by Unknown
“Yeah, well, he’s not a rhino.” Eli tore the soft cotton of Ben’s scrubs for a better look at the wound. Eli was already calling Dr. Shad’s office.
“The IV did come loose,” Ben gasped, his face white with shock as he looked down at his torn and bloody limb. “It was my fault. I had a hard time getting hold of him in that cage, so when I finally grabbed him, I turned away from the door too fast. I should have been more careful.”
Josie finished relaying the emergency information to Dr. Shad’s nurse and hung up the phone. “It is not your fault. You heard me say it: Bill was on a massive dose of sedative. He still is. It should have been impossible for him to move that fast. Hell, even if we’d removed his IV entirely, he still shouldn’t have been able to so much as open his eyes for at least a couple of hours.”
Eli grunted. “Too bad it didn’t actually work out that way.”
When she hurried to Ben’s side and reached out to examine his leg, Josie realized her hands were shaking. Embarrassed, she snatched them back and pressed them together to stop the trembling. Closing her eyes, she took a slow, deep breath, then carefully blew it out.
Opening her eyes, she reached out again and helped Eli finish tearing the left leg off the younger man’s green scrub trousers. “The blood is flowing, not pulsing,” she observed, using the torn cloth of the scrubs to wipe away the worst of it. “And it looks like he mainly got the outside of the leg. So that’s good news. You don’t have to worry he nicked your femoral artery.”
Ben offered a weak hiccup of a laugh. “Oh, good. At least there’s a bright side.”
Josie felt constitutionally unequipped to stand around doing nothing while they waited for the doctor to arrive. Humans and animals might be different species, she reasoned, but the principles of medicine were universal. When something living had a bleeding open wound, the first thing you did was to stop the bleeding, and the second thing you did was clean the wound. She grabbed a package of sterile dressing and ripped it open.
“Has anyone else noticed that we seem to be going through even more of these wound care supplies than usual?” she asked absently.
This time, Ben’s laugh sounded stronger. “Yeah, I wonder why that is . . .”
Josie smiled brightly at him, encouraging him to share the joke. “Poor practice management is my guess.”
“I was going to go with insubordination and thievery in the ranks, personally.”
“Well, you’ve always been a British naval justice kind of guy.”
“Keelhauling is an underused form of punishment,” he argued, grimacing when she applied direct pressure to the largest area of bleeding.
“Maybe that’s because so few people these days have properly sized keels at their disposal.”
Eli interrupted their banter with a light touch to her shoulder. “If you’re okay here, I’m going to take a look at something. I’ll be right back.”
Josie looked up and nodded. She was okay, but that didn’t mean she didn’t hope Dr. Shad would hurry up and get here already. And it didn’t mean she was really okay. How could she be okay when her friend was hurt, her gut told her she was responsible, and two of her patients seemed to be either going insane or dying right before her very eyes? For a woman who had succeeded at everything she’d ever attempted, this pill was becoming particularly hard for her to swallow.
“Young lady, I thought you and I had a deal,” a voice announced, and Josie turned to see Dr. Martin Shad standing in the doorway with a huge yellow tackle box in one hand and a cherry lollipop in the other. “When you moved back here to take over your father’s practice, I assumed that we would continue with the same understanding he and I always enjoyed: You treat your patients, and I’ll treat mine.”
Relief flooded through her, unexpectedly intense. After all, nothing truly terrible had happened. She could see Ben’s wounds weren’t all that serious, and she and Eli had emerged from the kennel unscathed. But maybe she’d had to handle just a little too much over the last few days.
Just a little.
She managed to smile at the doctor, though, remembering how he’d always shared those lollipops with his young patients, of which she had once been one. “Well, that could work, provided that your patients don’t turn into my patients while you’re out playing with trout,” she teased. “Catch any keepers this weekend?”
