CHAPTER 5

Josie kept the door to the kennel area propped open so that she could hear if any of her patients made a sound indicating that they required attention, but so far the evening was proving as tedious as the paperwork she filled it with.

Sighing, she rubbed a hand over her forehead. If she were honest with herself, Josie would have to admit that the only sound she cared about at the moment was one indicating that the Lupine in the other room might be waking up. And the only reason she had no patience for any other part of the job she loved was that her mind couldn’t stop chewing on the problem of this particular case.

All her life, Josie Barrett had known that she wanted to be a vet, and she had pursued her goal with a single-mindedness bordering on compulsion. She had all but coasted through her training, not due to any particular academic brilliance or inherent intellectual genius, but simply because she spent all her spare time reading and studying a subject that fascinated her. She found the mechanics of animal physiology riveting, and nothing satisfied her so much as puzzling out the solution to a problem with only the clues provided by careful observation and testing. Human physicians could ask their patients questions if they needed guidance for a particular problem, but all Josie could do was watch and feel and test and treat until she found the right answer. And in return, she got to see a creature who had been ill or in pain recover and thrive. She couldn’t have asked for a greater sense of personal satisfaction.

Except in the rare case when the right answer completely eluded her.

Biting back a growl of frustration, Josie reached for the cup of coffee on the exam table before her, then grimaced as she realized it had long ago gone cold. She’d poured it for herself nearly two hours ago, just before she brought her stool and stack of charts over to the large, clean surface of the exam table to work. It had seemed like a good way to simultaneously catch up on the backlog of paperwork that never went away and keep an eye and ear tuned in to her latest puzzle, but now the caffeine kick had begun to wear off and she’d made little noticeable headway in either the paperwork or the Lupine case.

It frustrated Josie to no end to find herself faced with a patient she couldn’t even diagnose properly, let alone treat. For a woman who prided herself on her credentials, this felt like failure, and failure didn’t sit well on her narrow shoulders.

“This is starting to get to me, Bruce,” she said, slipping one foot out of its battered loafer and using it to rub the belly of the dog currently sprawled beneath the table in front of her.

Bruce obligingly cocked a hind leg and twisted his torso to offer her better access.

“She should be awake by now. Every reference I’ve consulted so far agrees on that. Lupines do not remain unconscious for this long unless there’s something seriously wrong. And in Others terminology, a minor gunshot wound does not count as serious. So what the heck else is going on?”

Bruce grunted and rolled completely onto his back.

“Not a big help, frankly. So far everything but that white count is normal, which means there has to be an infection somewhere, but nothing is showing up in culture.”

Another grunt, following by a sneeze-like exhalation.

“If I run one more test or set up one more culture, I’m going to run out of both blood samples and culture media, and I suspect all I’m going to get are the same results I’ve gotten for the past twenty-four hours.” She sighed. “I could really use a clue here.”

For a second, Josie almost thought Bruce intended to give her one. The enormous hound jerked his head off the floor, pendulous flews dangling, and stared intently at the rear door of the clinic. With a soft, whooshing woof, he flipped back onto his stomach and eyed the heavy metal exit portal with steady intensity.

Reaching down, Josie scratched behind one floppy ear and slid off her stool. “Really? Company at this hour?”

She’d barely gotten the words out when a crisp tap at the back door was followed by the click of the latch. The panel swung open a few inches and a familiar head poked in through the opening.

“Dr. Barrett. I saw your light on and thought it was probably you still in here. Has anyone ever told you that you work too much?”

Bruce scrambled to his feet and stood beside his mistress, watching the scene calmly but closely.

“Sheriff Pace,” Josie greeted, her hand moving out of habit to rest atop her dog’s heavy head. “I can’t say I was expecting to see you again today. What can I do for you?”

Eli stepped fully into the room and pulled the door shut behind him. He held up a large white bag and offered a casual smile. “I was hoping we could put our heads together again about this situation with the Lupine. I even brought dinner as a tool of bribery. Don’t tell the town council.”

Before Josie could decide what to make of the unexpected gesture, or how to react to her unexpected visitor, Bruce made up his mind for both of them. He inhaled half a dozen times in rapid succession, then crossed the floor between him and the sheriff in two exuberant leaps, skidding across the slick tile to finish in a perfect, attentive sit at Eli’s feet.

She couldn’t help laughing. “Let me guess: You brought Laura Beth’s meat loaf, didn’t you?”

Laura Beth Andrews worked at Joe Schmoe’s Café, the most popular—and only—dedicated dining establishment in Stone Creek. Unlike the Stone Creek Tavern, which supplied mediocre snacks and average pub food to help soak up its alcoholic offerings, Joe’s prided itself on a small but satisfying menu featuring seasonal local ingredients presented in both traditional home-cooking favorites and more adventurous rotating specials. It also happily catered to the children and families who felt so out of place at the tavern.

