“Wait, what?” Cade frowned. “Why?”
Maddox raised an eyebrow. “You sure those drugs didn’t fuck with his mind, Grey?”
“I’m sure.”
“You should have told us, Cade.” Maddox scrubbed a hand down his face. “This is a fucking nightmare of epic proportions.”
“Sounds like hyperbole to me.” Cade shifted against the stack of pillows, wondering when he’d leaned back against them. “I don’t remember a lot about today,” he admitted. “Lucy took me to some doctor in Española, and he nearly outed me as a wolf, but—”
“He knew about shifters?” Maddox scowled.
Cade shook his head. “I don’t think so. But he was trying to tell Lucy why she needed to surrender me to a conservation officer. You should have seen her telling him he didn’t know what he was talking about.” Cade chuckled. “She’s got some fire, that one.”
Grey and Maddox shared a look that wasn’t lost on Cade.
“What?” He demanded.
“She thinks you’re a dog,” Grey said. “She named you Atlas.”
Cade blinked at that news. He remembered Lucy calling him that, but he’d already been pretty out of it.
“At least she’d picked a good name.”
Not something like Wolfie or Midnight.
“Are you really lying here in her bed happily playing the lap dog?” Maddox scowled.
“No.” Cade sat up, ignoring the pain in his hip and the way his head ached.
“Here’s what’s going to happen.” Maddox said evenly. “You’re going to get up and leave this place as a human. After what it took to get you to shift, we aren’t risking you re-entering wolf form until your bones re-knit.”
“My bones?” Cade scowled. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You should have been brought in immediately.” Grey growled. “She did well with you, but you should have gotten medical care or shifted right away so things realigned properly from the beginning. As it was, I had to readjust your hip and your femur. You’ll need to take it easy for the next few days, and no shifting for the rest of the week, at a minimum.”
“Shit.”
Cade shook his head as the reality of his situation set in. Shifters healed quickly, but their anatomy and needs varied based on their form. By staying in his wolf form and not getting medical attention right away when he’d needed it, he’d limited his own recovery, and possibly endangered his own mobility.
“Look, I couldn’t have shifted even if I’d wanted to when it first happened.”
“That’s because you’d shattered your pelvis.”
Cade frowned at Grey’s reply. “That vet said I’d just broken a leg.”
“That’s because by the time he took the x-rays, you’d already begun healing. And incorrectly at that.” Grey frowned and started pacing.
Maddox shook his head. “She should have called us first.”
“The important thing is that she called.” Grey kept up with the pacing. “But now, she’s attached to this ‘dog’,” Grey gestured to Cade, “and we’re going to have to take him away from her somehow.”
“Then we need to leave.” Maddox said. “We already told her he can’t stay here. We’ll tell her we had to take him in for diagnostics or some shit.”
“And then what, Maddox?” Grey frowned. “We tell her he died?” He shook his head. “She’s done everything she could for Cade, treated him like her own pack. She deserves better than that.”
“She knows he’s not her dog,” Maddox pointed out. “We tell her we found his family and we send ‘the dog’ far the fuck away from here. That way, he doesn’t have to ‘die’ and Lucy won’t have to know about our world.”
“But she shops in town.” Grey said. “She visits the grocer and the farm stands.”
