by Holley Trent
SUMMARY
In spite of his apprehensions, Dr. Paul Berger gives in to the psychic pull guiding him home to Norseton and the Afótama clan. His friends are all pairing off in unions blessed by the old Norse gods, but as he lacks the sociability of his peers, he assumes he’ll get passed over for a match. However, the Fates have someone unexpected in store for him.
When the newcomer werewolf Petra becomes his patient after being thrown through a truck window, it’s evident to almost everyone that Paul is meant to be a wolf’s mate. His terse practical nature doesn’t bother her one bit. She’s more worried that Paul will abandon her because of her wild behavior—the same way her human father left her mother.
To complicate what should be an easy love affair, Paul’s wary of being left, too. If he bonds with Petra in the way of his kind, he risks irreparable emotional ruin, and he has good reason to be concerned she won’t stay.
No other woman ever has.
CHAPTER ONE
Paul Berger suspected his bedside demeanor could use some brightening, but not once in the ten years since he’d graduated from medical school had he been accused of intentionally aggravating a patient. There was a first time for everything.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered.
As the wild woman in his care snarled and charged at him, he dodged and weaved around her. He wasn’t running from the nude werewolf. In the past, he’d tackled far more fearsome patients who were plain-old human. He was trying to find a safe angle to grab her from. The lady, though, was agile, and wasn’t afraid to throw a punch.
“She wouldn’t have swung at you like that unless you’d done something to her.” The man called Arnold, who was the wild woman’s twin, blocked the door of the bedroom—the only real favor he’d done for Paul in the week since Paul had started making house calls for his sister.
His sister. The wild woman. Petra.
Petra had been comatose until a few hours prior, and Paul had been tending to her in spite of the fact that he wasn’t a veterinarian. He worked in the small, sleepy, emergency care department of the Norseton community hospital, and he’d never in his life tended an animal. Or even a person who was capable of transforming into an animal. Supposedly, the one under Paul’s care lacked the ability to shapeshift for the time being. That didn’t make her any less unpredictable.
Before Norseton’s wolfpack had moved into the community to head up security for his clan leaders, Paul had never encountered a shapeshifter face to face. He thought he would have known if he had. If all of them put off the same kind of energy as the wolves in Norseton, there was no way he wouldn’t have pegged them. He was a witch, though. Or at least, something close enough to one. He was probably a little more attuned to weird shit than the average E.R. doc.
“You know damn well I didn’t do anything to her,” he snarled at Arnold in response to the snarl the other man had targeted at him first.
Paul’s bedside manner perhaps wasn’t the sunniest of all the medical care providers in the community, but he was a good doctor and everyone knew that. They didn’t call on him because they wanted someone who’d be tender. They called him because he didn’t back down from challenges.
He didn’t appreciate Arnold’s accusing tone. Paul was doing him a favor.
Petra charged at Paul again, white teeth bared and dark almond eyes narrowed. She made some wordless, screeching sound and, reflexively, he bent.
He rammed his shoulder into her belly and hauled her—flailing limbs and all—to the bed.
That’s enough from you, she-beast.
“Arnold, grab my bag,” Paul said.
The bed she’d hadn’t moved more than an inch in on in the entire week since she’d arrived had become a chaotic swirl of torn covers and dented wood. She’d waked and gone wild, and Arnold claimed Paul had been the trigger.
Paul hadn’t done shit but to step into the room, warming the end of his stethoscope just like he had fifteen other times.
He narrowly missed the swipe of her hand near his cheek, but not the nasty words coming off her sharp tongue.
“Degenerate bastard. Fucking loser. Sadistic asshole.”
“Yeah? I’ve been called worse.” He turned her over onto her belly, pinned her arms behind her back, and pressed his knee to the top of her shoulder.
Still, she writhed and fought—very nearly throwing him off. She might have been tiny, at barely over five feet, the best he could tell, but Paul wasn’t a small man. He probably had eighty pounds and at least ten inches on her.
“What the hell are you doing?” Arnold stood at the end of the dresser lamely holding Paul’s bag. Halfway across the room, instead of next to Paul where the bag could have done him some good.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to keep the wild woman from hurting herself. Perhaps you could let her know that I’m not here voluntarily, so she can direct her vitriol to someone more appropriate, hmm?”
“…the fuck off me!” she shouted.
“The angel has such a spirited voice.” He scoffed.
For a week, he’d imagined that the voice would have been bell-like and sweet, but there was huskiness to it—an unexpected strength coming out of that small body that extended no welcome to strangers. She probably considered Paul strange enough.
The feeling was mutual.
“If this is how she behaves all the time,” he said to Arnold, “I can see why she wrecked your truck.”
Arnold kept his useless vigil by the dresser, glowering at Paul, and Petra bucked hard beneath Paul’s knee. Her protests were becoming less violent, but he’d expected that would happen. Her adrenaline was going to crash, and the waif hadn’t had a solid meal in who knew how long.
“I’ve got something in that bag to calm her down,” Paul said. “If we don’t get her calm, she’s going to hurt herself.”
