Page 4 of Wolf Bane
“I can’t piss,” Vinnie grumbled.Melly and her brother Jay both snickered at that.Vinnie’s glower, if possible, grew even more terrifying.“Shut up.”
Celestine pushed to her feet, bracing against the room’s small countertop.“We’re sick.Human crap,” she added with a disdainful curl of her lip.“Ever since your sort’s been creepin’ in on our land, we’ve all come down with this shit.”
As if to underscore her grandmother’s point, Melly let loose with a hacking, racking cough.Jay, not to be left behind, opened his mouth and erupted in a cacophony of rattling, scraping hacks that made all of us recoil.“Okay then,” I muttered, grabbing for the hand sanitizer on the wall.“Let’s triage this…”
Clannish to the end, the Clemenses refused to be divided between rooms.Vinnie refused to pee in a cup, the kids refused to stop stealing exam room supplies, and Celestine refused to stop cursing my heritage up one side and down the other.The fact I didn’t seem bothered by her imprecations regarding my parents only fired her up worse.
“Typical human trash,” she muttered as I wrangled Jay into showing me his throat.“Don’t give a single damn about family.”
“I would if I could, but I can’t so I won’t,” I murmured.“You’ve got a pretty red throat there, kiddo.Been coughing a lot?”
Melly tugged my pant leg and hacked heroically.
“When did this first start?”
Vinnie was the one who replied this time.“Ma got the sniffles a month or so back, after the big meeting up in Denton.”
“Vinnie,” she hissed.“That ain’t his business.”
“Denton?Tyler went up there back in… August?”I mused.“July?Stood in for Ethan at a big clan gathering.”Yeah, that’s right.I know your business.Because it’s kind of mine now, too.“Annual thing, right?Like a family reunion for the Texas clans and packs?”I knew damn well what it was—Ethan had been going since as long as I’d known him, first at his dad’s side, then on his own, then with Tyler after I went off to college apparently.The specifics were still off limits to me, but the gist wasfamily gathering but with more red tape.
Vinnie eyed me warily, lifting one meaty shoulder in a dissipated sort of shrug.“Kinda.Talkin’ about business.Clan stuff.”
“The Stones,” Celestine groused, rolling her eyes so hard I thought she might strain something.“More human-loving trash.”
“Ma,” Vinnie muttered, cheeks tinting just a tiny bit.“Not so loud.”
Celestine pursed her lips but kept quiet for the rest of the visit.Mostly.Grunted, snorted, huffed, but didn’t talk out loud.Melly let me peek at her throat and coughed in my face while giggling—thank the powers that be for masks—and Jay sat under the exam table, poking at my feet with a tongue depressor until I was done examining his sister’s lymph nodes.“What about you, Vinnie?Have you had any symptoms?”
He shrugged.“Just tired a lot, but I work long shifts at La Dolce Vita.”
I paused, mid-handwash, leveling a sharp glare at Vinnie.“Are you certain you haven’t had any symptoms?”Working in a kitchen, breathing germs not just on his coworkers but possibly contaminating the food of dozens of people per day… Nightmare fuel on several levels.
He bared his teeth, incisors weirdly larger than any other were I’d ever met.I wondered if he’d had them fixed to look like that or if his genetics just decided to lean hard into the trait.It was a disturbing effect, to be honest, and if the previous year and a half had gone any differently for me, I’d likely have been scared.Instead, I just stared back until he answered.“Of course not.I’m not an idiot, Doctor Babin.And we been wearing masks back there anyway.Nestor, one of the other cooks, he got some cold that won’t go away, so we’ve been careful back there.”
I nodded, not really satisfied but there was little else I could do unless I wanted to play Chicken Little and alert the health department over a cold being passed between line cooks and their families.“Well, I’d like to take a culture of the kids’ throats to rule out strep and?—”
My words ended in a sharp yelp as Melly sank her teeth into my calf, her sharp little incisors so like her father’s piercing through the fabric of my trousers and drawing blood.
Do you know how much paperwork is involved when a patient bites you?
Neither did I until that afternoon.
“I liked it better in the ME’s office,” I muttered, adding my name to yet another incident report.“My patients didn’t bite then.”
“And if they did, you’d have more problems than just some forms to sign,” Reba pointed out pertly.“Now, you gonna do your pathogen testing or are you going to the urgent care for that?”
I scowled.“I’ll do it myself.”
“Thought so.”
“How many patients are left for the day?”
Reba didn’t look up from her computer, tapping away rapidly.“Hm?”
“Reba.Patients?”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
