Wolf Trap

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Parker gave his coworker a sideways glance. “Attacked. In the park.”

  “No kidding? Come with me.” Woodsen pointed to a bed.

  “No way.”

  “Let me dress those wounds.”

  Wounds? Only then did Parker take a closer look at himself. Sure enough, he had some deep scratches and a few other bumps that Woodsen shouldn’t have seen, since they’d be gone by the time Parker returned to work the next morning. Another werewolf perk, miraculous regenerative powers. If Woodsen treated him, Parker would have to try to remember to reapply bandages in the same exact spots—which wouldn’t be easy with his mind spinning so fast in all directions. He hoped he hadn’t slipped up too badly.

  “Maybe a tetanus shot.” Woodsen was already calling for one.

  “I don’t need a shot,” Parker argued. “They’re surface scrapes, nothing more. I’d like to know what they find out about the girl.”

  “Right. Like they’d let you anywhere near her in the shape you’re in.”

  “What shape is that?”

  “Dirty,” Woodsen replied. “You’ll need a shower and some fresh clothes if you’re going to hang around. And,” he added, “since when do you have time to work out? Who knew you were so buff, my friend? Do the rest of us overworked MDs a favor and don’t let the nurses see your abs. I want to ask Nikki out. Shit, Madison, have you always looked like that?”

  Already Parker was feeling the strangeness that kept him distanced from everyone else. He’d forgotten about his new musculature, and here he sat, without a shirt to cover himself, after being careful for so long.

  Another potential mistake.

  He had to get out of here, pronto. He didn’t want to make small talk with Woodsen, get a stitch or a Band-Aid. He wanted to follow the blonde, see how she fared, make sure she got the attention she needed.

  He wanted to be with her. He felt responsible. At the same time, everyone in this hospital knew what to do, so his promise had been fulfilled. He had gotten her the help she needed. End of story.

  Not quite. Emotions were running rampant and astray. He should go back out there now, into the dark, and find that other thing so like himself, the thing keeping him separated from all these people. That had been his goal.

  Being in the hospital, in this current mental state, was dangerous. Since he’d said they’d been attacked, Woodsen would have already given the signal to call the police. The cops would show up within ten minutes if the rest of the city was relatively quiet.

  Not much time to beat the foot traffic out of here.

  Damn. If he had just accomplished a partial shift and was still on edge, what was to stop a morph from happening in here, under fluorescent lights brighter than the moon? Under police scrutiny? In front of everybody?

  “Okay,” Woodsen said, yanking the curtain back, “I’ve got to go. Accident coming in.” He handed a syringe to Parker. “Shall I send in a nurse?”

  “Don’t bother.” Parker prepped the needle. With his colleague not turned completely, he jabbed the syringe into his own upper arm and remembered to wince.

  “See you in the morning,” Woodsen called over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Parker mumbled, already on his feet.

  He got no farther than the lobby, where the receptionist pointed a long finger at him, and two of Miami’s finest blocked his exit. A third man with “law enforcer” written all over him approached with his hand extended in greeting. What was this, a frigging tea party?

  “Are you Dr. Madison?” this guy, a detective most likely, asked.

  Parker took the offered hand, pretty sure he couldn’t get away with lying about his identity in his own E.R., though he would have liked to. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m Madison.”

  “Detective Wilson.”

  The detective was a tall guy and stood eye to eye with Parker. He was leanly muscular, with brown hair worn on the shaggy side. Maybe he worked Vice? He was dressed in faded jeans, his blue shirt open at the neck, and he’d pinned his badge to his belt. Doctors were so used to making quick assessments, Parker didn’t bother to mask his scrutiny. Detective Wilson, however, didn’t seem in the least bit bothered by his overt once-over.

  And why had they sent a detective, right off the bat? This wasn’t usual procedure. There’d been no homicide.

  Or had there?

  No. The girl was alive.

  “You were attacked in the park?” the detective asked, his voice falling somewhere in the lower portion of the sound register. “Mind if I ask you a few questions about that?”

  “I’m in a hurry.” Parker waved a hand to allude to his state of undress.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” Wilson said.

  Somehow Parker knew that wasn’t going to be the whole truth. He’d been through this many times in discussing patients brought into the E.R., and he didn’t want any part of it. He needed air. He needed to get outside, into the night. He needed to do some running to ease off his incredible high. He wasn’t feeling at all civilized.

  “The woman with you,” Detective Wilson said. “We’d like to know what happened to her.”

  Parker felt an odd stirring in his chest with the mention of the blonde. The detective would have called her “the victim” if she had died.

  His sense of relief was a surprise. Had he developed feelings for the girl that he didn’t want disturbed? Deep-down raw emotion that he wasn’t at all sure about? The fact that she might make it seemed of the utmost importance all of a sudden.

  In these familiar surroundings, standing at the edge of the lobby, Parker found the dichotomy of wanting to be in two places at once tearing at his soul. Find out how the girl fared, versus getting outside to seek the pale wolf. Parker wasn’t able do the one—look in on the girl—appearing as he did at the moment, but he could do the other. He could go back out there, do some prowling, then shower and return for her.

