Chapter 31
In the Aftermath
Phoebe
I’m halfway through stitching Roan’s shoulder when he tells me the others are hurt too.
Not stitching, exactly. The wound is already closing, the accelerated healing doing its work beneath my hands, but the muscle is shredded deep enough that proper cleaning matters regardless of how fast the tissue knits.
I’ve been working in focused silence for ten minutes, gauze and antiseptic and the steady routine of wound care that keeps my hands from shaking and my mind from replaying the howls that split the evening air an hour ago.
“Lewis took a bad hit to his foreleg,” Roan says. He’s sitting very still, letting me work, but his voice carries the tight quality of someone cataloguing damage. “Jack’s shoulder is deep. One of the younger wolves, Jamie, went down hard. He was unconscious when I left the field.”
My hands pause on the gauze. “Where are they?”
“The main house. The pack takes casualties there. It’s set up for it.”
“I need to see them.”
“Phoebe, you don’t have to.”
“Jamie was unconscious. That means a potential head injury. Who’s monitoring him?”
“Whoever’s available. We don’t exactly have a—”
“A doctor. No. You have a vet.” I tape the last piece of gauze over his ribs, where the old wounds have reopened along the same lines as the forest fight. The scarred male targeted them deliberately. I file that fact away for later. “Get up. We’re going.”
He looks at me for a moment. Whatever he sees in my face settles whatever argument he was constructing.
The main house is bigger than I expected.
A sprawling stone building set back from the lane, with warm light in the windows and the kind of quiet authority that old houses carry when they’ve sheltered generations of the same family.
I’ve never been here before. Roan has kept me separate from pack spaces, a boundary I understood but didn’t examine too closely.
Tonight, the boundary doesn’t exist.
I walk through the front door with my emergency kit over one shoulder, Roan beside me.
The hallway smells of blood, antiseptic, the concentrated scent of a dozen wolves in close quarters.
People are moving with purpose but without panic, the organised efficiency of a group that’s dealt with crisis before.
Chris Mistwood appears from a doorway at the end of the hall.
He’s changed clothes since the fight, but there’s still blood in his hair, and his face is drawn with the particular exhaustion of a leader who’s been on his feet for hours.
When he sees me, something shifts in his expression.
Surprise, maybe, that I’m here. Then something warmer.
“Dr Clarke,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”
“Phoebe,” I correct, because if I’m going to treat his pack members, I’m not doing it from behind a title. “Where are the injured?”
He leads me to a large room off the main hallway that’s been set up as a makeshift infirmary.
A long table has been cleared and covered with sheets.
Basic medical supplies are laid out alongside towels and water.
Three wolves in human form are being tended to by pack members with varying degrees of competence.
Jamie is the one I go to first. He’s lying on the table, conscious but groggy, with a bruise spreading across his temple and the unfocused gaze of someone whose brain has been rattled hard.
I check his pupils, his reflexes, and his cognitive responses.
The pupils are reactive but unequal, and when I ask him to follow my finger, his tracking is slow on the left side.
“Mild concussion,” I say. “Possibly moderate. He needs monitoring for the next twelve hours. Wake him every two hours, check his pupil response, and ask him simple questions. If the left pupil stops reacting or he can’t answer the questions, you need to call me immediately.”
A woman I don’t recognise nods and takes up a position beside Jamie. I write down the monitoring protocol on a piece of paper, clear and specific, and hand it to her.
“Is this different for us?” she asks. “The concussion, I mean. Do we heal from it the way we heal from everything else?”
“Soft tissue and bone, yes. The accelerated healing handles those efficiently. Brain injuries are different. Neural tissue repairs on its own timeline regardless of species. Don’t assume he’s fine because the bruise fades. The bruise is cosmetic. The brain underneath it needs time.”
She nods again, and I see something in her face that I recognise from years of practice: the relief of a frightened person who’s been given clear information by someone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about.
I move to Lewis. He’s sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his right foreleg, his right arm now, cradled against his chest. The injury is a deep bite, the kind that tears through muscle and grinds against bone.
The accelerated healing is working on the surface tissue but the deeper damage is still raw.
I clean it thoroughly, checking for tooth fragments, and dress it properly.
