by SA Magnusson
“Let me know what you find out,” I said.
I left her and started my day. There was no point in waiting, not since I wanted nothing more than to simply get through it. The only problem was that it was slow, and so I took my time with each patient, working through them, trying to keep my mind off Aron and the shifters, but every time I left a patient room, my mind kept going back to it. I found myself thinking of the pursuit through the forest, or of what the shifter had described. There had to be some way for me to help, but what?
Aron didn’t want me involved, and for that matter, I didn’t want to be involved. I knew better. Any attempt I’ve made at trying to understand what was taking place would only serve to get me dragged deeper into the magical world. Ariel had done it this time, and—
“Michaels?”
I blinked and pulled my thoughts back, looking up to see Dr. Locks watching me. I hadn’t realized he was the attending on today. He was an obese man, and normally hid in the attending lounge, waiting for residents to come present patients to him, so seeing him out and rounding in the ER was a little bit of a shock. Most residents and nurses knew enough to hide from him. It was just better that way.
“Dr. Locks. Is there anything I can help you with?”
He frowned at me. “Where are you going?”
I looked around and realized that I had wandered toward the urgent care, heading away from the ER. “Just a little distracted this morning is all.”
“I’m sure your colleagues appreciate the fact that you’re distracted. Your patients, too.”
I suppressed the urge to snap at him and comment on the fact that he never gave his patients any time, but that wasn’t entirely true. Locks had an interest in traumas, which were the only cases he spent any time observing. “Not distracted like that. I was thinking about a patient who came in yesterday. Worrying about him, you know.” I could spin it that way and it wouldn’t sound quite so bad. Besides, Locks wasn’t here yesterday and probably didn’t know anything about the shifter.
“Which one? Wait. You were involved in the mauling, weren’t you? From what I hear, that was quite the case. Ortho spent four hours trying to reconstruct his shoulder, and plastics couldn’t wait to get in there, but they needed to give it a few days. Did you figure out what got to him?”
It figured Locks would hear. Just what I didn’t want to have happened. “I didn’t. Someone suggested it was a dog.”
“A dog? From the reports I heard, whatever it was damned near took off his shoulder. He was lucky to be alive.” He cocked his head, studying me for a moment. “And didn’t you know him?”
“I didn’t know him.”
“There was some connection to you. What was it?”
“I don’t know. I never figured that part out.”
“A note. He came in requesting you.” He wrinkled his nose at the mere idea of someone requesting me. “If you can figure out how you knew him, you can figure out what attacked him. Something like that reminds me of a case I saw when I was in residency. The circus was in town, and the tigers got a little excitable.” He whistled softly and the smile on his face repulsed me. “Never seen anything quite like that. The way they ripped that man apart. There wasn’t anything we were able to do for him by the time he got here.”
I swallowed, trying to ignore the excitement in Locks at the story. It was one of the morbid things that ER docs did but didn’t make it any better. Most of us liked to tell stories, oftentimes the grosser the better, but it only served to make us seem disturbed. It was why ER docs liked to hang out with other physicians, as there weren’t that many people willing—and able—to listen to the kind of stories we had to tell.
“I’m going to get back—”
Locks stepped toward me, forcing me to take a step back. “What are your plans after residency?”
I looked around. The two of us were the only ones in the hallway. There was something always not quite right with Locks, and I wanted to get away from him if possible. The quickest and easiest way might simply be to answer his questions. “I plan to go into practice somewhere. Probably out state.”
“Out state? You’d go to a rural hospital?”
“What makes you think I meant rural? I just said that I would go out of the Cities.”
“Dr. Roberts is applying for fellowship.”
“I know.”
The fellowship decisions would come soon, and if he managed to snare a fellowship at Hennepin General, it meant another year of dealing with him. And worse—it meant he would be something of an attending, as the fellows often served in that role in some capacity. I didn’t want to imagine what it would be like to have to deal with Roberts as attending. He was bad enough as an upper-level resident.
“Don’t you have any interest in fellowship training? Dr. Lee has been offered the ultrasound fellowship, and Dr. Jonas was offered the toxicology fellowship.”
What was Locks getting at here?
“I haven’t given it all that much thought,” I said. “And I really need to get back to my patient. It was an abdominal pain patient, and unfortunately I think I need to call gynecology in.”
The comment had the desired effect and he waved me away. I doubted he wanted anything to do with pelvic pain, not that I actually had a patient like that.
I hurried down the hall and ran into Jen. She looked past me, her eyes widening slightly when she saw Dr. Locks, before grabbing my arm and leading me along the hallway. “What was that about? Why were you down the south hallway?”
“Distracted, mostly. I didn’t intend to encounter Locks.”
“He’s looking at you with a strange expression.”
“Yeah? He was asking me some strange questions.”
“Such as?”
“Such as about my plans for after residency.”
“Do you think he wants you to do a fellowship?”