Martin Shad was older than her father by a decade or more, which put him well into his seventies, but he looked at least a decade younger. His white hair still grew full and thick, his eyes sparkled with no help from corrective lenses, he walked with a quick, agile step, and he carried at least twenty extra pounds on his five-foot-seven-inch frame. If he’d had a beard, the man would have been Santa Claus. It wasn’t natural for anyone so round to be so healthy, but the man had never been sick a day in his life. Or at least, not in Josie’s life. Not that she could remember anyway.
“One or two,” the old man said in response to her question, grinning broadly. “Caught a real nice steelhead, but I had to release him. I was already at my limit.” He heaved a gusty sigh. “And now I’m done for the year. Makes a man hate the winter, I tell you. Now, why don’t you fill me in on what happened over the weekend? It’s been some time since I heard a good tale.”
While Josie outlined the situation with Rosemary and Bill for Dr. Shad, the physician frowned and nodded and turned to poke at Ben’s injury, but for all his slow, gruff nonchalance, Josie had noticed that the old doctor had already removed her padding to examine the wounds, prodded the skin, and grunted his approval.
“I rescind my earlier comments about poaching patients. I think you can keep the ones you’ve just picked up. Sounds like you’ve got a better handle on their problem than me, anyway. Country doctors like me don’t even do our own blood counts. We send that kind of mess out to a lab.” Without opening the huge tackle box/jump kit he’d brought with him, Martin reached for the saline flush that Josie seemed to keep permanently in hand these days and began squirting it over the wounds. “I don’t know if I’ve peered into a microscope since my internship.”
Somehow, Josie had a hard time believing that, but she didn’t blame Martin for wanting to stay well out of the mess she’d gotten wrapped up in. Heck, she’d have run in the other direction if she’d been in his shoes.
The doctor poked at Ben’s leg and shook his head. “Young lady, it’s folks like you that give physicians like me a complex. You do twice the work as me and only charge half the money. Anyone ever wises up to that fact, and I can kiss my retirement home in Tempe good-bye.”
Josie ignored the doctor’s scowl and bluster and took the compliment the way it was intended. “My dad always planned to take an ad out in The New York Times.”
Martin snorted. “That wouldn’t do him any good. Tell him I said go for it. No one around here reads the Times, except maybe some of those kids down in Portland. Now, if he’d said The Oregonian, then I might be worried.”
“I’ll let him know. With the money he’ll save, he can probably buy a whole page.”
Ben, watching in fascination while the doctor finished cleaning and began stitching his wounds, snorted. “Whole page? Heck, he could probably buy the whole paper.”
Martin peered up at his patient through the screen of his bushy white eyebrows. “What’s the matter, boy? You work here, don’t you? Don’t tell me you’ve never seen stitches go in before.”
“Not into a human. What did you use for the local before you started? Was that levobupivacaine?”
“I use good old-fashioned lidocaine. What is it with you young folk, always wanting to do something different? Where I come from we believed that old saw about not fixing what isn’t broken.”
Ben held up a hand and shrugged. “No problem. I was just asking.”
The physician set the last stitch and sighed, pulling off the gloves he’d worn during the procedure. “Done. Can I assume you know how to treat stitches, young man?”
“Keep them dry for at leas
t forty-eight hours, use an antibacterial ointment once a day and clean gauze dressings. They can come out in one to two weeks.”
Martin grunted. “That’s something, then. If you come see me, I’ll take them out when they’re done, or you can have Dr. Barrett here do it for you. I know which one I’d vote for, if I were you.”
“Me, too.” Josie grinned. “I don’t hand out lollipops. How do you feel about liver snaps, Ben?”
“Like I’ll be going to see Dr. Shad, thanks, boss.”
The old man had already grabbed his kit as he was making his way toward the door. “Call my office if you do anything stupid enough to need me again.”
And with that, he slipped out the door.
Ben looked to his right. “Twenty-three stitches. How come I thought it was going to be a hell of a lot more?”
