Page 1 of Wolf Bane (Marked #3)

Chapter One

“I think this is it,” Reba announced, dropping a cardboard box—like the kind you’d get at a bakery—onto the front desk of the clinic. “Forget the soaps, the knitting, the macrame swings, the stained-glass wind chimes, the singing telegrams?—”

“Oh, yeah,” I mused, leaning back in the chair. “I remember your singing telegram business. That went better than I thought it would, honestly.”

Reba glowered, coming around the desk to shove her purse in the bottom drawer next to my ankle. “I got two clients and one of ‘em thought I was a stripper. Seriously. Me! A stripper! I’m not nearly graceful enough to pull that off. What stripper shows up wearing Doctor Scholls and an arm brace?”

“One who slipped and fell on her leftover stock of glycerin from her soapmaking business?”

She sniffed. “Try it.”

I took a sniff of the box before opening it. “Peanut brittle? Seriously?”

Reba beamed. “Seriously. Peanut brittle.”

I nodded at Reba, crunching through one of the pieces she’d offered me. It was like trying to chew glass, more brittle than peanut, but had a nice heat behind it.

“Did you put jalapeno in this?”

She beamed. “I’ve also made chocolate peanut brittle, pumpkin spice peanut brittle, eggnog peanut brittle, which is kind of a misnomer because there’s no egg in it and it’s vegan, and butter rum peanut brittle, and?—”

“How many flavors did you make?” I asked, finally getting the bite down without my teeth sticking together. “And why?”

“Ten so far, and because I saw how well Causey James’ brittle did at the Winter Fest in Grapevine and decided to give it a go.” Reba smiled smugly, plucking a reddish-hued piece from the box between us on my desk. “Hers is good. Mine’s better.”

“I’ve never had Causey’s brittle, so I’ll have to take your word for it.” I picked up one of the red pieces, and, after a cautious sniff, took a bite. “Holy crap.”

“Masala chai flavor,” she said, crunching. “Dane suggested it. I was thinking make little bundles, you know? Cafe flavors, spicy flavors, traditional, and then just some really out-there ones, you know? Like…” She hummed. “Oh! Grape jelly flavored because peanut butter and jelly!”

My dentist was going to hate me, but I took another piece of brittle. “I think you might be on to something,” I said.

Reba clapped her hands excitedly.

“Take this away from me or I’m gonna spend all morning eating this instead of seeing patients.”

Reba whisked the box away, and I went to the tiny employee-only bathroom in the back of the new clinic to wash my face and hands, then give my teeth a good scrub while Reba wiped down my desk and got her hands and face clean.

We were only one week into the new clinic being open, causing anaphylaxis in patients who might have a peanut allergy wouldn’t be that great of an idea.

Though it did make me miss working in the coroner’s office. Very little bothered my patients there.

I still went in once in a while, when they needed the help, but the state had pretty much cut most of the rural medical examiners out of the budget for the next five years, so I was adrift. Or would be adrift if it hadn’t been for Werewolves International.

Okay, that isn’t what they called themselves, but it was less of a mouthful than International Committee of Were-Shifter Relations. Or, as their business cards said: IC Mediation Group.

Because you never knew when someone outside your little group of weirdos might get hold of your information.

For all the bullshit they’d been up to for the past year—at least in my life, and God only knows what they’d been doing before then—they did have some pretty solid ideas they wanted to put into play.

Like setting up accessible clinics near rural were and shifter communities.

Which was pretty much all of them since, by and large, weres and shifters were clannish even when they didn’t form packs.

Generations of otherness and humans being able to just know something was weird about you and yours meant they (we?) kept to ourselves a lot.

Add in the fact that weres and shifters were just different from humans—faster heart rates, higher body temperature, weird metabolism, and healing abilities are just the tip of the iceberg—it made sense to open up specialty clinics.

Making the clinic bigger than a typical human clinic was an added bonus—not only did it feel less cramped for humans, the weres and shifters didn’t get as antsy.

Given that the last time there was any sort of specialty clinic for weres, it had been in the form of a sort of sanitarium,according to Cullen,where weres who were out of control with something they called moon sickness with symptoms that sounded like some sort of severe mood disorder back in the day got sent. .

