“Can I have one now?”

Max shrugged. “Sure, but why settle for some old bones when we're going to the butcher's anyway? Come on.”

“Alright!” cheered Angel.

The raid couldn't have started off better, in Angel's opinion. She polished off two strings of sausages single-pawed; not bad for a pup her size.

“Watch out,” called Max, chuckling. “Looks like the kid thinks this is an eating race.”

“Yeah,” added Lily. “Careful, Angel, or you'll be looking like your sister in no time.”

“Her sister?” asked Buck, looking up from a porterhouse.

“Oh yewah, huh,” Sammy nodded, mumbling around a mouthful of raw goose. Of course he meant, “Oh yeah, her.” Swallowing the bite, he added, “Her sister. The ugly one of the litter.”

“Got fur like a mop,” cracked Lily. “And I ain't talking a clean one, either.”

Angel snorted, barely keeping some of the sausage from going out her nose. Coughing a moment before she dropped the meat, she smirked. “You don't know the half of it. One time, she thought she could make herself pretty if she tried some of that makeup stuff Mom's girl uses. She looked like she ticked off a paint factory.”

Everyone laughed, so Angel kept on going. “Smears of all kinds of stuff all through her fur, soot around her eyes, the works. If she smelled as bad as she looked, she coulda knocked out a wolverine!”

The more she spoke, the more they laughed. It was fun mocking her sister behind her back.

And no Mom and Dad to yell at me, she thought.

Just then they heard footsteps thudding outside. “Scram!” shouted Max. “Butcher's coming!”

They dove into the hole and Sammy hastily pulled the grate shut just before the door opened and the butcher walked in with a lantern in one hand and a cleaver in the other. “Alright, who's in here?” he demanded. “Show yourselves, you thieving mutts.”

Everyone stayed quiet and slowly backed away from the grate, making their way down the vent to the outside.

“Hmm.” Up above, the butcher knelt on the floor. Already re-frozen atop the sawdust was a small pile of chewed-up brown meat: Angel's mouthful. Scowling, the man followed the tracks from it until his lantern's glow fell upon the crooked grate.

With a grunt, he suddenly brought his cleaver down on the floor with such force that it pierced the boards right above the dogs and showered them with splinters. Buck nearly got the blade itself across the top of his head.

“Move!” shouted Max, and the whole pack of them scrambled for the outside and safety.

Behind their retreating tails came a bellowing threat. “Don't you ever come back, you hear me? Or there's going to be a special on dog-meat!”

They didn't stop running until the butcher's shop was a block behind them. When they did they panted hard, and then first one, then another began to laugh. It spread like fire among them until even Angel was laughing, giddy with the glee of narrowly escaping death.

“Woo!” shouted Sam. “That was the most fun I've had since Groven's army!”

Angel nodded and looked to Max, the only one who wasn't laughing. Instantly his dour expression doused her mirth. “Max?” she asked.

He waited until the rest of them had stopped laughing. “This isn't good,” he told them, every inch of his body shouting severity. “We've got a big problem now that the butcher knows we were in there.”

“So?” asked Buck. “He's known about us for a long time.”

“No, he only suspected,” Max corrected, ears flat against his head. “But now he knows we've been sneaking in, and how, and that's gonna make it a lot harder on us in the future.”

The others looked worried. This hadn't occurred to them. “So now what?” asked Angel.

Max frowned. “You go back home,” he ordered. “The rest of us'll meet at the hideout. I've been cooking up a plan in case something like this happened.”

Angel tilted her head. “So why can't I come to the hideout?” she asked.

Max' eyes flicked to one side so briefly it was almost unnoticeable. “Eh, trust me, it'll be better if you go home. Besides, look how late it's getting. Ya don't want your folks on your tail again, do ya?”

Angel had to agree to this logic. “Okay,” she agreed. “See you guys later.”

Max grinned as she scampered off. Believe it, kiddo, he thought quietly.

