Familiar by M. L. Rhodes

Author:M. L. Rhodes [Rhodes, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781945514029
Publisher: Kellesborne Press
Published: 2016-10-31T18:30:00+00:00

Part II

Three and a half years later…

11

Hope. That fickle, fickle word. Fickle because it seemed to come and go at random intervals, and wasn’t always easily scrounged up when you needed it.

Tonight it would be nice if it could kick in because, honestly, hope was all we had left when it came to the poor, bedraggled beast lying on a soft rug in the bottom of the cage. We’d done everything we could for him. My brother-in-law Geoff—Dr. Farrington—had used every trick he knew, both veterinary and magickal, to save the poor thing’s life, and the rest of us had coddled and encouraged and begged him to pull through. But now, we all knew there was nothing left to try. We’d started calling the battered and broken gray tabby cat “Rocky” because he was such a mess yet somehow he still kept fighting and hanging in there like Rocky Balboa in the movies. He was getting weaker, though, and we all knew it. Geoff said that if there was no improvement over the next twenty-four hours or so, the only merciful thing left to do was put him down.

Rocky had touched a place in our hearts, maybe because of how he’d been found—someone had run him over with a car, then either they or someone else had picked him up and, instead of getting him help, had tossed him into a trash barrel behind the Dunkin’ Donuts on Canal Street. Thankfully, one of the workers had found him when she’d been taking out the trash late that night and had rushed him here to the small emergency vet clinic where I worked four nights a week.

The clinic was owned and run by Geoff, my sister Morgan’s husband. He was a witch like she was, and the clinic had one of the best reputations in Salem for helping animals…probably because Geoff supplemented his veterinary knowledge with his gift of healing magick, though most of his clients never knew that. Morgan was an animal lover like Geoff, and I knew that if poor Rocky did make it, Morgan would give him a home in a heartbeat, amongst the rest of her rescued menagerie.

Tonight the clinic was oddly quiet. It was eleven o’clock, late but not crazy-late, and usually at this time of night we’d have at least a patient or two in progress. But we’d sent home a guinea pig named Peewee and a spaniel named George a half hour ago. No one had been in since. I wondered if it was the weather—a huge winter storm was forecast to move in tomorrow, but light snow had already started falling a couple of hours ago. Maybe everyone was home battening down the hatches, as my grandfather used to say.

I still had an hour left on my shift. I usually worked from six to midnight. The pay was decent, especially for a college student who didn’t have any formal training as a veterinary assistant, and it allowed me to make some extra money to buy gas and other necessities.

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