Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
"I can't believe they're making you work so late on a weekend!" Aya's voice was a bit tinny through the speaker on Elise Nevin's phone. "Are you okay? I can come keep you company."
"For the fifth time, it's totally fine." Elise couldn't tell if she sounded angry or just tired. "This is my job; I signed up for it."
"I thought you signed up for taking phone calls and managing their schedules. You're an admin assistant, not a doctor."
Elise took a deep breath and didn't hang up the phone. Her coven sister would never believe that the call had dropped. "I work for a wildlife rehabilitation program. Sometimes they need all hands."
Sometimes. Sure.
Not tonight though.
"Promise to let me know when you get home, though, okay?" Aya pressed. "I don't like the thought of you out alone so late."
"I'm twenty-four freaking years old. We're literally the same age. And a fully blooded witch. I can handle myself." If Aya was at the zoo with her instead of on the phone, Elise might have sent a spark of magic at her just to prove it.
"That doesn't mean you're—"
"Sorry, Aya, I need to go. My boss is calling." Elise punched the button to end the call and set her phone in her locker with more force than was necessary. If it hadn't been covered in her cute, sparkly pink case, the screen might have cracked. And then she'd be really miffed.
She rested her forehead against the closed locker next to her open one and massaged her temples.
It was always a bit too bright in the locker room, and she hated the constant buzz of the overhead lights, especially when they started flickering, announcing it was almost time to change them.
Maintenance did not consider the staff room a priority.
She didn't like lying to her coven. They were her closest friends. Her chosen circle. She'd caused a stir in her family when she'd chosen to join a newly forming coven instead of taking her place in the Wallace Grove coven like everyone else in her family had for generations.
Her path had been laid out for her since birth. Learn gentle magic. Marry a nice witch-boy with strong, aggressive magic from an allied coven. Have three or four magic-rich children. Rinse and repeat for all generations.
Forever.
Some women in her family never even left coven grounds.
Not that she could blame them. The coven estate was over a hundred acres and was a small town in and of itself. Some called it paradise.
She'd been suffocating there since she was thirteen.
Now she was her own woman.
And her chosen coven still thought she was a delicate little flower.
After calls like that one, Elise really wished she had major aggressive magic. Fire powers, maybe, like Delainey could sometimes manage. Or more than the tiniest smattering of blood magic. If she could make people really hurt with her magic, she would …
Not. Because she was a healer down to her marrow.
Elise groaned and shut her locker, wincing at the clang as she slammed it with just a bit too much force. "Sorry!" she muttered and realized she was apologizing to inanimate steel.
She wasn't really on shift. She probably didn't need to lock her stuff up. But habit was habit. No one wanted to accidentally leave their phone in a wildlife enclosure.
It was true that she mostly did admin work for the wildlife rehabilitation center.
Officially.
But off hours and really off the books, she did a little … moonlighting.
It was great being in a small, chosen coven. Really great. Except for the meddling, but witches were meddlers by nature, so there was no escaping that.
But with a coven so small, she didn't get ample opportunities to use her powers outside of soothing Delainey's cramps when her period got really bad and working her magic on colds and the occasional UTI.
Ah, the glamorous life of a healer.
She wasn't sure if her coven-sisters would throw a fit if they knew she snuck into the zoo sometimes to heal the animals.
It wasn't dangerous. Not really. She wasn't about to sneak up on a polar bear or a Komodo dragon.
And even if she did, she probably had enough magic to knock a creature out before they could really damage her.
Probably.
But the bears and Komodo dragons were doing just fine.
Tonight, Elise was worried about the fox.
She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting when she started working for Stewart County Wildlife Rehabilitation. A year ago, if someone had asked her what a wildlife rehabilitation service did, she'd say … rehabilitate wildlife?
It was mostly foxes and does. Then there were the raccoons and the squirrels. She'd expected more birds, but apparently, they were handled by another facility.
The rehab center was attached to the Stewart Central Zoo, though they were a separate organization.
And that was what allowed Elise to sneak in.
The zoo security guards were never sure of the Wildlife Rehab's schedule, and when they had particularly tough cases, it wasn't unusual for one of the vets or some of the techs to stay overnight.
Elise was neither a vet nor a tech, but the security guards didn't need to know that.
Tonight, she'd put on a borrowed pair of scrubs. They were purple and covered in Snoopy, which was a choice. She was more of a Hello Kitty girl herself. And if any of the security guards caught her, she could flash her Wildlife Rehab badge and let her scrubs do most of the talking.
So, the fox.
It had come in with a broken front paw and some labored breathing. The vet on call had been worried about a respiratory infection and thought the paw would need to be amputated. Elise knew that foxes could survive after limb removal.
But with a broken limb and an infection, the vet wasn't confident and wasn't willing to do much more than administer antibiotics and pain meds until they had a better idea of the animal's potential for survival.
Vet medicine was tough like that. If she had her way, she'd save every animal she could, no matter how injured.
But too many miracles might cause questions. And Elise could only supply so much magical healing.
Tonight, the fox was getting a miracle.
She wanted to creep down the hallways like some kind of thief but forced her shoulders back and her chin up. After hours, the lights were dim, and she cast a long shadow. She tried not to be freaked out by it. If a security guard saw her, she had to look like she belonged there.
But no security guard spotted her and, thankfully, her card worked when she scanned it to get into the med center. The sensor beeped and the color changed as the door unlocked.