Partly due to Max's comment about her parents' recent admonitions, Angel decided to come in the back way and perhaps let them think she had been home for some time. As it turned out, she needn't have worried much. Toby was out with the boys, Luna was dozing contentedly by the fire, and Star was regaling Arrow with the events of her day spent playing with someone named Eska.

Incongruously, Angel was annoyed at the fact that no one seemed to have missed her while she was out. And the fact that no one seemed to notice even when she sauntered right into the room and plunked herself down behind Star in full view of Arrow. The older sister's expression was only one of casual interest, but she seemed totally oblivious to anything but Star's account.

“Hey sis,” Angel grumbled, trying to sound bored.

Star's ears perked up and she turned her head. “Oh, hi, Angel,” she greeted brightly. In fact she was practically glowing. Her eyes were bright, her ears were perked,. And her tail would not stop wagging. Even her fur looked happy. “I was just telling Arrow about the friend I met today. His name is Eska.”

Angel rolled her eyes. “Whoop-ee,” she uttered.

Arrow made a face. To any decent dog, Angel's attitude would have seemed inconsiderate at best. But Arrow recognized the tone all too well; it sounded an awful lot like the old Sam. For that matter, it sounded a lot like she herself had before Luna rescued her from the stray life.

“Angel,” she offered, trying to mimic the trademark “warning tone,” Luna often used in the face of inappropriate behavior, “Why don't you have a seat and listen?”

Stifling a groan, Angel did so. But bored to begin with, she had little interest in Star's tale and focused more on thinking up an excuse to leave. Finally, as Star was in the middle of describing a game of hide-and-sniff (complete with the obligatory reenactment of the game's crouching, stalking, and pouncing) she seized on an excuse.

“Look,” she said, “It sounds fun, but this is hard to pick up in the middle.”

Star looked slightly disconcerted at this.. “Do you want me to start over?” she asked.

Angel shook her head. “Nah, forget it. You keep going; I'll hear it some other time.”

Arrow narrowed her eyes. “It's fine, Angel. Go ahead and start over, Star. I don't mind.”

Luna groaned and opened one eye. “Kids, no fighting,” she scolded in a half-awake voice, and went back to sleep.

Angel smirked just a little as she sauntered out of the room before Arrow could come up with an answer. At least something was going her way.

Going into the kitchen, she settled down to ponder the nature of Max's elusive “plan,” for she hadn't the slightest doubt that this was what he had taken the others away to discuss without her. But why was she left out, she wondered, when everyone else got to be in the know? Perhaps the idea was too dangerous – she remembered with a shiver that massive cleaver piercing the floorboards above. Was Max planning to attack the butcher? No, forget that. Although in truth she was starting to see past the ploy about helping him, it would be foolish to harm him directly. One word of crazed dogs in town and it would be game over. Besides, the ending threat he had hurled at them played itself in her mind like a horror story. She knew humans didn't eat dog meat, but all the same the thought of being on the wrong end of one of those knives gave her goosebumps.

So she considered some manner of stealth, and while this seemed infinitely safer, it seemed senseless that she should be left out. Who better to hide or fit through unexpected places than she? Who better to be silent than she?

Well, except for that little comic act she did the day before. Maybe that was it; she had spoiled it by causing all that ruckus. But it wasn't fair, not when they had all laughed and made noise too.

As she was thinking this dismal thought, who should disrupt her but Star. “Hey,” she greeted.

The delinquent frowned. Perhaps isolation wasn't so terrible after all. “What do you want?”

Star smiled hopefully. “You seem bothered, and I just want to cheer you up.”

Angel rolled her eyes. “Knock yourself out,” she retorted, dearly hoping her sister would do just that.

Much to her chagrin, Star did not ram her skull against the nearest wall as requested. Instead, she sat down and began to tell of the day's ventures. Tag, hide-and-sniff, caves, bo-ring.

“It was so much fun,” Star said at one point, to which Angel rolled her eyes and sighed.

“Yeah, if you like pups' stuff.”

Star tilted her head, puzzled. “But we are pups.”

“Maybe some of us,” Angel all but sniped. “My friends and I never bother with that kind of junk.”

Star's