pairs was easier, Darid had known men who lived with men and women who lived with women. But what Jon wanted was different. After three years under Barr and the rest, the line inside him that should have divided what was okay to do from what wasn’t had started to blur. Darid was learning how to handle him, to put him off gently enough that the older boy still thought they were friends. But Jon was getting bigger and officially he was in charge of Darid, and Darid knew there would be a time when Darid would say no, and Jon would simply ignore it.
But the night of the screams wasn’t that night. Jon tried to bring Darid’s hand to his crotch, but when Darid feigned a yawn and pulled his hand away, Jon let go and rolled away to take care of his own business. In a few minutes there came a soft grunt, and then Jon rolled back, pulled Darid close again, and went to sleep. As Darid lay in the dark and the filth, Jon’s body twined over his like the ivy that climbed the Wall, the other boy’s soft breath in his ear didn’t drive out the memory of the screaming, not at all. The knowledge that this was now Darid’s life made him so weary he could barely gather the strength to breathe himself.
He still heard voices outside the kennel but soon they, too, were gone. Barr would be too keyed up after the slaughter; he and the others would want to find other staff, share the story. Darid waited for silence to descend over the kennel.
But it didn’t. There was a noise. An unsteady, gurgling noise. He closed his eyes and pretended it wasn’t there. Then he told himself it was none of his business, and there was nothing he could do, and it was better not to see, anyway.
None of this worked.
Finally, carefully, he extricated himself from Jon’s grasp and crept out of the kennel. Inside the yard itself, several lumpy piles of various sizes were discernable in the moonlight. Most of the hounds had retreated to the corners, chewing objects that Darid didn’t like to think about, but one still hunched in the middle worrying at the largest of the piles. Darid had good ears that hadn’t been boxed too many times and he knew, as much as he didn’t want to, that the large pile was the source of the gurgling; the pile was a person, and the person was still alive.
Barr had his own special beating stick, but for lesser members of the kennel staff, there was a communal bucket of similar weapons just inside the door. For the first time ever, Darid picked one up. Slowly, he unchained the gate and slipped through. Avoiding the piles, and ignoring the new gruesome smells that threaded their way through the ordinary ones, he walked to the hound in the middle. It paid him no mind. He wasn’t a threat. He was barely even worth noticing.
As quietly as he could, Darid made a noise in his throat that he hoped sounded like Barr’s leave-it noise.
The hound growled faintly.
Darid lifted the stick, not sure if he could use it. He had never hit an animal before and his hands shook. But then the person took in a deep, rattling breath, and twitched all over, and Darid brought the stick down as hard as he could, right between the hound’s eyes. It yelped, startled and jumped back. The growl deepened.
“Back,” Darid said under his breath, and hit it again. The feeling of the stick hitting living flesh was extremely unpleasant.
The hound shook off the blow, confused. It made a motion toward the dying person in front of it again, and Darid hit it one more time. “No.” His voice sounded stronger this time. “Mine.”
The hound glared at him. Then it picked something up—unfortunately, Darid got a good enough look to identify it as a hand, with a decent bit of arm attached—and wandered off, as if that had been its intention all along. Quickly, before it could change its mind, Darid dropped the stick and hooked his hands beneath the shoulders of the mauled body in front of him. He dragged it out of the kennel yard, locked the gate behind him, and then crouched down next to the body, feeling sick. The head had been partially scalped, but the hair that was left was dark, possibly with blood, and tightly braided. A woman.