And as one of the few were-adjacent medical professionals out there, the IC tapped me to helm one near Belmarais. Well. I say tapped . More like strong-armed and pushed . I didn’t exactly hate it, but I really missed forensic pathology.

But the clinic… it was okay. And I’d get used to having patients that were, you know… warm.

“Hey, Lan, Eustace Robards just called to see if we can work him in,” Reba announced, drawing me out of my navel gazing. “Said he got bit by a dog. Told him we got time now, so he’s on his way.”

“I’ll get room one ready.”

* * *

“You look awful, Doctor Babin.”

“I was up all night just hoping I’d get to see you today, Mr. Robards,” I said, flashing him a grin.

Eustace Robards, probably older than God, was one of those old dears who knew everyone, even if you didn’t realize you were on his radar, and he knew everything.

And I mean everything .

“Oh, I’m not so doddering as to believe that.” He chuckled, waiting patiently while I readied the suture kit. “Not when you’ve got that hunk of man waitin’ on you.”

My face warmed—I could feel it all the way up to my earlobes—and I shook my head. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Maybe I like my men older.”

He laughed again, wincing when I started dabbing the blood away from his shin. “It’s been ages since I got a good scar,” he mused. “Think this one’s gonna be a beaut.”

“Reba said you fell off your porch. Did you experience any dizziness beforehand? Lightheadedness? A loss of vision or something?”

Robards snapped his teeth together, his jovial expression fading rapidly. “Something like that, yeah. I did indeed fall.” He held up one hand so I could see the barked skin on his palms. “Right on my rump, too. Got a bruise comin’ in and everything.”

With the blood gone, the wound was easier to see. Jagged, torn and deep, it had weird scalloping along one edge, the skin ripped back rather than simply cut.

“Mr. Robards,” I said carefully, holding his leg in my hands even as he tensed, like he was about to bolt. “Did someone bite you? Who was it? Did you get their name? Human mouths are filthy, Mr. Robards.”

“Oh, now, it was just the neighbor’s dog!

She didn’t mean harm!” His chuckle sounded forced.

His leg jerked in my grasp as I started irrigating the wound itself.

“This is hardly a scratch. I told my daughter, Eliza, it weren’t any use going to the ER about it.

I’d just sit there till the damn thing was nearly healed anyway and end up with a staph infection for my troubles.

But she’s moved back home after that split with the jackass she married, and she and the Clemenses next door get on like a house afire.

” He shook his head with a small, pleased smile.

“Old Celestine, she was on my side, said it weren’t nothin’ to worry about. ”

I hummed noncommittally, grabbing another syringe of saline solution.

Celestine Clemens and her son Vinnie had been some of the most vocal about me and Ethan.

Well. Mostly about me. Ethan was just catching strays, I think.

They didn’t even try to keep it in the confines of clan meetings, at least not Celestine.

She’d made a point, both before and after the clinic opened, to loudly refer to me as a mutt and to try and filibuster meetings when Ethan was leading them, demanding votes on whether or not he should stay in charge of the clan.

Ethan half suspected she wanted Vinnie to be clan leader, but at the heart of it all was that she wanted the clan to be pure .

She’d be thrilled if every human in the vicinity just vanished one day and took shifters and part-weres with them.

Fuck… I’m gonna have to call animal control on them, aren’t I?

“What kind of dog is it? I’ll need to report this to the county, Mr. Robards. Any animal bite is dangerous but unprovoked ones could indicate something like rabies.” Unless the dog that bit you was a wolf and that wolf had a virus that made it hyper aggressive. Fuck.

“I have no idea.” He sniffed, good humor gone.

He stopped trying to pull away and let me continue treating the wound, though not without a grunt of annoyance at my ministrations.

. His anxiety was ratcheting up—I could smell the sour funk of it making its way through the clean lavender of his laundry soap and leathery wood of his aftershave.

Something else was there, too. Something earthy but not pleasantly so.

Like the mud from the edge of a swamp, where it slimed up with rotting vegetation, like blood gone bad with the fishy sharp tang of rot.

It was just the very faintest whiff though, barely noticeable even with my slightly better than human senses.

I wondered if I could get Tyler to stick his head in here and take a whiff.

Sorry, Mr. Robards, I need to call my boyfriend’s brother real quick.

Sit tight for about an hour and, oh, hey, do you mind if he takes a whiff of your leg?

That would lose me my new license real quick.