Josie hadn’t noticed Eli’s return from the isolation room, but she felt something inside her relax when he moved to her side and draped an arm around her shoulders.
“Probably because it hurt a hell of a lot,” Eli said, giving the younger man a small smile. “And I say that as the voice of experience.”
“Right. Too bad I can’t pull that cool magic trick, though, and make the wounds disappear. I gotta say, that’s a handy skill to have, man.”
“I like it.”
Josie listened to the banter, relieved to see that Ben looked mostly recovered from the incident. True, he had twenty-three stitches and his scrubs now only had one leg, but his color had returned to normal, as had his impudent attitude. Something, though, was not right with Eli. She watched him, frowning.
“Why don’t I drive you home?” he offered Ben, before Josie could ask the question hovering on the tip of her tongue. “You should probably rest that leg for a few hours at least. I’m sure your boss will keep you hopping tomorrow.”
“Only as far as the file room,” Josie assured them. “There’s plenty in there that needs to be done, and you’ll be able to stay off your feet.”
Ben made a face. “Geez, why don’t you just have me executed? It would be less painful.”
“Maybe for you, but then who would do my filing?”
Eli helped ease Ben off the table and wrapped one arm around the younger man’s torso to steady him. “Think you can make it to the car this way?”
The tech nodded. “Yeah, it’ll just be slow going.”
“Take your time.”
Josie opened her mouth to demand that Eli tell her what was bothering him, but he cut her off with a glance.
“I’ll swing back around to your place after I get Ben settled. We can talk then, all right?”
No, Josie thought, it really wasn’t, but it looked like the best offer she would likely get. Reluctantly she nodded and stepped ahead of the pair to open the back door.
“I’ll see you in a little bit then,” she managed unhappily and watched while the two men beat a slow path across the parking lot.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eli found Josie curled up on her sofa wearing an ancient T-shirt that looked like it would fit three of her. She had her feet tucked up under the hem and her arms wrapped around her knees; her hair hung down around her shoulders in a dark, gleaming curtain. Beside her, Bruce lay on the sofa in a shaggy, dark-eyed lump, his chin propped on Josie’s elbow. She looked about sixteen years old, which—based on where his mind went every single time he laid eyes on her—made him a damn pervert.
She had left her apartment door unlocked, and he took that as an invitation. Any other time, he’d have taken it as a cue to read her a lecture on personal safety, security, and the inadvisability of being too trusting in this day and age, but at the moment he had more important things to discuss with her. He’d get to the lecture another time.
“How was Ben?” she asked as he lifted her from her cushion and usurped her place, settling her onto his lap instead. Bruce just sighed and curled himself into a hairy, lopsided ball.
“He’s fine. He was discussing where tonight would fit in his memoirs when I left him at his house. He already called one of his co-workers—Andrea, right?—and arranged to have her pick him up and drive him to work in the morning. Since he left his car downstairs.”
Josie rested her head against his shoulder and nodded. “Good. I didn’t think to ask him if he’d need a ride before you guys left. I guess I still wasn’t thinking clearly.”
They sat in silence for several more minutes, Eli stroking her silky hair while an old Cary Grant movie flickered on the television, the volume so low it was barely audible. In the end, Josie spoke first.
“I don’t want you to think that I was dumb enough to go into that cage after you left,” she said quietly, “but I did look into the room. I guess that was what you didn’t want me to ask about before you left with Ben, huh?”
Eli sighed, feeling suddenly tired. “I just knew it would be a discussion that didn’t need to keep Ben away from his own sofa. He needed to get home. And I’ll admit, I did kind of hope that you wouldn’t want to go back into that room after what had happened.”
Josie drew back and pierced him with an incredulous look. “In the time that I’ve known you, have I done anything to indicate that I’m a delicate little flower of womanhood who faints at the sight of blood and loses her head in a crisis?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what made you think that I wouldn’t want to go back in there?”
