Chasing Her Tail (4 page)

Katie Allen

interrupted the other night and they’d had incredible, mind-blowing sex, it would have crushed her to be ignored like this. It hurt badly enough as it was.

Wanting desperately to get away but unable to think of a way to back out of the conversation gracefully, she gestured toward the loaded cart. “Um, are you having a barbeque? I just mean, that’s a lot of meat.”

Micah’s expression darkened even more. “No party. We’re just… It was on sale.”

“Oh.” Bridget dropped her eyes and shifted from foot to foot, her hands gripping her shopping cart handle. “Okay then.” Her fingers tightened around the plastic handle, slipping in sweaty circles. “Have a good…um, shopping.” Barely resisting the urge to slap her own forehead, she pushed her cart away.
Nice one
, she berated herself.

Good way to show the uncle of one of your students that you have a firm grasp of grammar.

“Ms. Grace?” Sam had scrambled out from under the cart and was hurrying after her. “Ms. Grace? D’you want to come over and eat ribs with us tonight?”

“Ribs?” It took a moment for the question to register. Glancing toward Micah, she inwardly winced at his expression, cool and uncaring, as if the night at the bar had never happened. Her stomach twisted. “Thank you, sweetie,” she told Sam, crouching down so they were eye to eye, “but I can’t. You have an extra one for me, okay?”

His face dimmed, clouds swirling in and darkening the bright green of his eyes.

With a shrug, Sam turned away and climbed back under the cart to resume his perch, leaving Bridget to push her cart away, her stomach churning and guilt pressing down on her at the memory of Sam’s defeated slouch.

She couldn’t resist a quick glance behind her, although she wished she
had
when she saw Micah frowning at her back. Swallowing hard, she faced straight ahead and almost ran down the aisle away from the too-sweet boy and his gorgeous, sexy, incredibly confusing uncle.

It was one of those days. Days when she wondered why she became a teacher. Days when she thought longingly of being a doctor or an accountant or a mortician. At least then she could work with someone who stayed still for longer than five seconds.

There was a puppy in the classroom. She’d been reading aloud to the kids when she had heard scratching on the door. Curious, she’d opened it and a dog had darted in, to the kids’ shrill delight.

The puppy was now dodging around the desks and the children had fallen in behind it, shrieking and laughing as they tried to catch it.

“Take your seats,” Bridget commanded, clapping her hands, but the excitement of having an unexpected canine visitor completely removed any possibility of the kids having their listening ears on. The wild train, led by the puppy, careened its way around the room until Bridget hurdled a desk and trapped the animal in a corner.

Sweeping the puppy up in her arms, she ordered the children back to their seats once again. This time they obeyed, although reluctantly. The dog squirmed in her hold 20

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and she shifted it beneath one arm. Needle points of pain darted into her wrist and she almost dropped the puppy.

“Little f—riend,” she improvised through clenched teeth, cutting off the curse she really wanted to say. The dog looked up at her innocently, his little tail thumping against her back. It looked like a cross between a Husky and a German Shephard, and was way too friendly for a puppy that had just sunk its sharp teeth into her wrist. Beads of blood were already dotting her skin.
Great
, she thought.
Nothing like a rabies shot to
complete my day.

“Does anyone know who this puppy belongs to?” she asked her class. Every hand rose to a chorus of “Me, me, me! He’s mine!” Rolling her eyes at her stupidity, she held up her free hand in a request for quiet and walked over to the classroom phone.

No one in the main office knew anything about a loose dog. The receptionist promised to call animal control and Bridget hung up, looking down at the puppy.

“So what am I supposed to do with you in the meantime?” she muttered. One of the kids sneezed and Bridget bit off a groan. Of course someone was allergic. The day just kept getting better and better.

She glanced around the classroom and her gaze caught on the supply closet at the back of the room right next to the hallway door. Hesitating, she bit her lip. It seemed mean to put the puppy into the closet but another scan of the room didn’t give her any other ideas.

As she carried the dog to the supply closet, the kids protested.

“Please don’t put him in there, Ms. Grace!” Jack pleaded. Even teacher’s pet Sophia offered to hold the puppy on her lap.

