Crying for the Moon (10 page)

Tate was carrying a large, plastic trunk up the front porch stairs when Alex threw open the door. His hair was damp, as though he’d hurriedly taken a shower, and long tendrils curled at the nape of his neck in a ridiculously angelic fashion. As soon as he entered the foyer, he set down his trunk and took off his coat, hanging it on the end of the banister. He was wearing the oversized tan sweatshirt again; the cuffs were starting to fray. This time, Alex noticed that it sported the logo of some sort of organization: the image of a wolf in a tuxedo dancing with a 1920s’ style flapper. He had to smother an inappropriate laugh at the thought of Nick, in his current form, dressed in a tux. His brain superimposed Nick in his human form wearing the same and he had to blink because, damn, that image was unexpectedly hot.
Focus, Alex.

“Okay. So where’s… holy shit!” Tate had opened the plastic trunk to take out a stethoscope and drape it around his neck. When he looked up, he paused to stare open-mouthed at Alex. “Tell me that blood isn’t yours!”

Alex looked down at himself. He had smears of blood all over his shirt and where he’d wiped his hands on his jeans. Damn. He’d really liked that shirt too. The crisp, blue cotton went well with his dark coloring.

“Not mine,” he said, suddenly seeing Peter’s bloody coat again and flushing at his self-absorption. “It’s, um, Shaggy’s.” He said the first name that popped into his head, thinking that it oddly suited Peter just the same.

Frowning, Tate picked up the trunk again. “Lead the way. No; don’t bother.” He shook off Alex’s silent offer to help. “I’ve got it.”

Alex hesitated outside the door to his bedroom. “Um, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Tate raised an eyebrow, resting the trunk against one thigh as he waited impatiently. “Don’t worry about the cost. Let’s just take a look first and see if there’s anything I can do, okay?”

Alex opened and closed his mouth. How could he possibly explain what Tate was about to see? He was placing Tate in terrible danger and he wasn’t even giving him the choice of accepting the risks beforehand. Why had he thought it was even remotely wise to involve Tate in the first place?

Because you trust him.
The realization surprised him, but it was true. In the brief time he’d known Tate, he’d somehow decided Tate could be trusted. It was Nick and the others he wasn’t so sure about—not in their current form.

“Let me go first,” he said at last, hoping he wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

Nick sat up alertly from where he’d been lying on the bed beside Peter. His demeanor completely changed when he saw Tate coming into the room behind Alex. He came up in a stiff-legged stance, lowering his head to peel back his lips in a fearsome snarl, ears pinned flat against his head. He stood protectively over Peter’s still, silent body.

“Nick,” Alex warned. He felt a sudden flare of anger toward him. He’d be Damned before he let Nick hurt Tate. He bared his teeth in a silent hiss at the wolf. Nick reacted by raising the hair all along his back from ruff out to the end of his bushy tail.

“Oh. My. God.” Tate breathed. “You are fucking
gorgeous
.”

The admiration in his voice was notably genuine and Alex saw Nick respond to it, even as he cast a hurried glance in Tate’s direction himself. Nick continued a low, rumbling growl, but his ears lifted questioningly and his lips closed over his fangs.

Tate flashed Alex an incredible smile before wiping it away and dropping his gaze. “You are without a doubt the most handsome creature on the face of the Earth.” He spoke in a conversational tone, patiently holding on to the tub while he avoided eye contact with Nick. His voice became rich and syrupy, his Southern accent more pronounced. “I’m here to help. I know you’re all upset, but I can’t do my job with you drooling all over everything. So come on. Be a pal and let me see what’s going on here. You want me to help your buddy, don’t you?”

Alex could see the confusion in Nick’s body language, the way he was still poised to defend Peter. Yet he was responding to Tate’s calm demeanor.

“Nick,” Alex said firmly. “Get off the bed.”

Amazingly, the big wolf complied.

He came forward to sniff at Tate’s fingers, still clasped on the handles of the tub. Grumbling in a low growl, he wedged himself between the wall and the bed to keep an eye on Tate. With a piercing glance at Alex, Tate slowly set the tub down just inside the door and went over to examine Peter.

