The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group Read Online Free

be utterly unfounded.’
    ‘Yes, I realise that, but—’
    ‘You shouldn’t worry about your son. He’s a healthy lad, and those cuts of his are fairly superficial. I’m sure he could do with a few hours’ sleep, though.’ Dr Passlow suddenly rounded on the two police officers. ‘Which he’s not going to get if he’s constantly disturbed.’
    I’ve never much fancied being a doctor, but you have to admit there’s an upside. Who else could have talked to the police like that and got away with it? Michelle was certainly cheesed off; her mouth tightened as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. Her partner swallowed, his expression becoming a little strained.
    ‘Okay. Well, I don’t think there’s anything else,’ he remarked. ‘We might leave you to it and check in later. Good luck on the scan. I’m glad things turned out better than we all expected.’
    I think he meant what he said. He was a nice guy. And I don’t blame him for thinking that I was a liar. After all, my own mother had jumped to the same conclusion.
    As for me, I guess you could say that I also jumped to conclusions. I was so sure that Fergus must have engineered some sort of joke or trick or scheme; something involving drugs, perhaps, or dingoes, or nudity, or all of the above. Something that I couldn’t remember, owing to the lingering effects of whatever substance I’d been sampling.
    Because there seemed to be no other explanation. I didn’t have an enemy in the world, so why would anyone have wanted to kidnap me and dump me in that dingo pen? More to the point, how could anyone have done such a thing? Even if some twisted creep had decided to sneak into my room and slap a chloroformed rag over my nose while I was sleeping, surely there would have been a few moments of consciousness? Surely I would have had a faint, confused memory of the struggle?
    As my mind veered away from this extremely unpleasant scenario, I quickly decided that I was being over-dramatic. No , I thought, that’s all spy-thriller stuff. That doesn’t happen in real life. In real life, crazy friends like Fergus dreamed up ideas that sounded hilarious when you first heard them, like the time we took all the firewood out of a firewood cage at Nurragingy Reserve, before hanging a sign on the cage that said free child restraint facility. Of course it all went wrong when Fergus decided to stick a few bits of playground equipment inside the cage; there’s a fenced yard full of old plastic spring animals at Nurragingy, and when we tried to rescue one of those, we nearly got caught.
    But that’s the kind of idea I’m talking about – the kind where you can really screw up. It seemed to me that the whole dingo-pen affair was a typical Fergus Duffy extravaganza.
    And I thought to myself, Fergus, you are dead meat on a doner kebab, my friend.

I stayed in the children’s ward overnight. It wasn’t much fun, because the food was lousy, the sheets smelled weird, and you had to pay for the tv (even though it was just ordinary free-to-air, not cable). I was sharing my room with a four-year-old kid who kept yak-yak-yakking about every tiny thing that popped into his head. You know the way some kids will give you a running commentary on stuff that most people take for granted? Like how water comes out of taps, or how cars have four wheels? Well, the kid I’m talking about was that kind of kid. And when he wasn’t babbling, he was coughing like a bull walrus. I swear to God, it was hard to believe the kind of monster coughs that kept coming out of his bony little chest.
    Apparently he had pneumonia. That’s what his mother told my mother, anyway. I felt sorry for his mother, who had to sit at his bedside all day long wearing mental earplugs while he exercised his mouth. She didn’t even go home to sleep in the evening; instead, she bunked down next to her son, on a kind of narrow sofa-bed that squeaked every time she turned over.
    Luckily, Mum didn’t do anything