Page 113 of The Shop on Hidden Lane

“Room service.”

He groaned and eased away from her warm body. “I need better timing.”

Sophy scrambled out of bed. “This is perfect timing. I’m hungry. Give me a minute to hide.”

He watched her disappear into the bathroom. Impulse struck.

“Will you marry me?” he called after her.

“Yes,” she yelled from inside the bathroom.

He smiled, tightened the sash of his robe, and opened the door. The room service waiter grinned.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“Thanks.” He took the heavily laden tray from her hands. “It’s been a whirlwind courtship.”

“Sometimes you just know.”

“Yes. Sometimes you do.”

Sixty-Two

The Cerberus research lab…

“FLD number Zero Zero Twois missing,” the lab tech announced.

His name was Reed and he looked worried, as well he should be, Egan Ashton thought. This was very bad news, perhaps even catastrophic for the research program.

Reed had worked in the lab since the inception of the Cerberus Project. He was good with the dogs and they seemed to like him—although with these particular dogs you could never be sure. Egan was starting to suspect that they could read humans even better than the researchers knew.

“That’s the second dog in the past three months,” Egan said. “Any sign of a security breach?”

“No, sir. The camera feed shows FLD Zero Zero Two in her kennel all night long but when I went in to feed her this morning she was gone.”

“There’s no way FLD Zero Zero Two could have manipulated the lock.” Egan hesitated. “The dogs are smart, but they aren’t that smart.”

At least, he didn’t think so.

The animals were descended from dogs that had been living in the tiny mountain community of Fogg Lake when the explosion in a nearby government lab had occurred. Like the humans and everything else in the vicinity, the canines had been exposed to two days of heavy fog laced with unknown paranormal radiation. No one knew what the source of the energy was because the government had gone to great lengths to destroy all the records related to the lab.

A year ago, decades after the explosion, someone at the Foundation had noticed that the descendants of the dogs of Fogg Lake were a little different.

Egan’s team had been tasked with conducting an experimental program. The goal was to examine the potential of the Fogg Lake dogs for law enforcement or military work. There were rumors that a certain intelligence agency wanted to know if the animals could be trained to serve as couriers in dangerous corners of the world.

Initial results were promising, but there had been some unexpected complications. Among other things, the litters were small—just two or three puppies at most. The real problem, though, was that the dogs did not bond easily with their assigned human handlers. In fact, Egan was starting to suspect that the animals were choosing the people they were willing to work with, not the other way around.

The dogs were not abused. They were well fed and properly cared for. No one was using them for medical experiments. The training was state-of-the-art and based on play. For the most part the animals seemed to enjoy the exercises.

Now two of them had vanished.

“Someone is stealing the dogs,” Egan concluded.

“That’s what it looks like,” Reed said.

“I will have to report this. There will no doubt be an investigation.”

“Yes, sir,” Reed said.

Egan clutched his clipboard and walked briskly toward his office on the other side of the compound. Sometimes, especially after dark, when he encountered one of the animals, he thought he saw the wolf beneath the surface of several thousand years of domestication.

He shuddered, aware that the dogs were watching him with their weird amber eyes. It was almost as if they knew he was a catperson.