Breathless

can be a diagnosis because there wasn’t an illness.”
    “But you said, they were in something like a trance.”
    “I don’t know what this means, it’s just what I feel. …” She took a deep breath, blew it out. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them, something was
right
with them.”
    “I can understand why you wouldn’t know what that means.”
    She told him about the incident with the abused breeder dogs that had been rescued from the puppy mill. “I didn’t witness the trance part, but I saw the change in the dogs after it, they were happy, totally and suddenly socialized. Somehow, what happened at our clinic and what happened at High Meadows Farm must be related to Puzzle and Riddle.”
    “I don’t see how, but I think you’re right. This many wheels of weirdness have to be on the same train.”
    The wolfhound and his new companions finished eating. Merlin noisily licked his chops. With their fingers, Puzzle and Riddle meticulously combed the fur around their mouths.
    Picking up her medical bag, Cammy said, “I’ll make my inquiries before I go to bed. By midmorning sometime, I should have replies, but I doubt there’s any chance we’ll be enlightened. Then we’ll have to decide what to do next.”
    “Come here for lunch?”
    “Yeah. Okay. Unless I have an emergency the techs can’t handleand that I can’t pass along to Amos Renfrew. He’s the best cow doc in the county, and he’s good enough with horses, but his heart isn’t in small-animal care. I wouldn’t recommend him for a dog in serious shape, he might overlook something.”
    Merlin settled to the floor in a weary heap. Puzzle and Riddle snuggled against opposite sides of him, apparently at last worn out. The wolfhound was like a great woolly coat that had been thrown down, and the golden-eyed pair were the coat’s dazzling trim.
    When Cammy opened the back door and stepped onto the porch, Grady followed her, but the animals remained behind.
    “I’m pretty sure they’re already asleep,” Grady said. “Sometimes I think it would be a great blessing to walk on all fours and have a smaller brain.”
    She shook her head. “It’s not their smaller brains that let them sleep so easily. It’s their innocence.”
    “Then I’ll be awake all night, maybe forever.”
    His singular smile was the best last sight to any evening, so she said, “Call you in the morning,” and moved toward the steps.
    He put a hand on her shoulder, requiring her to face him once more. “This isn’t a theory or hypothesis or even something as grand as speculation. It’s a gut feeling. Nothing’s going to be the same.”
    “Not all change is for the better,” she said.
    He took her by both shoulders, and his face lowered toward hers, and for a moment she thought he might, with the purest of intentions, do the worst of wrongs that he could do. But the kiss he gave her, the first between them in these four years, was a brother’s kiss, his lips chaste against her forehead, and that was an expression of affection with which she could cope.
    “Thank you for Merlin,” he said. “Whatever Puzzle and Riddle might be, I don’t believe they’d have followed me home if I had been on that walk alone. I think it was Merlin who drew them here.”
    “He’s a magnet, sure enough,” she said. “He was from the moment he was born. Be careful tonight, Grady. I know they’re not a threat, they’re as innocent as Merlin, but innocence always has its enemies. Always.”
    In the car, driving away, she hoped that she had not tensed when he bent down to kiss her brow, that he had not felt her stiffen defensively. She should have had faith that, though he knew nothing of her younger years, his intuition would always be that of a heart healer who knew the seriousness if not the precise nature of those wounds that could not be seen, for that’s what he had been as long as she had known him, a good man of exquisite intuition, not just a friend but a grace for which she was profoundly grateful.
    If Puzzle and Riddle were more than one kind of curiosity or another, more than a quick stranger-than-fiction item on cable news, more than mere mutation, if they were
something
, as she believed they were, something momentous, they could not have entrusted themselves—or been entrusted—to better hands than Grady’s.
    She drove out of the foothills, to the lower meadows, where the moonlight pooled in the pale grass.
    The strange night appeared to have wrought