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The creature shelter was little more than a pair of terrace houses that’d been knocked through, and where almost every room except the kitchen and bathroom had been converted into sleeping spaces.
It was cramped and busy and, on average, filled with a dozen on-edge creatures. Pet was hiding in a boiler cupboard, since the kitchen cabinets were jammed full of supplies and saucepans, and the cupboards in the bedrooms were similarly full with spare clothes, sheets and towels. It was a tight squeeze in the boiler cupboard too, but it was warm and quiet. They left the door ajar, and the little bit of noise and light that filtered in kept the cupboard from being too similar to the pitch-black cellar Pet had been abandoned in; that, and the heat.
Mariann didn’t live at the shelter like the two main human workers, Arwen and Si, but she visited regularly to check on Pet and her other charge, a tiny, yellow-furred creature who couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
“Tea’s ready!” Si called up the stairs. He didn’t exactly yell so much as just raise his voice. There wasn’t any force to it.
Careful not to touch any of the exposed metal boiler pipes where the insulation had flaked away, Pet shuffled themself slowly out the cupboard and out onto the landing, squinting in the bright lights. Their still-healing ribs ached slightly from how curled up they’d been, and their splinted tail itched, but their injuries had recovered so as to hardly bother them anymore.
They’d tried to avoid meals at first, until realising that led to Arwen or Si coming up to find them. The boiler cupboard switched very quickly from a sanctuary to a trap when there was a human at the door, unintentionally blocking them in.
Tea was spaghetti hoops on toast with a poached egg. Neither of the human shelter workers were very good cooks, but the food they made was cheap and tasty and Pet didn’t have to force themself to eat it. Pet ate on the floor, crouched in the corner where they could keep an eye on the room. The creatures were split half-and-half between those who ate on the floor and those at the table. The humans never pushed it either way; there was always chairs free at the table and cushions on the tiled kitchen floor.
Pet couldn’t reach the sink easily to wash up without a stool, so their after-dinner chores usually involved mopping the floor and wiping the table. They were perched on a kitchen chair, scrubbing at a bit of stuck on jam on the table when there was a sudden, awful smash from behind them and Pet yelped. They folded flat down on the table so fast they smacked their chin, covered their head with their paws, and cowered, shaking.
“Aw shit.”
Through the haze of their panic, Pet heard the sounds of a creature whimpering apologies, a human’s low voice, and the chink of shards being cleaned up. Shaking violently, Pet stayed still and quiet and hoped that no-one would notice them at all.
But they weren’t so lucky. They heard Si’s heavier footsteps approach, his feet always making a slight scuffing noise from his worn-out slippers, and then the big man crouched down beside them. Pet realised the cleaning cloth was still clenched in their hand and had made a small puddle by their cheek.
Si was the man who’d carried them out of the car and into the creature hospital. He was huge and his face creased between his eyebrows so that he often looked like he was frowning in thought, his thin lips and crooked nose making him look mean. But Pet hadn’t seen him raise a hand to any creature yet, not when the pale-brown creature wetted her bed every night, nor when Si moved too fast near a scruffy-looking, off-white creature, who then tried to stab Si with a fork.
So Si’s approach didn’t send them into a panic like it might’ve done a couple weeks ago, but Pet still curled further in on themselves, pressing their forehead to the damp tabletop.
“Buddy, everything’s cleared up now, okay?” Si said, his voice slow and even. “There’s no problem. We’ve got too many mugs anyway, the cupboard’s overflowing. Half of you guys don’t even drink tea.” Si paused. “Can you sit up for me? No-one’s angry, and nothing bad’s gonna happen. Lenna didn’t mean to drop it and I don’t mind, no-one minds.”
It helped to hear Si say it, but Pet had already begun to realise that the shelter people didn’t seem to get angry over the things they really ought to get angry over. And if someone’d been angry at the dropped crockery, there would have been immediate shouting, and there hadn’t been. Just quiet voices and clearing up. But knowing that didn’t make it easier to stop shaking.
After a minute, Pet managed to shakily sit up like Si asked.
“Good,” Si said gently. “I’ll finish wiping the table, then I think it’ll be bedtime for everyone.” He extended his hand for the cloth, but didn’t try to take it from Pet’s clenched paw.
Pet swallowed and then minutely shook their head.
“No? You don’t want to sleep?”
Pet flinched. They hated to disagree with anything, it made their heart feel like it was sticking and juddering inside them. But they didn’t want to leave the table unfinished just because they’d had a stupid reaction to a bit of noise. So they forced their paw to relax around the cloth and, sending Si a nervous sideways glance, slowly resumed cleaning the sticky table. Pet might be broken, but they’d be damned if they let it stop them from completing the task they’d been set.
“Ah.” Si nodded in comprehension. He moved to stand and Pet flinched, going rigid, but Si just slowly moved away from the table, over to the sink where he fetched a cloth to wipe down the kitchen counters that Pet couldn’t reach without standing up uncomfortably on their legs like a human.
Once Si was occupied, Pet set to cleaning the table thoroughly, wiping off all the bits into their cupped paw and then dumping them in the rubbish bin.
Si finished up too and rinsed the dirty cloth for them, before gently herding them upstairs. Unlike some of the others, Pet was used to brushing their teeth, a habit Master Parry had rigidly insisted on lest they become even more repulsively disgusting to him.
After that, they slid under one of the bunk beds and pulled their shelter-provided blanket and lumpy pillow close. Arwen had tried to coax them into a bed, but it’d felt too exposed and they couldn’t untense enough to sleep. Instead, they pressed themself into the dark corner under another creature’s bed, carefully arranged their healing tail so it was lying comfortably, and felt safe there instead. Arwen hadn’t fought them on it, but insisted on giving them blankets and hoovering out the space so that the dust didn’t get up their nose.
