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Hi all, went through a period of moving and in general, being way too busy to be an arteest. Enjoy!

The cabinets in Delia's kitchen were white pine, purchased three years ago when she was still married as part of an extensive remodeling project that was to start in the kitchen, snake through the living room, a baby's room, then finally into the master bedroom where they'd erect an exalted sanctorium so they may extol their holy union by the fruit of their lips and the deeds of their hips. Despite the bedroom being unfinished, however, they did not stray from a quick prayer now and again, and as such, the deeds of their hips soon became the fruit of her loins. The baby came too soon, and Delia demanded they keep the prenatal barnacle, and her husband in turn decided to keep neither of them.

The kitchen never improved past the stainless steel refrigerator or white pine cabinets, and now both are besmirched in blood. Delia is in her kitchen with a dead otter on the floor. Blood is on her paws, and on her arms and on her overalls and even a little bit on her chin, where the funny smell tickles her nose. She didn't smell it before, but now she does--she scrapes it against her shirt and otherwise stands there, listening to the world beat down her door.

The police enter her living room with a fanfare of shouting, and once inside they're treading over broken TV glass and talking to each other in quick volleys. One of them's a hothead and the other's curt, clipped and measured. The hothead has his theory all lined up, he knows it's another domestic disturbance with a hopped-up husband whom he prays hasn't already out and killed his old lady. He's seen this a googol times and he aches for the day in which this cruel society will stop churning out these monsters who've got no respect for their better and fairer halves. He's got a wife himself and he's been with her for ten years and he still lets her know, each and every day, that he loves her and cherishes her like the day they said "I do."

He also watches too many cop shows, the other says, because that's definitely not what's happened. It can't be. It's never been; when's the last time his theory panned out? The curt cop does, however, thank him for throwing that theory out so she can shoot it down again.

The one female in their precinct would say something like that, he grumbles, to which she says that the one female in their precinct would say that because she's always right.

"We're in the house," she says to her shoulder mic, "signs of a serious struggle, assailant may be armed, confirmed bloodshed. No present activity."

Delia herself is not presently active, nor is she actively present, and instead stands stolidly still before the body with the murder weapon sticking straight through it. She disaffectedly glances at the tip--warped on its way through--and perks her ear toward the sound of cautious footsteps and hushed tones. Her bloodied trowel lies face down near her feet.

This lasts until they see her, a blood besmirched Dalmatian whose empty eyes echo tiny noises in the absence of thoughts, the sound of a penny hitting the water in an endlessly deep well. They are as black as her spots, and they do not react as much as echo when the hothead Terrier yells at her--get down on the ground, get down on the ground!--and she doesn't do more but stare back. The curt, clipped Dragon holsters her gun and walks around the both of them, and when she arrests Delia on the spot she doesn't bring a godless psycho to justice as much as she dresses a mannequin in handcuffs, leading her to the cruiser as the Terrier stones her with threats and platitudes.

"I knew that otter for five years; her daughter would puppysit my little ones after they got out of school and they loved her. She's dead too, you know. Was that your intent? Put the grieving mother out of her misery? Do you have kids, fleabag? Cause you're not gonna see them for a long time. They'll be working MacDolan's when you're back out and you're stumbling the streets with your cracked Spurloki-size change cup; you've lost everything!"

"That's plenty, Manassas. I think you just discovered the fourth degree. Now hush," she says as the car radio crackles. The Dragon confirms that the house is clear and that Homicide is free to conduct their investigation.

"Obvious signs of a severe struggle. Started in the living room, ended in the kitchen. Perp apprehended, going back to the station to process."

Delia leans against the hard plastic seat back as they ride through the city which digs the cuffs roughly into her wrists. Her vision distorts with every fevered beat of her heart, and the Terrier's admonitions fragment before her. Her body, frozen like her mind and by the dried blood on her overalls, shifts with the tight turns the Terrier throws the car through. From time to time, the Dragon glances at her in the rear view mirror as the city moves past her in a blur, scenery repeating itself or at least seeming to.