“Because I barely wanted to go back in there. Seeing Bill flip out like that shook me up. At first I was afraid he was going to kill Ben, then I was afraid he was going to hurt you, and then I was afraid I was going to have to take him down with a bullet. None of those options made me a very happy man.”
“And I can understand that, but I’m a vet, and at the moment, those two are my patients. I can’t just leave them in there to rot. They still need food and water and medications and wound care. That doesn’t change just because both of them are now acting like actual rabid wolves.”
He swore. “Rosemary, too?”
“Yes. I thought you saw her before and that’s why you didn’t want me to go in there.”
“No, she had started to wake up when I was there, but she still couldn’t stand. I didn’t want you to see what Bill did to his bedding.”
“That he’d shredded his bed and marked the stuffing?” She snorted. “If you think I haven’t seen worse than that on a slow night in vet school, you’re out of your mind. Besides, Rosemary was in the middle of doing the same thing the last time I saw her; she was just neater about it. She had all the stuffing piled into the corner in a new bed, and Bill was guarding her from all comers. I decided to leave them to it.”
“It wasn’t what he did; it was what it signifies.”
Josie looked confused. “What do you mean? I pretty much just assumed it signified that he was a wolf. Am I missing something?”
“That’s exactly it. Bill is acting like a wolf. And apparently, so is Rosemary.” When she shook her head mutely, he elaborated. “The aggression stemming from defensiveness and territoriality. The guarding of his mate and marking his territory. Those are all wolf behaviors, not things you see in Lupines.”
He saw when Josie began to understand what he was getting at. “You think they’re turning into actual wolves?”
“Sort of.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair and tried to order his thoughts. “There are rumors among all the animal shapeshifters about the dangers of spending too long in any form other than human. According to the stories, if a shifter spends too long in the between form, he or she will get stuck there and no longer be able to take on the shape of either a human or an animal. And not belonging in either world will drive the shifter into insanity.”
“God, that’s horrible.”
“They say something similar about staying in animal form, although some people take a sort of romantic view of the idea of reverting completely to the animal form. A shifter who takes on his animal shape and refuses to turn back could be t
rapped in that animal form forever. He wouldn’t be caught between two worlds, though. He would become fully an animal, with all an animal’s instincts and emotions, but with an ability to reason much more advanced than any other in his species. And the strength to match.”
“Like some kind of super wolf?”
“Something like that, yes.”
Josie sat up straight and turned to face him, her expression reflecting both horror at the idea and a sense of guilt at not being able to stop it. She seemed determined to take the entire world’s troubles on her shoulders.
“We can’t let that happen,” she declared firmly. “We have to find a way to fix this.”
“I agree. And that’s why we’ve sent the blood samples to Steve, and it’s why the witch is going to come out to evaluate Rosemary and Bill tomorrow.”
“Right. I just hope she can evaluate from a distance, because there’s no way I’m letting anyone into that kennel until I can figure out a way to get them sedated again.”
Eli blinked. “You think you can do that?”
“Clearly, sedatives have worked up until now. If we’re lucky, their bodies are just learning to cope with the chemicals they’ve been exposed to in the past, building up a resistance. If I can find a new chemical, one they haven’t been exposed to before, it might buy us some time to either treat them or keep them from hurting anyone else.”
“And you think that could work?”
“Theoretically, but I won’t know for sure until I try.”
The image of Josie walking into the kennel with a syringe in one hand and a dog biscuit in the other made him blanch. “You’re not going to try just giving them shots until you find the right drug.”
She looked at him like he’d lost his mind, which strangely made him feel better.
“Do I look suicidal to you? I don’t think so. Since we’re the only vet in a bit of a drive, we’re licensed to provide emergency care to wildlife, some of which don’t take well to being handled by strangers. We have an air gun that shoots tranquilizer darts. I can use that and shoot through the chain link. If I hit one of them, I just wait to see if they go down. If not, I try another drug, and if so, I shoot the other one.”