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Andrew's sleep for the rest of the night was, as it had been on the couch with Bligh, dreamless - for as much and as long as the past had haunted most every time he had shut his eyes these traumatic two days, it had, at last, for the first night he lay with the two people who fully completed his life, been banished back to its rightful place in the intangible, invisible realm from whence, with the years, it had been consigned.

He awoke, the Sun coming through the blinds dappled and broken on his bedroom floor, as he had two days before, with the skin of Cody's shoulder, although now much warmer, pressed against his mouth - he held the moment there, losing himself in Cody's sweet, fresh deliciousness...it was his first time waking up next to Cody as half-dogs, it was the first time Bligh was beside him in the same bed, and he meant to savor it.

Slowly, gently, he lifted his left arm, which had been bunched up at his chest as he slept, to wrap around Cody, pulling him even closer to him - he moved his mouth from Cody's shoulder to his ear, rubbing his nose against it, letting himself be tickled by the velvety fur.

The ear twitched against his face, and he heard Cody let out a small moan, the noise of being awoken and aroused at the same time - his tail waggled against Andrew's legs.

"Mmm...Andy..."

"Hey," Andrew whispered into his ear - he glanced back behind him to see Bligh that was still sound asleep, mouth sideways and agape, his wheezing breaths in a steady rhythm...as he shut his eyes and came back to Cody, planting a kiss on the boy's cheek, he let out a quiet, breathy laugh.

It was almost too much - his heart was so full, his life in this minute so perfect, that he found his arm moving down below Cody's waist, to the forest of soft fur, just to make sure it was real...his hand caught the morningwood of moist, erect cockflesh, knot and all, jutting from Cody's sheath.

He felt a flush of passion flare, and he used his hands to turn his boyfriend toward him, so that now, they were face to face.

They were - as they were. They needed and wanted for nothing, except each other - the only thing missing was the link of intimacy that each had experienced with Bligh as they had come into the dark truths of his tribe.

Andrew kissed Cody, putting his fingers through his hair, running them through his tawny hair, feeling his velvety ears graze his hands - they began sweetly, but the passion between them mounted, until they both, nearly at the same time, let loose their first eruption of precum that day, all over each other, trying to mute their cries of rapture so as not to wake Bligh.

But an idea occurred to Andrew as they two studied each other, Cody feeling the slickness of the transparent liquid all along Andrew's stomach - and he smiled, with an ingenious lechery that seemed almost evil.

He motioned with his head to Bligh, on his side, facing away from them - grinning, his tail thumping against the bed. Cody nodded back with a smile, understanding him - Andrew backed away from him nuzzle Bligh's face, kissing his face gently, repeatedly, scritching his best friend's thick beard until, slowly, dreamily, Bligh's icy blue eyes opened at last. He shuddered out a low, drowsy cackle, then came forward to kiss Andrew deeply. Their tongues almost wrestled against each other as Andrew scratched behind Bligh's ears - as Cody came from behind him to brush a hand against Andy's nipple, both of them, Andrew and Bligh, let out stifled moans of immediate erogenous pleasure.

The three of them stopped - Andrew and Bligh's mouths parted, and after a pause filled with the sounds of the three of them in this sanctuary of heavy breathing, all three canine hearts beating the same pounding rhythm for each other, Andrew smiled.

"Morning," he said - deliberately understated - as he played in the lustrous jet-shaded feathers of Bligh's hair.

He was about to say something else - something about how much he had wished for this, years ago, to wake up next to his best friend, who he was never without but never, not once, thought he loved him as much he truly did - but Cody, whimpering in that playful way he always did when he wanted sex, turned his head back toward him to lock him in a kiss, shoving him back to give the two of them room.

Andrew, at once, knew what he was being directed to do, and his tail began to wag as he and Bligh shared a quick glance - Bligh, in turn, sat up slightly to watch them both, his penis turgid and bulging proudly from underneath the blankets.

As soon as Andrew was at a proper distance, Cody rose up out of the covers, crawling over to where Andrew was waiting for him, his tail awag, his face bursting with the largest smile Andrew had ever seen him make...he slid up into Andrew's lap, where he kissed him again, wordlessly taking Andrew's erect penis gently into his hand - causing another involuntary spurt of precum - and, maneuvering himself over it, guided it into his ass.

Cody's anus was, Andrew thought to himself silently, rather more easy to get into than it had been as a human and in the cacophony of erotica that swam inside his brain Andrew still clung to the logic that had guided him here, wondering if Cody's new body was now especially built for this, for coitus, for reproduction, a mammalian breeder, eternal mother, radiant and resplendent because of the alchemical miracles that could take place inside him.

Hearing Cody's moans grow progressively louder as his penis went further and further into him was a special kind of thrill, the knot going on with hardly any resistance, firing off the pleasure receptors that made copulation so irresistible down to its most visceral - Cody was unquestionably thinking about only him, his cock, which may have been shaped like a dog's, but belonged to him.

Bligh, who seemed to be waiting for Andrew and Cody to finally come together this way, wrapped his arms around Andrew from the side, periodically kissing and licking Andrew's cheek as the other two made love.

Bligh's warmth, his smell of home and safety, so near him, was still not as stunning to his nerves as the feeling of his yet-untested doghood - fatter, thicker, than Bligh's, as mighty and as long and as powerful as his was - inside Cody was ineffably exquisite, it made his mind swim in a kind of ecstasy that could have been matched only one other time in his entire life...when he was with Bligh.

His thrusts were calm and assured, even with Bligh's arms around him at side, his tongue washing his cheek with the claiming swathes of a possessive canine, the chest hair subtly tickling the skin it was pressed against - even after all this he still made making love to Cody his utter priority, as if the world depended on it.

"A-Andy..." Cody moaned. "Oh - oh god--"

"Baby," Andrew breathed. "What - what--"

"Feels - so - s-so - g-good - y-you're - it's so b-big--"

Cody's words, scarcely coherent, were broken further as Bligh, still with his arms around Andrew, leaned as far as he could to kiss Cody, deeply and passionately.

Andrew's thrusts quickened - sheer elation had exploded in his mind: he was bigger than Bligh, at least by width, at least by girth. He could never match Bligh's sheer power - but the raw physical, mechanical action of his evolved penis made the pleasure for Cody more intense, more visceral, than even Bligh could manage.

He did not know - he was not sure - if the jealousy that had gnawed at him the day before was about being able to please Cody as he wished, or about Cody being pleased by anyone else by him alone...perhaps it was both. But in that moment, with Cody riding him, with Bligh's arms firmly around him in comforting safety, even while they, Cody and Bligh, were wrapped in the deep kiss, both of those aspects, and all the jealousy that could have still formed from seeing Bligh and Cody sexual, vanished.

He was confident - he was sure of his new form, how Cody would continue to love it, and him, in rapturous, and eternal, sexual euphoria.

Something insidious crawled out from some decrepit corner of his brain as he felt orgasm nearing - a territoriality, something so atavistically primal it must have arisen from the very origins of life itself...he knew, in a brightening epiphany which cleaved through his thoughts like a meteor into the clouds, what this was.

Inside Cody now, beneath the skin of the lithe, toned skater's stomach, through some obscene miracle that they only barely understood, swam the first mystic marriage of sperm and egg - as utterly impossible as that should have been, Andrew knew, with an instinct that defied the scientific logic he had nigh-worshipped all these years, and passing the doubt and cognitive dissonance of the day before, that it was so.

And yet the sperm was near-totally Bligh's - Andrew knew his place, even as his best friend caressed him lovingly now, even as the years of being as close as brothers as they could be without sharing blood had come before them and would still stretch on to eternity...he knew, in a grotesquely base way, that he was not as fertile as Bligh.

His seed was too diluted, too choked on the cesspool-waters of the shallow gene pool that cloistered nobility had wrought...and he, Andrew, Andrew Lightfoot, as strong as was, mentally and physically and even sexually, could never overcome the basic weakness of his own semen, the latent sensation that would come to him in moments of abject failure that the aristocratic line that brought him here through the centuries was about to extinguish itself - buried in the same mountains from whence it arose.

And the feeling that squirmed inside him, the one that must have arisen in antediluvian ages billions of years ago - was competition.

He was Bligh's, but Cody was his, and his originally. Those puppies should, by rights, be his - Cody was his mate, Cody should bear _his_offspring.

And he would have it - he would have it today, in his lifetime, as he took an arm from Cody's waist and gently, as respectfully as he could in the throes of near-orgasm, push Bligh away from Cody...Bligh scooted back some, with a dark snicker, a hand on his own long, powerful penis, masturbating, as he watched the two of them.

None too soon - Andrew's moans grew louder, and his control began to falter, and his hands dug into Cody's waist, climaxing with a guttural growl, pouring cum into Cody's new womb with thrust after unsteady thrust, his eyes shut in deep concentration as some screaming primal urge to reproduce bade him will his sickly sperm swiftsure to their destination.