It's beautiful, though. The sun beats down on the streets and makes new asphalt glow like burning coal, and the trees--carefully planted in this concrete jungle--flutters their leaves like the feathers of sparrows that would land in the birdbath Delia bought when she moved into her new house. Delia takes none of it in; the muzzle of her mind hangs open as the city spoon feeds her heaping helpings of luscious, crisp hedges trimmed flatter than an ironing board and washes it down with whipped, creamy clouds fluffier than the tangled poofs of a puppy's grooming brush, but it all slops off her tongue, bland like oatmeal and water, and dribbles off her lip and into her lap. Only a sneaking urge to pee keeps her in her bloodied fur and her bloodied overalls in that plastic bench seat in the back of that cop car in the middle of the city and going fast toward a most lonely, ignominious livelihood and lack of livelihood therein.

The Dragon's eyes flick up into the rear view mirror again. Her irises are an iridescent grey and rifled like twin magnums. Like a splash of cold water, Delia snaps to attention and looks into the Officer's eyes--her ears splay and she leans forward with every relevant vertebra, expectant that she would pull a zip-close bag of imitation bacon treats from her lap, open the back with a heavy plastic snap, and feed her a morsel of what her future would be, of what was in store once they rolled into the station and what would be the cell, the yard, the kennel where she would subsist as the world moved on.

The Dragon looks away and does not look back for the rest of the ride, which proceeds without incident and only occasional insult from the Terrier. When they pull into the police station they lead her by the arms and the Terrier's grip is much too firm and the Dragon's large hand is surprisingly soft and smooth, and so Delia tends to the Dragon's lead more than she does the other's, who walks at a faster pace and puts the three of them at a diagonal. When she trips on the station's stone stairs the Dragon shouts,

"Manassas! Cool your paws. This ain't a race for justice." to which he grumbles,

"This ain't a walk in the park, neither, R'heem."

That was the brand of Delia's water heater.

Inside is the receptionist at her desk, who sits at the far end of the desk even though her computer is dead center. On the other side of the desk perches the bat with the starched oxford shirt and creamy orange tie, who upon seeing the three adjusts his sunglasses closer to his eyes even though he's inside and the office lights aren't that bright.

Officer Manassas suspends the stink eye he was giving Delia and puts it instead toward this secretive winged paperweight. The bat doesn't seem to notice, and definitely doesn't move--his ears are so open that Delia can see a little electronic earpiece embedded in one.

Officer R'heem, however, ignores the furry flying elephant in the room and checks in with the receptionist, who awkwardly scoots in front of her computer and starts typing away.

"Okay, so, this would be, um, Delilah Maplewood?"

"Delia Dapplewood."

"Okay, sorry, R'heem. Long day, yeah..."

The dragon frowns and leans toward her. "Didn't you get on just as Manassas and I left?"

"Well yeah, but anyway, um, so...how did we find her, again?" she asks as she leans out from behind her monitor. The cringe on her muzzle pulls her lips into a lower-case "n." "Is that her blood; does she need to go to a hospital?"

"What is wrong with you, Tymber?" Manassas asks, "She'd be there, not here. It's not our first day on the job, and neither is it yours."

"Yeah, sorry, I know," she whines as she ducks behind her screen. The receptionist's questions continue page after page from the same form in the same awkward form, and the awkward process of this processing continues for a confounding long time--so much so that Delia eventually finds the most solace staring at the floor between her bare bloody feet.

Finally, after her knees begin to buckle and her arm lapses into numbness from the Terrier's harsh grip, the receptionist says, "Okay, sorry about all that," and then turns the screen around. "Does this look right to you?"

The bat's ear twitches as the Dragon leans in to look over the form. "Should be fine, but I'm concerned about you. Why don't you take the day off after you file this? You're usually Cool-Paw Tymber of the Wooly West."

"I know, sorry..." she whines, which is when a black wing reaches over and hits a key on her keyboard. The entire screen turns black, and then pops back up as a blank police form. Officer R'heem and her partner stare aghast at the three-piece suit bat.

