The Return Read online

  FOR TUI

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Tracking Callie

  Chapter 2: The Kennel

  Chapter 3: Escape

  Chapter 4: Decisions, Decisions

  Chapter 5: Denward Bound

  Chapter 6: Lessons on Friendliness and Approachability

  Chapter 7: The Legend of Lassie

  Chapter 8: Streetwise

  Chapter 9: Lessons Relearned

  Chapter 10: To the Beach

  Chapter 11: Oasis

  Chapter 12: Rip Tide

  Chapter 13: Piecing Things Back Together

  Chapter 14: Home Sweet … Pile of Rubble

  Chapter 15: Outside the Open Door

  Chapter 16: Home

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek

  Other Books

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Shep stood alone in the dark. There were no lights above him and no cage held him, but still he could not move. The cries of his friends echoed around him. Their voices moved like birds on the wind, but he saw nothing except the empty stone beneath his paws. He didn’t know how to find his howling friends. He didn’t know what he could do to save them. He stood, motionless, in the unending black.

  A rumbling growl freed Shep from his nightmare. He cracked open his eyes just as one of the huge, squat metal-box Cars rolled past. These strange Cars and the green-clad humans who crouched inside them infested this part of the city. A dog could barely sneak a lap of water before some human showed up to snatch him.

  Shep stretched from his shoulders to his claws. These new dreams were almost more terrifying than the old ones in which he was trapped in the fight cage or in the storm’s wave. At least in those dreams, he knew what he had to do. Now, in his nightmares and his waking life, Shep was wandering blind, not certain of anything. He was far from every home he’d ever known, searching through a strange city for vanishing prey — his lost friends, his Callie.

  But what other choice do I have?

  The sun was setting, which meant that the remnants of Shep’s pack — seven dogs and one cat — were due back from the sun’s hunt. For the past three suns, the small pack had walked hundreds upon hundreds of stretches, from the boat toward the cold winds, looking for traces of the humans who had stolen their friends. Each sunrise, the dogs split up to search, going out alone or with one other dog. When the sun set, they met at a chosen landmark and then followed whatever trail had been found. It was a slow process, and a painful one: Every heartbeat lost to sniffing out the humans’ scent was one more that the rest of his pack remained trapped. But Shep was adamant about taking these precautions. If he weren’t afraid of losing the trail entirely, he would forbid their moving when it was light out. He didn’t want to lose another packmate to the dog catchers.

  Shep rose and scented the late-sun air. He’d dozed in a moldy paper box after heartbeats of fruitless sniffing and now had to rush if he was going to rejoin his packmates at the meeting place by sunset. Just before dawn, they’d selected a ruined building with a tall, thin spire as a landmark; Shep hoped his wandering hadn’t taken him too far from it.

  He padded to the end of the alley. Long shadows stretched across the street. A dirty, tired-smelling woman pushed a cart filled with garbage bags along the Sidewalk. Shep decided that she didn’t pose a threat and loped onto the open pavement.

  His packmates were not as cautious as he was when it came to people. They seemed to have already forgotten the terrifying men in black who’d invaded the boat and taken their friends. Shep had not forgotten. In the suns since the invasion, he’d seen humans in normal-looking body coverings with long poles and dangling ropes chasing down strays. He warned the others that the dog catchers looked like every other person now. But did the pack listen to him? No, the fur-brains wagged their tails at every outstretched hand. They’d been lucky so far. Every evening, when all his dogs checked in at the meeting place, Shep gave thanks to the Great Wolf for their not having been captured, then reminded himself that there was no such phantom watching over them. No such thing as the Great Wolf. Not anymore …

  A Car stopped ahead of him in the middle of the street. Shep paused; he pricked his ears and scented the breeze. There were few regular Cars on the roads — mostly, Shep saw the metal-box Cars — and what Cars he’d seen were driven by dog catchers.

  The Car’s doors flapped open.

  I knew it….

  Two people, one with a pole and rope, climbed out. They began calling to Shep, whistling.

