Adriana
“Hey, I just wanted to make sure you have someplace safe to go for the moon. Have you had time to look around town a bit?”
The full moon, her first in Cambric Creek, was at the end of the week, at last.
She had been asked the same question the previous afternoon by Dr. Marsh, the handsome shifter nearly giving her a heart attack over his assertion that he’d wanted to check in.
“Dr. Brunelli, I was beginning to think I’d imagined hiring you! Every time I come through to check in, you’re nowhere to be found.”
Her back had stiffened, hands closing around the tablet she clutched as though it were a lifeline.
It was embarrassing, the way she could be reduced to a squeaking bobble-head doll, her insides a puddle of panic and defensiveness in the face of authority.
It had been that way her whole life. She always assumed the worst was about to befall her the instant any higher up wanted to “check in,” her hackles raising, jaws snapping within.
“Relax, Adriana. I know you’ve been busy with patients. I’m not accusing you of hiding in the office. But I really have wanted to check in. I feel like we hired you and then left you to fend for yourself entirely.”
Dr. Marsh reminded her of a certain clique from medical school, all privilege and pretension, most of whom had coasted into surgical residencies or orthopedics.
Or private practice, apparently. The same clique Trapp Hemming had belonged to, she thought sourly.
The werewolf hadn’t crossed her mind in years, and now here, in the course of little more than a week, she’d been forced to ruminate on his big dick and perfect jawline more times than she cared for.
“Have plans for the moon?” the shifter asked conversationally, swinging his bag onto his shoulder after she’d assured him that she was settling in well, that she had unpacked, that she didn’t need more time to transition.
The question had brought her up short. This is as bad as him telling you to call him by his first name. Absolutely not. If you want to be called Shay, go back upstairs to your office and call your wife. Dr. Marsh must have read her expression, raising his hands almost defensively.
“I’m only asking because you’re new to the area. We want to make sure you’re feeling supported.”
She had exhaled slowly, forcing her expression into one that wasn’t a grimace. Get a fucking grip. This is a multi-species town. Asking about the moon is the same as talking about the weather. She’d been hearing patients casually mentioning it for days.
“I have a yard. That’s good enough.”
The turn was unsafe. It was a lesson that had been drilled into her head since childhood.
Too surrounded by the larger, more aggressive wolfpack of her childhood, her own pack had strove to become invisible under the moon’s bright white face.
As an adult, she’d been too surrounded by humans for the turn to ever be comfortable.
She gave her mother the same answer she’d given the golden-eyed shifter, albeit with a bit more enthusiasm.
“I have a yard! Nothing big, just a little fenced-in patch, but it’s good enough.”
On the other end of the call, her mother clucked her tongue. “You have to pay extra for the upkeep? You know, that adds up fast. Your aunt Loretta had their front yard paved over, and it was a better investment. Somewhere to park instead of grass you have to pay to cut.”
She bristled. Her little patch of green space made her giddy, and she had already begun scrolling social media for inspiration on what she could do with it.
A cute little bistro set, a raised garden bed, maybe.
She had been thrifting her whole life and had no doubt she could make the space feel homey on a budget.
Not that she voiced any of that. Her mother would probably advise killing her grass to avoid needing a mower, but Adriana was going to make her little yard a sanctuary.
“It’ll be nice having someplace for the moon every month,” was what she did say, pointedly. “I don’t even need to leave home, so that’s worth the price of a mower, I think.”
To her mother’s credit, she didn’t argue. “On your way into work?”
Adriana breathed out slowly, carefully sliding the stack of boxes she still held to a chair.
The chair had been in her previous kitchen, but her little table was too undersized in her new home.
The chair had been requisitioned to the foyer, now standing adjacent to a little console table with a tall mirror she’d found at a roadside sale near a winery, on the other side of town.
The boxes contained the blankets she’d ordered, a few decorative pillows, and a plump, lavender-colored cushion for the chair.
A little ceramic bowl sat on the table, butter yellow with purple swirls, and she decided it was the perfect spot for a vase of flowers, maybe.
And this weekend, after the moon, you can look for some frames. Because you deserve it.