“I’m amazed they even hand out menus on meat loaf night,” Eli said, grinning at her over Bruce’s head. “Personally, I can’t imagine ordering anything else.”

“Neither can Bruce.”

“So what do you say?” He shook the bag a little and raised an eyebrow. “Have you two eaten yet?”

Josie pursed her lips. She hadn’t, but Bruce had. Still, she’d never known her dog to turn down an extra meal, and she found herself battling a strange reluctance to turn away the sheriff’s company. She told herself it was just because she needed a distraction from her paperwork. It had nothing to do with his broad, muscular shoulders, or the way his green eyes sparked at her from between thick, dark lashes.

Nothing at all.

She waved him forward with small snort of surrender. “While it might make a difference if I had, Bruce clearly fails to see why that matters. Come on in and sit down.”

Turning to fetch a second stool for her guest, Josie watched out of the corner of her eye as the sheriff turned his attention from her to her huge, lumbering dog. Well, normally Bruce lumbered; at the moment, he simply sat in front of Eli, quivering from nose to tail with the anticipation of his favorite human food indulgence. For some reason, though, the sheriff looked mildly wary of her pet.

“Don’t mind Bruce,” she assured him. “He’s pretty mellow with strangers. Mostly he just ignores them. Are you afr—er, do you not like big dogs?”

“Oh, I like them just fine, but sometimes I find that they’re not all that wild about me.”

Josie recalled his story last night about the sled dogs and grinned. “Well, like I said, you don’t need to worry about Bruce. Even if he’d decided to hate you this morning, he can’t bring himself to do it anymore. A man who comes bearing meat loaf is his best friend for life. You probably just made it into his will.”

“I’m going to remember that trick,” the sheriff said, laughing. He stepped around her dog, wisely holding the bag of food up against his chest as he crossed to the exam table. He waited for her to shuffle her files back into order and move them to the counter before he set it down and settled onto the stool across from hers.

He removed disposable dinnerware and plates from the bag and set them neatly before each of them. “Has there been any change in the Lupine’s condition?”

Josie shook her head. “I wish I had something new to tell you, but her condition is still the same. It’s starting to worry me, especially since I don’t know who she is. Without any kind of medical history on her, figuring out the problem is that much harder. Have you heard from the Alpha yet?”

“I spoke to him briefly.” Eli took two round foil containers from the bag and set them on the table. “He hadn’t heard of a missing female from his pack, but he was going to make some calls and ask around. He was in the middle of something fairly important when I saw him, but he said as soon as he’s free, he’ll come down here himself to check her out. And in the meantime, if he hears from anyone he expects might know more, he’ll send them over immediately.”

Josie nodded and helped herself to the food. “Good. I’ll feel better when I at least know her name. Not that I expect it to make much difference in her condition. Mostly it will make me feel better.” She made a face. “I had my vet tech run some tests today, though, just to see if we missed anything, and her white blood cell count was really high. So it does look like she might be fighting off some kind of infection. I’m wondering if maybe that’s hindering her recovery somehow. I really thought she would have shifted by now, or at least regained full consciousness.”

“That is odd. Most shifters have pretty amazing immune systems. We’re practically immune to most human infections. You won’t see a Lupine with mono, for instance. And personally, I’ve never been sick a day in my life, unless I ate something bad. Even that’s a rarity.”

“I know. That’s what I’ve been reading for the entire day. The Lupine shouldn’t be able to contract any kind of serious infection. But I can’t think of another explanation for her white cell count. It’s astronomical, even for an Other. And her stitches and surgical incision look good, but they’re not healing much faster than I’d expect in a normal wolf.” Josie shook her head and stabbed her mashed potatoes with unnecessary force. “There’s something going on there. I just haven’t been able to figure out what it is.”

“You will.”

She felt the Feline’s eyes on her and looked up. His mouth quirked as he glanced from her face to her plate. Following his gaze down, Josie realized she hadn’t taken more than a bite of her food. Mostly, she’d just hacked it into little bits and pushed it around her plate until it resembled a multicolored mess. She flushed.

At her feet, Bruce moaned at the tragic waste.

“Thank you for bringing dinner, Sheriff Pace,” she said hastily, feeling her cheeks flush with color. “I guess I’m more distracted than I am hungry. How much do I owe you? I can’t let you pay for my little art project here, since I didn’t even have the decency to enjoy it.”

“Eli,” he corrected, his cajoling even as he watched her face with a kind of subtle intent. “And sure you can, since I invited myself to join you for it.”

“Thank you. Eli,” she acknowledged, slipping a bite of meat loaf under the table to a heartily approving Bruce. It gave her an excuse to look away until the butterflies in her stomach settled down. “Frankly, though, I think you’re charging yourself too high a penalty. Trust me when I tell you I’ve dined with less pleasant companions. Of course, most of those have been patients...”

He grinned. “Well, I’m glad to know I rate higher than a sick Pekingese, anyway.”