“God, I hope not. I want nothing more than to be done with training so I can be on my own.”
“You keep saying that, but I have a hard time seeing you practicing anywhere but here. I know you say you want to get into a smaller hospital, but that doesn’t really fit you.”
“Why not?”
“I see the way you run to traumas. Everybody does. I imagine Locks suspects you’ll apply for a trauma fellowship, follow Roberts. Hell, I wouldn’t blame you. You’d probably show Roberts up if you did.”
“I don’t want the trauma fellowship.”
“Right, because you can’t stand it. And you’re so terrible at it.”
“Hey!”
“And if you go into some rural hospital where all you get to do stabilize and ship, you won’t be happy.”
That wasn’t right, but I couldn’t expect Jen to understand that by going to some rural hospital, I would be even more removed from the magical world than I was. Maybe doing that would allow me to finally escape everything I had encountered so far.
Then again, the shifters were rural.
I couldn’t think like that. I didn’t want to end up drawn into that.
Sirens wailed and I perked up, listening to them but also focusing on the sense of death. There was none.
“See?” Jen asked. “Every time you hear that sound, you get excited. You’re not going to get that anywhere but in the metro.”
“Why do I get the sense that you’re trying to talk me into this?”
“I just figured we could practice together.”
“We’re going to stay friends regardless of where we’re practicing.”
“Probably, but it won’t be the same.”
We started toward the trauma bays as the ambulance crew wheeled the person off. It was an older man, and he had an oxygen mask on. Heart attack or heart failure or COPD exacerbation, most likely.
“You want me to take this one?” I asked Jen.
She shook her head. “I’ve got it. Besides, you still look a little off. Maybe you should just go and get some rest.”
I wasn’t sure that I could rest.
Every time I tried to do something else, I began to think about Aron or the shifter and wondered why Aron hadn’t called, not that I expected him to. Aron wasn’t much for technology, certainly not the kind that would involve him alerting me to his safety—and that of the shifter. It would’ve been nice to know they had managed to get to safety, but it was possible he was resting now. Maybe he had taken the shifter to get some sort of magical healing. Either way, I had to wait.
The end of my shift couldn’t come quickly enough. The rest of the day was unremarkable, the usual mix of patients, and made slightly more tolerable by the fact that none of the obnoxious attendings were here and I hadn’t come across Dr. Locks again. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with Dr. Roberts.
By the time the day was over, I grabbed my pillowcase stuffed with clothes and hurried out and into the cool spring day. I waved at Jen, not bothering to wait behind for her. She’d probably try to talk me into a glass of wine and dinner, and while that sounded fine, I had something else I needed to do.
The walk to my home seemed to take much longer than usual. I kept seeing shadows moving around me and was far jumpier than I should be. At one point, I could swear I heard a low and mournful howling, but that had to be my imagination. Either that or it was someone’s dog.
I got up to my unit and locked the door behind me, reaching my kitchen before I realized I wasn’t alone.
Magic surged through me.
What I wouldn’t give to have my sword, but Aron had that in his car. I focused on the sense of magic, looking to see if there was anyone in the room with me. The protections Aron had placed on my home should have prevented anyone else from breaking in. Not that I had any way of being able to ensure they held. The spells he used were much different than the type of power I used.
Since I didn’t have the sword, I grabbed a knife from the butcher block on the counter. If no one was here, my cat Lucy would be the only one to know how ridiculous I was being.
“Hello?”
There was no answer, but I couldn’t shake the sense I wasn’t alone.
I headed back out to the living room and searched. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had broken into my condo, but most of the people who had done so were friends—other than the members of the Dark Council. Considering what Aron had done with the protections he’d placed, there shouldn’t be any way mages would be able to break into my home.
But we weren’t dealing with mages. The attacks had come from shifters, and the kind of magic they were able to use and access was so much different than that of the mages.
My condo was small: two bedrooms, kitchen, two bathrooms, and the living room. I’d gone through the living room and the kitchen, which left the two bedrooms.
I went to my bedroom first, nudging the door open with my foot. Lucy jumped out, rubbing herself against my leg and looking up at me with her blue eyes and meowing.
“Is someone here?” I whispered to her.
She rubbed against my leg and headed out into the kitchen toward the food.
Not a lot of help from her.
I checked the closet before feeling as if my room was safe.
That left the other bedroom.
It was a spare room, and one I used only for storage. The door was open, and as I approached, I realized it was the source of the strange energy. This was where my intruder would be.
Lucy bumped up against my shins and I leaned down, wanting to carry her away from whatever—and whoever—was in the other room. I didn’t need Lucy getting attacked, not by some stranger.
She seemed completely unconcerned by the fact that there might be a stranger here. Lucy was a strange cat. She was far too friendly, willing to rub up against anyone, even if it wasn’t necessarily safe for her. Doing that now posed a risk, especially if there was the possibility of an attack. But then, if there was an attack, why would they have remained in the room like this?