She had an eclectic little collection of original paintings acquired whenever she came across a sidewalk artist selling their five-minute creations for a few dollars, deciding that some gold-painted frames would pull the motley group of canvases together, creating her own little gallery wall. Not a place. A home.
“I’m off today. I finally got my hair cut; it was like a bird’s nest.”
It was a gross understatement for the luxurious deep-conditioning treatment she’d received at the she-wolf’s recommended salon, the heavenly scalp massage that smelled like spearmint and made her skin tingle, the deep-water facial with marine botanicals that had left her cheeks feeling pillowy.
Her thick waterfall of black waves was swinging loose for the first time in more than a year, the dead ends trimmed away, several volumizing layers cut in to prevent the heavy weight of it from looking limp.
It had been the most money she’d ever spent on herself in a single sitting that wasn’t related to med school, but the uncharacteristic splurge was worth every penny.
She felt shiny and glamorous for the very first time in her life, and she wasn’t going to give her mother the opportunity to huff that she should have given herself a trim over the bathroom sink.
“Just be careful,” her mother went on. “You don’t know what it will be like there, during the turn. Better safe than sorry.”
Adriana murmured her agreement, staring at her reflection in the hall mirror as she did so.
She looked like someone brand new. She was halfway to feeling like one.
She felt pretty and polished for the first time in .
. . she didn’t know how long. Maybe ever?
New job, new house, new you. Next you need some hobbies, cultivate a personality outside work. Maybe you’ll even meet someone.
Perhaps the next step in her reinvention, she mused, rubbing a strand of her newly-silky hair between her forefinger and thumb, was to fall in love. She had time for a relationship now. Someone brand new, in the market for someone brand new, for the very first time.
* * *
The day had started like every other she’d spent in Cambric Creek.
Shileen had spent far too long taking vitals from a huldra with a swishing tail, and when Adriana had turned the corner to where they stood, she walked into a conversation about the tomatoes in that week’s CSA assortment, not getting back to the business of blood pressure until they noticed Adriana’s presence.
Her next case had involved a minotaur with swollen nostrils, an infection caused by an allergic reaction to his wedding ring, she deduced, the copper band cinching the bullman’s wide, pink nose the cause of his discomfort.
Exam two held an amphibious boy and his mother, suspected poison sumac exposure, she read from the chart after leaving the forlorn minotaur, the snipped remains of his wedding band in a baggie.
And this will take even less time.
“We had them in our backyard last year, and they caused so much trouble! You’ll have to be careful with that back door, especially now that summer is — Oh, Dr. Brunelli!
” The medical assistant was still perched on the rolling stool, looking up guiltily when Adriana entered after knocking.
“Um, Kiton and his mother were just telling me about the raccoons under their porch.”
Adriana paused, looking over the tablet screen with a frown. She couldn’t abide clerical errors, particularly when there was nothing urgent about the majority of these cases. A raccoon bite, on the other hand, was a serious matter.
“I’m so sorry, I thought Kiton was here for suspected poison sumac. If this is an animal bite, have we already followed the proper cleaning protocol? Unfortunately, we’ll need to do a full course rabies vaccine—”
“Oh! No, no, sorry . . . yes, poison sumac. The raccoons are just . . . well, the raccoon didn’t bite anyone.”
“Not yet,” the blue-skinned boy piped up, quickly shushed by his mother.
Adriana smiled thinly, stepping around the goblin on the rolling stool to reach the patient. “You were playing outside when you got this? Was it a very wet area?”
“The back of the property is a fen,” his mother confirmed. “And he knows not to go crawling through it.”
“It was an expedition!”
“No evidence of secondary infection,” Adriana murmured, looking the boy’s arms up and down.
“No swelling beyond what we’d expect to see.
It’s definitely sumac, but fortunately, not as bad as it could be.
With the porosity of your skin, I’m going to recommend a hydrocortisone soak twice a day, in addition to an oral antihistamine.
Absolutely no scratching,” she directed to the boy.
“That’ll only make it worse. We need to make sure we’re wearing the proper coverings for exploration, okay?
You should be feeling better within a few days, but don’t hesitate to call us or come back in if it gets any worse. And be careful in those fens!”
“Doctor Brunelli, would you like to sit here?”