I've worked with monster patients. Not many, but enough. Most ERs still route them to specialty clinics, which is a whole separate conversation about healthcare access that makes my blood pressure spike. I sutured an orc dockworker's split knuckles in Galveston while he told me about his daughter's piano recital. I held an IV line for a centaur in Albuquerque and talked him through his panic attack while the attending pretended to read charts on the other side of the room because he didn't want to get close. I've seen seven-foot orcs cry over broken bones and five-foot-nothing human men throw punches at nurses for asking them to rate their pain.
Size has never been a variable that scares me.
He stops at the edge of the light. Dark fur covers his forearms, dense and close to the skin, built for cold I can already feel eating through my jeans. His horns curve back and up, filed to blunt points. His chest fills the space between the trees and the road, broad enough that my hands wouldn't span half of it, and his fingers could wrap around my entire rib cage. Amber eyes fix on me with an expression I can't read through the downpour.
I wipe blood off my upper lip with the back of my hand.
"Oh, thank God," I say. "Can you call a tow truck?"
He stares at me.
Water drums the wrecked car and drips from his horns but he doesn't move. I don't move. I'm standing in a ditch with blood on my face, and a seven-foot minotaur is looking at me like I've glitched in his operating system, and I realize what's happening. I'm not reacting the way he expects. No scream, no stumble backward, no fumbling for a phone to call 911.
He crosses the distance between us in a few strides. Each one covers more ground than I could in two, and the earth gives under his weight with a soft compression I feel through the soles of my sneakers. He crouches beside the car, and the rental groans as his shadow falls over it. His hands move over the crumpled hood, checking the frame, testing the axle, pressing a palm flat against the engine block. He pulls back and wipes his hand on his thigh.
Then he straightens and holds out his hand.
His palm is twice the size of mine. Scarred across the knuckles, calloused in patterns, and I take it without thinking, because I've been standing in this ditch for five minutes and my options are trust this stranger or wait here until morning.
He pulls me out with one arm. Lifts me, really. My feet leave the mud and for a second I'm weightless, and then he sets me on the road. I stumble on the wet asphalt and his hand steadies my elbow, a brief grip that disappears the instant I'm balanced.
He turns toward the forest.
"Wait." I take a step after him. "Where are you going?"
He doesn't answer. He walks. His silhouette moves between the trees with a sureness that means he knows this ground, every root and rock and dip.
The wrecked rental sits behind me, its lone light bleeding into the dark, water pooling on the crushed hood. The road stretches empty in both directions, no sound except wind. The minotaur's back is already dimming between the trunks.
I run after him.
He hears me stumbling behind him, of course he does, I'm crashing through underbrush like a drunk toddler while he moves through the forest like he grew from it, and after twenty seconds, his stride shortens. He doesn't look back. Doesn't slow his pace, exactly. He takes smaller steps so my legs can keep up, and if I weren't paying attention I'd never catch it. But my Abuelo used to do the same thing, shorten his stride when he walked me to school, pretend it was because his knee bothered him. Never admitting he slowed down for a kid with short legs.
The downpour lets up by degrees, and then the trees open.
A clearing. A cabin at its center, square and solid, built from logs dark with age and weather. A porch wraps the front, and the porch light glows warm yellow against the wet wood. Smoke rises from a chimney I can smell before I see it, cedar or fir, something resinous and clean that cuts through the cold. Through a window left cracked open despite the temperature, I hear music. Classical. Strings, something I half-recognize but can't name, spilling into the clearing with a sweetness that doesn't match anything about the man walking ahead of me.
Snow has started falling. I didn't notice the shift, the temperature dropping somewhere in the last five minutes, and the first flakes catch in the porch light, drifting against the yellow glow.
I stop walking.
The minotaur reaches the porch, climbs the two steps, the wood barely creaking under reinforced planks built to hold his weight, and opens the door. He steps aside. Stands there, one hand on the frame, not looking at me, not speaking, the firelight from inside spilling across the fresh snow between us.
He's giving me the choice.
Come in or don't. He'll stand there either way, holding the door against the cold, waiting for a woman he doesn't know to decide whether his home is safer than the dark. I think about Mami's voice, Mija, you trust too easy, and Abuela's hands cupping my face, pero tu corazón sabe, mi vida.
Your heart knows.
I walk through the snow, up the porch steps, and past him into the warmth.
Chapter 2
Garrett
The woman won't stop talking.
She's sat at my kitchen table bleeding from her nose onto the dishcloth I handed her, and she hasn't paused for breath. Her name is Nina. She's a nurse. She's starting at the Nightfall clinic on Monday. She hit a deer. She thinks her wrist might be sprained. She likes my cabin. Is that Dvorák?
