Wildfire by Roxanne Rustand

waste of time. I’m not going.” Claire dug into her lunch, polishing off the last morsel before looking up again. “Already take too much medicine as it is—and that’s a waste of good money. Doesn’t work, anyhow.”
    Janna had made the appointment in hopes that a change in medication would help, but no one could deny Claire’s grim future—especially since she refused to take her medicine half the time.
    The back door squealed open and Sofia charged up the three steps into the kitchen, her face damp with perspiration.
    “I think you need to call your sister Leigh right away,” she exclaimed, breathing hard. She nodded a greeting at Claire, then she turned back to Tessa with an expression of distress and lowered her voice. “It’s your mother’s horse, Socks. I found her loose in the barn, with the feed room door open. I don’t know how full that sack of calf supplement was, but it’s all gone now…and that horse sure doesn’t look right.”
    “What was that?” Claire barked. “Something about my horse?”
    Tessa grabbed her cell phone and ran for the back door. “I’ll go check it out, Mom,” she called out. “You stay here with Sofia.”

     
    By the time Leigh pulled up in her vet truck, Tessa had tugged and coaxed the mare out of the barn, and had her front hooves planted in a couple of low, black rubber tubs filled with cool water. Tessa held the lead rope in one hand and a slowly running water hose in the other, to keep the water cool and circulating.
    Despite her instructions to the contrary, Claire had followed Tessa to the barn, and now she and Sofia were standing to one side. But for once, Claire was silent. Watching. Her face was a mask of worry.
    “Just the front hooves were hot, Leigh. It must have taken me ten minutes to get her out here. She was in a lot of pain.” Tessa tossed the end of the hose into a stock tank on the other side of the fence.
    Leigh pulled her long, strawberry blond ponytail through the back of her ball cap and frowned at the mare’s stance.
    No wonder. Already, Socks had adopted the typical stance of acute laminitis, with her front legs extended to relieve the intense pain and pressure inside the unyielding outer walls of her hooves.
    “How long would you say it’s been since she got in the feed?”
    “Everything was fine this morning when I did chores.” Tessa reached out to stroke the mare’s sweaty neck. “I always double-latch the feed room door, and I double check it before I leave. And I always check the stall doors, too. Everything was fine before I left for the Lodge to get Claire. But when we got back here, I didn’t go to the barn—it was lunchtime, so we went straight to the house.”
    Leigh jogged into the barn and looked into the feed room, then came back outside. “How full was that bag of calf supplement?”
    “I hadn’t opened it yet. It was a twenty-five pound bag.”
    “Has she been rolling or showing any signs of colic?”
    “Nope—thank goodness.”
    “Did you give her any medications yet?”
    “I thought about it, but you said you could get here right away, so I thought I better leave everything up to you.” Tessa managed a small smile. “You’re the expert, after all.”
    Leigh darted a glance at Claire, clearly waiting for a sarcastic remark and surprised that their mother didn’t offer one. “I’ll do my best for your mare. I hope we’ve gotten to her in time to minimize any permanent damage.”
    She bent over and lifted one hoof and then the other, moving aside the water tubs and first holding the hoof between her hands to check for heat, then palpating for the digital pulse just above each hoof, at the back.
    With a grim expression, she jogged back to her vet truck and retrieved syringes and small bottles, then came back and drew up three syringes of medication that she handed to Tessa.
    After palpating the mare’s neck and finding the right vein, she delivered the medications slowly, one after