Eventually, ignoring the way my body is shaking, I push myself up to standing, turn, and walk right out the door.
I don’t pause. I don’t look back. I’ve made my decision about the DNR. If my father stops breathing, if he goes into cardiorespiratory arrest…
Then so be it. I’m going to let him die.
I’m almost out the front entrance when someone shouts my name from behind me. Well, they shout “Mr.Briggs” several times, in escalating pitch, until I’m forced to turn around.
I finally pivot to see a young nurse in tight pink scrubs pushing her way through the crowds in the lobby. “Mr.Briggs,” she says again, rather breathily, having evidently pursued me through the corridors.
It’s late, and I’m exhausted, and I’m still sofuckingangry, so I frown and say, “Please, call me Harrisford. Mr.Briggs is my father.”
“All right…Harrisford,” she says haltingly, testing the weight of my name on her tongue. Then she blushes prettily, her eyelashes fluttering as she blinks up at me.
I’m used to this reaction from women—whenever they talk to me, or I talk to them, or sometimes even as soon as they see my face—but for one of the first times ever I’m completely immune to it. She’s objectively attractive, with smooth tanned skin and dark glossy hair, and about the same height as Gwendolynne Chan—
Stop it, Briggs.Good lord, why am I comparing everyone and everything to Gwendolynne lately? It’s like I can’t get that goddamned woman out of my mind, even for a fucking second.
I sigh again. “Do you need me to sign more forms?” As I’d passed the reception desk, I’d dutifully signed the hospital paperwork…including scribbling my signature, pressing the pen harder than truly necessary, at the bottom of the Do Not Resuscitate form. Perhaps—in my hurry to exit the hospital with its glaring lights and crowds of people and its sanitized smell of death—I’d missed one.
“No,” she says, flushing harder, her gaze sliding down to my shoes. I’m making her so nervous that she cannot even look at me.“It’s just—my boss has asked me to check if you could possibly see a centaur.”
The nurse continues to shoot covert glances my way as we walk side by side to the emergency wards, where the centaur is apparently waiting.
Centaurs are an ethical conundrum when it comes to medical treatment. Seeing as they are half-human, half-horse, debates have raged for centuries as to whether they’re under the purview of human medicine or should be treated by us vets. Throughout history, both laws and public opinion have swayed from one extreme to the other: sometimes categorizing centaurs as human, and other times classifying them as beasts. More recently, in the twenty-first century, the laws have been updated to officially define them as both. Hence, the official policy is that they attend human hospitals for anything pertaining to their heads and torsos, and veterinary hospitals for problems related to anything else.
The issue is, the centaurs don’t always listen. For one, they consider themselves entirely above the common laws and tribulations of humans. And second, they often get mixed up and show up to the wrong kind of hospital. Especially when they happen to be—
“Barnabus,” I mutter as I round the corner to find the dark-haired centaur inside the pen.
“All right, Harrisford?” he says, grinning, then lets out a loud belch. His hair and tail are both tangled and snarled with leaves and sticks. “Old friend.”
Barnabus isn’t my friend, really. It’s just that we have something of a tumultuous history. He’s shown up to the veterinary hospital before, repeatedly, drunk to the point of collapse. Many times I’ve had to either bundle him into an ambulance to be taken to thehospital, or patch him up as best I can with the materials that I had on hand—while simultaneously tryingnotto alert Seamere management to the fact that I’d illegitimately treated the front half of a centaur.
I only do it because when he drinks, which is almost always, he can become aggressive without any warning. And a bucking, belligerent, seven-hundred-kilogram centaur is not something to be blasé about.
Therefore, it’s usually just easier to do what needs to be done as quickly as humanly possible and then send him off on his merry way.
Most of his injuries are simple: cuts and bumps and scrapes from his constantly inebriated state. Most of them can be healed by magic, but occasionally he also needs stitches. Tonight, though, I immediately notice that he’s not putting weight on one hoof. It’s his front left limb, and he’s toe-touching it, lifting it every now and then as though it is really sore.
Why’d you comehere, Barnabus?I want to groan at him, but he’s got that vicious glint in his eye that tells me that if I question it, he may well decide to kick my teeth out.
Raf Malik—the poor sod of a junior doctor who seems to always be on duty, and therefore has also dealt with drunken Barnabus many a time—crams his stethoscope in the pocket of his lab coat. “All yours, mate,” he says, giving a quick wave as he takes his leave. It’s clear he cannot get out of here fast enough. The door eases shut behind him with a whine.
After placing Pudding carefully on top of a stainless steel trolley, I sigh, roll my sleeves up to my elbows, and get to work. The nurse who accompanied me hangs around, giving obsequious smiles and offering to assist me “in any way she can,” so I make her useful by asking her to fetch some coveralls and the tools they keep for this exact purpose. The hospital stocks things like hoof testers and hoofknives just in case—though the tools look at least fifty years old and are horrendously inferior to what I’m used to.
Once equipped, I lift Barnabus’s foot, propping it on my knee, and lever off his shoe. Then I palpate his pulses and, with Pudding helping me to harness the atmospheric magic, check his aura for a localized area of pain. Once I find it, I start digging away at the sole with the hoof knife, while the nurse hovers around us, making awestruck eyes at me. She’s apparently never seen anyone do veterinary work on a centaur before.
“Ow,” Barnabus bellows as I hit a particularly tender spot. “Easy, now, mate. You’ll take me bloomin’ foot off!” He hiccups, and for once I’m kind of glad that’s he’s so utterly drunk, as it’ll make this entire process far less unpleasant for the both of us.
“I won’t be much longer,” I say, my breaths puffing. Centaurs are bigger than normal horses—and far bigger than fine-boned unicorns—and their legs are fucking heavy.
Barnabus lapses into silence for a few minutes, the only sound the soft scraping of my knife. Then his voice turns pensive, ponderous, brooding.
“Death stalks you, Harrisford Briggs.”
The nurse gasps, but my movements barely falter; I’ve heard all this before. I can never treat Barnabus the centaur without him predicting some horrific fate for me. But everyone knows that centaur astrology is hazy science at best.
“The stars of your birth are—”