He flung Cody toward him, pressing them together, the boy's hands still about his own neck, in an embrace that could have fended off an apocalypse - he heard him breathe his name over and over as the boy's hips began to buck of their own will, and then, his arms coming down to grip Andrew's sides, he heard the long, low cry that sounded like a howl, the same sound from last night as he and Bligh had tied for the first time...the sound of Andrew's triumph with Cody as a sexual being.

Andrew was so lost in exquisite victory that he did not mind the attendant geysers of semen, the spurts of liquid musk, that shot out of Cody's penis and onto his abdomen...he heard Bligh let out a final cackle broken off by an immodest groan, and opened his eyes to see him in the final act of climax, spewing his own cum on Cody's back, the whole room fragrant with the gamey, woodsy odor of their reproductive fluids.

Cody had been inseminated by Andrew, and Bligh had marked Cody in turn - the trio, the triad, was, at last, physically complete.

Still tied with Andrew, Cody leaned back just slightly - Andrew stroked his boyfriend's cheek, feeling the boy's final orgasmic breaths hot against his own face - a profound quiet seemed to have descended between the two, so that the very passage of time itself had slowed down so completely it did not seem to pass at all. For that spare minute of the day, everything was perfect, all was forgiven, nothing hurt.

"I love you."

They were mere breaths of words - strands of air from Andrew's mouth - but he felt Cody's chest shudder against his own, and heard a whimper escape from his throat, and he knew that Cody had heard them, and he knew that it had made all the difference.

"Andy - I - I love you too--"

Another shudder, more profound this time, and Andrew tightened his embrace around him even further, sensing that he was about to cry - he knew why, he knew that cheating on Andrew, even while he was fully willing, fully sentient, was too much, the betrayal of someone who owed his life to Andrew too complete...even after Andrew said he had forgiven him, even after they had all become equalized, even if Andrew loved Bligh as much as he loved Cody too, there was still the lingering fear, the deathless guilt, of having been unfaithful, and having been weak.

"Andy - An-Andy--"

They had not apologized to each other, not properly - and now they would not need to - Cody's tears, Andrew's warmth, would be enough.

"Shhh...it's okay, Baby--" The words came rapid, swaddling his boyfriend, the boy who he had saved from the streets of Tampa, in the comfort of their shared existence. "Don't cry - it's okay, I'm here, I'm here Cody, I love you too..."

He had done this their first night together, a year ago - his mad, instant love for this boy, the celestial vision that had started everything of him framed by the glorious Florida sunset, killing off all reason, all logic, as he literally kissed the filthy boy's tears away, exorcising the anguish and despair of a life unlived, for the promise of a world, the two of them, without end.

It was easy to forget - too convenient to let slip into quotidian oblivion the tragedy and the pain of how it all began.

But now, they both remembered - with Andrew's knot tying them together as they could never could so intimately and so completely when they were human, they remembered who they were.

Bligh and Andrew had remembered themselves the night before - once, they were just kids. Now, it was Cody and Andrew's turn - once, they were just strangers.

Bligh himself had retreated to the corner of the bed where Cody had slept to watch the two of them like this - Cody, vulnerable as a newborn puppy and just as needy and loving, giving himself to Andrew's impervious, invincible embrace. Andrew could not see him, as his eyes were closed, pressed into Cody's hair, but Bligh's expression was one of immense satisfaction, as though of a great master who at last had seen his magnum opus completed.

At some length - neither of them could be sure how long - Cody nudged Andrew very slightly so that they could behold one another, and it was here that Andrew could see his boyfriend's eyes were precious hazel gems that glimmered wetly with brimming, but happy, tears.

"I love you," Cody whispered back, his throat seeming full. "I love you, Andy."

Andrew leaned back in to kiss him deeply. "I love you too, Cody," he whispered back with his reassuring smile. He nuzzled the boy's cheek. "Are you okay?"

Cody nodded rapidly. "Y-yeah - w-well..."

Andrew returned to beseech the boy's eyes. "What, what is it?"

"I - I love it--" He giggled breathily. "S-so much, but - you're...really thick...it's - it's getting a little--"

It was Andrew's turn to nod. "Okay - okay. Lemme pull out."

"Are you sure?"

"Baby you're uncomfortable--"

Cody shook his head. "But if you like it--"

Andrew kissed him to silence him. "No, c'mon. I don't wanna hurt you - I would never hurt you, you know that."

Cody seemed to reluctantly acquiesce. "Y-yeah, we - we should, I guess. Let's do that, then."

"Y'all okay?" Bligh asked.

"Yeah dude, we're fine - just gonna--"

Cody and Andrew slowly, gingerly, in near-tandem, began to separate - Andrew no longer fully engorged could ease out with little difficulty from Cody's anus, even as the latter, experiencing the second orgasmic rush from the receptors inside his rectum, could do little more than moan uncontrollably as Andrew's retreating shaft hit each one in succession once again.

At last came the wet pop that told Andrew he was free - and he took several deep breaths as his doghood was once again exposed to the cool of the air conditioned apartment...he and Cody's eyes, opening from the ecstasy trying not to become overstimulated, he took a hand to feel along his own stomach and put a dab of his boyfriend's spent semen on his finger, offering it him.

Cody took Andrew's finger and slurped it into his own mouth, holding it there, their eyes locking in place - as Bligh's head appeared, his beard digging into his shoulder, Cody relinquished his lips from Andrew's finger, taking his hand by wrist to put it amidst the slimy, overly musky semen that had pooled on Andrew's upper stomach.

"Eww..." Andrew said playfully - Cody let out a happy giggle, and they kissed, Bligh's arms coming around to squeeze them both in a group hug.

"Aww shit, now I got cum all over me..." Bligh murmured with a soft cackle.

"You love it, don't lie," said Cody over his shoulder with a giggle.

"Maybe I do," Bligh tittered.

Andrew nuzzled Cody's cheek. "That was the first time we ever did that..." He looked to Bligh, who had retreated from the bear hug, laying back on the pillow, smearing his own cum off Cody's back into his forest of body hair - it was a tantalizing, deliciously sexual sight, and he felt a mild stir in his sheath.

"Yeah," Cody said, falling back into Bligh's arms - the sticky cum getting on him also. "That was really, really amazing."

Bligh nodded with a grin as he offered a dab of semen to Cody, who licked it off his finger in a deliberate - so Andrew thought, newly aroused by the sight - imitation of how a dog would.

He sighed - it was ruined as he remembered he and Bligh's conversation from the night before, and he mopped away Cody's semen from him as he stood up, looking down at his two mates with a sideways frown.

"Hey - I gotta get up, that okay?"

Bligh nodded. "Y'aight, though?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine it's just..." He moved to open the blinds with his finger, squinting at the pouring sunlight that came through. "Fuck it's gotta be noon - why did we sleep so late?"

"We was tired," Bligh said with a titter - Cody giggled at the small joke.

"Ha," Andrew offered sarcastically.

He took his phone off the nightstand where he had laid it yesterday evening, and thumbed through his notifications - emails, an advertisement from Neiman Marcus who had never left him alone since he had bought the shirt that now stank of blood in the trash, and a reminder from USF that class would be starting on Monday the Twenty-Sixth - but he felt his ears go flat as he stood before his closet, as he remembered why he had to use the phone in the first place.

Cody saw it - it must not have taken him very long at all to pick up on their new body language. "Hey, Andy? What's wrong?"

Andrew glanced over his shoulder at him as he chose a shirt from the closet, shaking his head with a small smile. "Nothing Baby - nothing."

"Yew gonna call Stevie?" Bligh asked, stretching.

Andrew nodded. "Yeah...I still - I don't know what to expect. It's been a bit..."

"Yeah you haven't talked about him in awhile," Cody said.

"I haven't talked about him much at all," Andrew added as he reached down for his khakis that he had laid there the night before. "Bad of me - wonder if he's upset...I'm gonna go, um, I'm gonna go take a walk while I do it. I need to--" The vision of the dream from last night reappeared, and a feeling of dread crept over him as he put his pants on, hiding his tail, which he only partially could shake off. "I need to ask him some things."

He turned around to them, both still in bed - his shirt in hand, he studied them, these two marvelous, furry, half-human creatures that inhabited his bedroom.

Cody perked up. "What are you gonna ask him?"

Andrew looked to Bligh, who stroked the boy's cheek with a smirk. "Drew thinks his bro might know sumthin bout how Duke n'his old dawg Walker - he thinks, uh...there's a connection atween em and how we - how we is."

"The talking dog?" Cody hazarded. "Stephen thinks him having a talking dog had something to do with..." He wagged his tail for effect. "With this?"

"Yeah," Andrew answered with a chuckle. "That's, um - that's exactly right, Baby."

"That...could be weird," Cody said.

Bligh tittered ruffling the boy's hair. "Yeah it could, Pup."

"We'll just have to see," Andrew said. "Obviously..." He put his head through the shirt, flattening it with his hands to remove any errant wrinkles. "Weirder shit has happened."

Bligh shrugged with a smirk. "Y'ain't ever believed that Duke could talk, but I'm tellin ya--"

"Yeah, yeah, I know - he was the smartest dog ever." Andrew chuckled again, plucking his USF cap from the handle of the closet door. "Though I think Stephen'd fight you on that. You know how he is about Walker..."

