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“That was cryptic and unhelpful. Thank you, Dr. Thatcher,” I told him. “Are you coming with me into town?”
Nick shook his head vehemently. “I’ll stay here, where it’s safe.”
“Thanks a lot,” I told him, making him laugh.
Leonard and I slid into town with a flourish in front of the clinic. I never thought I’d be so happy to see a collection of weather-beaten buildings in the middle of nowhere. But I was practically giddy as Leonard untied my bags from the back of the snowmobile. I handed him his cabbie fee (a prescription to treat several different rashes) and called out my thanks before I jogged down the main drag through the village. Leonard waved me off and started the journey back to Grundy, where he could proudly boast to the local ladies that he was disease-free (for now).
I searched for any sign of Caleb on the street, but I couldn’t even spot his truck. Mixed in among the more weather-beaten houses were newer homes, constructed over the summer after a smaller pack merged into Maggie’s group. There were too many families and not enough housing. Now that the neat little one-story homes were finished, the pack had invested some money in renovating the older buildings, including the community center and the clinic.
Nick had funded the expansion out of his own pocket. Maggie and most of the pack had objected, but he ignored them. You would never have guessed it from his “nerd armor,” but Nick was loaded from his involvement in developing Guild of Dominion, an online role-playing game to which he contributed character designs and story lines from his extensive mythological studies. He was pretty unpretentious about the money. In fact, I was pretty sure he had T-shirts that were older than some of my patients. But when he could put his extensive funds toward something good, it made him happy, which was the mark of a good man first, rich man second, in my book.
As the alpha-slash-mayor-slash-sheriff of the village, Maggie kept an office in the large all-purpose building that served as the community center. I made my way down the street, running over the speech I’d prepared in my head. Maggie had always been a bit of a puzzle for me. She was among the younger wolves of the pack, but others followed her without question. She was a good person but about as cuddly as sandpaper, preferring hunting and fighting for the pack to the more maternal roles embraced by the other females. She didn’t have time or patience for bullshit, which I respected. Ultimately, she was going to be wicked pissed at me for leaving without notice, but she would know it would be easier to take me back than to try to initiate a new doctor into the ways of the pack.
So I had a little bit of clout on my side . . . but that didn’t make me feel any better when I walked through the front door and found Maggie frowning over the village checkbook.
She looked up, and rather than looking surprised or angry, her face went completely wooden. I swallowed a little lead weight in my throat. A calm Maggie was a truly scary Maggie.
“I heard you might be showing up,” she said, the corners of her mouth tugging southward.
I offered a nervous little smile. “I heard something about a medical position being available at your village clinic.”
“Normally, I would tell you to go screw yourself,” she said sternly, glaring at me over the top of her checkbook. “But I happen to need a doctor, and you’re less irritating than most of the medical people I know.” Before I could respond, Maggie stood and pulled her flannel shirt away from her compact frame to reveal a small but definite swelling of her abdomen.
“You’re pregnant,” I said, my mouth hanging open a little.
“Well, I’m happy to see your fancy degree isn’t wasted,” she deadpanned.
I held her jacket open to get a better look, gratified when she didn’t swat my hands away. “How many weeks?”
She smirked at me. “Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”
“Come to the clinic in an hour, and we’ll do an exam. I need to go home, get cleaned up.”
“That might be a problem. Tom and his family are living in your house now.”
My mouth fell completely open this time. “You gave away my house?”
Maggie threw up her hands. “We’re still in a bit of a housing crunch. The only reason we kept Caleb’s dad’s house open was that we knew Caleb was coming back this winter. We couldn’t just wait around for you to decide you were coming back. Tom’s family needed the space.”
“Great, so I’ll be sleeping in the clinic, then.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. You can stay with Caleb,” she said in her no-nonsense voice. “Once you bat those baby blues at him and he forgives you way too easily.” Well, I’d never expected Maggie to take my side in the argument.
I bit my lip. “I owe you an explanation.”
“You’re damn right you do.” Maggie frowned. “Anna—”
“It’s Tina,” I reminded her, my tone apologetic and glum.
She blanched a little. “Well, that will take some getting used to. Tina, we’ve always known you’d had some trouble in your life before the valley. People with expensive educations don’t take on the Dr. Moder job, isolating themselves out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of half-crazy, mostly naked people, unless they have a reason to hide. We hoped you’d open up a little, but you did your job well, so we didn’t pry.
“But to be honest, I’m not in a good frame of mind to hear your explanations right now. I’m in a bit of a panic about this whole baby thing. I just found out a couple of weeks ago, and everybody keeps telling me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s no big deal, women in our family all have easy pregnancies.’ But we’ve never had a pregnant alpha before, mostly because they were dudes. I’m terrified of shifting, for some reason, even though I know my own mother did it until a month before she had me. I can’t so much as look at coffee without barfing like something out of that Monty Python ‘wafer-thin mint’ sketch. And I’m afraid of lifting anything. Nick actually found me crying in the garage this morning, because I needed to put a gas can in the back of my truck, but I didn’t want to lift it, and I didn’t want to ask him for help for something so simple. So my husband now thinks I’m insane, which is awesome. So really, I just need you to forget about whatever excuse you were going to give me for disappearing from the face of the earth without a word, and give me an exam to show me that everything is normal and healthy and I am not giving birth to some sort of Cthulhu baby.”
I stared at my badass werewolf alpha-lady boss as she burst into tears. “Wow.”
“I hate this!” She sniffled. “I mean, I’m really excited about the baby. But I hate feeling like I don’t have control over anything, including my hormones. I mean, I watched all of my cousins cry and power-eat ice cream through their pregnancies and thought, not me. Not Maggie-Effing-Graham. I’ll be the Chuck Norris of pregnant ladies. And look at me! I don’t cry! I hate feeling so girlie and stupid about everything. And I really, really want some peanut butter fudge ripple, but I don’t want to ask Nick to go get it for me, because I don’t want to hear any of my cousins say ‘I told you so.’â??”
I circled the desk and wrapped my arms around my patient as she sobbed into my jacket. I patted her hair and rubbed her back and assured her that what she was going through was completely normal. I laughed a little as she sniffled into my shoulder, and that earned me a light punch to the kidney.
