Page 9 of Better the Devil

Taggart barked, just once, mostly because he was feeling left out.

‘Why not?’ Olivia asked.

The man prodded a finger into the centre of his chest. ‘Because that’smybloody bin, no’ yours!’

‘It’s just a bin. It’s being emptied in the morning.’

‘That’s not the bloody point!’ the man cried.

‘What’s she saying?’ demanded a voice from inside the house. A woman. Olivia couldn’t see her, but if you stuck a wig on this guy, she guessed it wouldn’t be too far off.

‘She put dog shit in the bin!’

‘I knew it! I fucking knew it!’ the woman screeched. ‘Give her a bloody mouthful for it!’

The man gritted his teeth and shouted back over his shoulder. ‘I am! I’m trying to! I’m just doing it now, if you’d shut up for one bloody minute and?—’

The bag of dog shit hit him slap-bang on the side of the face, just below his right temple. The sudden impact was toomuch for the fragile compostable bag, which was instantly torn open, allowing the contents to spray explosively in all available directions.

The man froze, his face stuck in a contorted grimace of horror as his brain desperately tried to think of alternative explanations for what had just occurred that would be more palatable than the awful reality.

It tried, but failed, and a howl of horror became a bellowed, ‘Ya wee bastard!’ that followed the laughing Olivia and the barking Taggart as they both ran off into the night.

They stopped running a few streets closer to home. Olivia had stolen a look back over her shoulder a couple of times to see if the guy was chasing her, but had been quietly confident that he wouldn’t be. He’d had no shoes on, and a face full of dog excrement. Neither lent itself well to a hot pursuit.

Taggart, despite having no idea of why they’d been running in the first place, was having the time of his life. He bounced about, all four feet dancing on the spot as he spun around in tight circles of excitement.

‘Good boy. Who’s a good boy?’ Olivia asked in a baby voice, though only after quickly glancing around to make sure nobody else could hear her.

She took a dog biscuit from her pocket, and Taggart instinctively sat, licking his chops as his eyes locked like a guided missile system onto the treat.

With a flick, a jump, and a snapping of jaws, the biscuit was gone.

Olivia bent and ruffled the top of his head.

It was then that she noticed the fur on the back of his neck. It was bunched together, raised up, a precursor to the low, threatening growl that rolled from deep down in his throat.

‘What’s wrong?’

His gaze was now locked onto the mouth of an alleyway off to their left, and on the pool of thick, gloopy darkness that filled the far end.

He lowered his head, dropped his body closer to the ground, the muscles in his back tensing, as if the gormless dog persona had been swept aside, and some ancient wolf part of his brain had been activated.

‘Tag?’

He was all teeth now. All anger, or fear, or some mixture of the two.

And he was still staring, eyes bulging, into the dark.

It couldn’t be the dogshit man. The direction was all wrong, unless he’d vaulted over half a dozen fences and across a garage roof.

But if she squinted—if she really looked—Olivia thought she could just make out the outline of a figure lurking down there in the deep inky black.

Just like Taggart, she felt the prickling of hair on the back of her neck. Her breath, still ragged from running, caught in her throat.

Olivia Maximuke had encountered all kinds of horrors and evils in her life. She’d faced them all, confronted some of them, even handled one or two.

Olivia Maximuke was no coward.