  How much of a fuzz head do they think I am?

  Shep wheeled on his paws and ran away down the pavement. He jumped through the broken front window of a building and hid behind a counter. Scenting the space, he smelled rot in the back corner. The back wall had partially collapsed and the ruined paper-stone was easily torn away. Shep scampered into a back alley and raced out onto an adjacent street. He dug his way under a wide plank of collapsed wall that rested on top of a Car and waited. His heart pounded and he panted hard. Shep counted two hundred beats, then decided he was safe. He’d eluded his captors once again.

  Boji and Dover were the first to reach Shep at the meeting place. The two Labs — one yellow like the morning sun and the other black as night — tended to go out together to search for their missing packmates. Boji was haunted by dark dreams of wounded and dying dogs. Dover, who always seemed to have his paws under him, stayed protectively by her side.

  “Any luck?” Shep woofed. He himself hadn’t found anything promising all sun.

  “More humans,” barked Dover. “And these weren’t dog catchers. These were regular people. An old man and a young one helping the old to walk.”

  Boji loped over to Shep and gave him a friendly sniff. “Do you think this means our humans are back? Do you think we can go home?”

  “I don’t know,” Shep answered. He didn’t bother reminding Boji that her home had been torn apart by the storm, that even if she went back there, her family might never return to that pile of rubble. Instead, he woofed, “Even if your master were back, would you abandon your friends to the dog catchers?”

  Boji’s tail drooped. “You know that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant after we find them that we could go home.”

  Shep snorted. “Maybe,” he woofed.

  The pack members had been on this home topic ever since they saw the humans at the boat. All the woofs about home rubbed Shep’s fur the wrong way. It wasn’t just that he didn’t think he had a den to go home to — Shep didn’t want to go home. Sure, it would be nice to feel his boy’s hand stroking his wet fur, rubbing him dry with a towel, and playing on the rug, but he couldn’t give up barking with Callie every sun or running the streets with Blaze, hunting for rabbits. He had just gotten the pack going on the right scent when those dog catchers came in and ruined everything. He had to see what it was like to live free with his fellow dogs.

  The rest of them would scent what Shep was smelling once the pack was together again. He knew it.

  Rufus the schnauzer and Ginny the sheltie were the next to arrive. Shep never counted on them to find a useful track, but they usually returned with food. Shep had no time to hunt, so the pack ate whatever could be scavenged on the streets. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much left on the street to scavenge. Ginny and Rufus, however, could always find something. This evening, they arrived with a bag of thick, circular pieces of bread.

  “There seems to be more people in this part of the city,” barked Ginny, “meaning much better pickings for food.”

  Shep’s ears pricked. “Are you saying that you got this food from a human?”

  Rufus wagged his tail — an unusually happy response from the squaredog. “You bet
your tail we did!” he yapped. “Ginny stubbed her paw on a nasty bit of metal and was limping. This human saw her and made all sorts of cooing noises and dropped this bag at her paws.”

  Shep could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Are you positively out of your fur?” he bellowed. “That human could have snatched you up!”

  Ginny stuck her snout in the air. “I think I can smell the difference between a human who wants to pet me and a human who wants to trap me,” she growled. “This was a young girl, and she just wanted to stroke my brown fur, which, mind you, was a not uncommon occurrence before this horrible storm nonsense.”

  Shep didn’t dig any further into the issue, sensing that he was the only dog in the room who felt that they should avoid all contact with humans. He munched his hunk of bread and watched the sky darken and worried whether any of the others would return.

  Daisy the pug arrived with no new scent of their friends, but with similar stories of regular humans digging through the ruins of their dens or rolling around the streets in their Cars. Snoop the greyhound also had no luck.

  “Sorry-Shep-all-I-smelled-was-humans-humans-everywhere-do-you-think-we-should-head-home-huh?” Snoop wagged his tail and had a hopeful look on his muzzle.

  “No,” Shep barked firmly. “Not until we rescue our friends.”

