Page 4 of Blood & Bone

Then he said, “Vampires in the Hollis place.”

The word arrived between them. Vampires. Not something, not strangers, not the kind of euphemism men like Deacon used when they didn’t want to say what they meant. He said it straight, same as he said everything that mattered, and it sat in the room, solid and unmoving.

June didn’t move. “How many?”

“Three. Showed up three nights ago. Been keeping to themselves so far.” He shifted his weight, one boot sole scraping softly on the linoleum. “Ramsey knows. Pack knows. Nobody’s making a move unless they make one first.”

“Should I be worried?”

“No.” Deacon put his hat back on. The motion was slow, deliberate, meant to be seen. “I’m not asking you to do anything about it. I just don’t want to find out what happens if someone does.”

The way he said it (not raised, not urgent, just flat and final) carried real gravity: a man who had seen things worth seeing and learned what not to disturb. June had known Deacon for five years. She’d stitched him twice, once after a hunt gone wrong and once after a bar fight he wouldn’t talk about. She had never heard him sound like that.

“Third Street,” she said.

He nodded. “Appreciate it.”

He left as he’d come. Through the rear door, pulling it closed behind him without looking back. June heard his boots on the concrete, then gravel, then nothing. The night swallowed sound fast out here, especially with the ridge pressing close on three sides.

She locked the door and stood in the fluorescent quiet. The boarders breathed around her. Six dogs, three cats, the collective rhythm of small lungs filling and emptying in the dark. The ridge road lay beyond the parking lot, black and empty, climbing toward the trees and whatever waited in them.

June didn’t move for a long time. Then she reached up and clicked off the light.

The knock came at eleven, heavy and urgent, and June knew before she opened the door that it wasn’t a scheduled appointment. The clinic had been dark for three hours. The boarders were asleep. She’d been in the back office doing paperwork under a single lamp, and the sound cut through the quiet, abrupt, wrong.

She opened the door and the dog came first. Big ridge-road mutt, maybe eighty pounds of hound and something else, brindle coat dark with blood along the left flank. The wound was deep, six inches of torn muscle, the edges ragged and weeping. The dog’s eyes had a glassy look that meant shock was setting in. Not good. Not terminal. Not something that could wait until morning, either.

The man holding the dog came second. Dark hair, dark eyes, not tall. Wiry. Young, or young-looking. Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. He had the dog cradled against his chest, one arm under its hindquarters, the other supporting its chest, and his face was set in a way that wasn’t panic but wasn’t calm either. Something in between. Something practiced.

June stepped back. “Exam table. Now.”

He came through the door without a word. The fluorescents clicked on when June hit the switch, harsh white light filling the treatment room, and the dog went from still to frantic in the space of a heartbeat. It scrambled against the man’s grip, whining high and thin, nails scraping against the stainless steel of the exam table as he set it down. The wound leaked fresh blood. The dog’s hind legs kicked, searching for purchase, and the man’s hands tightened, not restraining, exactly. Holding. Keeping the animal from hurting itself worse.

“Let go,” June said.

He did. The dog thrashed once, twice, and then June’s hands were on it. One palm flat against its chest, the other cradling its muzzle, her voice low and steady in its ear. Not soothing. Directive. The kind of voice that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with control. The dog went still. Its breathing slowed. Its eyes found hers and held.

“Good,” she said to the dog. Then, to the man: “Hold the hindquarters. Don’t let it roll.”

He moved to the back of the table without being told and put his hands on the dog’s hips. His grip was firm. Not crushing. Just exactly enough.

June worked. She clipped the fur around the wound, flushed it with saline, probed the depth with gloved fingers while the dog trembled but didn’t move. The laceration ran deep into the muscle. Something sharp, probably a branch or fencing wire, and the dog had hit it at a run. Clean, though. No debris. She’d seen worse.

She sutured in tight, even passes, each stitch placed with the particular precision of a hand that had done this ten thousand times. The needle curved through tissue, the suture pulled taut, the wound edges meeting under her fingers. She didn’t talk. The man behind her didn’t talk. The only sounds were the dog’s breathing, the soft click of the needle driver, and the occasional shift of the man’s boots on the linoleum when the dog tensed and he adjusted his grip.

His hands never shook. That was the first thing she noticed that wasn’t the obvious thing. Not just steady. Still. The kind of stillness that had nothing to do with concentration and everything to do with something fundamental, something that lived underneath the skin and didn’t vary. He held the dog’s hindquarters for two hours without shifting his weight, without fidgeting, without the small compensating shifts that come with muscle fatigue. June had worked with enough people to know what effort looked like. This wasn’t effort. She catalogued the rest of him the same clinical way she catalogued a gait or a wound. The line of his forearm, the economy of a body that wasted nothing, not even the effort of standing still. And made herself stop before the catalogue turned into something else. She didn’t entirely manage it.

An hour in, she needed the clock. The one on the far wall, above the supply cabinets. She glanced up at the window over the sink. The glass was dark, reflecting the treatment room back at her. And saw herself. Her own face, tired under the fluorescents, a streak of blood on her right sleeve. The sink. The cabinets. The dog on the table.

No one standing behind her.

She finished the suture she was holding. Set the needle down. Picked up the next one without turning around.

The last bandage went on at twelve-fifty. June taped the edges down, checked the dog’s pulse. Strong, regular, shock receding. And stripped her gloves. The bin accepted them with a soft clatter. The room went quiet.

She turned around.

The man was still at the back of the table, his hands now resting lightly on the dog’s flank. The animal had settled into something close to sleep, its breathing deep and even, the bandage a clean white square against its brindle coat. The man’s eyes met hers. Dark. Old. Older than his face by a measure she couldn’t name, something she felt more than saw. Something else moved under it too. An attention that had settled on her sometime in the last hour and hadn’t left, warmer than the fluorescents had any business making her feel.