“Oh, much. First of all, unlike most Pekingese, you’re not a mouth breather, and that kind of thing always counts with me.”

His grin turned into a laugh, and raw electricity danced along her skin until she had to clench every muscle in her body to prevent a visible shiver from coursing through her. So much for calming those butterflies. This man made her react in ways she hadn’t since she was a teenager.

Or even when she’d been a teenager, come to think of it.

“So, Dr. Barrett,” he said, bracing his forearms on the table and leaning toward her. “Tell me, what made you decide to become a veterinarian?”

“Please. Just Josie,” she said, jumping to her feet before she could give into the urge to meet him halfway across the expanse of surgical steel and see if her assumption that kissing him would send her into immediate cardiac arrest was accurate. “I’m going to grab myself a soda. Can I get you one? I’d offer you a beer, but I don’t keep any in the clinic.”

He smiled, a crooked, knowing sort of grin that only served to make her walk toward the fridge even faster.

“Soda is fine,” he said, “Josie.”

The way his voice dropped on those last two syllables almost made her drop the soft drinks. As it was, she wasn’t sure her walk back to the exam table would have passed a sobriety field test. His company was going to her head faster than the beer she hadn’t drunk.

“I’m not all that sure I had a choice,” she continued, setting both cans on the table and sinking back into her seat. “About being a vet, I mean. My father started this practice back in 1972, so I literally grew up in a vet’s office. Not that my dad pushed me into it—I think he secretly hoped I’d go into human medicine so I could make decent money one day—but it just always fascinated me. I used to practice wound dressing on my teddy bears and apparently had to be earnestly talked out of performing exploratory surgery on the neighbor’s cat to find out why it wouldn’t stop meowing one summer when I was seven.”

Josie knew she was babbling, but at the moment babbling seemed safer for her than any of the alternatives she could think of.

“It turned out the cat was in heat, which I didn’t really understand, but my mom said the only way to distract me was to let me help out in Dad’s office.” She grinned sheepishly as Eli chuckled. “Not with surgery, of course, but with cleaning the kennels and the exam rooms and alphabetizing charts. Things like that.”

“I’m impressed. Not many people know what they want so young and manage to go after it.”

“I like to say I was determined. My mom usually changes that to obsessed.” She looked up and met his eyes, and she could have sworn she saw a reflection of her own hyper-awareness mirrored there. She hurriedly took a sip of her cola. “What about you? Did you not grow up wanting to be a cop?”

Eli shook his head. “I wanted to be a professional hockey player. Or an astronaut. And I had a brief desire to be in a rock band, but that was mostly because Mary Pressman had a thing for guys with long hair and guitars.”

Josie fed Bruce more meat loaf and smiled. “Somehow I have trouble picturing you as the long-haired type.”

He ran a hand over his closely cropped hair, the length almost militarily severe. “Yeah, so did my mom. Mary ended up dating Eric Bosky, until he went to juvie for breaking and entering.”

“Poor Mary. But what killed your dreams of sports glory and space exploration?”

“Well, I gave up hockey because I realized I really sucked at it. I was fast and coordinated, but I had no real sense of the game. At least that’s what my coach told me right before he cut me from the team. And I abandoned the astronaut idea when I had my first change.”

Josie blinked in surprise. “Why? Are there no Others working at NASA? I find that hard to believe.”

“There are Others in the space program, sure,” he said, slipping her dog a bite of his own dinner. “But you won’t find them being sent up. Everyone is afraid of what might happen if they got trapped up there over a full moon.”

“But that whole full moon thing is a crock. Even before the Unveiling, everyone in Stone Creek knew that the moon can’t force shifters to change their forms. Sure, there are Lupines and Others out there who like to take advantage of a nice, well-lit night to do some hunting, but it’s not like something out of a Lon Cheney movie.”

Eli toasted her with his soda can. “Ah, but the people of Stone Creek have always been an enlightened bunch when it comes to the Others. Most of the human population still doesn’t really understand that much about us.”

“I so don’t get that. Is that why you took the sheriff’s job out here, though? Because you’d heard we were a haven for the things that go bump in the night?”

“Not really. I just wanted a change of pace. I’d started to feel a little crowded in Seattle. The work was exciting, but it’s possible to have a little too much excitement, you know?” He finished the last bite of his mashed potatoes and speared a broccoli floret. “I was ready for something different, and I knew I wanted to be somewhere more rural. More like where I grew up. Though I will admit that the idea of living in a place where the human and Other populations were so well integrated did have a certain amount of appeal.”

Josie pushed her plate away and picked up her drink. “That’s our claim to fame, all right.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s the town’s only appeal.”

“No?”

Eli held her gaze and shook his head, his green eyes glittering brightly. “Not by a long shot.”

She leaned forward slightly, as if drawn to him by some magnetic force, which she supposed was as good an explanation as any. How else could she describe the attraction that seemed to be building between them?

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