“She’s just doing what her instincts tell her to do.”
“Get off me!” she shouted.
“Are you going to be still?” Paul asked.
She made some vicious sound at him that couldn’t legitimately be categorized as language, but he could guess that noise meant, “No.”
“If you’re not going to help,” he shouted at Arnold, “go get your fucking alpha, or tell him to send someone in here who can talk her down from this wild episode.”
Still, Arnold stared.
“Go, God damn it!”
Arnold dropped the bag and ran through the door.
“Arnold!” Petra spasmed ineffectively under Paul’s grip and made another of those sounds of animalistic protestation. Cavewoman noises coming out of a woman he’d mistaken for an angel. She’d looked like one when she’d been asleep, but of course, she hadn’t had those dark-as-night eyes open then and her pretty face contorted into a terrible sneer. She hadn’t been trying to slice his eyes out with the fingernails one of the helpful ladies in the pack had thoughtfully trimmed for her.
“I’m Dr. Berger, by the way,” he said through clenched teeth.
She hissed at him.
“I thought you were a wolf, not a cat.”
“Shut up.”
“And to think, everyone calls me uncivil. I can’t wait until they get a look at you.”
More writhing. More hissing.
This is what I get for wishing for a little action in the E.R.
“I imagine you know who you are since you recognized your brother, but humor me. You’ve been asleep for a week. That may be normal for your kind, but I generally treat people who are a little more human.”
“Fuck you.”
“Does that mean you don’t know who you are? If you don’t tell me, I�
�ll assume you don’t, and I’ll have you strapped to a table, sedated, and rolling into a CT scanning machine within an hour to make sure nothing in your head is about to explode.”
“You’re not putting me into any fucking machine!” She growled and arched beneath him—no longer strong enough to dislodge him, but still trying all the same.
She was pitiful. He almost felt sorry for her.
Almost. He’d probably be feeling that one good blow she’d landed on his shin for a week.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
“Why? I’m sure you know it already.”
“I want you to tell me. Tell me your name and the last thing you remember before you fell into your enchanted sleep, princess.”
“Don’t call me princess!” she shouted, because apparently, she’d coded that word as an insult rather than the metaphor he’d intended it to be.
She was no sleeping beauty, though. True love’s kiss hadn’t woken her up. She was up and hissing because she’d healed enough from her accident for the wolf part of her brain to shut off the hibernation. And he was no prince. He was just the doctor who’d been in the right place at the wrong time. Or the wrong place at the right time. He wasn’t sure of which yet.
“What. Is. Your. Name?” If she wanted to snarl tersely, he figured he’d do the same—talk to her in the language she understood. Briefly, he considered trying grunts and rude sign language next to see if those would be more her speed.
“Petra!” she shouted.
“Petra what?”
“Just Petra.”
He didn’t push because he didn’t think doing so was going to get him anywhere. Arnold hadn’t divulged a last name, either.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I was—ugh.” Another ineffectual wriggle.
He pulled his knee off her back because pinning her down seemed too much like overkill, and contrary to what her brother might have thought, Paul didn’t want to bruise her.
She’d already yanked out her IV needle improperly and her hand was bleeding all over the white bed sheets.
He needed to get her calm so he could clean and dress the wound and examine her, now that she was awake. Or get her over to the hospital and let some other fool examine her. If she were holding out for a lady doc, though, she’d be shit out of luck. Norseton didn’t have any at the moment.
He was off her back, but still holding her wrists together against her spine. “You were…”
“I—” She turned her head to the left—toward him—and pinned her one visible eye on him. “I was in the truck.”
“Okay. Give me a little more than that. You could have picked that up just from the conversation we’ve had in here today.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You’re not equipped to diagnose that, but I happen to be. I’ve got an M.D. after my name.”
He still wondered if veterinary credentials would have done him more good with her, though.
“I don’t trust you,” she spat.
“Tell me something new, sweetheart. I’ve heard that before.” Sick people weren’t always rational people. “You have the right not to. You probably feel very vulnerable right now. Trust me—I understand. There’s some asshole in scrubs pinning you against a bed and you’re not wearing a scrap of clothing.”
She’d had some on—just a simple hospital gown that tied at the back—but she’d ripped that off sometime during her acrobatic attempted escape from the room. He couldn’t even remember seeing her strip. Things had been a blur.
“Normally, we’d get you a lady in here as a chaperone so you feel comfortable,” he said, “but you weren’t awake, and Arnold couldn’t predict when you’d wake. Neither could Adam.”
“Who’s Adam?”
“Your alpha.”
“I don’t have an alpha.”
“You do now.”
“What?”
“Welcome to Norseton. You can thank your brother for getting you here.”
She stopped squirming, but her body was tense. He knew better than to give her too much slack. “Norseton? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged and tried to put on a smile, but he was too stressed. He knew what his smiles looked like when he was stressed, and they were far from charming. His friend, Chris, who also worked at the hospital, had turned Paul into an Internet meme about doctors. The jerk had taken a picture of a sneering Paul right after he’d come off a twelve-hour shift. He’d been hungry, had the headache from hell, and had bags under his eyes bigger than his mother’s Dooney and Bourke tote. Chris’s favorite of his creations was the one that said, NOW PAGING DR. LOOKS-LIKE-ASS.
