Underdogs The First Stories - By Geonn Cannon Page 0,54

was going to tell them she'd been there no matter how sneaky she was, so she might as well make her presence known. She picked up a rock and shattered the glass door with it. She thought about breaking as much glass as possible, but she didn't want to harm the plants.

She let herself into the house and grabbed a garbage bag from the kitchen as she passed through. The living room looked basically the way she had envisioned it in the dark, and she made her way to the roll-top desk. The mail had accumulated in a neat pile on one corner, with the personal correspondence taking up a special place in a cubbyhole. She went through it and deemed none of it worth her time to read in full.

Ari opened the bag and shoved things into it without pausing to examine them. She emptied the drawers, grabbed a handful of ledgers, added a few pens just to be thorough. She twisted the neck of the bag and headed downstairs to the basement. She could smell Dale's fear thickly in the narrow space, stoking her anger. She searched for Dale's clothes but didn't find them. She knelt next to the spot where Dale's scent was strongest and touched the dirt.

Dale had been thrown in the dirt, half-naked, threatened... all because of her. Ari choked on her anger and guilt before she carried her bag upstairs. She took some of Sadie and Beck's perfumes in case she needed to disguise her scent later and added some of their clothes to her bag. Every little bit helped.

When she decided she had enough, she headed back downstairs. She saw the dining room chair they'd tied her to and used the legs of it to break the living room window. She wanted them to know they were dealing with a mad dog, wanted them to worry more about what they would do to her than what they planned to do with Dale. She crawled through the window and hurried across the lawn, jumping the fence and racing down the alley to where she had parked her car.

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They had given back her clothes, which had been nice, but the handcuffs didn't make sitting in a car very comfortable. She was wearing a blindfold under a pair of wraparound sunglasses so it wouldn't look suspicious, other than the fact she was wearing sunglasses at dusk. She was in the cramped backseat of the Jeep pinned between the scary muscular woman and the smaller blonde. The blonde had a hand on the back of Dale's neck like a lover would, but the tension in her fingers was anything but affectionate.

The Jeep came to a stop and Dale was hauled out of the car like a bag of laundry. Her feet tripped over unfamiliar terrain, but the beefy woman kept her from falling over. She smelled a thick, unpleasant smell that she couldn't place and wondered how three canidae were able to stand it with their stronger senses.

She heard a lock being released and then chains fell to the ground. "In here," the redheaded leader said. She tried to place them from Ari's report she had typed up that morning. The leader was obviously Sadie. The blonde was Beck, she was pretty sure, and the other woman had to be Pen. Dale was shoved forward and the ambient light seeping around her glasses and blindfold disappeared entirely as she was taken inside.

"Can I ask a question?"

"Why not." Sadie's voice was flat.

"Which of you did Ari fuck? Pen doesn't really seem her type, so I'm thinking it was you and--"

Someone punched her in the stomach and Dale went down. She wasn't proud of the sound she made, or the face that she immediately started to cry. She was unaccustomed to pain, and to be hurt by someone who truly meant to do you harm was worse than she could have imagined. She wondered how Ari had dealt with it earlier as she sobbed and tried to hold her stomach.

"I can't believe you two," Pen grumbled, keeping her voice low.

"Mind your business, Penelope," Sadie said. She knelt down and slipped something around Dale's neck. She heard it click, and felt two metal prongs against her throat. "Say your name."

"Dale Fr--" Dale's entire body convulsed as an electric charge pulsed through her body. She dropped from a kneeling position to lie prone on the floor, twitching as the last remnants of the current passed through her. She gasped, reaching up