“Don’t shift until this has fully closed,” I tell him. “The transformation puts stress on healing tissue. Forcing damaged muscle through a complete restructuring before it’s repaired will tear the new growth.”
“How do you know that?” he asks.
“Logic. Also, Roan’s ribs took three days to fully heal after his first fight. He shifted too soon, and one of the scars came out wider than the others. The tissue didn’t have time to set before the restructuring pulled it apart.”
“She’s been studying us,” Lewis says to Jack, who’s sitting beside him, waiting for his turn.
“I’ve been observing. There’s a difference.”
Jack’s shoulder is next. Another bite wound, deep but clean, the kind of injury that comes from a wolf who knows where to strike. I clean and dress it, noting that the healing rate is slightly slower than Lewis’s. Older wolves heal faster. I add this to the growing database in my head.
I treat two more wolves with minor injuries, cleaning and dressing wounds that are already half healed, offering advice on what to watch for and what to leave alone.
With each patient, my confidence grows, not in my medical skills, which have always been solid, but in my understanding of how those skills apply to bodies that don’t play by human rules.
The accelerated healing is predictable once you understand the pattern.
Surface tissue first, then muscle, then deep structures.
The rate varies by severity and by the individual’s age and overall health.
Nutrition matters: the healing burns enormous calories, and two of the wolves I treat are shaking with a tremor that means their blood sugar has crashed.
I send someone to the kitchen for food, high-protein, high-calorie, and stand over them until they eat.
“You’re good at this,” Chris says. He’s been standing in the doorway, watching, and I’d forgotten he was there. Which tells me something about how focused I’ve been.
“I’m a vet. This is what I do.”
“This is more than what you do.” He steps into the room and looks at his pack, bandaged, fed, and resting. “You walked in here and treated wolves you’d never met like they were yours.”
“They were hurt. That’s enough.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I hold his gaze because I’ve spent my life holding the gazes of creatures larger and more dangerous than me, and this man, Alpha or not, doesn’t frighten me.
Whatever he’s looking for, he seems to find it.
He nods once, the way Roan nods when he’s decided something.
The resemblance between them catches me off guard.
“Thank you, Phoebe,” he says. And the way he says my name, carefully, as if he’s testing the weight of it, tells me this is the first time he’s used it.
It’s past midnight when I finish. Roan is waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his eyes half closed and his arms folded carefully across the bandaged ribs.
He opens his eyes when I come out. The look he gives me is so full of things he’s not saying that I feel the weight of them from across the hall.
“Everyone’s stable,” I say. “Jamie needs watching overnight, but the prognosis is good. Lewis and Jack will be fine in a day or two. The others are minor.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I chose to come.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “You did.”
We walk home through the dark village, my kit over one shoulder and Roan’s hand in mine.
The high street is empty, the pub dark, the houses shut up tight against the November cold.
Our footsteps fall into the same rhythm they always do, and neither of us speaks, and the silence between us is full rather than empty.
I chose to come to Mistwood. I chose to treat the wolf in the forest. I chose to open the door when Roan knocked.
I chose him. Tonight I chose his pack. Every choice has led me further from the quiet, uncomplicated life I thought I wanted.
Closer to something louder, messier, infinitely more meaningful.
The cottage is cold when we get back. The nest is still in the living room, blankets piled in the corner. The sight of it does something to my throat I wasn’t expecting. I built that. My body built that, driven by instincts I didn’t understand, and it kept me safe while the world shifted around me.
Roan locks the door. I put the kettle on. We move around each other in the small kitchen with the unconscious coordination of two people who’ve learned each other’s rhythms, and neither of us speaks until we’re sitting at the table with tea between us.
“Your father called me Phoebe,” I say.
“I noticed.”
“Not Dr Clarke. Not ‘the vet.’ Phoebe.”
Roan wraps his hands around his mug, and something crosses his face. Not the old resistance, the flinch I used to see whenever pack and personal life intersected. Something softer.
“He liked you,” he says. “He liked watching you work.” He pauses. “He said you reminded him of someone.”
He doesn’t say who. He doesn’t need to. I reach across the table and take his hand. Outside, the village is quiet. Sleeping. Inside, two people who never planned for any of this sit at a kitchen table, drink tea, hold hands. Nothing else needs saying.