Nick placed his head on the mattress beside Peter again and whined. Tate ignored him. Alex wondered at first how he could have the presence of mind to do such a thing, but he could soon see that Tate was completely absorbed in his assessment of the silver wolf lying in front of him. He got up on the bed so he could look at Peter more closely, crawling around to the far side to briefly lift a foreleg and make a small noise of dismay at whatever he saw there.

“I need the trunk.” He motioned toward Alex over his shoulder without looking back, fingers snapping imperiously, and Alex hurried to bring the plastic tub to the bedside.

Tate listened to Peter’s chest with the stethoscope while Alex stood with the trunk in his hands. He looked up and motioned to Alex to put it down within reach on the bed.

“Find me some gloves,” he said as he continued his assessment.

When Alex opened the lid, he could see that the interior was stacked with clear plastic containers, each of which held different supplies. He found a small box of latex gloves in the second compartment he searched. Tate snatched them without comment and put them on, pulling a thermometer out of his back pocket to check Peter’s temperature with one hand while he explored his wounds with the other.

“Okay,” he said, sitting back on his knees at the edge of the bed and draping the stethoscope around his neck once more, heedless of the bloody fingerprints he was leaving on his own clothing. “He’s in shock. I need to start an IV catheter and fluids, and I can
do
that, but I need to know right now: We’re not referring him to an animal ER, right?”

Alex swallowed hard and nodded in agreement. “Right.”

He hoped he was doing the right thing for Peter. He really did. But what choice did he have?

“Okay,” Tate said firmly, in the tone of one making the best of a bad situation. “I can’t tell you how seriously he’s hurt at the moment. Shock can make you look like you’re at death’s door, but once it’s reversed, he might not be as injured as we think. I do need to get him warmed up and explore these wounds a bit, make sure that none of them penetrate into his body at all. Some of them need sutures, and we need to do that before he rouses much. I can’t do any sort of sedation—it’s not allowed under my license. I don’t even carry the drugs.”

Alex nodded uselessly again.

“Just for the record here,” Tate added with a raised eyebrow. “As far as I’m concerned, every animal in this room is a husky cross. Crossed with what, I won’t speculate. Let’s just say I hope no one gets bitten because the health department will have a meltdown.”

The health department would be the least of our worries if someone gets bitten here tonight
, Alex thought. Aloud, he said, “Right. Husky mixes.”

Nick shot him an amazingly indignant look and narrowed his green eyes. It must have been his imagination, but Alex thought he heard Tate smother a small snort.

“Right,” Tate said, all business again. “Do you have a bathtub where we can shift, um, Shaggy? I need to rinse off all this blood so I can see what’s going on and we can use the water to warm him up as well.”

Alex had almost forgotten that “Shaggy” was what he’d named Peter. “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll grab some towels and some more blankets.”

Alex watched Tate work to stabilize and assess Peter’s condition. He efficiently clipped and prepped a spot on Peter’s foreleg and installed an IV catheter, directing Alex to tear off strips of adhesive tape and hand them to him as he taped it in place. Together they carried Peter into the bathroom and lowered him into the tub. Tate commented on Alex’s strength with a smile, adding, “Remind me to take you rock climbing sometime.”

When Tate reached for the removable showerhead and used it to hose off Peter’s chest and shoulders, he murmured, “I love these things.” The smile he gave Alex was decidedly seductive.

Nick shoved his head over the edge of the tub to view the proceedings, causing Tate to quip, “The solution to pollution is dilution.” He spoke to Nick as though the wolf could understand him. Alex suspected that it was habitual on Tate’s part. He continued to direct the water over Peter’s wounds, washing away the bits of hair and leaf litter embedded within the flaps of torn skin.

They got soaked hauling Peter out of the tub and back into the bedroom again. His wounds continued to ooze, but were no longer bleeding heavily. His gums looked terribly pale to Alex, as though he were a victim of a blood feast.

“Shock,” Tate explained, as though reading Alex’s mind. “If he doesn’t pink up with fluids, then he might need a blood transfusion.” He eyed Nick speculatively. Nick’s ears pricked up and then dropped limply at Tate’s assessing stare. Alex couldn’t help but marvel at his submissiveness in the situation.

