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2
Bennett pushed against the slick stainless steel surface beneath him, shoving himself upright. The metal was cold against his skin, and the lights were too bright. The whole place smelled like a weird combination of antiseptic and essential oils. That horrible screeching noise wasn’t making things any better. Bennett shook his head and tried to get his bearings.
He finally figured out where that awful noise was coming from. In the corner of the small room, as far away from him as possible, a woman stood with her shoulders hunched against the drywall. She stared at him, keeping her wide eyes on him as her hands patted the nearby countertop, searching for something.
A few things started to click together in his addled brain. The last place he remembered being was in the forest. Things had been bad, and then it’d all gone dark. Now, judging by the weird table he was on and the poster on the wall that lectured about the dangers of heartworms, he was in a veterinarian’s office. It made zero sense, but at least he was putting reality together around him.
The woman was the biggest problem. She’d stopped screaming now, but her breath was heaving in her chest. Her long hair was bundled into a frazzled braid that fell down over her shoulder, and her green eyes glittered with fear. There were fine lines on either side of them now, and he spotted a few threads of gray in that braid. Even so, it was impossible not to recognize the face he knew so well from high school, the face he’d dreamed of at night. It was Stephanie Caldwell, the only woman he’d ever loved.
“You…you…you changed,” she stammered. Stephanie’s hand landed on a tray of tools, and she snatched one up. She glared at the useless tongue depressor in her hand and tossed it aside.
Bennett had to smile. “Hey, I’m not gonna say the years have been kind to me, but everyone looks different after a few decades.”
“No!” she snarled. Stephanie straightened up a bit against the wall. Her eyes ran over every part of his body. “You were a wolf. Like two seconds ago, you were a friggin’ wolf! And then you changed into…you!”
Shit. So much for keeping the shifter secret. In all of his forty-seven years, he’d never revealed himself to anyone but fellow shifters, and he wouldn’t have done it now, either. Bennett was getting some of his bearings, but that didn’t mean the world around him made any sense. “What am I doing here?”
“What the hell is going on?” she asked at the same time.
“Why are you here?” he tried.
“How did you do that?” Both of their questions echoed through the room simultaneously.
Bennett sighed. This was bizarre as hell, but he wasn’t the one who’d just seen an animal turn into a man. As far as he was concerned, that meant the burden of making sense of this for both of them was on him. “I have plenty of questions I’d like to ask you, but we’ll start with what you just saw.”
Stephanie gave him a very firm blink and nodded. “That would be good. I hope it means I haven’t lost my mind.”
“You haven’t.” He bent forward and rubbed his hands up and down his face. How the hell was he supposed to explain this? It was simple enough, but only because he’d been living it. His wolf was surging inside him, demanding answers. It was also demanding that he get closer to Stephanie. Given her current state, he knew it wasn’t a good idea. Either way, battling with his beast wasn’t making this any easier. “I’m a shifter. I spend most of my time looking the way you see me right now, but I was born with the ability to change into a wolf.”
“So you’ve always been able to do this?” She was still studying him, her eyes following the line of his shoulder, ears, and nose.
His stomach dropped with guilt. “Yeah.”
“Even back in high school?”
She didn’t say ‘when we were dating,’ but he knew that had to be what she truly wanted to know. “Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I couldn’t. It’s not the sort of thing we can just announce. It might freak someone out.” Bennett offered her another smile.
Stephanie let out a syllable somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. “That’s a pretty fair bet. I still don’t understand, though. Why are you like this? You said you were born this way?”
He nodded. “Just like the rest of my family.”
“There are more?” Stephanie pushed herself away from the wall now. She found a wheeled stool amidst the wreckage of medical supplies and dog treats she’d scattered on the floor and sat down. “This is a lot to absorb.”
“It’s a lot to tell,” he replied honestly. “Think about what it’d be like if you tried to explain to someone what it was like being human.”
“I don’t think I’d even know where to start,” she admitted. “I’m still not sure I haven’t gone off the deep end. One minute, my daughter and I were carrying a nearly dead wolf out of the woods, and the next, the wolf turned into you. You can tell me all day long that there are shifters in the world, but my mind is just refusing to understand.”
He pressed his lips together. That was exactly why they didn’t tell anyone. Plenty of other creatures were in fiction and movies, but humans could handle that because they knew they weren’t real. Bennett and his family—as well as plenty of other people in Eugene and even all over the world—were completely made up as far as most humans were concerned.
But at least she’d started answering his questions, whether she realized it or not. “So you brought me here? Is there anyone else here with us?”
“Yes. No.” Stephanie took a deep breath and let it out. “I mean, my daughter and I found the wolf—you—while we were out for a short hike. You were in bad shape, so we brought you back here to my office. I sent her home with the dogs, and the office is closed for the day. We’re alone.”
That should’ve been reassuring, but it only sent a stab of desire through his body. Even after all these years, she was still just as beautiful as ever. In fact, if he squinted a little, he might’ve thought she looked exactly the same as she did the last time he’d seen her. Maybe a little curvier, but he sure didn’t mind that.
Stay on track.
Okay, so there weren’t any other witnesses to his shift. Good. “Did anyone else see you when you were in the woods? When you found me? Or did you call anyone to report this?”
