Her smile widened. “Too formal. Everyone calls me Dr. Pat. You don’t have to call me anything if you don’t want to.” Her scent and her babbling conveyed her nervousness. “I don’t know what to call you. You’re the leader of all the Shifters around here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to bow or what.”
“If you bow, my son will shit himself laughing,” Bowman said in all seriousness. “Just call me Bowman.”
“Fair enough. You haven’t answered me about the leg, you know. How is it?”
She advanced into the room, her gaze on the splint, as though longing to take it off and examine what was beneath.
“A lot better,” Bowman said, not moving, though he had the sudden urge to wriggle his toes. They were starting to itch. “I’ll be healed in a day or so.”
Pat’s eyes widened. “No, you’ll be healed in about six to eight weeks. Those bones were seriously shattered.”
“Shifters heal fast,” Bowman said—he kept saying the words, reassuring everyone to also reassure himself. “You sticking them back together last night helped a lot. I thank you.”
“Did it help? You were up on it, and you re-broke it running around the parking lot.”
Bowman shrugged. “It had already started to set by that time. When a Shifter’s fighting adrenaline is up, the metabolism speeds up even more. Hell of a hangover the next day, but we can heal at the same time as we fight.” An exaggeration, because he felt like shit, and rebreaking the leg had caused a boatload of pain. But it never hurt to make Shifters seem invincible.
“Interesting.” Pat looked thoughtful. “I’d think the adrenaline would hinder the healing process, kind of putting it aside until the danger is over. You might not feel pain, but you shouldn’t get better until much later.”
“No idea,” Bowman said, unworried. This woman was so harmless she amused him. He kept an eye on her and assessed her to figure out what she truly wanted, but for now, she could ask questions. “Healers might understand it, but I’m just a fighter. I fight, I heal. It works—I don’t argue.”
“There are Shifter healers?” Dr. Pat took another step toward the bed, caught up in her curiosity. “What do they do?”
Bowman shrugged. “They heal Shifters.”
Ryan had remained silent the entire time, having taken a seat on the chair Kenzie had vacated. He pretended not to be there, but he watched, and he listened. Smart cub.
“Really?” Dr. Pat asked. “Do you have clinics or special hospitals? I’ve never heard of them—do you think I could meet a healer?”
Bowman lifted one hand to slow her chatter. “There aren’t many around, and no, we don’t have our own clinics. We go to human ones. Healers are . . . special. And shy. Don’t try to find one.”
“Oh.” She looked puzzled. “Do they go to med school? How do you become a Shifter healer?”
“You’re born one,” Bowman said. “It runs in families. Parents train cubs.”
“Cubs . . . Oh, you mean kids.” She shot a glance at Ryan, who stared right back at her. “So it’s like an apprenticeship. Neat. The surgical practice was like that, ages ago, before we had med schools and vet schools. Surgeons historically were looked down upon by doctors, you know, and now surgeons are top of the profession. Strange, isn’t it?”
She continued to babble. She didn’t need to be nervous, but Bowman wasn’t going to tell her that. “Are you a surgeon?”
Her flush deepened. “I am. But not for humans. Animals pull my compassion—they have as many hurts and diseases as humans, and they need care too.”
“You don’t have to explain that to me. I’m surrounded by animals every day.”
Her eyes were starry. “Shifters are the best of both, aren’t they? Animal and human. The strengths of each. Maybe the weaknesses too? Would be fascinating to study . . .”
Bowman’s amusement swiftly died. “Humans like to study us a little too much,” he said in a hard voice. “They dragged us into laboratories when we were first discovered and tried to figure out what made us work. Not all Shifters survived the process.”
“Oh.” Now Pat was bright red and no longer smiling. “I didn’t mean like that. I mean study you to learn how to heal you. Like I studied to be a vet. I didn’t mean . . . dissection.”
“No, you didn’t.” Bowman looked her over. Harmless, he decided again. He read her scent, her eager chatter, the look in her eyes. She was interested in Shifters because they were Shifters, not for some ulterior motive.
That was his assessment, anyway. Kenzie would probably get a better reading of her. Kenzie was wise about people.