With lightning speed, the happy wolf-dog dropped all pretense of tameness and launched itself at my other outstretched arm, clamping its sharp teeth down on the fleshy part below my forearm.
It happened so fast, I didn’t feel a thing for the first few seconds other than crushing disappointment in the wolf-dog for turning on me.
But my disappointment was soon followed by a much less metaphorical pain.
I screamed as I desperately tried to shake the creature’s mouth from my arm.
But the wolf-dog held on for several more seconds, its silver eyes bright and resolute.
And despite the huge adrenaline spike, I simply wasn’t strong enough to pull my arm from the wolf-dog’s firm bite.
But just as I was beginning to wonder if I would be forced to watch the creature tear off my arm and eat it in front of me like something out of a particularly graphic horror movie, it just let me go. So suddenly, I fell back on my butt.
I cut off screaming to stare at the unblinking animal. I had no idea why it had bit me and then just let me go. But I was done pretending it wasn’t a wolf, and I wasn’t about to look this unexpected gift-of-freedom horse in the mouth.
Scrambling clumsily to my feet, I clutched my injured arm to my chest and ran like a bat out of hell back to the relative safety of my car.
Without the thumb drive.