Free Storm Warned (The Grim Series) by Dani Harper

wet insulation, twisted shingles, a pair of Uncle Conall’s ample hip waders, an upside-down lawn mower, a broken shovel, countless lawn ornaments. Liam was sorry now for sometimes wishing Aunt Ruby wasn’t so crazy about gnomes. As far as he could tell, her entire collection, numbering more than a hundred—maybe even two hundred—and lovingly collected over the course of decades, now lay smashed all over the lawn. The many little pointed hats, disembodied faces, and broken limbs made the yard look like a bizarre battlefield.
    Liam finally made it all the way to his truck, but his sense of accomplishment was short-lived. A full-length two-by-six had speared the windshield and buried itself in the driver’s seat. Three flat tires underscored that he wasn’t going to town for a while, or even—as he had hoped—around the farmyard and the pastures. Dizzy and still nauseous, Liam leaned against the vehicle for several minutes before he turned and looked back at the house. The two-story Victorian had survived the storm well—if you didn’t count that damn tree stuck in the living room wall. A few bundles of shingles, and some new glass, and the old house would probably be as good as ever. The house was a hell of a lot older than Liam, even older than his aunt and uncle. Perhaps it had weathered similar storms in its long lifetime and had learned how to deal with them.
    Mentally Liam shrugged off that odd line of thinking. He’d grown up loving the house and the farm, but they weren’t alive, weren’t sentient, didn’t feel or know anything. The animals needed him. He had to stay focused, dammit, had to get to his livestock and help them.
    Glancing past the house, it was plain that the power lines along the road were down for at least a mile. Liam sighed heavily. That meant he had to get the generator hooked up and running, or he’d be milking forty goats by hand. If he still had forty dairy does. And where were all the yearlings? He’d only seen a couple in the tightly packed herd. As for his cattle, they were nowhere in sight, and they would have to be rounded up from wherever they’d fled to. A sensible horse could pick its way through this mess, but he didn’t have one available to him—Dodge and Chevy had been pastured with the cows. The shed containing his four-wheeler lay in a splintered heap.
    Shit. Not only did he have a hell of a lot to do, but he had no choice but to do it on foot. And somehow he had to manage it all without passing out or . . .
    Liam leaned over and threw up some bile, narrowly missing his boots. A round of dry heaves followed, nearly taking him to his knees as the top of his skull threatened to tear off. He knew he should probably get the lump on his head checked out, although how he would fit that on the to-do list that was growing by the minute, he didn’t know. Gonna be a long damn day.
    He’d made it most of the way to the heavy steel corral that attached to the west side of the barn when he spotted something large and dark crossing the field toward the other side of the big building, the shaded side. An animal, definitely, and limping badly. One of the does? Saanens were pure white, but LaManchas came in every color—and his herd’s best bloodlines resided in four does that were mostly black. Christ, I’d better check her first. Although the ground seemed to move beneath his unsteady feet, he finally made it to the wire fence that provided a token separation between plowed land and dirt farmyard, and he gripped it with both hands like a lifeline.
    But the approaching creature wasn’t a goat at all. It was a dog.
    Not his dog of course—he’d buried his best friend, Homer, only a few months ago. The big gold shepherd had passed on in his sleep, in his favored spot on the thick sheepskin-hide pillow beside his master’s bed—and Liam hadn’t been too manly to let honest tears fall.
    This animal was one he’d never seen before, and it wasn’t a creature that could be