"He still wears the necklace with his tooth on it," Cody said with a small frown. "That's - that's kinda sad."

"I guess so, but - when you love someone a lot..." Andrew slid on his pair of Sperry's, noting in passing how even with his new canine padded feet they, like his other shoes, still fit - he moved, putting on his cap in a swift, single motion, back to the bed, where he gently brought Cody to stand in front of him, kissing him on the forehead. "...you never forget it."

Cody beamed at him - the smile as warm as the Florida Sun.

"Aww..." Bligh teased. "Y'all cute."

Andrew glanced at him with an appreciative smile. "Thanks--" He raised his eyebrow gamely. "So are you."

Bligh rose from the bed to hug Andrew tightly - they turned to kiss, and as Andrew took a step back, feeling Cody's hand encircled his own, he could see Bligh's face had turned sincere.

"G'on," his best friend said quietly. "Ya gotta do this. He's yer brother."

Andrew nodded - he felt Cody squeeze his hand as he planted a smooch on his boyfriend's cheek. As they separated, making his way to the bedroom door, Andrew called over his shoulder:

"Hey, Baby?"

"Yeah?"

"I want you to show Bligh how to work the DVR, okay? Y'all watch some TV - I'll be back soon."

Cody nodded. "Okay, sure."

Bligh tittered again, scratching his ear with one hand as he pulled Cody into a hug with the other. "Sounds like fun."

Andrew grinned. "Good - see y'all soon."

"Love you, Andy!" Cody yelled as Andrew came into the living room.

"Love y'all," Andrew yelled back - he sensed that this would be the patterned call-and-response between them from now on, and it warmed him, the idea that from the nightmare that began this, their lives could finally become something approaching normal - and loving.

He opened the front door, feeling himself break into something like a cold sweat, and as he shut the door behind him, he bid in vain his heart to stay its nervous palpitations as he went down the steps and out into the parking lot, his phone in hand.

He paced out onto the pavement and rounded a corner choked with elephant-ears to the large artificial canal that, with a tasteful tapis vert next to it, ran parallel to a street that led to an intersection some ways off - all day and all night in the midst of this canal a large fountain, in a pallid American imitation of Versailles, burst forth its ceaseless torrents of water underneath the watchful boughs of straining live oaks.

He heard the whirring call of the cicadas that languidly said their own name from the tangled, verdant groves of Brazillian pepper and the wild weeping blades of the Sabal palms across the street...further on he could hear the ambient roar of the intersection the street led to, cars passing by, one by one. As he passed, sunning anoles scattered from his feet back to the grass and the mulch, and a lone red ant - Solenopsis, Andrew guessed, the tiny chitinous invaders that had callously annexed the Southeast to themselves long ago - wandered aimlessly on the concrete.

Taken together, Florida in the summertime was absolutely alive, with a tropical vivacity that had survived the best, cruelest intentions of Mankind when he shat forth his stain in this emerald American Elysium.

To Andrew's evolved sense of smell, it was even more intense, and he took it in as best he could for the sharp shock that it gave him...this, he surmised, bathing in the profuse layers of odors and aromas, is how a dog must live, with intensities and flavors constantly surrounding him.

Even so, everywhere, a stillness had descended - everything, every insect and car and leaf stirring in the bare breezes off Tampa Bay, seemed to be going in a kind of suspended slow motion.

Unlike having to experience his surroundings virtually anew with his suddenly superior nose, this - the stillness - was a feeling Andrew knew well...whether it was West Virginia or Florida, August, the whole month but especially those first few weeks, offered a kind of breather from the insanity of June and July, when spirits run too high in humans and in nature, when thunderstorms tear rampant and unchecked across the Eastern Seaboard, the shimmering blue skies swallowed by cumulonimbus, in between the rising swelter of the days following the Solstice, the Sol Invictus becoming Sol Niger as the sunlight begins sweetly in the morning and by afternoon becomes unbearably Hellish.

Summer was the season of violence, in the skies and in the heart - but August dulled the pulse, and bid the Sun itself to ache slowly in the sky as the autumn approached...even if Andrew, this year like every year, would strain to feel that licking chill announcing that the seasons were changing.

These were, so Andrew had heard from the old-timers back in Adkins County, the Dog Days - Sirius, heart of Canis Major, glaring white and immortal down from the night sky. Dog Days - how odd it should be called so, since Andrew's introduction to doghood, his cessation of life as a human and the beginning of his life as abhuman, canine, half-canine, had begun during this very period...

Perhaps some malign celestial influence - truly bucking any sensible scientific reasoning to the contrary - had caused all this...that somehow some alien cosmic ray had streamed forth from Canis Major and its diamond-white heart, down to Earth, to create beautiful beasts in its own image.

A perfect idea for a low-budget science fiction picture, if it hadn't already been done before - Bligh would know, he'd seen probably every werewolf movie ever made, and Stephen, especially, would find it hilarious, it was so literary, so theatrical.

He stopped - looking over the canal, in its shallow green-brown waters where duckweed wafted sleepily and ancient turtles swam lazily and tranquilly amidst nameless small fish, he knew that he was just putting off the inevitable.

He took his phone in hand and pressed the contacts icon - he scrolled through name after name, noting bitterly how few of these people he ever spoke to anymore, how his life from just a year and half ago was some forbidden planet he had exiled himself from...who were these people? Surely, sometime, they would come to his name in _their_phones, and have the exact same thought.

At last he came to the name he needed - Stevie, in plain sans serif. He swallowed hard. It had been six months since he had spoken to him - there were excuses, very good excuses, as to why this was so, had Stephen just been another acquaintance from a class at USF or a guy he had met at Ybor.

He'd been so busy lately - hadn't he? Grad school applications and the end of the semester and tutoring - no. This was his brother, and he owed him far more than he had given him.

He pressed the button and held the phone to his face - and waited.

The first few rings were agonizing - by the third, a creeping, cautious relief crept inside him, that maybe Stephen was busy that day, or perhaps he was sleeping, and he could put this off even further. Such a handy excuse for him to tell Bligh and Cody that Stephen was--

"Oh heeey, what up Drewseph?"

Andrew had little time to react - he fumbled his first attempt at saying hello, taking a few excruciating seconds to steady himself, and speak to his brother for the first time in half a year:

"H-hey - hey there yourself, Steverino."

A laugh came from the receiver - it was the mischievous laugh Andrew had known most of his life, when Stephen had emerged from his childhood of being a near-mute, a laugh that seemed to find life so hideous and unbearable that the only thing to do was find it funny.

"Holy shit - Drewseph you dumb sack of crap, what the fuck."

Andrew chuckled, rolling his eyes. "I missed you too, Brother."

Stephen's accent from his childhood and adolescence - the Appalachian drawl that whiskey made worse - had slowly vanished as he had aged, so that he sounded refined and Virginian like their father.

"Oh my goodness - yeah about that, where the fuck you been, dude?"

The fatal question - and again, Andrew stumbled over his response: "W-well I--"

"Oh I don't care, whatever, shit happens but - hey - hey I'm glad you called, man I missed you but whatever - whatever - because actually I was gonna tell you something - um - it was kinda important, uh..."

As Stephen wafted in and out of what Andrew, with a deep cringe, strongly suspected was the effect of shots of liquor in the afternoon, he was still relieved at Stephen's flippant shrug of their absence from each others' lives - and then, as he heard Stephen giggle with self-aware stupidity, he wondered why, knowing his brother as the puckish scoundrel he had grown into, he ever worried at all.

"...oh dude I'm sorry, I'm really drunk right now."

"I know, I - I can tell."

"Yeaaah you were always good at that - oh that's what it was!" Again with the mischievous laugh - Andrew raised an eyebrow. "Oh dude - dude I am so, so, so sorry - uh--" Andrew heard him try to steady himself - he knew what he was going to say, but he let him deliver the news anyway. "Dude - Pappy died. I went to his--"

"Funeral, yeah, Bligh told me - he--" Andrew took a breath. "He's down here. He's with me - and Cody."

A pause, punctuated by a small, outraged laugh. "Wait. Wait what."

"Y-yeah, I--"

"What the actual fuck. That stupid hick didn't even - what the fuck!"

It was drunken rambling, Andrew knew, but Stephen's reaction still made him nervous.

"What - Stephen, what--"

"He just - oh, dude, dude, you don't even know!" He was becoming excitable. "Story - story! I have a story, okay?"

Andrew chuckled. "Alright, Brother, tell your story."

"Right! Okay - story. When I was at Gus' service--"

"Gus who?" But Andrew corrected himself, feeling almost ashamed at having to ask. "Oh - oh, Gustavus--"

"Yeah, Gus, that's what Pa called him when he wasn't being, yanno, all formal and shit."

"Pappy," Andrew said - to himself, but he let the name escape to the August air, where it could hang, for a moment, in immortality.

"Not to me," Stephen said what sounded like a sneer. "But to you, so - I'll let it go."

"Thanks." Andrew had forgotten - and did not know why he had forgotten - how cruel, how apathetic to suffering, Stephen could be.