  Return for the girl…

  As if she belonged to him. As if she’d want anything to do with him after this. He’d be a reminder of a very bad night. He would probably never see her again, except through a plate-glass window in the surgery ICU.

  Not true. I will see her again.

  Glancing down the hallway in the direction the staff had taken her, Parker found that his legs were starting to move nervously in that direction. Funny. He showed concern about his patients on a regular basis, but the pull to go to this girl was so strong that he remained idiotically mute.

  Detective Wilson signaled to the receptionist. “Dr. Madison?” the detective said. “Are you all right? Should you be getting some help here, also?”

  Parker responded automatically, “I’m fine.”

  The receptionist sidled up to him anyway, waiting for directions. He knew her, of course. Older woman, kind to everyone. He wasn’t sure of her name.

  “I’m fine,” Parker repeated, directing his reply to the woman, who nodded and went on her way.

  “Can we sit down somewhere, then?” Wilson asked.

  Obviously, this guy wasn’t going to let up. Parker led the way to a cubicle behind the reception desk, wanting to stay the hell away from Woodsen and the rest of the night crew behind the door. But he couldn’t sit. Energy skittered throughout his body. Somehow he’d managed to swallow a lightning bolt. Again he looked to the door, to where he’d last seen the girl he’d held so possessively.

  What was it about her?

  “I don’t know her name,” Parker said finally, as Wilson leaned against a desktop with a small notebook in one hand and a pen poised in the other. “She’s a small blonde. Five-three or -four. In her twenties. She’d been beaten up by some guys on the far side of the park. Most of the damage was to her head, her face in particular. She had numerous other wounds and contusions—shoulders, neck, probable broken wrist. She was dressed in jeans and a blue top, and missing her shoes.”

  Parker stopped his own discourse to stare yet again at the door to the hallway…swear to God, as if he were possesse
d. What was it? Why should he feel so interested? Did he need to feel human so badly?

  Detective Wilson cleared his throat in the way that polite people did to call a wandering mind back into the present. Parker found this another anomaly—a polite detective.

  “Did she have any identification on her?” Wilson asked.

  “None that I saw, but I wasn’t looking for it.”

  “Purse? Wallet beside her?”

  Parker shook his head. “She had a pulse.”

  “Did you see her attackers?”

  “I encountered what might have been her attackers. I can’t be sure. They were close to her when I heard her call for help.”

  He couldn’t say that their scent was all over her. What would the good detective think?

  Wilson nodded. “And you just happened to be out there, close by?”

  “I was running.”

  Wilson raised an eyebrow, probably having noticed that he had on boots, not running shoes. As far as Parker could tell, the detective hadn’t written down one single word in the notebook.

  “I sometimes go off by myself after a long shift,” Parker explained, figuring he most certainly would be the only one in the room to catch the double meaning and sheer irony of that. “I like to be alone, so I sometimes lose track of time and distance. The fresh air gets me cleaned out. You know, from in here.”

  “Fresh air is supposed to be great for de-stressing,” Wilson agreed. “I sometimes run myself.” He let a beat of time go by. “You encountered the guys after this woman, and then what?”

  “I tried to fight them off her.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Four or five.” Okay, admittedly he should not have mentioned those numbers to the detective, whose eyes had just narrowed. Parker needed to tack more details on to that explanation to make it sound more credible.

  “They were getting to me, ganging up, when another guy intervened on my behalf. Then it became two of us against the rest, and the guy who came to my aid was big. The creeps out there didn’t seem to prefer those odds or his size. They ran away.”

  “Did you know this other guy?”

  “No. He disappeared right after they did. I picked up the girl, needing to get her some help.”

  “That was a pretty brave thing you did—going up against four or five guys in such an isolated area, in the dark.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t realize there were more than a couple of them when I barged in.”

  “Any description of the guy who helped out?”

  Suppose he just said the word on the tip of his tongue? Parker thought. The W word. How would Wilson view this case then?

  “To be honest, I didn’t see his face. All I had time to notice was that he was tall and well built.”

  Wilson absently scratched his chin with his pen. “Do you know how she is? The woman you helped?”

  “I’ve been chased out of my own E.R. for looking the way I do. I’ll get cleaned up, then check back in.”

  Wilson nodded again. “Appears as though you took some decent punches.”

  Parker glanced at his bandaged chest and arms. “The damned tetanus shot hurt worse than anything they threw at me.”

  He wasn’t surprised to see that his skin was riddled with black-and-purple bruises already starting to form yellow centers. In this instance, he was healing in minutes rather than hours, a phenomenon that must have been due to that partial shift in shape. Maybe his beast was still precariously close to the surface, even now.

  Getting away from here had become crucial, the sooner, the better. This detective probably knew about the color palette of a bruise, since he encountered problems every day in his job. Parker hoped the man wasn’t paying close attention.

  “Well,” Wilson said, “it turned out to be a good thing you were out there tonight, Doctor. That other guy, as well. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “Yeah. There should be signs posted all around the darker parts of town, warning people to keep out.”

  “I agree.” The detective nodded. “Then again, you’d assume people would know this automatically, wouldn’t you? Especially young women?”