There was something I wasn’t quite grasping.
I held onto Lucy as I stepped into the spare room. Power surged out from me and she squirmed in my arms, almost as if she didn’t care for the magic I pulled on. I squeezed, trying to hold onto her but not wanting to squeeze too tightly. Without having any way of holding her, I was forced to let her go, and she ran into the spare bedroom.
“Lucy!” I hissed.
She ignored me, much as she often ignored me.
I wasn’t going to leave her in there if there was the possibility of an attack, and I made my way in slowly, carefully, the power of my magic seeping out.
I couldn’t shake the sense that there was someone else in the room. So far I hadn’t seen them, but Aron had demonstrated the way mages could mask themselves, using the power of their ability to hide. It was possible that whoever was in here did the same thing.
It wouldn’t be Aron. There would be no reason for him to hide like that.
Could it be Gran or Gramps?
Neither of them were likely to have hidden here. There was no point in it, especially as doing so would unsettle me, and considering what I’d been through, I doubted that they would be interested in doing that to me. They knew better.
There was something else.
The magic felt different.
There was no way to explain it other than that. It wasn’t so much the power of a mage spell, and it wasn’t so much the fact that I felt someone; it was the type of magic that unsettled me.
It took a moment, but I began to recognize the magic.
Shifter magic.
As the realization came to me, I surged outward, sending a blast of my magic into a barrier, holding it in front of me so that I could avoid the possibility of a shifter attack in my home.
“I know you’re here,” I said.
There was no answer, no response whatsoever, which suggested that either whoever was here wanted to remain hidden—or they couldn’t answer.
The entire situation was confusing.
I flipped on the light switch, no longer interested in the possibility that somebody might be hiding in the dark. It was better for me to know what I might be dealing with, better that I be prepared.
And there he was.
John the shifter lay in the middle of my floor. It might be a spare bedroom, but that didn’t mean there was a second bed. I didn’t have guests often enough to need one. When Gran and Gramps came, they only visited and never stayed here. They had some other place they could go, likely someplace with the council, and I never questioned why they didn’t stay with me.
For that matter, I really didn’t want them to stay with me. Having grown up with them, I was more than happy to be out on my own. It felt as if it had only been a few years that I had been on my own.
The shifter didn’t move.
Aron must’ve brought him here, but why?
Considering the barriers Aron had placed, he might have been the only person who would have been able to allow the shifter into my room.
I stood, watching the shifter, trying to shoe Lucy away so that she didn’t rub up against him. She ignored me.
“Traitor,” I whispered.
She meowed and the shifter jolted, sitting up and looking at me. “Where am I?”
“Apparently, you’re at my home.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m the person who saved you when you were brought into the emergency room.”
“The human doctor,” he growled.
“You don’t have to say it as if you’re annoyed. I’m the one who saved you, after all.”
The shifter got to his feet and glanced at the wrappings on his shoulder. “I have you to thank for this, too?”
“Not that. You have the surgeons to thank for that.”
Aron had believed that he would restore himself by shifting, but I wondered if that were the case. “You were attacked. The injuries were pretty extensive. Had you been a human—“
“I’m not a human.”
“Had you been a human,” I said. “You wouldn’t have ea
sily survived. Even if you had survived, you would have been left with a significant deficit.”
The way that he moved his arm told me that whatever deficit he had was minimal. Either he had already healed quite a bit or there simply wasn’t that much of a deficit. Maybe the surgeons had been more effective than I’d realized.
“Do shifters have the ability to heal themselves the same as mages?”
He looked up at me, his deep brown eyes narrowing for a moment.
“I’m not trying to uncover some secret.”
“You’re asking questions the mages have asked before.”
“Yeah, I’m not really a mage, am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know enough that Ariel sent you to me.”
“Only because she feared what might happen otherwise.”
“She worried you would lose the function in your arm?”
“She feared that I would lose my connection to our power.”
I thought about what I had detected from him when he’d first come into the emergency room. There had been that strange sense of his magic departing him, that sensation of power leaching away, and somehow I had used magic to seal it off, healing him.
“She couldn’t have known I would have some way of restoring you.”
“She trusts the archer. He spoke highly of what you did for the Carter.”
I couldn’t move. There was something surreal about standing in my spare bedroom, the bookshelves lining the walls filled with my medical textbooks and all of my college texts, speaking to a wolf shifter about magic, but here I was. “What did the archer say about me?”
“Only that you are a skilled healer. He told her that if she ever had need of something the shifters couldn’t do, she should go to you.”
Aron had said that about me?
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t necessarily want to be the doctor the magical world came to, but at the same time, it was something of a compliment. Aron had trusted me with Finnaster, and while I might not have been able to do much for him—at least, they might not have allowed me to have done much for him—the fact that Aron trusted me left me feeling surprisingly good.