"Welcome!" Stephen rejoined, not quite mocking. "Anyway - so we're at Gus' funeral, right? Huge thing, the whole fucking town is there, because, I mean, you remember the guy, preacher at Living Hope, old as fucking Hell and - didn't know this, thought this was cool - Bronze Star, Purple Heart in Korea! Ain't that awesome?!"

Andrew's gaze - over the canal, to the sprawling brick apartment complex from whence he had just come - grew distant. For a moment he did not see what was in front of him at all, but rather Pappy's face, the salt-and-pepper beard, smiling at him, holding the medals he had won - burnished bronze and glinting gold-and-purple, and the scar on his hand from exploding shrapnel - at some far-off place called Triangle Hill. He would show them to he and Bligh every so often, and regale them with stories of the brutal days where he had first found God in the cold Far Eastern Sun that shone one morning down on Sniper Ridge. As children, mere boys, Bligh and Andrew would sit in rapt, wide-eyed attention as Pappy would tell the stories, the images vivid with the words in the hereditary tradition of the great Appalachian raconteur.

"Yeah..." was all he could manage back to his brother.

"So - uh, yeah, we're there, right? Me and Bligh - and um, it's weird, the entire time he never takes his hat off, don't you think he would? I mean he takes it off to eat, but not at a funeral?"

Stephen had, unwittingly, given Andrew an answer to a question he had wanted to ask.

"You mean you've never seen him with his hat off?"

"I used to," Stephen said. "But um - like eventually he got to be wearing it like literally all the time. Never took it off. What's he hiding?"

Andrew suppressed sudden, uproarious hilarity - the irony was almost too immense to be real. "Just his ears, I guess..."

"Huh. Weird. Any - way - keep getting distracted - so I'm there, Bligh's there, wearing the hat, but Ma and Pa aren't there--"

"Yeah, Bligh said they weren't."

"--like holy shitballs, they spent the weekend at the Greenbrier -and they wanted me to go with them and I was like, fuck, really? This dude - Gus, your Pappy - he just died, how fucking rude! And I told Bligh that when I was there, because, I mean - whattya do, what is to be done?"

"I think you did the right thing," Andrew answered him. "I wouldn't make excuses for them anymore."

"I never did," Stephen said. "I mean - look, Andrew, let's be real, okay, let's be really, really real - Pa liked me better--"

Andrew let out a guffaw. "Oh, you think?!" He shook his head. "Tell me something new, Stevie. Seriously."

Stephen laughed, the same mischievousness rattling the speaker on Andrew's phone. "Something new?! Well that's the thing! He said - Bligh said, he said he'd had enough, right? And that, once this - um, the funeral, yanno - he said he was going down to see you."

"Yeah, he--" Andrew's mouth twinged as he remembered how desperate Bligh had been, the embryonic stages of them being together that had unfolded the day before. "He, um - he mentioned that."

"So - but - I didn't - I'm just really surprised he actually_did it_. Just off and went - oh and swore me to secrecy, just like you did for me with the whole proposing-to-Cody-at-graduation thing--"

"Wait--" Andrew smiled to himself. "You - Bligh made you promise not to tell me?"

"Well, yeah. And I did it, too - I mean - I really didn't know what was going to happen? Honestly? But you know me - I love a good show."

Andrew was horrified. "What the fuck?"

"What?!" Stephen cried defensively. "He wasn't going to homewreck you two, I mean, he really thought Cody was adorable once you showed him what he looked like--"

"Yeah, he said that too..." Andrew frowned.

"Exactly, exactly! So I just - I just let it happen, if y'all three wanted to do some three - three - way - thingee - Drewseph c'mon, I'm not like them backwards-ass hayseeds in the county, I'm down for whatever makes people happy. I told him to go for it, and he did." He paused, and drew in a breath, as though in epiphany. "Wait - wait a minute - he's there now - did y'all--"

Andrew grinned, and he felt his tail wag in his khakis, knowing, now, he'd have to deliver the happy news. "Yeah - yeah, we did."

"Wait - wait - wait. It actually happened?!"

"Y-yeah, Brother - me, Bligh...and Cody."

For a moment Stephen seemed as aghast as Andrew had expected - but then, a convulsive laugh broke from him as the thought seemed to fully click. "Holy fucking shit - oh, Christ, three people co_hab_itating - poly_amory! How fucking _dread_ful! Who thinks of these stupid words, anyway - a Greek root and a Latin root--" He carried on with more peals of strange laughter as Andrew fidgeted by the canal. "Ah, ah, oh God, make it _stop, it's too funny!" His laughter ebbed away from the hysterical peak it had reached, and then transmuted, by degrees: amused, docile, sad, apologetic. And at a brief length, at last, there was no laughter at all, only a flat ending: "It makes sense though, don't it?"

Another silence elapsed before Andrew, thinking on the events of the past two nights, sighed, with another grin. "I guess it does."

"I mean--" Stephen continued. "I mean - you - were so in love with that - with that boy--"

"Cody," Andrew murmured correctively.

"Yeah, right - and then Bligh, fucking Bligh, whenever we'd hang out--"

An eerie, jealous feeling rose through Andrew's chest. "Y'all hung out?"

"Wh-what, he didn't tell you?"

"No, he--" Andrew thought a moment, continuing his pace along the canal. "But I guess...he didn't have to literally tell me that, he seemed to know a lot about what you were up to..."

"That - uh. Huh."

There was a pause that Andrew almost thought sounded confused, as though it should have been utterly obvious that Stephen and Bligh would hang together even in Andrew's absence.

The strangeness was forgotten, however, as Stephen recovered quickly: "That - that little snitch!" It was meant to be funny, but sensing, correctly, that Andrew was unamused, he continued: "Any - anyway, y-yeah, whenever we'd hang out he'd talk about you constantly..."

"Well I mean I tried to keep up--" Andrew swallowed back the jealous feelings of someone else outside of Cody having a monopoly, however brief, on Bligh.

"You did, yeah. Called him all the time - uh - from what he told me you'd get drunk and--"

"He told you that too?" Andrew heard himself let out an exasperated groan. "Dammit, Bligh..."

"What?! Seriously, fucker - Jesus how can you be so fucking dumb - he missed you so fucking much, he kept waiting to hear you say you loved him--"

Andrew's chest tightened, and he stopped in his tracks, a hand to his forehead, underneath the bill of his hat. "Stop," he ordered. "Stop, Stephen. You've done enough."

"I haven't done shit," Stephen answered - so languid and casual he seemed almost bored with the idea. "Don't try to pin this on me, okay? Just because I speak the truth, and you're probably unused to that, I bet that boy you're with just lies to you all the time because you took him off the street--"

"What the fuck." Andrew yelled it - it was so short, all the words melded together in a single phrasing of outrage, forged in the idiom of the youth at USF. "What the fuck, Stephen. What the fuck."

There was still another pause on the other end - a heavy breathing, a losing of control, a decorum beginning to lethally crack. "It's because of that boy--" Stephen went on, undaunted at his brother's verbal wrath. "It's because of that jumped-up pantry boy that you stayed there, that you never came home, just rotted there in that spic-infested--"

"Stop it," Andrew said angrily - brother or not, the words hit too close to home. "Stephen - Cody's the love of my goddam life, and I _ain't_gonna have you--"

"I don't wanna fucking_hear_ about him!" Stephen cried. "What about me! And Bligh! And good for fucking him for finally taking initiative but - motherfucker you got people you gotta answer to!"

A defiance - the same defiance that Andrew had felt at the beach, when Bligh had said something similar - surged through him, and he straightened his back as he remembered, rather too late, who he was, and what he stood for.

"Stephen - stop, okay? Just stop. You know for a fact that there was nothing there for me. I was--" He shook his head vigorously. "I was really confused about who I was, and all that time I thought Bligh was straight--"

"Yeah," Stephen said with a jeering laugh. "Boy you dropped the ball on that one."

This, at last, was too much: "Do you ever shut the fuck up?!"

There was a pause on Stephen's end - and then a small sigh, as though of defeat. "Sorry," he murmured.

Andrew sighed in frustration. "It's - Brother, c'mon, you know better."

"Mmm," Stephen intoned. "Don't fuck with Bligh - I guess don't fuck with Dakota either - well then..." Another pause, shorter than the last. "Good to know."

The silence between them was brief, but unbearable.

"I'm - I'm sorry I yelled at you," Andrew tried to backpedal.

"No - no, I guess you're right. Other than - but - me, though, me, Drewseph, and Bligh too. Even if everybody else in Tempest is a fucking ghoul--" His tone was far less belligerent, even if his words meant essentially the same thing. "You still - owed us something."

Andrew shut his eyes - he felt his ear twitching underneath his cap. "But he's - here's now, so it's--"

"And he's with you, yes, and that's great - because - you know what's funny?"

Andrew's eyes opened as he rolled them. "No, Brother - tell me, what's so funny?"

"I'm here too."

There was something like confusion, at first, that Andrew first - and then, a chilling fear. He knew what Stephen meant.