He rolled his eyes and let out a short breath. “We try to keep outsiders from talking about us too much.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re weird.”
“How?”
“I think I was the one asking the questions. Nice try distracting me, though.” He eased off the bed, still clamping her wrists in one hand, and helped her sit up.
He needed to cover her so she felt a little more comfortable—so she’d know he didn’t have any lecherous intent. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough hands to do much more than to loosely drape one blood-spotted sheet against her front.
“I’ve gotta pee,” she said.
“I’m sure you do. You’ve been getting intravenous fluids for a week. Fortunately for you, the nurse that was here earlier took out your catheter this morning because you were getting a little irritated. That’s not something you really want to have fall out while you’re leaping around a room like a lemur on crack.”
She opened her mouth to obviously spit out some retort, but she didn’t have time to get the words out. Arnold had returned with the Norseton wolfpack’s alpha—Adam Carbone—at his heels, as well as one of the younger lady wolves named Graciella.
“What happened?” Adam asked. He stayed in the doorway of the room, but Graciella sidled around him and cautiously approached the wild waif.
Graciella was proof that werewolves smiled on occasion. She was the happiest beast Paul had ever met. Apparently, she tended to be somewhat more optimistic than the typical wolf. She had plenty of reasons to be happy, though. One of her favorite refrains for when folks asked her how she was doing was, “Life’s good!”
“Hi, Paul,” she said softly.
“Nice to see ya.”
She moved a little closer, putting her hands up in a placating gesture.
Petra eyed her warily.
Paul didn’t know if wolves recognized each other on sight the way his people—the Afótama—did. He was guessing they did. Wolves supposedly had much better senses of smell than their human counterparts, even when they weren’t in their wolf forms.
“I’m Graciella. I live not too far from here.” She moved a little closer and knelt at the bedside. She crooked her thumb in the general direction of town, which was about a ten-minute walk on a desert path from wolf housing. “I’m kinda new here, just like you.”
“Where’s here?” Petra asked.
Graciella cringed, and then looked over her shoulder at Adam.
Adam nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Norseston. A very small town in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico?” Petra furrowed her brow. “How’d we get here? We were driving in Oklahoma.”
So she does remember.
Paul wasn’t so ready to let go of her hands and leave her to the wolves, though. She did still need medical attention. If not from him, he’d need to arrange for someone else to provide the care. He had a professional obligation to do so.
“Looking out for folks to take in is what we do,” Adam said. “Or rather, what the ladies in the pack here do. Their idea. I can’t take credit. I think it’s one of the better ideas they’ve had.”
“I still don’t understand,” Petra said.
“That’s because he’s not explaining it very well,” Graciella said.
“No. He’s not.”
Graciella, gnawing on her lower lip as if she were trying to choose her words carefully, settled onto the edge of the bed beside Petra. She started to rub slow circles onto Petra’s upper back, and Petra let her.
Petra probably didn’t know why she was submitting to the touch, but Paul suspected the friendly wolf was pushing magic through her. He’d been around the wolves enough in the past seven days to have picked up a lot of trivia about their magic. Like Afótama magic, the various kinds of wolf magic seemed to be necessary for maintaining pack order. Unlike with the wolves, though, Afótama magic was a needy sort of phenomenon. It needed constant feeding.
Interaction.
That was the hardest part for Paul. He’d moved back to Norseton because he’d had to. Their queen connected the Afótama psychically. Being at a great distance from the network was incredibly disquieting, though had been mitigated somewhat for Paul by the fact that Chris had been with him. They’d had a tiny network of two when they’d been away. Magic had pulled them both back to the clan in the past year. The disquietude was gone, and in its place came discontentment.
So much about the clan made him fucking miserable. When he’d first gotten back, he put on a good front that he’d reformed and turned into a nice person, in spite of the hostile treatment he’d endured from some of his peers as an adolescent.
Most folks knew better. Lately, he’d stopped pretending to be pleasant.
He didn’t have any choices. Couldn’t leave—not without a huge psychic wound—but he wasn’t happy, either. Mostly, he just tuned out and ignored the magic around him. He didn’t think he’d be able to ignore it for much longer, though. Magic had a way of invading one’s dreams.
“I think it was Christina’s idea initially,” Graciella said quietly after a minute of silence. “She’s one of the wolves who’s been here longest, and her job is finding people. Normally, she’s looking for specific people for the Afótama, but she tried something a little different for the wolves one day to see what would happen. The good thing about being in a group like this is there’s always someone around to brainstorm with. Someone suggested that we could probably find some homeless wolves to shelter if we started calling around to hospitals and places like that querying about John and Jane Does who don’t seem quite right. Hospitals don’t generally want to give you any information over the phone, but we have ways of putting clues together.”