Chapter 24
Veterinary Mysteries
Phoebe
The springer spaniel on my examination table has a wound that shouldn’t exist.
It’s a puncture, deep and clean, on the left flank just behind the ribcage.
The entry point is too precise for a bite and too narrow for a branch or fence post. If I’d seen this in London, I’d have suspected a knife or a sharp instrument.
Here, in Mistwood, with my newly calibrated senses reading the tissue like a language I’m only beginning to speak, I know it’s something else.
The wound smells wrong. Not infected, not dirty, but layered with a scent signature I’m learning to associate with the supernatural.
It’s the same musky, animal undertone I catch on Roan, on the pack members I’ve met, on the air around the bonfire field.
Except this is different. Sharper. Less wolf, more something else that I don’t have a category for yet.
“When did this happen?” I ask the owner, a young farmer called Pete, who’s shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“Found him like that this morning. He was out all night. Gets through the fence sometimes, wanders the fields.”
“And you didn’t see what caused it?”
“No.” He says it too quickly, and his eyes don’t quite meet mine.
In my old life, I’d have noted the evasion and moved on.
Now I can smell the anxiety coming off him in waves, sour and metallic, and beneath it something else.
Not guilt exactly. Fear. The specific fear of someone who knows more than he’s saying and is afraid of what happens if he says it.
I clean and dress the wound, prescribe antibiotics, and send Pete on his way with instructions to keep the dog indoors at night. After he leaves, I stand in my surgery and look at the gauze I’ve just removed. The blood on it is normal. Canine. Red and iron-rich and unremarkable.
But the edges of the puncture were already closing when I examined it.
Not at the accelerated rate I saw on Roan in the forest. Slower, subtler, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it.
As if whatever made the wound left something behind that was encouraging the tissue to repair itself.
I add it to the file I’ve started keeping. Not my official case notes, which remain scrupulously normal. A separate file, a notebook I keep in my desk drawer, documenting the cases that don’t fit.
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 the counter 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 more like 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 to observe 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 a wound and feel the difference between ordinary tissue and something that shouldn’t exist.
The village needs me. Not just as a vet. As someone who can work in both worlds, who can treat the injuries that come from living alongside the extraordinary without asking questions that the answers would only complicate.
It’s not what I planned. It’s better than what I planned.
I lock the surgery. Make a note to order more of the antiseptic that works best on accelerated-healing tissue. I walk through to the main house with my senses open, my notebook in my bag, the quiet growing certainty that I’ve found the work I was meant to do.