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It left us mostly in the clear, although Taavi was definitely still getting the side-eye.

I looked around at the three other cops who had tried wading through the protests to get at our car. One was sporting something that would be a spectacular black eye, another had a split lip, and the last was holding an arm that didn’t quite look right.

All of them were staring at me as though I were a completely different species. Okay, even more different than I already was. Arcanids are subspecies—we all started off with human DNA in there somewhere. Well, okay.Mostof us. Those who weren’t born this way.

I wasn’t sure what to say.Hey, thanks for trying to get to the car and failing?Glad I had to get out and rescue you? Like, seriously. What the fuck was I supposed to say to these people? They’d just gotten beaten bloody for me, and I’d basically just walked through without a…

No, hang on.

The adrenaline was fading, and I was starting to notice pain in several places. I reached across my body to touch my side, which felt funny.

And, yes, that was blood. Okay.

Goddamnit, Taavi was going to give me fucking hell for this.

I hit the pavement before I even registered that I was blacking out.

19

Five in themorning is not the time you want to be going home from anywhere, much less the hospital, although I suppose I should count myself lucky that Igotto go home at five a.m., rather than end up in surgery or fucking dead as a result of the stab wound to my side.

Whoever did it—and a very annoyed Smith told me around nine that nobody was talking, because of fuckingcoursethey weren’t—had literally zero knowledge of anatomy, because they could have made it so very much worse for me.

Instead, I had seven stitches, a pint of blood that wasn’t mine, completely freaked out parents, a furious boyfriend, and a panicked best friend who had come to the hospital and planted himself in a chair next to me because, and I quote, “I can’t fucking lose anyone else right now, you selfish son of a bitch—no offence, Ma,” the last meant for my mother.

My mother had informed him she took no offence and that if I weren’t forty-one years old, she’d ground me.

From the corner where the nurses had decided to permit him to sit, Taavi had glared at me down the length of his pointed doggy nose. I had no idea how my parents had convinced the hospital staff to let a dog stay in my little curtained-off area in the ER. My mother’s response to that question had been to tell me to worry about myself. Taavi’s hard gaze echoed the sentiment.

Dad and Elliot both just looked uncomfortable and worried.

Mom fussed around me as she helped me to get dressed in the clothes she’d sent my dad home to get because the ones I had been wearing were soaked in a disgusting combination of my blood and the grimy slush of Shawano’s sidewalks. I now had on a pair of sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a fleece from the hospital gift shop because my lovely warm parka was absolutely fucked and my whole family was too short to donate a coat to me.

After I was dressed, the nurse came in with the final paperwork, then insisted on pushing me out in a wheelchair. My dad had found a harness and leashsomewhere, although I hadn’t the faintest idea where, because we’d never owned a dog, and had clipped it on Taavi, who paced along beside him like the world’s most well-behaved service dog.

Maybe that’s what my parents had told the hospital staff he was. I had no clue.

Elliot helped me into the passenger seat of my dad’s SUV, then herded my mom and a clearly still-annoyed Taavi toward his truck, which did not have shattered rear windows. I watched my canine boyfriend easily jump into the back seat and felt a surge of worry mixed with nostalgia. The first, because he wasn’t with me, and Elliot was a known shifter. With MFM assholes overrunning Shawano, I was genuinely worried someone would target Elliot—which, for the drive back to the house, also meant Taavi and my mother.

The nostalgia came from the first time Taavi’d been able to jump into my Charger, presumably safe back in Doc’s driveway in Richmond. He’d just gotten the cast taken off his leg, and was more than happy to jump, bound, and run after spending weeks hobbled and confined by plaster. He’d periodically looked back at me likeisn’t this great?, tongue hanging out of his mouth and one ear flopped over.

The look he shot me now was not happy in the slightest, and his mouth was shut, no tongue hanging out, and his ears were both pointed straight up like a jackal’s.

And then Elliot shut the back door, made sure my mom was in the front, and headed to the driver’s side. Dad pulled out of the pull-around, and a quick check in the side mirror told me Elliot was following us—probably quite deliberately.

“He’s mad at you, isn’t he?” my dad asked, his voice gentle.

“Yeah,” I answered. There wasn’t any point in hiding it.

“Because you got out of the car?”

“Yeah.”

My dad took a breath. “Whydidyou get out of the car?” he asked.

I swallowed, staring out the window at the mostly-dark windows of shops and houses as Dad drove home. “I couldn’t watch them beat that guy to death,” I answered.

“The cop?”