Still twitching from the incident in the kitchen, Pet heard the other creatures in the room fall asleep before they did, their quiet snuffles and settled breathing calming Pet. At Master Parry’s, they’d always slept alone on a folded-up blanket in the laundry, curled up close to the radiator in the winter. But there was something about sleeping in a room with other creatures that brought up half-formed memories of their parents from back when they were very small, and a sense of safety. Safety in a pack, in having other ears and eyes to listen out, and the remembered comfort of another creature’s fur pressed up against their own, keeping them warm. But it’d been a very long since they’d had that, and Pet wasn’t entirely sure they hadn’t just imagined it.
*
Even before they’d been at the shelter for a full week, Pet realised that they were unwanted.
Unless they were injured like Pet had been, the creatures moved quickly enough through the shelter system that new ones seemed to show up almost every day. At first, Pet was afraid that the shelter was disposing of them somehow, disappearing the damaged creatures, but Si caught them watching nervously from behind the bannister as creatures were taken away or arrived and sat them down in the kitchen to explain.
SI didn’t say it in so many words but Pet slowly gathered that the especially difficult creatures, ones who tried to bite, flinched, cried constantly or starved themselves, would go away to volunteers’ homes. Volunteers like Mariann, except Pet hadn’t seen her take one home yet. Si told them that the volunteers looked after the creatures until they got better, not in their body but in their heads. Sometimes the volunteers kept them permanently, or else the creatures went to new homes.
The less damaged ones; the pretty ones who might be scared but were still soft, obedient, and eager for affection, went directly to new humans. There were a lot of humans who wanted to adopt, Si explained, and Pet filled in the gaps of what Si wasn’t saying. Creatures were rare, they knew that because people often stared at them, and they knew creatures were expensive too, because Master’s guests had asked him how much Pet had cost and then gasped at the answer. The creatures here weren’t new, so they must cost less, Pet reasoned. And that was why humans wanted them. Maybe they were a little broken, but they were cheap.
Pet didn’t really fit into either category. They weren’t aggressive, they ate when they were told, and they didn’t try to run away, so they weren’t fostered out to volunteers. But their muddy brown, scruffy fur wasn’t pretty and only got frizzy when Pet tried to comb it with their clipped claws. They weren’t young and cute, they flinched easily, and they were wary. Humans wanted creatures who’d trot over to them in eagerness, and lay their head in the human’s lap. Pet couldn’t do that.
After another week at the shelter, their ribs felt almost entirely healed and though their tail itched a great deal until the bandages Arwen changed regularly, there wasn’t much pain. They were moving quietly along the hall with a glass of juice held carefully in their paws when raised voices from a bedroom on the ground floor made them go still and rigid on instinct. No creatures were staying in that bedroom yet, they remembered, because the big, quiet, grey one who’d been in there on his own had been adopted that morning.
“It’s out of the question,” Arwen hissed. Pet knew they shouldn’t be listening, but they’d never heard either Si or Arwen angry before and something bitter and wary in them wanted to know, wanted to see the worst because the humans’ pretence of constant calm and kindness couldn’t be real.
“What do you suggest, then? We’ve tried-”
“No, Christ, just no. Auctions attract the worse fucking people, you know that!” Pet startled to hear gentle Arwen swear so viciously.
“Arwen.” Si’s voice was quiet now, and firm, like he used when a creature was panicking and Si was trying to stop them from doing something to hurt themselves. “The shelter-”
“I know.” Arwen audibly exhaled, following by a creak of springs, like she’d sat down heavily on the bed. “We’ll do fundraisers, though. We can’t do this, it goes against everything we aim for. The poor thing could end up with-”
“Anyone, yeah, it’s a risk. But we can’t cover the medical bills of the three we’ve got in hospital right now. They’ll shut off the lights in a week, and the gas-”
“I fucking know,” Arwen spat. Pet couldn’t stop the soft whine in their throat. The shelter… what would happen to all the creatures here? Pet thought of the lights all being turned off and it being completely dark at night, dark and cold and empty because all the other creatures had been chosen by humans and there was only Pet left.
“Their sale will be triple what we get from an adoption.” Si sounded as exhausted as Arwen was angry. “It’ll keep the bills at bay.”
There was a quiet, shaky breath. “I can’t, we can’t do that. We won’t be able to vet the buyer. They…” she trailed off.
Pet felt cold and shivery all over. A loud, sudden clunk made them startle. The feeling of cold liquid soaking into their shelter-provided socks made them look down at the glass they’d dropped and the juice making a mess of the wooden floorboards.
The bedroom door opened and Pet staggered backwards until their back hit the wall when Si stepped out, staring at them. The shock on his face turned to something anguished and… guilty.
Pet stared at him, frozen and shaken.
“I don’t know what you heard, but it’s going to be okay,” Si started.
Pet bolted up the stairs, their wet socks sliding on the wooden steps. They understood, and at the same time didn’t understand at all. They were so fucking stupid, starting to think that what? These humans would actually protect them?
They dived under the bed, startling one of the other creatures in the room, and started sobbing. A creature tried to approach to talk to them, to reassure them, but Pet couldn’t respond for how hard they were crying.
Si… had been talking about selling a creature at a second-hand auction. And from the expression on Si’s face when he saw them… and Pet having been here longer than any other creature, made Pet sure Si had been talking about selling them. And hadn’t it been Pet who’d hid or cried whenever Arwen or Si tried to coax a small group of creatures into meeting some potential adopters? It was just their own fault for not being… a better pet in every way. And yet the realisation that Si had given up on them shouldn’t have hurt so much, or made them feel so sick, but it did.