  Daisy slurped up the last crumb of her bread. “Do you still — snort — think we’re going to find them?” she woofed. “It’s been three whole suns, and the scent’s been fainter with each passing of the moon.”

  “We are going to find them,” Shep snapped.

  Shep trotted to the hole in the den’s wall to wait for his last two packmates — Oscar the dachshund puppy and Fuzz the cat. Every morning, Oscar raced out to search alone, sometimes not even waiting for every dog to wake before heading onto the streets. Perhaps the pup knew that none of the other dogs would have gone with him after how he’d betrayed the pack. Shep knew that Oscar was sorry for leading Zeus and the wild pack to the boat, that he never meant for the wild dogs to slaughter their friends. Shep had tried explaining this to the rest of the pack. But Higgins and Virgil had died, along with so many others — it was hard to forgive such a betrayal so soon after it had happened.

  In other circumstances, Shep wouldn’t have let Oscar go out alone. Fuzz seemed to have read Shep’s thoughts. Every sun, after the pup scampered away from the den, the cat went out to shadow him. The fact that Fuzz always knew what was buzzing around in Shep’s brain was some strange-smelling stuff that Shep would rather leave unsniffed. Whatever the reason for Fuzz’s knowledge, Shep was glad that at least some dog — or cat — was looking out for the pup. Who knew what kind of trouble the misguided mutt would get them all into?

  The fact that none of the dogs had found a scent was not good news. Boji and Dover had caught a trail on their search the sun before, and Snoop had found a scent the two suns before that. But Shep was not going to give up the search. He couldn’t. Not after everything they’d been through. Not after he’d braved the fury of the storm, a pack of wild dogs, a world-crushing wave, and monstrous water lizards from the deep of the canal to collect this pile of dogs he called his pack.

  The sun fell below the horizon and deep blue stretched over the roofs of the nearest buildings. Shep began to worry about the fur-brained pup. What trouble has Oscar gotten himself into now?

  A Car squealed down the road and its headlights revealed Oscar’s silhouette bounding toward the den.

  “Shep!” he cried. “I found them!”

  Shep’s ears pricked up. “Where?”

  The pup dragged himself through the hole in the wall, his thin tail whipping. “A little farther toward the cold winds,” he woofed, panting. “I saw an open-backed Car with a dog in a crate. When it stopped, I ran up a pile of trash and jumped into the back with the other dog!”

  Shep cocked his head. “You jumped into a dog catcher’s Car?” he barked. “Have you lost your tail? We are trying to rescue dogs from the dog catchers, not give them easy prey!”

  Oscar ducked away from him, but the grin on his jowls betrayed how happy he was that at least Shep was worried about losing him. The other pack members didn’t seem to give a shed hair whether the pup was eaten by a water lizard.

  “I was careful,” Oscar woofed, trying to sound tough.

  He explained that the truck drove toward sunset, then stopped at a big fence, beyond which sat huge Cars with stiff, birdlike wings on a field of pavement.

  “I jumped out before the Car went into the fenced-in part, then ran back here. But I could smell that a whole mess of dogs were somewhere inside that place.”

  This was the best-smelling stuff Shep had heard in suns. “Do you remember how you got back here? Can you lead us to the field?” His tail was wagging so hard it hurt.

  Oscar looked out the hole in the wall, then cocked his head. He sniffed the air. “I think so,” he yipped. “Yes. Definitely. I think it’s two streets up.”

  Daisy tilted her head to the side, unconvinced. “For all we know, the pup’s leading us into another trap.”

  Oscar’s tail drooped. “It’s not a trap,” he whimpered. “I promise on the Great Wolf’s coat I’m telling the truth.”

  Dover raised his eyebrows, then looked at Shep and licked his jowls.