"You're - you're--"

"I'm at Eckerd College - heard of it? It's like Reed College except - wait, do you know what Reed College is like? All hippie and shit? Well - like that, plus - a freakin beach." There was a delightful laugh as Andrew stood, frozen. "A beach! And they paid me to go there because my grades were so good, ain't that fucking great?! Too bad the town's awful - Saint Petersburg, so many old people--"

"What - St-Stevie, what--"

Andrew was utterly unprepared for this - Stephen had abandoned Virginia Tech, a safe distance of four states away, in favor of a college barely thirty minutes from where he was. He had no recourse, no defense, no backup plan - Stephen was invasively close to him, to Bligh, to Cody, to their shared secret and their brand-new life which he was only perhaps that very day becoming fully adjusted to.

Something began to claw into the back of his mind - a feeling he was unfamiliar with in his world of planning and reason - panic.

"S-Stevie - this - what - why--"

"Because I wanted to get out of Appalachia - that's where we're from, yanno, West Virginia and Virginia and all that - I mean, let's be real Brother, what have we got to look forward to? Meth? Oxy? Shit."

Andrew was still numb from the revelation. "But - you--"

"I - what? Got accepted to Virginia Tech and um - what was it, like, Marshall I think and also, uh - did I apply to Wheeling Jesuit?"

"Yeah," Andrew blurted. "Yeah, you--" The panic that set in was starting to fade, replaced by something new - supreme irritation. "Stephen what the fuck - why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I wanted it to be a surprise, dude! I made all the um, all the arrangements like - uh - two months ago? And I moved down here last week, a few days um, a few days after Gus' - Pappy's funeral, and before you say anything, dude, dude - wouldn't - wouldn't it be really cool for me to just - show up? And we could be a family again? And we could settle down and do all the shit we used to do? Because, don't you know - don't you know - don't you know, how much I've missed you?"

It disarmed Andrew completely - it was like he had been carrying a bomb in his arms for as long as he had been from Tempest, so long that he had forgotten it was even there, and that now, with Stephen's words the spark, the fuse had been lit, and it had detonated, all over his face.

Several seconds of silence passed. A pair of mallards quacked happily in the water, and some scarlet skimmers - Crocothemis servilia, Andrew noted instinctively - jetted amidst the cattails that clung to the banks. It was a picture of tropic Floridian perfection - that he, unworthy Appalachian, did not belong in.

"I - I know."

"Do you?" came Stephen's accusation - it was as though he could leer through the phone at any minute, from the receiver would be his angry glare. "Do you even want to see me, now that I'm finally out of that shithole we grew up in - and - I'm down - down here?"

"Stevie - dude - listen, yes, yes I want to see you but--" His mind raced for an excuse. "Bligh - he's - he's still new here and he still has to get his shit from back home--"

"Are you fucking me," Stephen said flatly, the outrage of mere seconds ago seemingly forgotten. "You mean he didn't even--"

A nervous laugh escaped Andrew as he realized what Stephen was about to ask. "Yeah - yeah, yeah I know he - he don't plan anything--"

"He really don't. He just barreled down there with nothing - what the actual fuck - like I said, dude, I _really_didn't expect him to actually follow through on that shit."

"Y-yeah, yeah - well, he did - and, so - it's kinda...bad time." He paused, cringing again, hoping that this would not hurt Stephen's feelings as much as he feared it would.

"S'fine, um, I got college shit to do anyway so not - not a big deal - now - but I'm here, Drewseph. I wanted to get out of West Virginia just like you - and - you were here, and, I mean shit, Bligh was gonna be here too. Added bonus, right?"

Something in Stephen's words troubled Andrew. "Why would you give up Pa? What did he say about you moving down here?"

"Oh, dude--" A dissonant clank arose as Stephen must have struck the table Andrew guessed he was sitting at. "They - were - devastated." Once more with the mischievous laugh.

Andrew was unsure whether to be gratified at his parents' comeuppance...or appalled at how callow Stephen was being.

"That...sounds about right," he offered.

"But I don't care - pretty obvious I don't but - I don't - I don't want anything to do with him," Stephen continued.

Even as he expected it, Andrew was still taken aback - not nearly as shocked to know that Stephen was in Florida, but it was still something he had never expected his brother to ever say.

"Well - why? Pa, he - loved you, Brother." A haunting of resentment floated up where he walked, and he frowned, adding: "Way more than he ever loved me..."

"Dude, yeah, that's just it - it's because of how he treated you- let's start with that, and then, oh I don't fucking know, how he treated everybody else?"

Hearing Stephen say it warmed over the cold fearfulness of him being too close, too suddenly, that had built up in Andrew's heart.

"I - I'm glad you see that too," he said with a small smile.

"Wasn't hard," Stephen dryly. "Ma - Ma just as bad as Pa, only a little less loud about it."

Andrew nodded gravely. "Yup, she was."

"And I just wanted to be away from all that - all of that. And I don't wanna go back - fuck it, I'll do fine on my own. We talked about that - we did, and, um - remember how much we talked about how much money meant to them, and it didn't mean anything to you - or me - or Bligh, or Pappy?"

"Yeah, yeah I remember."

"Well - uh, then this might interest you. He - Pa - he's losing money like crazy these days."

Andrew raised an eyebrow. "He what?"

"Well there was that whole thing with the - yanno, the New Elysium Group up in Mason County--"

"That was like - ten years ago, Brother."

"It was five years ago, and it don't matter, he still took a huge hit with those people trying to rebuild that town--"

"That nobody moved to, I know, but..." He thought a moment. "Where's all his money now, then?"

"Tied up in the mine - ain't that fucked up? Ain't it fucked up that Pa - our Pa - basically owned Bligh?" He chuckled to himself - a blithe, affable aside, because he knew what kind of damage that it inflict on Andrew, the very thought of their father's evil affecting Bligh, how much that would disgust and upset him.

A long silence followed Stephen's remark - Andrew let loose a harsh sigh - in the midst of a tumult of emotions, he still had to press on.

"Listen, Stevie we - I - um, the reason I called you, the whole reason, was - about Tempest, and--"

"Hopefully not about Pa. Because he still hates you for being bi, since we're keeping score."

Andrew shook his head in mounting annoyance. "Thank you, so much for that--"

"Just saying. I mean--"

"Okay first off, dammit, quit interrupting me!"

There was a pause on the other end - a shuffling and a clinking sound, as of glass hitting glass.

"Aight..." came Stephen, sounding as though having to feign disinterest.

Andrew sighed again, putting a hand to his hat as he watched a pair of mallards waddle about on the bank.

"Look - again - I'm sorry Brother, I'm just - under a lot of stress right now."

"Over--" There was an abrupt pause, and, as Andrew frowned, sliding his hand off his hat down to his pocket he realized that Stephen was swallowing something - more drink. "--uh, uh sorry, um - over what? Bligh being there and y'all are together and junk?"

"That's--" Andrew hesitated. He wanted to tell him the truth, the full cosmic scope of the matter, but it was suddenly so enormous to him beyond the basic facts that he quickly decided he could do little more - like Bligh, asking him if he'd changed any - than be excruciatingly circumspect. "That's - part of it. We, um - a lot's changed."

To his instant relief, Stephen did not inquire further: "Well - I mean yeah, okay, since y'all, um - together and what-not."

"Yeah - yeah."

"But that ain't why you dropped off the face of the Earth."

Here again was the crux of the issue. "Stevie - I wanted to talk to you but I've been - crazy, crazy busy--"

"And you're off Facebook too, what the Hell's up with that?"

"Yeah, that's part of me being so, um, busy - I gotta start applying for grad schools, Stevie. I don't need these people creeping all up--"

"And seeing those drunk pictures you didn't bother to un-tag - Jesus, Brother, I just _can't_with you some days."

Andrew found himself blushing, images unwillingly thrown up in his mind's eye of the same pictures Stephen spoke of - pictures that Cody, who had never bothered to get a Facebook, had never seen.

He huffed out an embarrassed sigh. "Stevie..."

"Whatever, what were we talking about?"

"We--" Andrew felt his heart quicken as he remembered the dream from last night, and the secrets that he might now uncover. "It's - about Tempest."

"This - sounds like a repressed memory type situation?"

Andrew's eyes widened. "How - how did--?"

"Why else would be calling your brother about our parents, hmm?"

Andrew forced a chuckle. "Okay - okay, yeah. Well, um - I wanted to know, because--" His mind raced for a feasible excuse. "I just - um, I've been thinking back recently to when we were kids, yanno, Bligh being here and all--"

"Uh-huh."

"And uh - is there some - weird shit that's supposed to happen with, um, with the town - Tempest, Dog's Creek - and the dogs from there?"

A small silence elapsed. "Why?"

"Because uh - you remember how Pappy freaked out Ma and Pa by telling them--"

"That Walker was special, yeah, and those ducks turned out to be endangered - but Pappy ate them anyway. He took one of em home for Christ's sake."

A small twinge of horror, down through the years, from the memory of eating an endangered species, made Andrew wince. "Uh - yeah, that - that night."

"Um...so you're asking is there a reason the adults are all weirded out by how the dogs are in the county?"

"Yes." Andrew was steeling himself.

