Prologue
A sleek and powerful shepherd lay on the rug by the heater, listening, distressed, to the sobs of his master. The shepherd strained to hear the words as his man cried into the telephone, and realised what he'd feared was true; the master had been pushed out of the job that had been his life for as long as Ace had known him. Ace was a good dog, he knew and understood his master, his loves and his passions, his fears and his passions. He also knew the moment it had all gone wrong. It was a bite, a violent attack from a leashless dog, one of the vermin the master had made it his life's work to see eradicated. That hand was useless now; Ace had felt it when the master tried to fondle his ears as he always had, and he saw it as the poor master fumbled with the simplest of tasks. That a dog could inflict such misery on a human was beyond his comprehension; the dog-human bond was what made a dog, a dog. A creature that would use its teeth and claws, the gifts they were given with which to protect their masters, to wound a human, could only be evil. Ace had finally understood why the master had spent these years taking leashless dogs off the streets. But the master had it all taken from him by those vermin… now who would protect the world that humans and dogs had built side by side? Without the master to control them, how would the spread of evil, the unnatural separation of dogs from their rightful place, be halted? Ace realised that it was now down to him to do what the master could not… to protect everything he loved from the leashless dogs that crawled the city streets.
Ace remembered his last encounter with one of the leashless; it was brief, but so soon after his master's wounding, its significance magnified. He and the master had been walking side by side one evening, pounding the streets near their Bronx home, when a screech of tyres and the blasting of a horn had them both turn their heads. Two leashless dogs, one large, burly and brown, and one small, white and wiry, had run in front of an oncoming car, which had swerved, narrowly avoiding a collision with a child on the sidewalk. Before Ace could so much as threaten the filthy street dogs, they were gone, melting into the alleys with such ease that they might have been cats. The master had grumbled, as he always did, and they walked on. It was clear then that it wasn't just the master's old hunting grounds of Upper Manhattan that was infested by these barely-dogs, but their very own neighbourhood. The danger was growing, and Ace knew that he had to stop it. The master had lost everything, and with every day he smelt more of the drink and smiled even less. Those vermin had ruined him. Ace had to avenge his broken master.