  Fuzz materialized out of the evening shadows. “Big-ears-on-small-snout almost tell truth,” he hiss-barked. He strutted into the midst of the dogs, swatting his long, fluffy tail. The cat explained how he’d followed Oscar and jumped onto the Car’s bumper just before it growled away with Oscar in its back. “Fuzz keep careful track of trail between den and stone field. Three streets up, then many over. Pack together by sunrise.”

  Every tail wagged furiously, and the dogs yipped and barked with joy. Snoop slapped his paws on the ground and began to play with Boji and Dover. Fuzz sprang onto the back of a smashed wooden bench to avoid being crushed under the pounding paws. Rufus and Ginny bounded into the mix, snapping at the big dogs’ jowls. Daisy stood to the side, yapping hysterically and flipping her knot-tail. Shep joined the game, nipping Boji’s scruff and rolling onto his back. Then he saw Oscar sitting alone by the hole.

  Shep stepped away from the scuffle and loped to the pup’s side. “You made a great find, Oscar,” he woofed. “You should celebrate.” He bit one of the bread-rings Ginny had brought back and laid it at Oscar’s paws.

  Oscar glanced at the bread, then returned his gaze to the darkening street Outside. “I can’t do anything right,” he whimpered. “I find the others, but forget to keep track of the directions that would lead you all back there.”

  “But Fuzz remembered,” Shep woofed, trying to lighten the pup’s black mood. “Everything is as well-furred as it could possibly be.”

  “For you,” the pup replied. “For the pack, yes. But I need to do something. Something right, all by myself. Or else how can I ever expect any dog to forgive me?” He looked up at Shep with his huge, sad eyes. His ears hung limp around his muzzle.

  “The pack will forgive you,” Shep woofed, licking Oscar’s head. “Just give them time.”

  Shep allowed the others to take a short nap, just enough sleep to keep their paws moving under them. After the moon moved a stretch across the sky, he woke them and the pack set out to find the field of pavement crowded with winged Cars. The streets were dark — even though nearly two moon-cycles had passed since the storm, the city’s lights were still out — and the dogs moved like shadows along the Sidewalk.

  Shep kept his nose open for any humans. On previous nights, the pack had found sleeping men, and sometimes women and children, hidden inside paper boxes or even simply Outside under the Great Wolf’s fiery coat, curled on the stone of the Sidewalk. Those humans must have returned to the city to find that their homes had been blasted apart by the storm or washed away by the wave.

  When they found these denless humans, a part of Shep wondered about his boy, about whether his family slept on the stone in front of their broke
n den. And in that heartbeat, sadness exploded so violently inside Shep that he felt ready to burst. But he would wrestle himself back from those feelings. He had a pack to run. He had friends to rescue. He had a new life. He was the alpha.

  Fuzz led the dogs under awnings and down alleys, careful to scent for any dangers. They were lucky to have the meower, though Shep knew most of the dogs would never admit to feeling that way. Even after all these suns, Shep himself was startled whenever the cat barked. Fuzz was eerily silent and still, and his eyes continued to set Shep’s fur bristling when he caught their green glow flashing at him. It was weird living with a cat — they were just so different. But Fuzz had proved an invaluable pack member time and again.

  When Shep allowed his mind to wander over his suns in the boat, he sometimes stumbled upon that wretched evening when he threw the cat out. In a heartbeat, all the horror that one stupid decision had led to would flood his memory. He would see poor Honey dead in that alley and his friends massacred by the wild dogs. He would see Blaze’s fierce eyes and cower all over again beneath their power. The guilt and anger and regret and sadness would tear through him like lightning.

  Shep would dig through the memories, trying to find exactly where he’d gone wrong. He knew that if only he could track down exactly where he’d lost the right scent, he could ensure that he’d never make that mistake again. Once he had crushed that blunder in his jaws, Shep would become the alpha every dog needed him to be.

  The first tails of dawn were flicking in the sky when the pack reached the fenced field of pavement. As Oscar had reported, tall Cars with stiff wings jutting from their backs were arranged in neat rows along the stone. Some were huge — bigger even than the boat! — others had blades like a ceiling fan where their noses should be.