"Huh. Well. For starters - even though nobody believed me--" He seemed rueful. "Walker - Duke, too, and by the way that's a stupid name for a dog, Duke--"

"Thanks," Andrew cut in. "I was the one who named him."

"I know you did, and it don't matter, it's still a stupid name - moving on, though - Duke, Walker - they could talk."

Andrew had been waiting for this. "Bligh said that too - but I'm still not sure--"

"Yeah well hold on a minute, because when I told people that, they'd - they'd misunderstand. I mean, you remember how he'd do--"

"But I honestly thought that's how dogs usually are, barking and whining to communicate--"

"Yeah - dude - no. Not at all. See the thing was - remember, I told you this - I could understand him like he was speaking English, dude. Other dogs, I been around other dogs that weren't from the county, and they'd - how'd you say it? Bark and whine? Yeah, uh - w-when they did that, um, it just seemed to me like...barks and whines. Not like when Duke and Walker did it - get me?"

Andrew weighed what his brother was telling him - for years he had dismissed it as his brother merely being damaged, par for the course for being mute, or nearly so, until practically junior high, for being just generally morbidly, notoriously weird. But now - with everything he had seen, and indeed become, he was no longer willing to question it.

He nodded, slowly, believing, for the first time in his life, that Stephen really could talk to dogs.

"Y-yeah - it's - possible I guess," he conceded.

"Possible? No, it actually happened."

"But you said there's more?"

"Mmmhmm."

"So - go on, then."

"Okay - uh, okay - yeah, and I was always thought that Walker being able to talk and think, basically, like a human almost, was because - it's related to this old-ass legend from way back in the day about some _seriously_fucked up shit."

Andrew felt his blood run cold. "What...what legend? They woulda taught us in school--"

"Dude, dude, no. Not this legend - oh and by the way, did it ever bother you Pa never sent us up to Charleston to go to some prep school? I mean why the Hell did we have to suffer the fuck through Adkins County--"

"Focus, Stephen," Andrew cut in peremptorily.

"Really? Fine - fuck, how'd it go? I heard Pa talking about it to Papa Sandoro, yanno the guy who--"

"Gave you Walker, yeah, what'd he say?"

"Uh - okay, well - it was like, two years after you left, right? And Papa Sandoro was over for dinner, and he, um--"

"He's still alive?" Andrew asked in disbelief.

"Oh Hell yeah. That motherfucker's never gonna die, what are you kidding me? That bald bastard's like ninety-something."

"Yeah I was about to say..."

"Anyway, um - yeah he was over for dinner and he put his hand on my shoulder and said how sorry he--" Stephen took a deep breath before he continued. "He - um - how sorry he was Walker died..."

Andrew let a respectful silence elapse before he pressed his brother further: "What else did he say?"

"Uh - uh - n-not to me, um, but like, a few hours later when I was supposed to be in bed or whatever - cuz it was a school night and I was seventeen and all that shit - Ma and Pa and Papa Sandoro were up late and they were talking, and um, I couldn't sleep for some reason and I was passing by the staircase - and I heard him - Papa Sandoro - say to Ma, that Walker was a good hound, and that he gave me all the protection I'd ever need for the rest of my life..." He paused again, as though reliving the memory. "Um...uh, sorry."

"It's okay, Brother. Take your time."

"That's all I remember_hearing_ from anybody, though."

"I see - and that's what he said? Protection..."

"Y-yeah - which was pretty dumb, I mean Walker was small--" He stopped mid-sentence to take another deep breath. "Uh - uh, Walker was small, I dunno what he coulda protected me from."

"I don't either..." Andrew murmured, both to himself and to his brother. "Do you remember anything else? You said - a town legend--"

"Y-yeah, see, what Papa Sandoro was going on about - and fucking shit I couldn't hear what else they were saying, either - I _think_has to do with the legend about the town, see - after you left, um, I used to sneak into Granddad's library--"

"Wait, what? That room's been locked away forever, what--"

"No, you just thought it was because the door was closed, and the rest of the rooms that side of the house had closed doors too, and they were locked - but not that not, not the library."

Andrew at once felt foolish at the idea he wasn't even aware of something so obvious inside his own house. "Oh - well shit."

Stephen seemed exasperated. "For someone who's so smart you really are a dumb fucker a lot of the time--"

Andrew rolled his eyes. "Focus."

"Fine - so I'd go into Granddad's library and like, poke around, yanno? Because - no Walker, no you - wasn't really a good time, so I would just sit in Granddad's at night time and read books - cuz I still do that shit, yanno, read books for fun."

"Nothing wrong with that," Andrew said. "More people should read."

"Well they don't, and that's why the world's a shithole - but anyway- there was, um, there was this old ass book that was written by the guy you're named for - Andrew Lars Lightfoot--"

"Yeah his picture is downstairs..." Andrew raised an eyebrow. "So that book must've been, like, what, a hundred, hundred-fifty years old?"

"Oh dude totally, it smelled really bad, and I always used to wash my hands after reading through it - but uh, yeah, one day I started reading it because it looked really old and um, it was out of place - it was behind a whole bunch of other books in the - whattya call that thing - you open it, you know, has little knobs for handles?"

"Cabinet?" Andrew guessed.

"Cabinet!" Stephen cried in epiphany. "Cabinet - cabinet, yeah, the cabinet that uh, was at the bottom of one of the bookshelves - I wanted to read it because it looked like someone had hidden it."

"Hidden it?" Andrew repeated.

"Well yeah, I just said, somebody had put it behind the other books - but I could, yanno, still see it. So I pull it out - and um, like I said, it's this old, old book that had this long introduction at the beginning and then at the bottom it was signed A.L. Lightfoot, Charleston, West Virginia--"

"West Virginia," Andrew clarified.

"Yup, that's what it said."

"So it was after statehood."

"Right, yeah, so um - you were looking for a date - it was sometime after 1863."

"I see - so what was in it?"

"I don't..." Stephen paused, as though trying to gather his thoughts once again. "I don't know, is the thing, about like, what the theme of it was supposed to be? It seemed like the guy, our ancestor, was trying to write down local legends, um, about all these countries that straddle the state line - oh dude, what were they - um, Greenbrier, Adkins, Craig, Alleghany..."

"Virginia and West Virginia?"

"Yeah, he was trying to make some kind of - like - guidebook for people who were interested in local - shit, what's that word - folklore."

Andrew's heart again began to race - he somehow knew where this was leading. "Okay..."

"Right, see, the way he was writing? I think he wanted to be like this learned, antiquarian dude who would write extensively about the place he lived in - does that make sense?"

"Yeah, didn't Thomas Jefferson do something like that? I remember Pa having something he wrote--"

"Notes On the State of Virginia," Stephen replied. "Yeah, yeah - like that. Only it was more focused on, like, the folklore and the history part of it. Some of it was really dry and boring but - there were other parts though...really creeped me out."

Andrew cleared his throat, not wanting to give away how unnerved he was becoming."Like - like what?"

"Uh...well there was two things. The first was about these big, black birds that looked like an overgrown crow - and he was very specific that it most definitely was not a vulture, okay, but a huge nasty crow - that had dirty-looking feathers and would call out peoples' names in the voice of people who were their, um, loved ones who had already died...and when you heard them, you were dead within a week."

"Oooh," Andrew shuddered in spite of himself. "That _is_creepy."

"Yeah and he swears it's true, like it's a real thing that happens in that area - our area, basically."

Andrew frowned. "Wait - wait, wait a minute. On what basis? Did he observe them--"

"Stop, stop, no, no - no," Stephen chortled.

"What - what?"

"I know what you're gonna do, you're gonna try and do all this sciencey stuff--"

"Well c'mon, Brother! You don't just publish crazy shit about new animals like that, I don't care what century you live in!"

"Yeah but he did, because he was dumb and old and lived in the days before fucking Google, okay? Can we move on?"

Andrew rolled his eyes, dissatisfied - the prospect of a new, undocumented animal in what could very well be his own backyard tantalized him, even if it was based on rumor, possibly on pure fancy.

"Yeah," he muttered.

"Anyway - I don't know if I believe that, although a couple of times I did hear kids at school talking about really ugly-looking crows in Greenbrier County - down near Alta, ugly enough that people had to, yanno, say they were ugly."

"Yeah I heard that too, it don't mean--"

"Of course it don't mean it's real, but it also don't mean the man was a liar - which - brings me to my next point, the whole thing about the dogs being weird and why it was called Dog's Creek originally--"

After a brief respite, Andrew found himself tensing up again. "Yeah, what about it."

"Alright, so - have you heard of the Moon-Eyed People?"

"No..." Andrew answered slowly. "What - or rather who, I guess--"

"There's this legend - it's on Wikipedia dude, look it up - that, um, like the Cherokee used to come in contact with, basically these people who were white, in the Appalachian mountains, way, way before Columbus."

Andrew grimaced. "That's impossible!'

"Actually, yeah, it's fully possible, because the legends are so - uh - they're so widespread. If it was just like one tribe, maybe, with one legend, then yeah, it'd be a different story, but--"

"Just because several people repeat a lie don't make the lie true."