She found the fox in a cage against the far wall, and he looked miserable. His fur was a bit matted, and his eyes barely opened as she approached, even though her presence was his only option for entertainment tonight. He looked absolutely miserable.
Elise's heart hurt for him.
She summoned a bit of calming magic to her hands as she opened the cage. The fox was too weak and out of it to do more than blink at her.
"Come on, little buddy. It's alright."
If she were a human veterinarian, she would have had to pull the little guy out onto an examination table and use a stethoscope or something to hear his heartbeat. There was imaging equipment and a machine that analyzed bloodwork. All of it great.
For humans.
Elise let her magic do the work for her.
She sank into the fox, letting her magic guide her to the worst of the hurts.
Her eyes closed as she narrowed in on his pulse, the way his heart pushed blood through his veins.
His lungs were a mass of infection and hurt, and her own ached in sympathy.
She wanted to unleash herself, to heal all of his ills and release him, to let him run free like he was meant to.
But she held herself back.
The key to getting away with secretly healing the animals was to never do it all the way. Humans could believe that the antibiotics worked quicker than they should or that a broken bone wasn't as bad as they first thought.
But if the fox stood up tomorrow on four perfect legs and was breathing like a marathon runner, there might be questions.
So Elise focused on the infection. Tendrils of her magic seeped into the fox and chased down the wrongness.
Delainy had once asked her what she saw when she healed someone, and Elise could never quite explain it.
She didn't see anything. Usually she closed her eyes, so everything was dark.
She didn't think it counted if she said the back of her eyelids.
Sinking deep into a person or animal like this was way more like touch or taste. And even then, it wasn't. Only a healer really could understand what it meant to chase down echoes of an infection and make it dissolve into something harmless.
She wondered if it was the same for werewolf healers.
Elise let out a heavy breath. That was crazy talk. Werewolves and witches didn't mix. Not unless you wanted a big fight and lots of blood. Which she didn't.
Though the subsequent healing would probably be very invigorating.
It was purely professional curiosity.
Witch healers made sense. They used magic, like all witches did, and they healed people with it.
Now, that magic was a bit different than normal witch magic.
A person was born a healer. Any witch could train to learn a few healing spells, but to do what Elise was doing to the fox, you needed the inborn healing talent.
Were werewolves like that? Or were their healers just doctors who howled at the moon from time to time?
She wished she could ask someone. But if she said a word about wolves to her coven, they'd wrap her in bubble wrap and hide her away where her own curiosity could never dare to harm her.
They didn't seem to understand that Elise could wonder about something without being freaking stupid.
Somewhere outside the room, she heard a crash.
Her head jerked up, and her connection with the fox broke. He let out a small whimper as her magic tore away from him, and Elise winced.
"Sorry, buddy." When magic was that deep inside someone, it hurt to pull it out, and it was supposed to be done gently to reduce suffering. It wouldn't injure him in the long run, but she was a healer—she didn't want to cause unnecessary pain.
A door slammed, the sound echoing through the rehab center and making her heart rate kick up.
Was someone else there?
Elise gave the fox a magical scan and looked at the clock. It was later than she thought. She'd been working on him for more than an hour. Her skin buzzed with the remnants of healing magic sinking back into her and she shook a little.
She'd need a candy bar or something soon or she was going to crash.
And if she fainted and someone found her, her sisters would never let her hear the end of it.
Elise carefully closed the fox's cage. The infection wasn't totally gone, but she'd taken care of it enough that the drugs could clear it up in no time.
She couldn't do anything about the leg. Not if a security guard was coming.
Had a door really slammed? Or was she jumping at shadows?
Elise quickly washed her hands and dimmed the light. She pressed herself up against the wall, heart beating fast. The wall was almost too cool through her scrubs, but it wasn't doing a single thing to calm her down.
Her instincts were telling her she wasn't alone. But her instincts tended to yell there was an axe-murderer hiding under her bed when it was particularly dark, so she didn't think they were doing her much good.
And so what if a clumsy security guard was out there? She had her Snoopy scrubs and an ID badge. She'd done this a dozen times.
It would be fine.
Mind made up, she pushed through the door that would take her back to the employee locker room and froze.
Whoever was making noise, it wasn't a security guard.
The medicine storage locker was busted open and looked like it had been ransacked by feral raccoons.
Which, okay, this was a wildlife rehabilitation center, so that was technically possible.
But they weren't treating any raccoons right now. And she was pretty sure most raccoons weren't stealing highly controlled substances.
Someone was stealing drugs from the wildlife rehab.
And she was the last one to swipe her badge.
Oh … fuck.
What was she supposed to do? If she called security to report the break in and her boss found out she'd been here after hours, she was going to get fired.
But if someone stole morphine and the police looked at the logs and saw her name, she'd get arrested.
Maybe she could find the culprit and make them return the drugs?
Yeah, because people who broke into the zoo to steal opiates were bound to listen to rational “please” from a woman covered in Snoopy.
Elise reached for her phone. She didn't want any crap from her coven, but she'd take the crap if she could have some help. Briana was a whiz with computers and tech-magic. Maybe she could wipe the logs or something.
Except Elise's phone wasn't in her pocket.
Because she'd left it in the locker, hoping no one bothered her.
Okay. Okay. Don't panic.
Elise just had to get to her locker, call Briana, and hide until this all went away.
Easy peasy.
Unfortunately, her heart was threatening to beat out of her chest, and she was pretty sure she heard footsteps getting closer.