There are more of them than I expected.
In the two weeks since the revelation, my practice has quietly shifted. The routine work continues: vaccinations, dental checks, and the elderly Labrador with arthritis who comes in every fortnight for his injection. But woven between the ordinary appointments, a second category of patient has begun to appear. Animals with injuries that heal too fast. Livestock with behavioural patterns that don’t match their breed. Wildlife turning up in places it shouldn’t be, acting in ways that suggest an intelligence beyond what biology should allow.
And the owners. That’s the part that fascinates me.
Some of them are pack. I can tell now, the way you can tell a colleague from a stranger in a crowded room. The body temperature, the subtle deference, the way their scent carries that warm, layered quality, I’m learning to read like a second language. They bring in their animals and watch me work with an attention that goes beyond normal concern. They’re checking.Making sure the new vet can be trusted with things the old vet either didn’t notice or chose not to mention.
But some of them aren’t pack. Pete the farmer isn’t. The woman who brought in a cat last week with scratch marks from something she described as “a very large bird” isn’t. They’re human, or they seem human, and yet they exist in the same quiet arrangement of awareness and careful silence that defines supernatural Mistwood.
This village has layers. I knew that from the beginning, from Maggie’s knowing smiles and Rebecca’s careful phrasing and the way certain conversations bend around things left unsaid. But I’m only now understanding how many layers there are, and how many people in Mistwood are living quietly alongside the extraordinary while pretending it’s ordinary.
I’m making notes. I’m building a map, not geographical but relational, of who knows what and who pretends they don’t. It’s the most intellectually engaging work I’ve done since my dissertation, and it’s happening in a converted cottage in a village that isn’t on most maps.
I walk to The Wren at lunchtime because the surgery is empty until three, and I need coffee that isn’t instant. The café is quiet, the mid-morning rush gone, and the afternoon crowd not yet arrived. June is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the woman behind thecounter is someone I’ve noticed before but never spoken to.
She’s young, mid-twenties, with dark hair cut short and a face that would be striking if she weren’t so clearly trying not to be noticed. She moves behind the counter with a quiet efficiency that suggests she’s been doing this for a while, but there’s something contained about her. Held in. As if she’s taking up less space than her body actually occupies.
“Flat white, please,” I say, noticing her name badge reads ‘Nell’.
She nods and starts making it without small talk, which I appreciate. While she works, I find myself watching her with the attentive stillness that’s become my default since the emergence. My senses read her automatically, the way they now read everyone, cataloguing data I’m still learning to interpret.
She’s pack. I can tell from her temperature when she hands me the cup, from the subtle layering of her scent, from the way she holds herself with the quiet physical awareness that all the wolves seem to share. Beta, I’d guess, though I’m still learning to read hierarchy through scent alone, and there’s something about her that doesn’t quite fit the pattern. The other Betas I’ve met have a solidity to them, an ease with their own position. Nell’s stillness reads less like ease and morelike waiting. As if she’s listening for something that hasn’t arrived yet.
“I’m Phoebe,” I say, because it feels wrong to keep coming in without introducing myself.
“Nell.” She meets my eyes briefly, and there’s a flicker of something in her expression. Not unfriendly. Assessing. The look of someone who watches people carefully and keeps her conclusions to herself. “You’re the new vet.”
“News travels.”
“It’s Mistwood. Everything travels.” The ghost of a smile. “Enjoy the coffee.”
She turns back to the machine. I take my cup to a table by the window. Sit with it. Think about the quiet woman behind the counter, the way she watched me. Her stillness like the surface of deep water: calm on top, with no way of knowing what’s underneath.
I add her to the map in my head. Not because she’s done anything remarkable. Because something about Nell feels like a question I haven’t thought to ask yet.
That afternoon, I treat a border collie with a dislocated toe (routine), a hamster with overgrown teeth (tedious), and a cat that someone brings in wrapped in a blanket with injuries that are unmistakably supernatural in origin. Three parallel scratches across the shoulder, deep, clean, with that same accelerated healing signature I’ve been documenting.
The owner is a woman in her forties I haven’t seen before. She’s human. I’m certain of that. But she handles the cat with the careful competence of someone who knows exactly what caused the injuries and isn’t remotely surprised by them.
“Fox,” she says, when I ask. Her tone suggests the conversation is over.
Fox, my arse. I’ve seen fox wounds. This isn’t one.
I treat the cat. The scratches close visibly as I clean them, the tissue knitting together beneath my fingers with a speed that makes my veterinary training quietly weep. The cat purrs through the entire procedure, which is unusual for a wounded animal and which tells me this isn’t a normal cat. It turns its head to observe the wound cleaning, then repositions itself to give me better access to the deepest scratch, with a deliberateness that no ordinary domestic shorthair possesses.
After the woman leaves, I sit at my desk and open the notebook.
Case 7. Domestic shorthair, female, approx. 4 years. Three parallel lacerations, left lateral shoulder. Clean edges, consistent spacing. Accelerated healing observed during treatment—wound closure rate approx. 10x normal for feline tissue. Owner attributed to fox. Owner is human but displayed no surprise at healing rate. Cat exhibited no fear response during treatment and demonstrated procedural awareness (turned toobserve wound cleaning, repositioned to allow better access).
Note: Healing signature similar to cases 2, 4, and 5 but with distinct variation. Not identical to wolf-type healing observed in R. Different species?
I close the notebook and look out of the surgery window at the village beyond. The high street is quiet in the late afternoon, a few people moving between shops, the lights of The Wren glowing warm through the autumn grey. Ordinary. Unremarkable. A village like a hundred other villages in the English countryside.
Except it isn’t. Mistwood is a place where cats heal at ten times the normal rate and dogs come home with wounds made by things that don’t appear in any wildlife guide, and farmers lie about what happened to their livestock with the ease of people who’ve been keeping secrets their whole lives.
I’m starting to understand why the cottage was so cheap.
I’m also starting to understand that the veterinary practice I thought I was building, the quiet rural surgery treating normal animals for normal ailments, is actually something much more interesting. I’m the first vet Mistwood has had in years who can see what’s really happening. Who can smell the supernatural on awound and feel the difference between ordinary tissue and something that shouldn’t exist.