"You can release Ms. Dapplewood now, Officers," he says as he removes his glasses and cleans them on his creamy orange tie, "she's no longer your concern. This Dalmatian is now the prop--, the interest, of the Sacrosanct Center for the Republic of Internal Terror Crisis Handling."

"The S.C.R.I.T.C.H.? For a knife-fight?" the Terrier spits. "Whatever. I'm sure your hostile occupation is why our Cool-Paw Tymber is now Noodle-Tail McGee, but you've got no reason to make our girl here go through so much paperwork. That's a blatant waste of department manpower."

"I know," he says, "Sorry. Just got the call."

The bat breathes on his sunglasses, rubs the fog out of them, and then replaces them on his face as he concludes, "Long day." His eyes are also a creamy orange.

The grips on Delia's arms loosen, and Manassas pushes her towards the desk. Tymber carefully turns her computer screen back to her, eyes bouncing between the bat and the Dalmatian.

"If you could release her too, please," he says.

Manassas and R'heem look at each other with a great amount of shock in their faces. Release a prisoner in the middle of the station, one they were sure was involved in the naughty dealings of death? They were simply aghast! But the bat, in his stone-faced insistence that ruffled nary a fur on his face, would not take less than a "Sorry, sir. She's your problem now. We're sorry for arguing--could we get you a coffee on the way out?"

"Sorry, sir," Rh'eem says as she fiddles with her key ring and then removes Delia's cuffs. "She's your problem now. We'll stop wasting your time so you can stop wasting ours."

"Can I get a coffee?" he asks.

"It's a crime worse than what we were going to book the lady for, I'll tell you that much." Manassas jokes as he elbows R'heem.

"If you were simply going to indict her on suspicions of first-degree murder," he responds, trailing off as he removes his sunglasses again and cleans them on his tie. "then you missed a spot."

A pregnant silence, dripping with icy miasmic mist, fills the room, and so the bat seizes the opportunity and hops off the desk to grab Delia and lead her out the front doors, where his all-black car is waiting with the engine running in a no-parking zone. She enters the rear with him and sits most uncomfortably behind an all-black shotgun buckled to the front seat. Seeing it buckled, she buckles in. The bat pays no mind, and as soon as his door is closed the car the driver, a preened fox in a pressed suit, large sunglasses, and an earpiece nods at them and takes off.

"I'm sure you have a lot of questions, Ms. Dapplewood, and I'm not going to answer most of them. I'm Agent Peach Cobbler from S.C.R.I.T.C.H., this is Agent Blueberry Buckle. I have a few questions for you."

Delia crosses her legs and quietly nods, reminded that she needs to pee. She picks at flaky scraps under her claws and notes the scent of new leather in the air.

"That would be fine," she responds, bringing her claw to her mouth. She thinks better of sucking the caked blood from under them and folds them in her lap.

"Your son, Spot Van DeFord, had the first case of rabies this nation's seen in three hundred eleven years."

Delia laughs and throws her head to the window. Tears run freely down her cheeks at the mention of her son--missed a spot; wasn't he funny--and as her vision floods she looks through the tinted bulletproof glass at the factories, refineries, and warehouses passing by. The smell of burning soybeans sneaks through the vents.

"Rabies. Rabies!" she laughs, pausing to lick her nose. "Like some kind of animal."

The bat nods, then sneezes and licks his nose. "Like a dirty animal, Ms. Dapplewood, and it doesn't stop there. Marcia Brookenridge came down with the same ailment after your infant son bit her, and we believe that this was transmitted to her mother, Martina Brookenridge, of whom our town's boys in blue are sure you're familiar with."

"She did not bite me!" Delia barks.

"Good girl," Agent Peach purrs. "The problem, Miss Dapplewood--"

"--Delia, please."

"Miss Dapplewood, is that this infection spread from an infant's bite to a young adult, both of which were native Amurrican citizens up-to-date on shots, vaccinations, modern medicine that kept this disease in the same dead fam--the same obsolescent group as mange and hip dysplasia."

