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“In town, about four miles down the road. Opens in the morning, around eight,” he said. “But if you’re feeling poorly, I have something in my room that might perk you up.”
I turned on my heel and made a mental note to prop a chair against the outside door once I got to the room.
I opened up the passenger-side door and saw that the big guy had managed to sit up and had his head resting on the seat back. He was snoring steadily. I spotted a bulky duffel bag in the backseat of the cab and threw it over my shoulder. I unlocked the room door, tossed the bag inside, and steeled myself for the task of hauling his unconscious ass into the room. Careful to keep his bloodied side away from the manager’s window, I hoisted his arm over my shoulder in a sort of ill-advised fireman’s carry and took slow, deliberate steps toward the open door. The movement seemed to reopen the wound, and I could feel blood seeping through my shirt. We made it through the door.
I heard a distinct metallic plink. I looked down and saw that the bullet had rolled across the filthy carpet and hit the wall.
I meant to set him gently on the bed but ended up flopping him across the bedspread. The rickety bed squealed in protest as he bounced, but he didn’t bat an eyelash. I huffed, leaning against the yellowed floral wallpaper to catch my breath. “Sorry. You’re heavier than you look.”
I locked the door and wedged the desk chair against the knob. The room was so outdated it was almost in style again but the dirt and neglect screamed “dingy,” not “kitschy.” The carpet was a dank greenish-brown color that could only be described as phlegm. The bedspread, threadbare and nearly transparent in places, matched the shade.
I shook off the Norman Bates flashbacks and told myself it was just like any of the other crappy indigent motels I’d stayed at in any number of cities, and I hadn’t been stabbed in the shower yet.
I turned back to the sleeping giant on the bed. The flannel shirt made an unpleasant ripping noise as I peeled it away, the dried blood causing the stiff material to adhere to his skin. The wound seemed even smaller now, the area around it a perfectly normal, healthy color. I pushed back from him, away from the bed, staring at the minuscule hole in his flesh.
This couldn’t be right.
Taking a step back, I knocked over his duffel and saw a bottle of Bactine spray sticking out of the partially opened zipper. I arched an eyebrow and pulled the bag open. “What the—?”
Never mind having to run to a pharmacy. The bag was filled to the brim with well-used first-aid supplies—mostly peroxide and heavy-duty tweezers. And several different types of exotic jerky. But not much in the way of clothes.
I glanced from the shrinking bullet hole to the enormous bag of meat treats with its distinct lack of clothes . . . and back to the bullet hole.
Oh, holy hell, this guy was a werewolf.
2
This Is What Happens When You Roughhouse
I dropped my butt on the bed, staring down at the unconscious shape-shifter and feeling very stupid. I’d spent the last few years as the family physician for a large pack of werewolves in the Crescent Valley, several hundred miles away in southwestern Alaska. I’d recently resigned my position, if one could consider sneaking away in the dead of night a resignation.
Yes, werewolves were real. They walked among us humans, living relatively normal lives, working normal jobs, and occasionally shifting into enormous wolves and hunting down defenseless woodland creatures. They weren’t alone in the shape-shifting animal kingdom. In my time with the valley pack, I’d met were-horses, were-bears, and even a tragically less cool were-skunk named Harold. If it was a mammal, there was a group of people out there somewhere who could shift into it. (Fish and reptiles were problematic, for some reason.) Presided over by an alpha male—or in the Crescent Valley pack’s case, an alpha female—a pack usually lived “packed together” in a limited amount of space, such as a single apartment building or a trailer park, depending on the clan’s resources.
All major life decisions had to be approved by the alpha, from mate selection to college enrollment. Everything had to be deemed for the good of the pack.
Accepting that (a) these creatures existed and (b) they were now my patients was a strange adjustment for me. I’d had a complete Maggie must have slipped me special mushrooms breakdown the first time she shifted in front of me.
The scientist in me still had problems accepting the paranormal element of werewolves. I tended to think of their abilities as a genetic bonus, which was easier to accept than magic exists, but you just weren’t lucky enough to have any in your life until you stumbled upon a pack full of eccentric shape-shifters in your late twenties. But after a while, I realized that compared with living with someone whose moods shifted from moment to moment, living with people who had exclusively unstable physical forms was practically a vacation.
I flopped back onto the bed, noting with a frown that my weight didn’t even jostle the wolf-man. Of course. Of course I would walk away from one of the largest werewolf pack settlements in North America, only to end up trapped in a run-down motel room with a wounded one. Only someone with my logic-defying bad luck could possibly defeat the unlikeliness of those odds. I was the ass-backward Red Riding Hood.
Had Maggie Graham, my former boss, sent this guy to search for me? The big guy did have the look of the Graham family—dark, rough-hewn, and handsome, not to mention bigger than a barn door, as my gramma would say. But I’d cared for every single member of that pack, treating everything from swine flu to suspicious puncture wounds brought on by “scuffling” with porcupines. I didn’t recognize him, and I certainly would have remembered someone who looked like him.
Not to mention that werewolves rarely strayed this far from their territory. They were genetically programmed to protect their packlands, to crave hunting within their family’s territory with an ache that went way beyond homesickness and edged into crippling obsession. The chances of some distant Graham cousin venturing this far from the valley for such an extended period of time that I hadn’t met him in the four years I lived there? Not possible.
And frankly, none of this mattered, because I wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough for getting to know you conversations.
I sighed. Werewolf or not, I couldn’t let him sleep with bloody, unclean wounds. I searched through the bag and found bandages, tape, Bactine, and hydrogen peroxide. The bathroom was surprisingly clean, which, sadly, was turning out to be the highlight of my day. I ran a washcloth under a warm tap and used it to wipe away the brownish blood from his skin, noting the wound was now about the size of a dime. Worried that it was too deep to use the Bactine, I irrigated it with the peroxide, catching the runoff with a towel. He hissed, arching off the bed, but he ultimately slumped back into unconsciousness. Just to be safe, I sprayed the wound with Bactine and bandaged him up.
It had taken me some time to get used to werewolf physiology and adjust my medical training to it. While the spontaneous-healing thing made my position as pack doctor easier, it also meant that untreated broken bones could set in bad positions. Wounded skin could heal over foreign matter and dirt, which led to infections.
Beyond wound care, my chief responsibility had been monitoring and faking state-sanctioned paperwork for as many as a dozen pregnancies at a time. Werewolves were ridiculously fertile. Maggie also appointed me the “supervisor” of the pack’s seniors, who, although they aged a bit more slowly than the average human, were just as susceptible to the typical blood-pressure and joint problems associated with getting old. But they were far less open to accepting these issues, considering them “human problems.” For one thing, werewolf metabolism burned through calories so quickly that it was damn near impossible to monitor their diets, cholesterol, or salt. Try telling a seventy-year-old who can eat three whole fried chickens in one sitting that he needs to watch his triglycerides. The reaction will be swift and hilarious, and then he will go fetch his friends to tell them what the funny new doctor said.
The first time there was an emergency with the pack, I’d panicked. It was just claw marks from an unfriendly interaction between Maggie’s lovable idiot cousin Samson and a grizzly. Frankly, he could have healed up on his own within twenty-four hours, but a few stitches moved the process along faster. Samson’s back looked as if he’d made out with Freddy Krueger, and the injuries were so extensive I froze. I couldn’t seem to pick a location to insert the suture needle in his skin.
And then, of course, Samson was himself.
“Hey, Doc, stop staring at my ass and stitch me up,” he’d called over his shoulder.