Tate inserted a dose of some medication into Peter’s catheter, drawing it out of an hourglass-shaped bottle that had two separate containers in it until he’d released the vacuum between them. “Solu-Delta,” he explained. “An ultra-fast-acting steroid to help with the shock.” He attached a bag of fluids to the catheter via a drip set and the two of them fashioned a hook out of a coat hanger to suspend the bag from the ceiling. Tate followed the steroid with an antibiotic injection.

“I need a hair dryer if you have one,” Tate said, after adjusting the drip set to his satisfaction. “Can you turn up the heat in here? Some hot-water bottles would be good too.”

“I can do better than that,” Alex said firmly, and after he located the hair dryer and offered it to Tate, he built a fire in the bedroom hearth.

It struck him, as he turned to watch Tate working with the hair dryer over Peter’s body, that he had at least part of his fantasy after all. The firelight did indeed catch the highlights of Tate’s hair and set it aflame with a glow of its own. He was enthralling as he worked.

“Perfect.” Tate smiled with pleasure at the sight of the fire roaring steadily in its grate. “Okay. Can you bring me another lamp?”

While Alex had obediently gone in search of another light source, Tate had shed his damp sweatshirt and replaced his gloves with fresh ones. When Alex returned to the bedroom, Tate was pawing through the trunk, holding a packet of suture material in his mouth as he retrieved a pair of forceps and what looked like a pair of long scissors from the box.

Tate was wearing an old, tight T-shirt that had shrunk to the point it gaped over his taut, toned abdomen. It read, R
EAL
D
OCTORS
T
REAT
M
ORE
T
HAN
O
NE
S
PECIES
. The appropriateness of the slogan made Alex snort with appreciation.

“Needle drivers.” Tate waved the scissor-like instrument at Alex. “I can’t sew without them, even when I do simple clothing repairs. It’s sad, really.” Tate’s smile was a touch smug, belying the tenor of his words.

“Okay. This is going to be tricky,” he said, all trace of humor gone. “I need to try and close some of these lacerations and Shaggy is showing signs of waking up. Which is a good thing in terms of shock; it means he’s responding to treatment. But it means he’s gonna feel this, too. Here, I need you to come up and talk to him. Just pet him and soothe him a bit, okay?”

Alex could see that Tate had clipped the margins of several long gashes with a pair of portable shavers. A small hand vacuum had apparently picked up any errant hairs. “You do this sort of thing a lot, don’t you?” he asked curiously.

Tate shrugged, laying out the various packets of suture and the instruments on a small, green cloth. “My job is to present out all the options and then help my clients decide which ones they can do. For many of them, money is a factor. Sometimes we have to do things in a less-than-ideal fashion under triage conditions. It’s a compromise, but more often than not, it works.”

“You’re smart as well as clever, and believe me, those two aren’t necessarily the same. You size up a situation in a flash and react to it accordingly. You make the best of the conditions in front of you. Most of the people I meet aren’t that adaptable.”

Tate looked up sharply at Alex and then flushed, dropping his gaze back to his arrangement of supplies. “Thanks. Could you plug that light in over here, please?”

Alex positioned the light so that it shone down on Peter’s side and came around to Peter’s head, stroking the soft fur of his ruff. Peter was starting to blink and lick his lips. Alex watched as Tate quickly began sewing the lacerated muscles and skin back together, starting deep and working his way outward in layers. It was fascinating to see the different structures under Peter’s skin and listen to Tate’s commentary as he worked. It was even more amazing to see how neatly he could close the gaping wounds, restoring them to an alignment that Alex wouldn’t have believed possible.

As though reading his mind, Tate said, “These all look worse than they are. They should heal okay.”

On the second-to-last deep laceration, Peter shifted suddenly, his head coming up and flailing down with a thump on the bed. Tate was in the middle of suturing his skin, his hands still attached to Peter by the suture material in his needle driver. Peter whipped his head up and snapped in Tate’s direction. Tate barely snatched his hands out of the way; the motion caused the suture to rip through Peter’s already mangled skin. He began to shriek and rolled up on his side, hiking one foot up in the air as he cried. The IV line swung crazily with the movement, threatening to pull the bag off its makeshift hook.

Nick immediately moved in, nosing Peter’s muzzle and licking his face. Peter whined and thumped his tail briefly before laying his head back down on the bed, looking drained. Nick rested his head across Peter’s neck as though holding him there.