Nearly dragging the veterinarian behind me, I raced up the tight and twisting stairs, desperate for him to treat my boyfriend. It was just after two P.M. and the vet, Dr. Geoffrey Lincoln, was already well acquainted with his patient, Johnny Newman. What other type of doctor would make an emergency house call to treat a wærewolf?

Johnny, wearing only dark jeans and an Ace bandage wrapped high around his rib cage, lay on his narrow bed in the attic bedroom of my saltbox farmhouse. Despite a grimace of pain, he made no sound.

As soon as Kirk, a wærewolf from Johnny’s pack, saw the doc and me enter the room, he rose from the folding chair next to the bed. He hadn’t moved since we’d gotten Johnny in the bed hours earlier. Kirk nodded at us and then walked quietly to the foot of the bed.

Dr. Lincoln set his bag on the chair, pulled latex gloves from it, and bent to inspect Johnny’s wound. It kept seeping blood and had completely saturated numerous gauze pads and two of the elastic wraps already. In the time I’d been gone, the blood had again soaked through layers of padding and was darkening the bandage like an ever-expanding Rorschach blot.

I hoped that I appeared to be holding myself together and functioning, but my shaking hands threatened to expose my counterfeit calm. This is all wrong. Johnny was in wolf form when injured. These wounds should have healed when he transformed back, but they didn’t. My fears ricocheted inside me like wild bullets—the crossfire could shatter my cool and collected façade at any moment, exposing my panic.

A veterinarian by trade, Doc Lincoln had experience with the traumatic wounds animals sometimes inflicted on each other, and he had treated Johnny and other wæres before. At five-foot-nine, with receding brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses, the doctor appeared at first glance to be an average man, but the fact that he was willing to provide care to wærewolves—albeit secretly—made him very special indeed.