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Biter, Bitten

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Ellie Hade set the basket of soup ingredients by the stove, got the fire started, and plopped into a kitchen chair. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples. An image of the day’s most challenging patient rose to the top of her thoughts. A runaway horse had trampled him and pulled a carriage over his broken body. Her assistance helped the doctor save him, but not before she decided to change tonight’s dinner to her favorite vegetation recipe. Travis called it You Don’t Want to Know soup, after the evening in which they decided not to swap work stories at dinner.

Tonight was one of her husband’s late nights, so she was in no hurry. After a hectic day at the hospital it was nice to come home and cook at her own pace.

Urgent knocks pounded the front door. Ellie sprang to her feet and raced to peer out the little round window set into it. A short, stocky woman stood on the doorstep. A boy who looked to be around sixteen years old leaned against her. He wore a bandage secured around his left cheek and a surly expression. The woman didn’t look too happy either.

Without thinking she twisted her wedding ring around her finger. Some women got flowers for their anniversaries. For their fifth anniversary, Travis had taken her ring and had a wizard put a pepper sprain spell on it. If anything threatened her, she could touch it with the ring and it would be incapacitated with temporary agony, as if flakes of pepper had been ground into the eyes and nose. So far she hadn’t needed to use it, but it gave her a boost of confidence when seeing special patients at home.

She opened the door a crack. “Can I help you?” she said.

“My son’s had himself a bit of an accident,” the woman said. “I hear you’ve got moon’s milk.”

Ellie stepped back and opened the door wide. “I do,” she said. “Come in. Have a seat at the little table by the stove. I’ll be right with you.”

The woman half carried, half dragged the boy into the kitchen while Ellie went to the storeroom for supplies. Her gruff voice followed her. “This is Shane, and I’m Mae,” she said. “We don’t have much in the way of money at the moment, but we’ve got plenty of eggs. That enough?”

Ellie returned with a bowl, a mortar, a jar of dried moon’s milk flowers, and some clean rags. “That’s fine,” she said.

She filled the bowl with water, set it over the fire, and turned her attention to her patient. Shane slouched over the treatment table, arms folded, glaring at her. He smelled like stale sweat and decaying flesh. They made eye contact for the first time and he pulled his lips back in a sneer, showing off his fangs.

Many of her non-human patients were werewolves, but most possessed enough self-restraint to make a better first impression. The few that didn’t had ruined the hospital for the rest of them, inspiring the lead doctor to ban all non-human patients many years ago. Though it wasn’t illegal for her to treat them at her own home, she made sure not to mention it around friends and co-workers.

She addressed the boy with a firm yet gentle voice. “May I please see the wound, Shane?” she said.

Shane narrowed his eyes. “M’not gonna let you touch me, human,” he mumbled.

He tried to stand, but Mae shoved him back in the chair. “Yes you are, you dolt!” she said. She kept one hand on his shoulder and waved the other in the air. “He’s about dropped dead with fever! I had to wait until he was too weak to keep me from dragging him over here.” She unwrapped the bandage. “Unbelievable,” she grumbled to herself.

The side of the boy’s face was red and swollen. Greenish-brown pus oozed from two rows of puncture marks, including four that were especially deep. Ellie was shocked. She had stitched up many battle-wounded werewolves, usually young males like this one. Their injuries tended to scar, but infections were rare. Moon’s milk flowers, useless to humans, offered powerful antiseptic properties to werewolves. The medicine was hard to find in the city, and few thought about it until they had an urgent need for it.

Ellie measured dried petals into the bowl and ground them in the warm water, which began to take on a milky tint. “Was there anything unusual about how you got the wound?” she asked Shane.

Shane glowered and said nothing.

“It was one of those horrid little ghouls,” Mae said. She scrunched her nose in disgust. “The boys are always chasing after them for sport. I keep telling them something like this would happen. Didn’t I tell you just the night before you went and did it that something like this would happen?”

Shane kept his eyes on the table. “I’ll make it pay for this, and you can’t stop me,” he said. “I’ll find its scent, and then I’ll rip off its other leg, and shove it down its throat.”

Mae cuffed him on the head. “Stupid boy!” she said. “Will you ever learn?”

Shane looked up at her and growled low in his throat.

Unease settled in the pit of Ellie’s stomach. She thought of Yerv and Zai, the ghoul couple she and Travis had befriended. Despite living in a hole in the ground they were better company than some of their human friends, always polite and full of interesting conversation. She could only hope that helping her patient didn’t hurt her friends later on.

“That makes sense,” she said in a quiet voice. “Their bites are known for causing serious infections when they have to defend themselves. I’ll send you home with extra moon’s milk petals.”

She dipped a clean rag into the pearly-white water and wrung it out. She turned to her reluctant patient. “Are you ready?” she said. “This might sting a bit.”

Shane followed her movements with bloodshot eyes. His voice rose, tight with anger. “I said you’re not gonna touch me!”

He stood and leaned against the table. His nails thickened and dug into the wood. His bared teeth grew longer. Black fur sprouted on his face.

Ellie took calm steps back, breath held, not making any sudden movements. Back against the wall, she gripped the cloth in a tight fist, ring pointing outward at the ready.

Mae grabbed Shane and tried to wrestle him back into the chair. “No!” she yelled, panic edging into her voice. “Stop, you fool, before you-”

One moment Shane was trying to push her away, and the next his eyes rolled back and he collapsed, bashing his head against a corner of the table. Blood trickled from the new wound buried beneath his scruffy black hair.

Ellie rushed to his side and felt his pulse. His heart rate and breathing were stable. The elongated face, sharp teeth and claws, and beginnings of a fur coat remained despite his loss of consciousness. She helped Mae set his limp body back in the chair. “His blood is badly infected,” she said. “You got him here just in time.”

Mae frowned and nodded. “Poor child,” she said. “And his brother is just as bad. Be grateful you didn’t have to deal with them both tonight.”

Ellie wiped out the shallow cut on Shane’s head, and then got to work on the infected bite. “I’ve never seen this before,” she said, motioning to the partial change in his face. His features were still mostly human, giving him an unbalanced and unsettling appearance.

Mae sighed. “It’s rare, but it happens,” she said. “Changing when you’re sick or injured uses up extra energy. Sometimes the body gives out and you freeze that way. Who knows, maybe it’ll do him some good to be stuck in between for a couple days. Anything to force some humility through that thick skull of his.”

Ellie dressed the wounds in clean bandages. She gave Mae a leather pouch with moon’s milk petals. “When he wakes up, get him to drink some of this,” she said. “His fever should go down in a few hours.”

Mae looked like she was on the edge of tears. “Thank you,” she said. “I owe you a lot more than the eggs. If you ever need anything, let me know.”

She gave Ellie her address, and then carried Shane away with greater ease now that he had no energy to protest.

The quiet always felt strange to Ellie after a visit from one of these special patients. It would be quite an interesting story to share with Travis the next time their schedules didn’t bring them together over a meal. She hummed to herself while she cleaned up and made You Don’t Want to Know soup. She was glad she hadn’t chosen to go with the pea soup recipe she had considered on the way home.

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Stories in order from bottom to top leonca.deviantart.com/gallery/…


Word count- 1,503

 

Some teenagers… :stare:

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MidnightDaybreak's avatar
Very cool start to something here.