Adriana #3
“I guess I didn’t think of that,” she murmured, cheeks heating.
She felt oddly culpable. The fish toss had been her favorite game to work, and she had always gone out of her way to have conversations with each little bowl, giving the fish a pep talk, hoping they were enthusiastic about going on to their new homes.
How many fish deaths were you complicit in, topping the bowls off with discount spring water?
Of course it was bad for them! See? This is why you work in emergency and not in diagnostics. “Poor fish.”
“We have the same game, actually, but it's bowls of rubber ducks, if you’ve got a little one who wants to play. Probably four or five booths down from here, on the left.”
The werewolf was younger than her by at least five years or more, and there was no reason for him to seem familiar to her eyes, but the tickle persisted.
There was something about him . . . and then he shifted, moving the plush dinosaur he’d been waving at passing kids, giving her a good look at the name tag he wore for the first time. Owen Hemming ~ Commissioner.
Hemming.
Adriana stiffened, cold moving up her neck like a ghost from her past had just licked up her spine, understanding why he looked so familiar. It wasn’t possible. She refused to even consider that she’d taken a job in the same city where he worked at the hospital. No, no, no!
“Are you related to anyone at Healers? The hospital?” she demanded, uncaring if her tone was suddenly crazed.
What if he was here? What if he was a doctor in the practice?
! She forced herself to exhale. He wasn’t.
She’d met them all and already knew he wasn’t.
But he might be at the hospital next door.
“No. I think that’s the one place we’re not,” he laughed.
“Bit of a touchy subject, probably.” The younger man’s eyebrows had shot up again, his smile almost amused, eyes narrowing just a beat later as if he’d considered that she was asking to go to the hospital.
“Is everything . . . do you need medical attention? Are you okay? I can call someone if you—”
“No, no,” Adriana blurted, taking a step back, cheeks burning in mortification.
He’s going to call an ambulance if you don’t get it together.
First you want a bag of mistreated fish and now you’re giving him the second degree about the hospital for no reason.
Of course he thinks you need inpatient. Closer to that grippy sock holiday than you think. “I-I’m good. Thank you for the info.”
She whirled, breathing out at last once she’d moved on from the bemused-looking werewolf, allowing the crowd to swallow her up, hiding her completely.
See? You’re being silly. She started her new job in just a few days, and there was no one at the hospital named Hemming.
Of course there isn’t. There’s nothing from your past here.
Nothing from the emergency department here.
Nothing from your life at all. This is a brand new place and you can be someone brand new in it.
Adriana pushed on, treating herself to a funnel cake from the stand beside the lemonade, deciding that the people watching was more interesting than anything the makeshift fair had to offer.
She’d thought she’d understood the concept of multispecies.
The city she’d lived in for years was technically multispecies.
Every single shift, she would treat at least a handful of goblins and trolls, occasionally even a minotaur or an orc, although they were farther and fewer between.
This, though . . . she had never seen anything like this.
Mothfolk laughed with satyrs, a centaur stood in line to buy raffle tickets behind a snake person.
Children of every species ran pell-mell across the lawn, trailing balloons and bubble wands, clutching small toys they’d won at the various games.
There were amphibians, minotaurs, ogres .
. . and they all live here! Together! In this nice place!
The thought followed her as she joined the line for lemonade, eavesdropping as the sylvan woman in front of her greeted the teenager working the stand by name and asked after his grandmother’s knee surgery, then again when a different teenage volunteer, ostensibly the one taking payment, waved away her attempt to hand over exact change because “Jack paid for the rest of the line.”
The interaction lasted less than thirty seconds yet somehow left her feeling as though she’d accidentally crashed a private neighborhood barbecue where everyone knew everyone else and was too polite to point out that she didn’t belong. Who the fuck is Jack?!
“Well, now, here she is! Our new doctor! Welcome to town!”
Adriana started at the sudden voice at her elbow, sloshing the full cup of lemonade over her knuckles.
Surely this was a bit. It was as if her inner thoughts were being broadcast over the microphone in the gazebo, advertising that she was crashing a private event.
She was going to find a video of herself later that same night, making the rounds on social media, “whole town adopts clueless stranger.”
Either that, or she was about to be sacrificed in their profane ritual.
The speaker was a woman with a long, sheep-like face, her tightly coiled puff of hair secured with a bright pink band, a complete stranger to her eyes.
“I . . . what? I mean, I think you have the wrong—”
“You’re the new doctor, right? Oh my stars, you are, right? Can you imagine if I’m just randomly accosting perfect strangers for no good reason?!”
Adriana wanted to point out that was exactly what the woman was doing . . . but neither was her assumption incorrect. “I-I am? I mean, yes, I am. But how did you know?”
The sheep woman waved a hand. “Oh, I run the coffee shop. I know everything about everyone five minutes before it happens. I’m so glad you made it to the festival! Hard move? Kanar said you were coming from a bit of a distance?”
Kanar was the orc in the practice, a model-handsome pediatrician. Her face heated at the thought of being talked about. But this is just sharing harmless community news, right?
“I did, but it was fine. I-I moved myself. Workers are coming to unpack the trailer tomorrow, so I should be okay.”
“Love that, I’m a do-it-myself girl as well. Xavier? This is the new doctor!”
Adriana felt the flush spread up her ears when a man with the horns of a ram and long locs secured at the back of his head turned, giving her a warm smile, extending a hand. “Welcome to town. They are really looking forward to you starting at the clinic.”
“This is my brother, and this is my husband, Reg . . . Like I said,” the sheepwoman went on.
“We know everything. If there’s anything you need help with, where to go, where to shop, I’m your girl.
Now, make sure you open your welcome packet when it comes in the mail this week!
There’s a pastry punch card in there for our shop — buy ten, get one free, and all teachers, medical, and first responders get a free medium house roast every day. And welcome to town!”
The smile Adriana gave the sheepwoman in response was more genuine than any she could remember crossing her face in months. They’re really nice and they give discounts?!
Her attempt to thank the coffee shop owners was swallowed by a sudden cheer rippling out from a nearby tent. She and the sheepwoman both turned in surprise, her brother leaning in to hear a reedy troll.
“Xenna, your man is stripping down. Ruby just said he’s next on the tank.”
The coffeeshop proprietress spun, her arms pinwheeling. She shoved a full bag of kettle corn in Adriana’s arms, sloshing the sweating cup of lemonade again, pulling off the bag she wore and thrusting it at the second ram-horned man.
“Hold my bag, Reg! We are getting that werewolf dripping wet tonight!”
“Should you be this excited to see that fireman in his drawers when I am standing right here?”
Xenna was already gone, pushing through the crowd with a fistful of money.
By the time Adriana edged her way closer to the noise, the crowd was so thick that she could barely see the platform. The man sitting atop it was practically naked, waving theatrically to the crowd he’d gathered.
Squinting, she tried to make him out . . . dark-haired with a lean, muscular frame, details she could only pick out based on the vaguely triangular shape of his upper body. Whoever he was, the town seemed deeply invested in his survival.
Or perhaps more accurately, she thought, surveying the whooping bystanders, deeply invested in ending it. This is like a public execution.
Another werewolf.
Her nose had picked them out of the crowd since her arrival at the square, one after another, able to smell them long before she could see them, a habit etched into the fabric of her very being.
It was important to be aware of them, to know where they were, to determine if one was surrounded.
Wolves, in her experience, weren’t friendly to her kind.
That’s only because you lived near the pack.