"A kind choice of words," Delia remarks, watching chimneys, silos, and metal scaffold towers pass under a sky that around the industrial sector seemed to turn the color of apple juice, its clouds like flakes of rust drifting through the brine. She worries about Amelia and her parents, remembering that her phone was on the nightstand. "But you're saying that Martina... and the rest... had rabies, like what wiped out one-third of Spangladutch in the Meridian Ages?"

"Or something like rabies," the bat says, staring straight forward as if studying the back of Blueberry Buckle's headrest. "How fast did Marcie contract this malady?"

Delia subconsciously grabs the strap of her overall for comfort, then feels the crust on its brass fastener and ties her paws together in her lap. Thoughts of Spot course through her mind, bringing tears to her eyes.

"Assuming it was the bite...from my baby, then I--excuse me."

Mother Dalmatian stops to wipe her eyes on the clean part of her arm, then licks her nose to re-wet it.

"Then it'd be less than a day. The poor girl was irate in the waiting room; I'd never seen her like that. She had to be dragged out."

A leathery wing stretches around her shoulders, spiderlike fingers clutch her arm. Agent Peach looks at her over the top of his glasses, eyes the color of glowing embers in his char-black fur.

"We're dealing with something much worse than a three century-old bug. And as far as we can tell, your son was the first this blight."

Suddenly, Peach's claws dig into Delia's arm, and the car's electric locks slam down.

"How did it happen?" he asks. Blueberry Buckler's eyes flicker in the rear view mirror, watching her. The bat's claws clamp down, and Delia yelps as a few pierce her skin. "This is the last time I'm going to ask nicely."

The car picks up speed, and Delia hears a small click as the Agent draws his pistol and aims it at her leg.

"Ten seconds and you're standing in the way of national security. Answer me now."

Delia panicks, hand over her heart which beats fiercely, eyes glued to the gun where a single spider-leg finger tenses on the trigger, a bullet in the chamber and biting at its brass bit ready to chase the rabbit straight into her quaking knee. Her mind is awash with images, places, people and none of it makes sense, she can't put words to it because she can't put thought to it--it's all a box of photographs thrown onto the floor, thrown into one of those cash grab wind-booths and blowing all around her like a swarm of locusts.

"I--I--"she squeaks. "Let me talk, I know what happened, I just need to think, stop! I don't--"

"I don't have time for this, Miss Dapplewood! I don't have the time to fiddle with flea-bit civilians one nip away from being a tick mark on a national casualty list! This could spread faster than a brushfire on a hot summer Califurnia afternoon and here you are just sitting, drooling on yourself like all the other salt and bacon grease people we swear to protect! I don't know what's shorter: our time, or my patience."

It was at that moment Delia wet herself, or perhaps it was the moment right after when a Hellhound bus, driven by a greyhound and way off its prescribed route, hit the side of the S.C.R.I.T.C.H.'s car and sent it sliding sideways down a perpendicular street and into a row of parked cars, which in turn turns the car onto its roof, and neither Agent Peach Cobbler nor Blueberry Buckler are buckled in.

Instead they are thrown about the cabin like dice in a shaker while Delia and the black shotgun stay fast to their moorings. Delia finds herself and her dignity badly bruised, and with fleet blessed by bursting adrenaline, she unbuckles herself, falls to the ceiling, and wrestles the door open.

Scrambling to her bare footpaws around a broken sheet of bulletproof glass, she stands to flee but the bat squeals at her for help and frantically grasps at her ankle and tail.

With a lucid presence of pure instinct Lady Dalmatian grabs the bat's wing and gingerly pulls him from the car--he and his small-boned form are light and Delia, who is so charged that she could throw him like a paper airplane, picks him up like a child. Agent Peach has lost his sunglasses and his other wing is mangled, crumpled like a broken kite. His breathing comes in labored rasps. Blueberry Buckler is dead; she knows this when she looks past the bat's shoulder at the car and he snarls in a jagged voice, "No."

