Everly's POV
The sutures were dissolving.
Not falling out. Not infected. Dissolving the thread I'd used, breaking down and disappearing into healthy skin like it had been there for weeks instead of thirty-six hours. I pressed along the closed wound with two fingers, checking the tissue underneath, and felt nothing but clean, firm healing.
I stepped back and stared at him.
"This isn't possible," I said out loud.
Silver stared back at me from the treatment table, completely unbothered.
I grabbed my chart notes from Christmas morning and flipped back through them. Deep lacerations. Possible internal bleeding. Toxic compound in tissue source unknown. My own handwriting, and I'd added at the bottom in capital letters: CRITICAL. SURVIVAL UNLIKELY.
That was forty hours ago.
The wound on his flank that had taken me twenty-two stitches to close was almost gone. A faint pink line in the fur, nothing more. The smaller cuts had vanished entirely. I picked up his paw, the one that had been torn badly enough to show bone, and turned it over slowly. New skin. Soft and clean, like a pup's.
I set his paw down very carefully, sat on the stool, and pressed my hands flat on my knees.
Think, Everly.
I was a scientist. I believed in things I could measure, test, and explain. I believed in biology and medicine and the slow, stubborn process of the body repairing itself. What I did not believe in was a critically wounded wolf healing in two months of recovery in two days.
Except it was happening on my table in front of my eyes.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. I need a blood sample."
He let me take it without moving. He always let me do whatever I needed without resistance, held still for injections, let me check his eyes and ears and teeth, and turned his head when I needed to access the wounds on his neck. The cooperation of an animal that understood exactly what I was doing and had decided to allow it.
I ran the sample through every test my equipment could manage. The results came back in pieces over the next hour while I worked, and each one made less sense than the last. His white cell count was extraordinary, not elevated the way it would be fighting infection, but structured differently, organized in patterns my reference charts didn't cover. His blood chemistry had markers I'd never seen in any canine sample. Some of them I'd never seen in any sample, period.
I wrote everything down. I'd been writing everything down since Christmas morning, filling pages of notes I didn't fully understand yet, because even if I couldn't explain this, I was going to document every single thing.
That's when my hand brushed his paw.
The warmth came instantly, the way it always did, that deep, steady heat moving up from my palm through my wrist and into my arm. I was almost used to it now, which was its own kind of strange. Two days ago, it had shocked me into pulling away. Now it just felt like... contact. Like the heat was the real part of touching him, more honest than the fur or the solid weight of his body.
I didn't pull back this time.
I spread my hand flat against his paw and let it move.
It was different when I stopped fighting it. The warmth didn't feel like it came from him exactly — more as it passed through both of us at once, back and forth, the way heat moves between two hands pressed together. I felt it run up my arm and settle in my chest, and something in me that had been wound tight for two days, the fear and the exhaustion and the questions with no answers, loosened just slightly, like a knot giving up a fraction of its hold.
Silver made a low sound. Content, almost.
"Yeah," I said softly. "I don't understand it either."
I sat with him like that for a while, my hand on his paw, not examining, not working. Just sitting. Outside the window, Pinevale was doing its Christmas thing. I could hear distant music from the town square, a car moving slowly on the icy road. Normal world, going on as usual. In here, nothing was normal, and I'd mostly stopped expecting it to be.
I thought about the man at the window. His cold smile, the gesture across his throat, the way he'd looked at Silver with that one flash of something that wasn't amusement.
Fear.
Whoever he was, he was afraid of this wolf. And whatever those people were looking for by circling the building in the dark, they hadn't come back. Two days of quiet. I'd slept both nights lightly with the tranquilizer gun close, but nothing had moved outside, no unknown numbers had texted, no figures stood at the tree line.
Waiting, maybe. For what, I didn't know.
I checked Silver's eyes. I had been saving them because they made it hardest to think straight. Pale blue, clear and sharp, tracking my penlight smoothly. Pupils are responding normally. No cloudiness, no pressure, no sign of the neurological damage I'd been bracing for on Christmas Eve.
"Perfect," I muttered.
He blinked at me. Slow, deliberate.
"Don't look smug about it."
The blink again.
I laughed. It surprised me with a short, tired, genuine laugh that echoed in the empty clinic. When was the last time I'd laughed alone? I couldn't remember. It had probably been before Christmas, and before Christmas felt like a different life.
I was washing my hands at the sink, already planning the next round of tests, when the warmth hit me without warning.
No contact this time. I wasn't touching him, wasn't near him. I was standing at the sink six feet away with my back to him, and the heat moved through both my hands at once, so sudden and strong that I grabbed the edge of the sink to steady myself.
It ran up my arms, across my shoulders, down my spine.
And then I heard it.
Not out loud. Not through my ears. Inside, somewhere between my chest and the back of my mind, in a place that had no name.
A voice. Low and steady, with that same quality from my dream, the kind that settles something in you before the words even register.
Thank you.
I spun around.
Silver was sitting up fully on the table, watching me. Not lying down, not resting. Sitting up straight, still as stone, those pale eyes fixed on my face with an expression that animals did not have.
My back hit the sink.
The warmth faded slowly, like the last of a sunset. And the voice, if it had been a voice, was gone, leaving nothing behind but the hum of the heater and my own unsteady breathing.
"That didn't happen," I whispered.
Silver held my gaze without blinking.
"Animals don't, I'm not, that's not."
My phone rang.
I grabbed it fast, grateful for the interruption, not even checking the screen before I answered. "Hello?"
Silence for one second. Two.
Then a voice real this time, in my ear, male and low and completely calm. "Dr. Reed. Don't be frightened. I need you to listen to me very carefully."
I gripped the phone tight. "Who is this?"
"Someone who has been watching you care for something that belongs to us." A pause. "We've been patient. But our patience ends tonight. Step away from the wolf, leave the clinic, and we won't hurt you."
My eyes went to Silver.
He was already standing. All four legs. Head low, gaze at the front door.
Someone knocked. Three slow, heavy knocks that shook the frame.
The voice on the phone dropped to almost a whisper. "Last chance, Doctor."