"You wanna hear this story or not?" Stephen was becoming annoyed, and Andrew, knowing his brother, decided to yield.

"Fine...go ahead."

"Okay - so - the Moon-Eyed People got their name because they could see better at night than during the day, so, if they weren't European, they could have been albino--"

"Which makes sense," Andrew had to concede again. "Photosensitivity is characteristic of albinism."

"Which is why they'd move to someplace like eastern West Virginia, right, am I right? Gets dark a lot, not really all that sunny?"

"I suppose."

"That's what Andrew Lars Lightfoot thought - because, by the time his ancestors had gotten to the area, they named it Dog's Creek, originally, because there were dogs ­everywhere. They ran the fucking countryside, dude. And the natives who were living there, amongst those dogs, okay, well, they had have to been Moon-Eyed People_because they _weren't Indians, they were this tribe that spoke a language the other Indians - um, they were related to the people Pocahontas belonged to - didn't understand, and they all had green eyes and whitish hair, which of course is way off the mark for regular Indians, which they totally weren't anyway, because they had this bizarre religion where they worshipped dogs - they lived with these strange-looking dogs and would separate the women and feed them shrooms to make them hallucinate so they could make prophecies and all this. Pretty fucked up, right? But even after all that, because they looked like them, the settlers that came from Virginia back east thought they were white people just like them, right? No harm no foul? But then - then - they massacred them - each and every one, down to the last baby, because they discovered something so awful--" Andrew could hear Stephen leaning in for effect. "--they didn't write it down."

A clenching shiver went up Andrew's spine. "Wait - what?"

"Yeah dude. Whatever those natives that they found were doing scared those settlers - and our ancestor, A.L. Lightfoot's ancestor, was one of em, remember that - scared em so bad they wiped them off the face of the Earth."

Another long silence proceeded the conclusion of Stephen's tale - Andrew was set into a flurry of deep thought.

"And then," Stephen went on, a little too blithely given the macabre material, "years later, to the day, a humongous storm blew through and that's why they called it_Tempest_. But originally, now, that creek - that creek where Bligh found Duke, okay, that runs through that old-ass church that nobody seems to remember it ever being built or being abandoned? Dog's Creek. But you knew that. And ever since then - people have been convinced the dogs from Tempest ain't right, because they seem...smarter." He chortled - perhaps self-aware at how deep he had gotten into his own story. "Hoooly shit, hold up, hold up, I need a_shot_."

"And you...you swear this is all true?" Andrew asked, still utterly aghast at what he just heard.

"I don't lie, Drewseph, you know this - honesty over everything, the fuck did I teach you?"

"Okay, okay," Andrew retreated. "I just - this is pretty intense--"

"Like camping! Get it! In - tents!" An almost maniacal laugh exploded from the phone, and Andrew cringed at the pun. But before he could react, Stephen cut in again: "But nah - nah, nah, nah. I wouldn't lie to you. Ever."

Andrew smiled, weakly. "Thanks, Brother."

"Yup!"

"Um - well uh, I guess - is there anybody else who would know about - about all that? The dog...cult...thing? The Moon-Eyed People?"

"I don't know who else would, to be real with you. That was a long time ago, Drewseph - we're talking centuries - so yeah it's weird that people are still talking about it and Pappy saying shit like Duke is special and Walker's special, but, dude, and I got wise to - to the fact, real quick, that if I ever asked Pa about any of this I'd get stonewalled - I spent most of my fucking life with the man and I honestly can't tell you a whole lot about him? Because he's - I mean you gotta know too, how secretive he is - and the book is still there, I put it back exactly how I found it, but what happens if Pa finds it? I dunno, dude..."

Andrew's mind was alive with questions - the cult of the dog-worshippers, descended from the Moon-Eyed People - the dogs who lived in the country being able to talk, to think...and Papa Sandoro's strange remark to their mother...

There were pieces - too many pieces, too many pieces to put together, because they were all so small, too tiny to be digested - or even, perhaps, be real.

"But that's - that's all you wanted to know? About the town history and all that shit?"

Stephen's voice brought Andrew out of his sudden introspection, but he quickly recovered, clearing his throat as a car passed behind him on the street.

"Well, no," Andrew said. "I also - yanno I haven't called you--"

"Don't fuck with me," Stephen's said, his voice suddenly rising. "You only called because you want something."

Andrew could hear the grimace in his brother's voice, and he stopped, gobsmacked - he was mortified at the idea his brother would, after all, be onto him that he had no other real reason to try and reconnect with him, even as his life had experienced such enormous, such irrevocable changes that he needed to tell him...

"St-Stevie, I--"

"Don't Stevie me, motherfucker - don't you get - don't you--"Stephen swallowed something, yet again, and then coughed, mildly at first but then picking up power until Andrew has sure he was going to vomit, still on the phone.

"Brother - Brother, are you--"

"I'm fine!" Stephen gasped. "F-fucking fine - but oh shit, I shoulda chased that--" There was another awkward pause as Andrew heard another glass clinking - there was a fumbling, and then a loud gulp. "Uh...uh, o-okay, okay--"

"Stevie please slow down!"

"Oh fuck off!" Stephen spluttered. "Don't fucking talk_- to me_ - about slowing down or doing too much, when you--"

"I'm well-aware what I used to be--" Andrew muttered irritably.

"--then you'll let me say it! When - you ­- were a drunk!"

Stephen took several deep breaths - his inner walls of faux-apathy and sarcasm and mean-spirited humor were at last crumbling, and Andrew could feel it, he could actually feel his brother become pregnable...mortal.

"When you were a drunk - a drunk like me. And you were the same as me and you weren't - fucking _perfect_like you are..."

Andrew frowned at the remark. "I wasn't perfect, Stevie. C'mon."

"I know that - but nobody else does, and now it's even worse, okay? You've led everybody else to believe that this new sober, monogamous faggotry you blew up Facebook with - and fuck, fuck all of that, because you, sober, is insufferable, because it means you're with that boy--"

"He has a name," Andrew interrupted him. "His name is _Cody_and whether or not you like him--"

"See? Like that - drunk Andrew would have never been such a pussy about whether or not I call that boy--" Stephen gave a hearty laugh, his infinite jest too delicious not to self-indulge in. "Dakota, that's his real name--"

"Yes," Andrew said, bracing himself for the inexorable. "It is."

"Dakota - and you just let him, just let him change you like you did, now you're - now you're this upstanding button-down Dean's List goody-goody who don't drunk dial Bligh anymore - who started talking about grad school like it was fucking Jerusalem or some morbid shit, and oh my god you were gonna marry that boy -Dakota, who in the fuck names their kid after an Indian tribe - and you made me keep that to myself til you graduated and, and then, and that was that, I mean what was left for you if Bligh hadn't come, huh? Proposing to that jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place and - and then what? You never really had_a plan, did you? And you gave Bligh so much shit for not planning...and there, and there, and there _you are."

Andrew absorbed the rant stoically - part of him knew that Stephen was right, that he had hailed Cody a little too publicly as the love of his life, the light of his Floridian existence - Bligh even said he had wanted Cody ever since Andrew had sent him that photo, the one of him at Clearwater Beach...a feeling of horror swept him, fleetingly, thinking of the ravenous jealousy that must have eaten Bligh alive this past year. Of course, now, this was redeemed - now, Bligh would wake up with him, and with Cody, every day - but Stephen's words chilled him: what was left for you if Bligh hadn't come? And this - he did not know.

The truth - the truth that Stephen, who could see through others to a degree that approached the telepathic, had already foreseen, was the same thing that Cody had spent the better part of their relationship helping him with, and what so surprised Bligh yesterday in the kitchen, as his internal organs mended themselves from the botched suicide attempt he would never not be ashamed of - needed to be said.

"Stevie - listen, I - you're - you're right."

Stephen sniffed. "I know I am..."

"My life was a mess before Bligh came."

A long pause which Andrew had not expected followed - after some length Stephen gave a small sigh, but hesitated, as though, at last, overcome:

"So you lied. You two lied to each other - and then you lied to yourself. And I guess you lied to Dakota too? Because it was obvious to me - you - you guys - were always meant for each other, I truly don't know what the fuck you were doing without him all this time."

Andrew chuckled - he did not mean to, but hearing Stephen say it made him want to, and he let go, letting the savagery that his own brother had attacked him fuel the laughter, this last bastion of liberation that he needed to be a truly new, truly free person.

"What - what's so funny--"

"You," Andrew said in the middle of a broken laugh. "You, Brother - you - you're right, you're absolutely right - it don't matter who I was - drunk or sober, I was still - still not who I wanted to be. I wanted to be with Bligh, um, even though...I never said it. I thought I was - happy by telling Tempest to fuck off but - I - I wasn't. And he's here now, and now--"

"You feel like you're a complete person again with him in your life."

Andrew's mouth was agape, startled at how lucid the revelation was, how incisive Stephen still was after all these years. "Y-yes, that's--" He recovered, swallowing hard, finding himself nodding along with the idea. "That's - yes."