“He’ll be fine,” Bridget insisted. “I’ll leave the light on.” With one hand, she shifted the reams of construction paper from the bottom shelf up out of puppy reach. A jolt of guilt flashed through her as she glanced down into the dog’s liquid eyes but another sneeze from behind her strengthened her resolve.

To ease her conscience, Bridget slipped off her sweater and laid it on the floor before tucking the puppy into the closet and closing the door. She gave a sigh of regret for her second favorite sweater, knowing it would probably end up serving as a chew toy.

Turning around, Bridget faced twenty-four pairs of accusing eyes. “Callie,” she told the sneezer, seeing the little girl’s swollen eyelids. “Go to the nurse’s office please.”

Callie nodded and slipped out of her desk as Bridget headed back to the phone to let the nurse know the little girl was headed her way.

When she hung up and turned back to the class, she saw the door closing at the back of the room and frowned. Bridget thought Callie had already left. She shrugged off the thought as another occurred to her.

“Where’s Sam?” she asked.

“He went to the bathroom,” Sophia informed her.

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Katie Allen

“That was ten minutes ago.” Bridget sighed. What else could go wrong today?

“Jordan, could you run down to the boys’ room and check on him?”

Happy to have an excuse to get out of work, Jordan grinned and ran toward the door.

“Walk please!” Bridget’s tone was sharper than normal as a rush of nausea rolled over her. Great—now she was getting sick. Well, that answered her question about what else could go wrong. After a quick glance at his teacher, Jordan slowed to a more controlled bounce, although Bridget heard his feet slapping the hall floor.

Picking up the book she had dropped, Bridget found her place and started to read, ignoring the occasional wave of dizziness that flowed over her. Jordan returned with a sheepish-looking Sam in tow and Bridget paused to eye the little boy. He looked okay but she made a mental note to check with him after story time, to see what had kept him in the bathroom for so long. He could have just been wandering around or he might not be feeling well.

Bridget grimaced as her stomach clenched threateningly. The kids were always getting sick—the little germ magnets. She usually could fight off the viruses they handed around but something was definitely hitting her today.

The final hour of school dragged for Bridget. It was with intense, nausea-tinged relief that she supervised the backpack loading and jacket collection before the children thundered off to catch school buses or meet rides or find older siblings to walk them home.

After the last straggler had left, Bridget hurried to the supply closet, dreading the mess that a small puppy could make in an hour. At least the dog had been surprisingly quiet. She reached for the knob before realizing that the door wasn’t latched. Yanking the closet door open, Bridget saw the tiny room was empty. No puppy, no dreaded puddles, no sweater even.

“Those little monsters,” Bridget muttered. How had they let the puppy out without her seeing? And what did they do with it? She remembered the classroom door closing as she turned around after calling the nurse. Had Callie snuck the puppy out with her?

Or Sam—had he returned then left again with the dog? Bridget shook her head. He’d been in the bathroom during all the puppy excitement. He wouldn’t have even known there was a dog in the closet.

With a bewildered sigh, Bridget walked over to the phone to cancel the call to animal control.

She was really sick. Almost scarily sick. Bridget had been feverish all night and her body retched and ached until she started crying in the early morning hours. She knew it would just make her head throb and her eyes swell—as if she didn’t have enough misery—but Bridget couldn’t stop the tears from trickling across the bridge of her nose to plop onto the pillow.

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This wasn’t the flu. Bridget had the flu before and this wasn’t it. This wasn’t anything she’d ever experienced. Her muscles and bones felt as if they were fighting under her fever-hot skin, as if her entire body was rejecting itself. Fuck, it hurt.

Groaning, she shoved herself onto her other side. The shift of position didn’t help.

A dull, tearing pain shot down her arm and Bridget knew she had to go to the emergency room. The thought of sitting at the hospital, waiting for hours, made her cry harder but she forced her aching body out of bed anyway.

As she dressed, slowly and painfully, Bridget wished she didn’t live alone. Most of the time she liked her solitary home but being sick made her lonely. There was no one to pet her, bring her soup and let her be snarly to him or, most practically, no one to drive her to the emergency room when she was really, really sick. Micah’s face came to mind and Bridget almost started to cry again.

