The Analogue Cat
When you wake, you wait a few moments for your eyes to come online. You can manage without them, but it's pleasant to lie in the dark warmth and purr while the blurred pixels slowly crystallise into your world. You stretch a striped arm and extend your...
Ground Control to Major Ward
"All systems check. Shutdown complete." Major Conrad Victor Ward snapped the last switch closed and took a deep breath, ears pricked in the sudden silence. Lights stopped blinking; air stopped humming. There was only a tall, white-haired lion squashed...
Baby on Board
I could hear crying from the top flat all the way up the three flights of stairs, which is never a good sign. I knocked cautiously, then again more loudly when it became apparent that nobody had heard me. Cate answered the door, five foot ten of pure...
Cold Scent
My name is Dutch, and I used to be the best damn nose on the force. Note: not 'used to have the best nose'. I was the Nose, and the Nose was me. "Dutch can smell a lie at ten paces," they used to say, and while that wasn't strictly true, I could...
Teaser: A Blacker Dog
Contrary to legend, the black dog doesn't come looking for you. It's already there. Most people just don't see it until the right moment, but I'm not most people. I often wish I was. "What do you reckon, Hunter?" My partner gets down on all fours to...
A Christmas Truce
Just our luck to be in the front line on Christmas Eve. And a colder, wetter, filthier Christmas Eve I had never known, nor hope to again. "Ruddy perishing perishing ruddy...." Barrie muttered. He'd been trying to strike a match for the last...
400 Rabbits
Eighty-Six-Rabbit woke up with a hangover. As far as he could remember, he had woken up with a hangover every morning since he and his three hundred and ninety-nine siblings, the Centzon Totochtin, were born of the union between Patecatl, god of...
Christmas with Krister
"Driving home for Christmas, we can wait to see some faces!" Krister sang, tapping the wheel with his paw. Flink peeped sideways at the carolling malamute. In the shimmer of passing headlamps he let his gaze rest on Krister's blunt muzzle, his slight...
Secret Santa
As was their custom, Flink left the office five minutes after Krister. The malamute's car was waiting round the corner, engine running. Flink darted a look to left and right before opening the front passenger door. Once inside, he pulled off his...
Bentley's Peace: III
The Cousin Wilberforce who appeared at the dinner table was a different creature to the one who had arrived at the front door. Spruced up, bathed and brushed, he was a presentable fox indeed. He was wearing a tail spat with his evening dress; it was an...
Colliewood & Whine
Rodolfo Volpino (better-known to his adoring fans as Rudolph Volpino, or simply Volpino; like the great doyenne of Colliewood, Lassie herself, he was famous enough to need only one name) sighed and fidgeted in the makeup chair. "Almost done," the...
The Witch Doctor - teaser
"OK, sucker," Marty growled, brandishing the kitchen knife. "Only one of us gets out of here alive!" The pumpkin stared insolently back at him. Marty had drawn a scary face on it, with narrow, slit-pupilled eyes and jagged teeth, but he had yet to...