Stephen laughed. "Still got it--" There was another shuffling. "I deserve some fucking orange juice for that one - going off topic here for a minute, I'm _seriously_impressed how cheap this shit is down here, even if it's still processed all to fuck--"

Andrew rolled his eyes. "Stephen. Would you please--"

"Don't you tell me to focus, fucker, I know what I'm doing."

"Then you need to hear this, okay?"

"Okay."

"You need to hear this, you just gotta know - I'm really...you said you liked me, um, me being a drunk but - no. Listen to me. I'm ashamed of it, and I'm ashamed of - of ever not being with Bligh and Cody."

"Ashamed?" Stephen repeated dubiously.

"Yeah, yeah Stevie - ashamed. You - you know how much Bligh meant to me, and without him..."

As his voice trailed off, Stephen laughed - it was a mirthless, knowing, jaded laugh, a noise that an eighteen-year old should not know how to make. "Drewseph you dumb son of a bitch - what the fuck, really, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why be ashamed of anything?"

"What - wait, I'm not sure I follow--"

"It's your story, Drewseph. Don't be ashamed of it. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story - yanno who said that?"

Andrew smiled - the words did indeed have a ring to them. "No, somebody famous?"

"Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald, uh he said that."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he did - and he should know, that drunken little shit. I don't know if I'll have to read him again at Eckerd but man - yeah - dude that'd be awesome."

Andrew could tell Stephen's energy, even at this early afternoon hour, was now mostly spent. If he knew his brother in the summertime, even with school starting, then a blacked-out nap would follow, and several hours later he would arise, brutally hungover, eat something, and then spend the next however many hours long in an enlightened haze, until the desire for fun or forgetfulness would overtake him, and the cycle would be started anew.

"Gatsby - I wonder if I'll have to read that again."

"Did you see the movie?" Andrew asked, going along with the change in subject.

"Yeah, um - Pa took me to L-Burg to see it. Yanno, um, he - Gatsby deserved better - he needed a woman who would appreciate all those years and all that money. Right? Okay, well - honestly she deserved better too, because who the Hell wants that kind of psycho - I mean buying a house next to her and shit? Jesus..."

Something truly psychoactive affected Stephen when he was in the later stages of being intoxicated beyond the mere euphoria ethyl alcohol was supposed to bring - it made him, somehow, uncharacteristically sagacious and sweet...as Stephen spoke, Andrew's hand again went to the spot on his cheek where he had kissed him the day he left.

"You deserved better - you deserved better than me."

"What?" Andrew shook his head. "No - no, Stevie don't ever--"

"I could have been a better brother..."

Andrew was aghast. "Why - why would you ever say that?"

"Because it's true!" Stephen made it sound like he was protesting. "Don't you--"

"No," Andrew cut him off, a sudden, dreadful thought flashing inside him. "I - I could have been the better brother. I could have stayed back home, and tried to help you - and not leave you - you, you and Bligh - like...like I did."

Another silence - Stephen coughed, and made a strange noise that sounded like a shudder, as though he was suppressing something.

"Nah..." he murmured. "Walker - Walker was all the brother I needed - needed, Andrew..."

Andrew drew in his mouth, a sad frown. "Oh, Stevie - don't do this..."

"But who - who was there with me when he--" He sighed, harsh but broken - Andrew stopped where he was, expecting his brother to break down at any second. "Who was there when he died?" The sentence came out as a single breath. "Who - was there? You were. You - you were, Drewseph..."

Andrew found himself nodding again. "Yeah, I - I wanted to make sure you were okay--"

"So there you go," Stephen said, softly, wryly. "There you go, you - you were a good brother and I didn't need to ask for a better - a better human one, okay?"

Andrew shut his eyes, fighting off an unwelcome tumult of emotions at the word human - he still could not tell him, his own brother, the true fatal secret, the reason that the arrangement that he, and Bligh, and Cody, together, formed such a complete and cohesive bond...he was not Stephen's human brother any longer, and this irony, which Stephen had unwittingly framed, made Andrew sick to his very soul.

The same fear from yesterday afternoon, of wondering who would ever want him as the queer new being he had become, surged through him once more - Stephen would know, sooner than Andrew had intended because he was living in Saint Pete, but how would he react? Could they still be a family, even after Stephen realized that Andrew had forged a new family - a family that was not human?

In the midst of this new storm that swirled cyclonic inside him through introspective silence on that fine August afternoon, came Stephen's voice once more:

"H-hey - hey."

"Y-yeah - yeah, Brother?"

"I love you, Andrew."

It was so suddenly poignant, so immediately sincere, divorced from the roguish sarcasm that Stephen seemed to spit every syllable, and so cosmically perfect for that moment.

Andrew, hearing the call of his childhood, swore he could see, on the grassy banks of the canal he had been pacing along, a phantasm of a strange little pale boy, barely old enough to walk, stumbling along, with a Beagle sniffing beside him - a ghost from another life he had led, with the hushed voice of his mother as soundtrack, the fresh Appalachian air still alive in his lungs.

"I...I love you too, Stephen."

A small laugh - no longer bitter, but still melancholy, as though part of a greater longing that could never be expressed - reached Andrew's ear. And then, as though Stephen knew it was too much - too deep of a vulnerability to be laid bare so suddenly - he made an odd noise, something between sighing and clearing his throat.

"Th-thanks, Drewesph. Um - so we'll each other soon, right?"

"Yeah - yeah, Steverino. I promise."

"Aight then!" Stephen's voice was suddenly - artificially - chipper and upbeat. "Great, great, greeeat. Then - text me later, okay?"

"Okay, Brother. I love you."

"Love you--" And again with the melancholic laugh, the sadness that did not have words because it was too happy to be sad. "Love you too, Brother. B-bye."

A resonant beep told Andrew that Stephen had hung up - the conversation was over.

Andrew lowered the phone slowly and put it back in his pocket - he was an unpleasant mixture of emotions, and as he slowly made his way back to his and Cody's apartment - and now Bligh's, as well - he felt overly full, as though having eaten a variety of food too disparate to be digested properly.

He was elated - relieved that his brother still loved him, still forgave him, even the stinging words about Cody came from a place that Stephen still felt blood was thicker, that their blood was thicker, even if Stephen could not tell that Andrew's blood was now pumped out of the heart of a dog.

And he was confused - what had Stephen, and indeed what had their father meant when Walker had been procured for him for protection? Protection - from what? What eldritch secret was hidden in the history of the abandoned church - the creek - the dogs of Adkins County...? The more he learned, the less he knew, and it irritated him to the point of sheer distraction if he thought about it too much...

And so then, as well - he was fearful. The lingering dread of Stephen's reaction - the horror at having to tell him another fundamental truth, far more difficult to reveal than merely admitting that his Florida life had become untenable and directionless - made him feel uncomfortably cold even in the balmy heat of that afternoon.

The former - Andrew thought to himself, as he made his way back down the sidewalk, hands in pockets, deep in thought - must surely override the latter. They had been through too much, too much as brothers and too much as young men, when Andrew himself still was a man, for something even as Earth-shattering as this...

A jogger rushed by on the other side of the street with her dog, a healthy-looking chocolate Labrador, and Andrew could smell them both - the sour sweat of the jogger, the sweet musk of the dog, who also, Andrew realized with his mingled horror and wonder, was female, something he could tell just by smelling her at a distance of no more than forty feet. He watched the dog run with the woman intently, to confirm, and sure enough, it was, as his nose had first told him, female...

He watched them keep running, further and further away, until they reached the stoplight, where they rounded the corner, following the sidewalk completely out of sight - he turned away and continued back to the apartment, trying to shake the notion that some fundamental part of his own humanity had just been irretrievably stolen from him.

He quickened his step - he was fully dressed, hardly different from the average person on the street at first glance, and yet without Bligh and Cody, who understood his strangeness as no one else ever could, he felt naked, unsure...this too had to be some new effect of his physiology, his body as well as his mind changed - a kind of separation anxiety, of being away...

...from his pack.

Any other day but today he would laughed it off, but Andrew's new life, the one he had now so fervently embraced, was ultimately built on a series of violent mindfucks.

He had been struggling since the first night Bligh was here, when he saw Cody become half-dog, with the notion of how, inside and out, a human being could evolve, through some sort of pathogen that may as well have been sorcery, into something that clearly approximated another species entirely.

As much as his mind had raced, as much as his innate desire for scientific order amidst the chaos of unreason yearned for answers...there were still too few. And if the basic concept of the malleability of the human form in the face of half-canine superiority was observably true - and the three of them were- then would it not also be possible for further alterations of the human mind, also?

For maybe the first time in his life, and certainly since the dim days of his early adolescence when he had pledged himself to the dream of being a scientist, he made a conscious decision to let go of the notion that he had to pursue, to investigate, and to know.

If some deformation of his brain brought about by his turning into a half-dog made him anxious to be around others of his own kind, a kind of pack mentality, it meant that Cody and Bligh had the same thing - Bligh had mentioned before about sharing everything, and now more and more it seemed prophetically literal.

In spite of this - in spite of everything - Andrew smiled to himself. He had much to tell Cody and Bligh...he had much to come back with, for his pack.