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“A doctor is allowed to have questions.”

It seems hypocritical to spend time learning how to care for people one doesn’t respect, but Sascha doesn’t say that. “So you think you can figure it out?”

Petra scoffs. “Of course I do. Don’t bring me places if you’re going to insult me.”

Collapsing onto the opposite bed, Sascha breathes a heavy sigh of relief. Petra has taken Sascha’s life in her hands many times over the years, and he’s confident that if anyone can put Avery back together, it’s going to be her.

The run he’ll be missing tonight pokes at the back of his thoughts. Saschashouldtext his dad that something came up, but he doesn’t want to. In fact, he turns off his phone entirely, allowing his attention to slip across the space between the beds, watching Petra’s deft, brown hands drag supplies from her bulky black bag.

Once she relaxes, Petra goes from stiff and professional tofascinated, and her steady, patient demeanor becomes flavored with enthusiasm.

The severity of Avery’s injuries requires traditional medicine, so Petra begins by cleaning, stitching, and dressing the wounds. While she’s doing that, Sascha uses her laptop toperform endless searches, pulling up dozens of threads and blogs exploring werecreature biology.

The Parahuman Resource Agency—a government branch designed to monitor shifter affairs within their mostly human society—has recently begun releasing more information on werecreatures, but there isn’t much publicly available beyond the longstanding advisory from the CDC on how to avoid exposure to the werevirus. With the lack of concrete studies, they’re left with other people’s trial and error DIY.

Once Avery’s external wounds have been tended, Petra reclaims her laptop to peruse Sascha’s research on the interaction between magic and werecreature physiology.

Years of treating the symptoms of Sascha’s spinning sickness required Petra to get creative. Moving through the aether as a normal shifter would risks vertigo episodes, limiting Sascha’s options for shifting at will. To prevent triggering these episodes with normal sweeps of healing magic, Petra developed a technique to propel her magic in small, circular currents, targeting problem areas with precision. It prevented the worsening of serious flare-ups and greatly decreased the amount of episodes Sascha experienced on a weekly and monthly basis.

These established techniques prove unexpectedly easy to modify for a werecreature patient.

Rather than passing through the aether to complete a shift, werecreatures are controlled by the magic carried within the werevirus itself, which travels through the infected host’s circulatory system. By Petra’s estimation, the amount of energy it takes for a man of Avery’s size to undergo a transformation as drastic as the were-ursine depletes his magic reserves quickly, leaving too little to support the rapid healing parahumans typically benefit from. Her solution is to target the areas that have suffered the most damage and repair the magic pathways, allowing Avery’s circulatorysystem to naturally carry the werevirus’ magic into those critical locations.

For the most part, Avery sleeps. Petra administers hourly treatments, moving in increments as she would with Sascha. As she works, she explains her process. Throughout the lectures, Sascha listens attentively. He doesn’t understand 90% of what she’s saying, but appreciates being included nonetheless.

Eventually, the sessions take their toll. After ten hours of tireless work, Petra is so drained she only protests lightly when Sascha insists on putting her to bed. Getting her to rest allows Sascha to finally close the gap between himself and Avery, as he’s been aching to do since they arrived.

Ever-so-carefully, he eases onto the bed beside Avery’s unconscious body. Even though Sascha is physically exhausted, his mind is wide awake. He ghosts his thumb over the knob of Avery’s wristbone, one of few spots on his body that lacks stitches or bandages.

As the next several hours pass, Sascha feels capable for the first time in… forever. Most of his life has been spent trapped behind layers of protective insulation, rendering him useless in so many situations it became his native state. In this hotel room, though, Sascha attends to both of his companions, supporting Petra in doing her job without allowing her to work herself to death while keeping up with Avery’s needs outside of Petra’s medical guidance.

He shoves his salad at Petra, glad for an excuse to not eat it himself, and when Avery can’t manage to swallow even small bites of a sandwich, he orders a smoothie with a billion added supplements and patiently forces Avery to choke it down.

In addition to having other miscellany delivered, including a charger for Avery’s broken phone, Sascha helps Avery to the bathroom with a surprising lack of awkwardness. He allows him what privacy he can, butremains outside the door in case his adorably pitiful patient calls out. Once, in the middle of easing Avery into bed, Sascha looks up to see Petra smiling at him, though she merely shakes her head when he asks why.

After a full twenty-four hours, Petra has to leave.

“I need to get back to the clinic before your father flips his lid,” she says, a wry smile tilting her full lips.

“What did he say?” Sascha hasn’t turned on his phone, avoiding the inevitable storm that will arise when he returns to the pack house after disappearing without a word. Petra reassured Samuel that Sascha was safe, but kept her distance from being implicated in his absence. A fair compromise.

“He wants to know where I’ve been, since someone mentioned they’ve only seen the assistant medics in the clinic.” Huffing through her nostrils, she adds, “I have no excuses. My whole life is on the pack lands. I told him I had to drive out of town to retrieve a certain ingredient and was grateful he didn’t ask additional questions. All I said about you is that you asked me to let him know you were visiting an old friend farther south.”

“I don’t have any old friends,” Sascha mutters. Only an endless cycle of new ones, hookups and chat windows active for five months, six tops, before the messages petered out into nothing. So many group chats gone dusty until Sascha had no choice but to leave them to preserve his sanity. Sometimes, he wonders what they did with the notification of his departure, if they even cared.

Petra doesn’t respond. She hugs him, then departs, leaving him with instructions to turn on his phone, deal with his father, and text or call her if Avery’s condition worsens. Anxious, Sascha tails Petra to the parking lot so he can stand next to her when he powers up the device. They both wince as a slew of notification sounds bursts from the speaker, alerting him to angry messages from not only Sascha’s father, but also his cousins and Aunt Marty. When Petra’s ridesharearrives, Sascha barely restrains himself from clutching at her like a cub.

Sascha lingers outside until the car turns onto the street with Petra inside, and only when it’s no longer in his sight line does Sascha return to the hotel lobby. He can’t make himself call his father, so instead, he shoots off a brief text explaining the signal where his ‘friend’ lives is perpetually shitty. He offers a lukewarm apology for the lack of communication and snaps a selfie with a thumbs-up to prove he hasn’t been kidnapped. Afterward, he hurriedly mutes the contact before Samuel can respond.

The next day, Avery feels better. He eats, lets Sascha change his bandages, laughs a few times, wheezes with pain, accepts painkillers, and rests his head on Sascha’s shoulder while he dozes. He watches videos on Sascha’s phone and kisses him with careful, dry lips, still so weak and fragile.

The day after that, Avery’s forehead feels warm. He insists he’s fine, that he feels better, and eats with much more enthusiasm. He even walks his own ass to the bathroom without Sascha’s support. By that evening, though, his skin is burning. Sascha pulls the noncontact thermometer from Avery’s brow, startles at the high reading, and nearly drops his phone in his hurry to call Petra, begging her to return.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

Avery