  “Yes,” Parker replied thoughtfully. “One would assume that.” Why had she been out there? Maybe just running in the wrong direction to get away from the guys chasing her? In jeans and bare feet? The thought brought on a chill, seemed incomplete.

  “So,” Wilson said, picking up on the same idea. “I wonder why she’d be out there alone, at night.”

  “You’ll have to ask her that,” Parker replied. “Hopefully you’ll be able to if you return tomorrow.”

  “She won’t be able to talk before that?”

  “I doubt it. After treatment she’ll be drugged up good.”

  “There will be a necessity for the usual tests,” Wilson said.

  Parker cringed. Of course the police would have to know if those gang guys had abused her other than with their fists. However, since she’d had on her jeans, all zipped up, Parker was pretty sure that sexual abuse would prove to be unfounded. Nevertheless, he didn’t want anyone touching her in that way, for information’s sake or not. He didn’t want her any more violated than she already had been, and stopped himself from throwing open the door and marching to surgery, off duty, bare-chested and dirty as he was.

  That girl had been lucky, even if some folks wouldn’t think of it that way. Her fate could have been much worse.

  “Has there been a lot of this sort of thing going on?” Parker asked, just to have something to say to the detective eyeing him. “We’ve been seeing more than a fair amount of victims of violence in the E.R. lately.”

  “The heat brings the violence to a head,” Wilson said. “Traffic in and out of the department quadruples when the thermometer reaches ninety.”

  Spoken like an experienced law enforcer, Parker noted. No devil in the details. And Wilson, he knew, was holding back.

  “Okay. Thanks for the time, Doctor.” He closed the notebook with a flip of his wrist.

  “No problem,” Parker said.

  “We’ll need to see her clothes.”

  “Of course. Someone here can get them for you.”

  “Oh,” Wilson said, turning toward the lobby. “Can we bother you to show us the exact spot where you found her? There might be some clue as to who she is. We’d need to notify her relatives if she can’t speak to us about it. You up for that?”

  Was this detective kidding? No way was he up for that. Going back out there with a couple of cops and a detective? Unable to run? Unable to try to find remnants of the other wolf? It was a big freaking inconvenience, but there was nothing to be done about it. Detective Wilson awaited a reply. The woman—his woman—had been wheeled to the operating room, and he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

  “Sure.” Parker gritted his teeth in between breaths. “I’ll take you there if someone can loan me a shirt.”

  “Got a spare in my car, for emergencies,” the detective said. “Shall we go now?”

  “Now is fine, but if you’ll give me that shirt I might be able to check on her progress before we head out.”

  “Deal,” Wilson agreed, contemplating Parker a few seconds more before heading for the lobby door with his blank-paged, spiral-bound notebook stuffed into his back pocket.

  God, she looked pale, and so small on that table that Parker wanted to go in there and pick her up again. He wanted to put her back together himself, though it seemed the team was doing a good enough job. They always did. Still, those damned tubes seemed invasive in a body so frail. He didn’t want to leave, but he had to. Wilson was waiting for him.

  Parker tapped on the glass. Only one attending nurse glanced his way, and nodded. Nurse Nikki Reese, the newest addition to the nighttime E.R. team—the nurse Woodsen coveted from afar. Parker was grateful to her for that nod, which let him know that the patient on the table would make it, and had stabilized. Only then did Parker breathe.

  But he didn�
��t leave. Didn’t move. Why was that, exactly? She was just another woman who had made an error in judgment and paid for it. He felt protective because he had found her. Because he had shunned his own deepest internal desires in order to help her. Helping her meant a lot. He was invested in her outcome.

  Her hand hung over the side of the table, white, long-fingered, elegant. Parker remembered the way it had fluttered in the night—the signal that she was alive. He almost expected it to flutter now.

  He remembered the way she had felt in his arms, as if her body had made a permanent impression there. He already missed the easiness of speaking with her. Okay, not with her, to her, since she must have been all but unconscious at the time. So perhaps that’s all he needed—an unconscious sounding board for the strange turn his life had taken. The freedom to say things out loud that had been pent up, like steam. There was no real reason to feel so connected to the girl. Theirs had been a chance encounter, nothing more. Good Samaritan. Good deed. His job.

  The thing was, he did feel connected. And way too possessive.

  Nurse Reese looked at him again with a lingering glance that said “Time to go.” The girl would be all right. He’d done his bit and the team had done theirs. She would be here tomorrow, recuperating. If the need remained, he would see her then. As he’d told the detective, he would check back. If he felt like it.

  It took five more minutes to tear himself away, and then only by sheer force of concentrated thoughts about placing one foot in front of the other. Police were in the lobby. Wilson’s pen was waiting to sketch out the details that might further help this woman, whoever she was. Her relatives certainly would want to know about her condition.

  They were all on the same side, wanting what was best for the female in there on the table. A young woman who would not, could not, sit up and see him there. A woman who wouldn’t know he’d been at the window. At the moment, she didn’t know much of anything.

  So why did he feel as if she knew of his presence and willed him to remain? Why did his heart continue to pound as he looked at that small white hand on the table?