Discovering the lesbian couple he employed at an inn he wasn’t qualified to run not only knew about werewolves but had also over the years provided emergency medical assistance was a bit of a surprise. After Zach finally got a signal halfway down the trail, he’d been mildly shocked but mostly relieved to discover the woman who spent most of her time repairing farm and landscape equipment so broken it would’ve been a mercy killing if they’d been taken out back behind the woodshed and buried could also perform an on-the-spot appendix removal if necessary.
The steel-haired stout woman had been there waiting for them at the Keller cabin, her face grim and deeply lined with concern. Ruth was already inside, boiling water for sharp-edged instruments they would soon use to peel apart Ellis’s flesh. There were bottles of chemicals, syringes ready to be plunged into Ellis’s cold skin, and the talkative, smiling Ruth Zach had grown fond of was replaced by a matter-of-fact, gruff authoritarian who told him to get out of her way when he stepped in to help.
He’d almost protested not taking the injured man down to the hospital, but as he stood at the cabin’s threshold, his hand on Ellis’s bared and bloodied stomach, he watched the wound on the former wolf’s chest heal over. The skin remained angry, purpling at first, and then streaks of black sprayed out from where the bullet entered him. The air felt hot around the area, noticeable even from far away. As Gibson carried his brother in, unselfconscious about his nudity and focusing only on what directions Martha gave him while she prepared herself for surgery, Ellis’s flesh began to ripple, and the skin closing over the enveloped bullet started to bubble, as if being burned from the inside out.
Martha took one look at Zach and ordered him outside. She didn’t want to hear about how cold it was or that he’d come up the mountain without anything to protect himself from the chilling wind; she just wanted him gone and out from under foot. Ten minutes after Zach found his perch against the deck railing, a stretch of wood he’d cleared of snow and pine needles, a fretting Gibson joined him, fully dressed but with most of his heart and soul left back inside the open cabin door.
“Saying it doesn’t make it true, Zach,” Gibson finally whispered, his hooded eyes dead and flat behind his long lashes. “I know you mean well, and I appreciate it, because I don’t know—no, I do know—how insane I would be right now if I didn’t have you here. You give me something else—someone else—to focus on besides what’s going on inside.”
“Is there somebody we need to call?” He hated asking that question, but as far as he could tell, no one had reached for a phone; no one had asked him or Ruth to reach out to a family Zach knew existed—the Keller brothers’ family. “Your father—”
“Yeah, the last thing our father told me before I kicked him off of Ellis’s land was to fuck off and die.” If anything, Gibson’s face got even bleaker, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “See, he—actually a lot of people in my family believe that Ellis should be put down just like Pat Brown wanted to.”
The shock stung, closing Zach’s throat. He choked on the back of his tongue, unable to reconcile the close-knit clan he’d built up in his mind with the stark reality of a man wishing his own son dead. Stammering, he asked, “Why? Because he didn’t want to be human for a while? What’s wrong with that? He said he had problems. Being a wolf wasn’t hurting anyone. Why would they care?”
“I don’t remember if we talked about this. Honestly, the night I found you in the lake, everything was so much a blur, then when you saw Ellis changing, it shifted—” Gibson grimaced, flashing Zach a rueful smile. “It changed how I saw you, because it—seeing him become human—peeled away all of my secrets.”
“Was that a good thing or a bad thing?” Zach studied Gibson’s body language, a coiled-tight bundle of nerves wrapped up in a man he wanted to hug, and the tightness across Gibson’s shoulders nearly made his teeth ache. “I can tell you changed my life. It kind of blew apart everything that I knew, or least everything I thought was engraved in stone. Hell, my mind is still being torn apart. I worked next to those two women in there for weeks now, and neither one of them breathed a word about being able to do field surgery or that my neighbor—my really hot neighbor—could turn into an adorable black puppy the size of a Shetland pony.”
He got a laugh out of that. A short one, but it still left a slight smile on Gibson’s face. One that disappeared when Ruth joined them outside, the once-white smock she donned to protect her clothes now crimson with Ellis’s blood.
“He’s going to be fine. It took a little bit to get the bullet out because he was healing too fast over it, but well, Martha’s stubborn—a hell of a lot more stubborn than some thirty-five-year-old puppy whose snotty nose she used to wipe—so your brother’s going to be okay,” she said, reaching for him, then stopped when the waning sunlight hit the blood crusted on her fingers. Ruth tucked them into her pockets, balling them into fists firm enough for her knuckles to dimple the smock’s fabric. “Martha wanted to move him upstairs into the loft, but I told her he’d probably be more comfortable downstairs in front of the fire. We’ve got him on the couch so he’s close to the bathroom and the kitchen. Martha is just finishing up now, but you’re going to have to stay with him, watch him for a while.”
“I can do that,” Gibson agreed, then pressed his lips into a thin, harsh line. “You two should probably take Zach down with you. I don’t know what Pat is going to do. If he’s going to do anything. We left him back there by the rocks. I’m not sure I trust myself to go back and look for him. I might beat him to death even if Ellis is out of the woods. He shouldn’t be wearing a badge, much less carrying a gun.”
“What do you think he is going to do?” Zach asked. “What can he do? Gibson, remember what you told me that night? How no one would probably believe me? If you’d asked me a couple weeks ago if I believed in the supernatural, I would’ve said that you were crazy, but now here I am with you, and somewhere out there Sheriff Brown is having to deal with a hell of a lot more truths than I had to.”
There hadn’t been time after they’d bundled Ellis up to give much thought to the broken man they’d left behind. If Zach had to come to grips with the reality of humans being able to change into wolves, he couldn’t begin to imagine the trauma of learning that blood ran through his veins nearly as soon as he learned of the shifters’ existence.