Oh, dear, I thought.
“Vets from Hell,” Frankie said. “Must be a new idea Rob’s been working on. Man, what an incredible brain that guy has! One idea after another!”
I was a little startled at this picture of Rob as a gaming mastermind. To me, Rob seemed to have only one idea, on which he was determined to ring in as many variations as possible. Lawyers from Hell, Doctors from Hell, Cops from Hell, and now, if public reaction to the rumor I’d inadvertently started was favorable, Vets from Hell.
“Hey, we could use Doc as a consultant,” Frankie said.
Doc? Did they mean Dad? Considering that all of Mother’s farmer cousins habitually asked him for free medical advice for their livestock, I supposed he could contribute usefully to Vets from Hell.
“Just think of it!” one of the developers suggested. “We don’t just have cats and dogs… We have anacondas, Vietnamese potbellied pigs, zebras…. It’s a teaching tool.”
“Unicorns, wyverns, manticores,” suggested another.
“Mutant Vets from Hell!” they shrieked in chorus.
“Mutant” was a code word; it meant they were about to stray even further than usual from reality. In about five minutes, they’d be arguing over how to implement a coherent system of magic. I’d heard this all before. Maybe it was time to nip this particular brainstorming session in the bud.
“Actually, I think I was the one to blame for that article,” I said. “It wasn’t something Rob was planning at all.”
They stared at me.
“Wow, I bet it’s, like, genetic,” one of them murmured in awestruck tones.
“So have you got a development team yet?” another asked.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said, and left, hastily. I knew Rob was already giving serious thought to Mutant Lawyers from Hell, in which the competing lawyers could win trials not only with evidence and witnesses, but also by casting spells to confuse the jury and turning the opposing lawyers into swine. With my luck, Rob would actually like the Mutant Vets idea.
I was relieved to get back to the switchboard. At least I was until I heard the door open and looked up to see the biker entering. Okay, he made me a little less nervous than he did before I saw him with the cat, but that didn’t mean I wanted him clinking into the Mutant Wizards reception room. And what was he carrying in the battered black leather satchel? Not to mention the crumpled brown paper bag?
“I’ve come to see Cathleen Ni Houlihan,” he said.
“I’m afraid, we don’t have anyone working here by that name,” I said while shifting so I could more easily reach the panic button.
“Nonsense, she doesn’t work here,” he said. “She - Katy!”
Katy, the Irish wolfhound, bounded into the room and launched herself at the biker, ending up licking his face with her front feet on his shoulders, while he said unintelligible things to her. Unintelligible because they were, apparently, in Gaelic. I didn’t speak Gaelic, but I remembered what it sounded like from the summer Dad was preparing for a trip to Ireland.
Rhode Island Rico trailed in after her and shook the biker’s hand, looking smaller than usual beside him. And beside Katy - why would someone ever want to own a dog that clearly outweighed him? Then again Keisha, who barely topped five feet, owned both of the Saint Bernards.
“Thanks for coming over, Doc,” he said.
Doc?
The biker reached into the brown paper bag and pulled out an object. I recognized the logo on the bag now - it was from Caerphilly’s most militant vegetarian restaurant, which meant that the light brown patties he was feeding to Katy had to be some kind of soy-based hamburger substitute.
“What happened?” Doc asked - I supposed I ought to begin thinking of him as Doc.
“Another dog bit her ear,” Rico explained. “I was worried that it might get infected.”
“Did you catch the other dog?”
Rico looked nervously at me. I looked down at the crate beneath my desk.
“I suspect he’s here,” I said with a sigh. “How did he get out, anyway?”
“Rob had him in his office,” Rico said. “We thought he’d calmed down. He was behaving like a lamb until Katy came in.”
“Never trust Spike when he’s behaving himself,” I advised. “He does it only to lull you into a false sense of complacency.”