The Hellhound is crushed, smashed against a light post with its headlights looking at each other, and from it bursts the greyhound with fire in his eyes and hate in a frothy roar. He runs right for Delia and Delia runs from him, Peach cradled in her arms.

He is a greyhound, though, and greyhounds are horribly fast--frightfully fast, in this case--and no matter how hard Delia pumps her legs, no matter how much alarm and how much fear courses through her veins like molten metal through an engine mold, she can't sustain the distance between them and stride by stride, he closes in.

"Drop me!" the wounded bat snarls, "Drop me and get out of here."

"No!" she coughs. Peach is getting heavy.

"It's either me or it's you and me! Drop me now!" he shouts, and then buries his tiny razor-sharp teeth into Delia's shoulder. Delia yelps in pain and stumbles into a parked car with Peach where she bangs her knee, and with him trapped against the car she wraps her arm under his butt.

"Behind you!" he shrieks, and Delia leaps sideways as the greyhound crashes through the car's side window. The bat has his good wing wrapped tight around her and his bad wing, and they both watch in horror as the greyhound pulls his head from the shattered window, blood streaming from his forehead and foam frothing in his mouth, and turn toward them.

"Get us out of here!" he shouts. Suddenly Peach is light again as Delia leaps to her feet and runs, and again he is hot on their heels as he chases them back to the wrecked S.C.R.I.T.C.H. car. He lunges at them and the bat swats with a massive wing. Every jolt brings him great pain, his broken wing flapping like a cape from Delia's neck. Delia cradles him closer.

The greyhound swipes at her and catches her overall strap, and as he yanks her back the bat bites him in the arm and wrenches. The greyhound howls and releases her, but does not stop his pursuit. Round and round around the car he chases them, always within claw's reach. The Dalmatian rounds the corners with ease, he seems to strike and tumble over its bumpers, side mirrors, a wheel that's turned sideways and still will not lose them.

He lunges at them again and with a mean shriek the bat rakes his claws down the greyhound's face, slicing one of his eyes and ripping his glass wounds. The greyhound stumbles and falls against the car's ripped bumper and Delia puts the car between them.

"I'm going to put you on top, okay?" she whispers into Peach's large ear. "Draw his attention if you want but don't be a hero."

"Yes, ma'am," he rasps, and with her help climbs onto the car's upturned underside. It's hot to the touch and he squirms.

As the greyhound scrambles to his feet, caught between the bumper and the trunk of the car, Delia dives into the back seat and wrestles with the black shotgun from the front seat. It's tightly clamped down and the clamps don't give easy, so with her claws near breaking and her arms weak from carrying she fumbles, scratches, and yanks at its restraints.

"Aww, is crazy shanks having trouble pulling his ugly face from the fender? Why don't you sink your teeth into this quarter panel, eh?" the bat sneers. The hound doesn't listen; he squats down and out from the bumper and looks into the rear window of the car, and on seeing gives a low, hungry, guttural growl.

"Hey! Frothballs!" he shouts, and then pulls his earpiece out and throws it at the dog's head. It hits his temple with a resounding snap and flies in a long arc while the dog stands bolt upright and glares at him with his one good eye. Their gazes lock, and the bat, exhausted and beaten with a broken wing, takes a long, raspy breath.

He exhales loudly, and then seethes, "So, are you going to eat me or are you just going to season me with your eyes?"

The greyhound leaps onto the car and towers over him like a great feral bear, and then his crotch explodes in a hail of blood, guts, and bone. The greyhound crumples with a gurgle and falls off the back of the car.

Lady Dalmatian stands free of the trunk, covered in tar and broken glass. The end of her black shotgun smokes like a Dragon's sigh, and her breath comes in puffs devoid of her voice.

Agent Peach Cobbler loosens his tie, coughs into his wing, and then says with a twitch in his ear,

"I owe you my life, Miss Dapp--ah, Delia. Thank you, Delia."