0aeaa1e36e6f2e625b6ba8d48f773062

But before she could withdraw into her private lair, suddenly the sound of a cat mewling made itself heard right outside the trailer door.

“Oh, for crying out loud!” she said, and stalked over. “How many times do I have to tell you not to let—” But the man she’d been scolding for gross negligence wasn’t standing sentry as he usually was. “Maxim?!” she called out. Where the hell was that no-good lazy bum now? So she opened the door to take a look, and suddenly felt a jolt like she’d never felt before. It was as if she’d been struck by lightning. And then she was going down, her face hitting the ground before she knew what had hit her.

And just before she passed out, she thought she caught a glimpse of a little old lady with white hair, holding a very big Taser in her hand, and giving her a big toothy grin.

Epilogue

I lazily opened one eye to take in the scene. Odelia was there, of course, and so was Chase. In fact our human’s entire family was there: Tex and Marge, Uncle Alec and Charlene, and Gran and Scarlett.

All of them were seated around the garden table, with Chase expertly flipping burgers and making sure his (future) family members were all taken care of—food-wise.

Marge and Odelia had had their memories returned to them, and so had Uncle Alec, though the latter still had a tendency from time to time to touch his hair, presumably hoping to find it thick and lush and gelled in place. What he found instead were the few stray wispy strings that had been there for a while—much to his disappointment, too. I didn’t doubt that at some point in the future he’d order himself a nice toupee or wig.

Chase, too, had had his memory restored, and now remembered who he was and where he was and how he’d gotten there. And our humans could talk to us again, imagine that!

It had taken some arm-twisting on Gran’s part to make that miracle happen, but Solange’s sister Selena had finally agreed to reverse the spell she’d put on the Poole family members, and they’d soon snapped out of their hypnotism-induced funk.

Charlene, too, had been saved from the kind of feverish spell she’d been under, and it was safe to say things had mostly returned to normal. In her case it had been a little trickier, as Selena had hypnotized her over one of her goons’ phones. As a consequence the spell had taken longer to take hold, but was more pernicious, and harder to reverse.

“So all this for a little bit of money?” asked Harriet.

“Not a little bit,” I said. “Unless you think one hundred and fifty million is nothing.”

“It is a lot,” she allowed, “but they never would have gotten away with it, would they?”

“I think they might have,” I said. “If they could have just kept on hypnotizing people and sending their goons around to make people’s wishes come true.” Like Santa’s elves, if Santa’s elves had joined the Mob.

“Amazing,” said Brutus, but he was referring to the piece of delicious turkey meat Odelia had handed us, not the case of Solange and Selena.

“I still think it’s a sad story,” said Dooley. “Solange must really have missed her husband to go to such lengths.”

“Yeah, but she shouldn’t have kidnapped Uncle Alec just because she missed her husband,” I said.

As it happened, Solange’s husband Wolf had died six months before, breaking his neck when he fell from the roof of his circus tent. And because he had no insurance, Solange and her sister decided not to tell anyone he’d died. They simply buried the body in the town where Circus Moonblood had been set up at the time, and pretended he’d skedaddled after a fight with his wife. She’d missed her husband, of course, and so had the circus, which had to go on without its leader. There had been some grumblings in the ranks about the leadership the sisters were extending, and it became clear they needed a new boss tofirmly take the reins. And then one day Uncle Alec and Charlene dropped by Madame Solange for a session. Solange had immediately noticed the resemblance to her late husband, and so she and her sister decided on a wild scheme: they’d abducted the Chief, dressed him up as Wolf, and with some of Selena’s hypnotic trickery, Chief Alec had actually believed he was Wolf Moonblood and so had everyone else!

“Do you remember anything?” asked Scarlett now. “Anything at all?”

The Chief gave her a rueful look.“Not much. I do remember I had to feed the elephant one day and he must have smelled that I wasn’t Wolf for he gave me a really weird look and then smacked me in the face with his trunk!”

They all laughed at that, but I thought it was pretty smart of Bella. At least she hadn’t been hoodwinked the way the others had. Of course if Dooley and I had managed to get up close and personal with ‘Wolf’ I’m pretty sure we would have known he was in fact Chef Alec, too.

I placed my head on my paws again. I’d eaten my fill and now it was time for a nap.

“Chase is a much better grill master than Tex,” said Dooley, chewing delightedly.

“Yeah, he certainly is,” I muttered sleepily.