Forcing herself to concentrate on putting on her shoes, Bridget shoved away the self-pity and shuffled out of her bedroom. The thought of calling a cab to take her to the hospital was too depressing to bear. Calling Jodi crossed her mind but Bridget hesitated. Jodi lived in a suburb forty minutes away and the hospital was barely a mile from Bridget’s house. She could drive herself.

Although the streetlights looked strange—too bright and haloed—Bridget made it to the emergency room entrance without crashing the car into a tree. She only had to wait a half-hour before an efficient woman had her reclining in a chair next to the nurses’ station.

“I’m so sorry you’re out here,” the nurse apologized as she took Bridget’s blood pressure. “We’re out of rooms. It’s been a crazy night.”

“It’s okay,” Bridget reassured her, her voice a little croaky. “As long as I’m not getting a pelvic exam, I’m fine being out here.”

“Of course we wouldn’t do that,” the nurse exclaimed, looking horrified. Bridget just closed her eyes, too tired and sick to try to explain that it was a joke.

Her left hand was really hurting now. She held it up to look at it, expecting it to be swollen to twice the normal size. The nurse gasped.

Bridget blinked at her hand, wondering if she was having a fever-induced hallucination.

Although it wasn’t swollen, her entire hand was…shifting, as if something was moving under the skin. Her fingers appeared shorter and stubbier, like they were withdrawing into her palm. As she stared at it, Bridget could feel the muscles stretching, pulling at the bones.

The pain drew drops of sweat from her forehead and she instantly felt clammy.

“Am I having a seizure or something?” Bridget doubtfully asked the nurse, not taking her eyes from the freakish thing that had been her hand a few minutes ago. “A hand seizure?” Bridget shook her head. It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud but something really crazy was going on with her hand—with her whole body.

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Katie Allen

“It’s…I…” the nurse stammered, tottering back a few steps and drawing Bridget’s gaze. The woman’s eyes were wide and fixed on Bridget’s hand. “I need to get…”

Trailing off into an incomprehensible mumble, the nurse turned and dashed down the hall.

Bridget stared after the woman. Whatever was happening to her hand had freaked out a
nurse
. Weren’t nurses usually unflappable? Hadn’t they already seen everything there was to see and were too busy getting things done to be shocked by a mutating hand?

When that very hand grew gray and blurry, Bridget realized she had stopped breathing. As she sucked in some much-needed air, she focused on her hand, trying to force it back to normalcy with mere strength of will. Her head pounded with the effort but she pressed on, desperate to
make
her skin and muscles and bones obey her and go back to being the hand-shape they’d always been up until now.

Under her ferocious stare, the shifting changed, her fingers lengthened, her palm narrowed and everything looked almost like it should again. Her breath huffed out in a gasp of relief. She wasn’t better though. Bridget could still feel the fever raging through her, the unsettled twitching of her muscles.

The nurse rushed up, red-faced and panting, followed closely by a white-coated man—a doctor, Bridget presumed. He had thinning red-blond hair and a round moon face. What was obviously supposed to be a comforting smile that pushed his cheeks up, hiding his eyes, didn’t reassure Bridget. It made her skin prickle.

“I’m Dr. Aspling,” he said, his eyes flicking down her body. “Let us see that hand then.”

Us?
Bridget thought, irreverent in her fever and shock.
The doctor and who else? The
mouse in his lab-coat pocket?
She couldn’t help but giggle and Dr. Aspling exchanged a look with the nurse.

“It’s fine now,” Bridget told him, holding up her back-to-normal hand.

The doctor’s eyebrows drew together as he examined her, turning her hand this way and that with gloved fingers. Bridget watched his face. He seemed almost…disappointed.

“It looks perfectly normal,” Dr. Aspling finally announced, shooting an irritated look toward the nurse, who huffed and stepped closer.

“It wasn’t a minute ago,” the nurse told him, frowning at Bridget’s hand. “The fingers were much shorter and the palm was thicker. It was…
changing
right in front of us.”

Dr. Aspling released her hand and studied Bridget’s face. “Is that why you came in tonight?”

“No,” Bridget told him. “It looked fine to me.” As she heard the nurse give a disbelieving snort, Bridget felt her cheeks heat. “It did.” Crossing her arms mulishly across her chest, Bridget wasn’t sure why she’d lied. There was something in the 24