CHAPTER 1
MASON
When the banging on my door woke me, it took me a moment to remember where I was and what was going on. And my brain only kicked into gear after I’d tripped over the chair beside my bed that shouldn’t have been there, because I still thought I was sleeping in my apartment in Cincinnati and not in a house in Goose Run, Virginia, that smelled of mothballs and Old Spice.
I swore at the chair as I pulled on my hoodie, shoved my phone in the kangaroo pocket out of habit, and then headed down the stairs. I hit the wall in the hallway where I thought the light switch was and missed.
“Just a second!” I yelled down the hallway. Through the frosted glass panels of the front door, I could make out the faint shape of a person standing on the porch. I tried once more for the switch, and this time I found it. Light flooded the hallway as I unlocked the door and opened it, leaving it on the chain while I assessed whether or not my late-night visitor was legit.
He was a young guy, cute, with dark, mussed-up hair. I didn’t take in much more than that because my attention was immediately drawn to the bundled-up sweatshirt in his arms,and the blood that had soaked through to the scrubs he was wearing.
I shut the door, unhooked the chain, and opened the door again. “Come on through.”
The guy didn’t move.
“I’m the relief veterinarian for Dr. Ross,” I said. I was also his great-nephew, which explained how I’d been talked into taking the position for three months at way below my usual rate of pay—I never could say no to Uncle Jim. Of course, the biggest selling point had been getting away from my parents’ relationship drama in Cincinnati. I was twenty-eight years old and they still treated me like I was an ungrateful teenager if I didn’t drop everything to listen to them bitch and moan about the divorce. “He’s on vacation. Come on through to the clinic.”
The bottom floor of Uncle Jim’s house was the clinic. It was a little tired around the edges, but it was serviceable, and everything was permeated with the competing scents of antiseptic and dog.
I turned on the lights as I moved, leading the way through the reception area and into the examination room. The guy followed.
“Okay,” I said. “What have we got?”
The guy gently set the bundled hoodie down on the examination table, keeping his arms around it. I reached in and peeled back the bloody fabric, and an amber eye regarded me from behind a curtain of trembling, tangled hair.
The dog was smallish, hairy, and shaking like a faulty spin cycle. One ear looked pretty torn up, the source of all the blood.
I peeled back the dog’s lip to check the color of its gums, and it gave a warning growl.
“You’re okay,” I told it, which was a blatant lie, but there was really no way to effectively communicate to an animal that the big scary stranger poking you in the face when you were alreadyhurting wasn’t actually a bad thing. I had the scars to prove it. “Good girl—or, no. Good boy. You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
I had no idea why I chose to meet the guy’s gaze when I said that, but his startled expression and his wider-than-an-owl’s brown eyes told me my timing was shit.
I let the dog’s lip go and slid my hands under his trembling body, feeling my way carefully to his back legs. I pressed my fingers against the femoral artery where his thigh met his groin and counted his pulse.
“His gums are pale and his heart rate is slightly elevated,” I said. “I can’t see any obvious injuries apart from his ear, though. So what I want to do is take a look at that next. Have you got a good hold on him?”
The guy nodded grimly, his face pale.
First order of business was a muzzle. Second was some opioid pain relief mixed with a mild sedative. Then I grabbed the clippers and began to cut away the matted hair on the dog’s ear. Clumps of blood-caked hair fell onto the table as I carefully worked to expose the injury.
“Hold onto him,” I said.
The dog yelped and squirmed, tearing the injury, and fresh blood welled. The dog shook his head, and blood splattered all over me, the table, and the guy.
“Hey,” I said as the dog struggled to free himself from the guy’s grip. “I said hold onto?—”
And I looked up just in time to see the guy’s eyes roll back in his head as he slumped silently to the floor in a dead faint.
“Fuck.”
Even the dog stopped to stare.
Great.
Now I hadtwopatients.
I set the dog on the floor while I dealt with the guy. The dog shook his head again, more blood splattering, and that wasjust what I needed to deal with on top of being woken up in the middle of the night—wiping down the floor and the walls in addition to the table when all this was done. But I took a moment to notice that once the dog had Jackson Pollocked the cabinets and actually started to wander around, he was moving okay. Then I turned my attention to the guy.
