The Doctor's Dilemma

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"Doctor Lister, we have another one for you," Nurse Fine said.

She was one of the older nurses and was really amazing. I loved it when she was the nurse for my section of the emergency room I was on. But we weren't working together tonight. It could only mean one thing.

I picked up my tablet and opened the new chart. A werewolf bite. I sighed. This was par for the course in the ER around the full moon.

Most of my peers considered me the expert on supernatural things, so all of these were given to me. I'd been teaching the other residents, but I was still the first one the nurses approached. They saw how well I handled most of them and liked how quickly I could turn the bed.

"Anyone want to come join me?" I asked my colleagues.

"I'll go," Tessa said.

Tessa Darrow was one of my few friends at the hospital. We were the only two female residents in the emergency room. There were about six of us assigned to the ER, but she and Leo were the only other residents on tonight in our small emergency room.

We made our way to room twenty-two with Nurse Fine. In the room was a woman who was about nineteen. She was pretty, with tawny brown hair and big blue eyes that were rimmed red from crying.

"Miss Davis? I'm Dr. Lister. I hear you had a pretty terrible night. You want to tell me what happened?" I asked, putting on my gloves.

"Well, I've been thinking about breaking up with my boyfriend. He's a werewolf and I don't know how much more of it I can take. He growls at dogs on the street and calls them traitors. He is really possessive, and he gets crazy and disappears around the full moon.

"I tried to talk to him tonight, but he said it wasn't safe for me to be around him. That he couldn't control his wolf so close to the full moon. I told him I wanted to break up. I'm not cut out for being a werewolf's girlfriend. That's when he grabbed me and growled in my face.

"He told me I was his mate and then he bit me. He said I would be a werewolf now, too, and I could never leave him. Is… is there a test for that? I can't be a werewolf. I don't want to stay with him," she cried.

I moved closer to examine the bite. Though I already knew there was no way her boyfriend was a werewolf, I couldn't just tell her that without looking. She would think I was just lying to get her out of there.

"Well, I have good news and bad news about this bite," I told her as I looked at the mark she had been covering with a paper towel.

"Wh-what is it?"

"The good news is that your boyfriend is not a werewolf. And the bite he gave you actually might not scar, even though he broke the skin. Humans don't like the feeling of biting living flesh, so we don't bite as hard as a werewolf might. You don't need stitches, but we're going to want to clean you up, and that might sting a bit.

"The bad news is that you're going to need a couple of shots and some tests. There are a lot of things that can be passed into the blood from saliva and human mouths have a lot of bacteria. We're going to want to give you a tetanus booster while you're here," I replied.

"He's not a werewolf? Are you sure? He can't touch silver or anything like that. The time I wore a silver ring, he jumped like something bit him," the girl said.

"Your boyfriend is not a werewolf. He didn't mark you as his mate and he didn't turn you into a werewolf, either. Being a werewolf is genetic. If neither of your parents was a werewolf, then you won't be one either. They shift whenever they want and don't lose control around the full moon. And very few of them growl at dogs," I chuckled.

"I'm afraid your boyfriend is either messing with you or has some serious mental illness. That being said, you can break up with him and I recommend you report this to the police. We'll take some swabs before we clean it and we'll take some pictures. Will you let me call the police in for this, please? If you don't take action, he could harm you or someone else."

"You know a lot about this…."

"I'm a doctor; it's my job to know about all sorts of people who might need help. There are werewolves out there, but they're just like you and me. None of them would ever bite their girlfriend against her will. They have rules and laws just like we do," I assured her.

"Do you know any werewolves? Real ones?" she asked.

"I have met several, and they are all really good people. If you like, I can give you a pamphlet for Supernatural Friends. They're a community group that educates others on the differences and similarities between vampires, fae, werewolves, and humans. That way, you'll be able to spot the fakes and bail before it gets to the point of biting. I'm going to get the things I need. You stay here and relax. He can't get you here," I said.

She nodded, and I took off my gloves, tossing them in the garbage as I left the room with Nurse Fine and Tessa. I closed the sliding door and shook my head. There was a surprising amount of werewolf fakers in this city.

"What would you like me to do, Doctor?"

"It might be too early for most of the tests, but get tests for STDs, just in case they were unsafe. It sounds like mental illness. If it's something transmittable, we'll want to get ahead of it. Start her on an IV with antibiotics. Get the camera and take some pictures, then we can clean it up. And call the police," I told her.

Nurse Fine nodded and headed down the hall as I put the orders into the tablet that had the patient's chart. Tessa stood by me with big eyes. She was pretty easily impressed, in my experience.

"How did you know it wasn't a werewolf bite?" she asked.

"The canine imprint was too small. If a werewolf were to bite a person, the canines would grow out and their other teeth would sharpen. I could see the flat surface of human teeth and human-sized canines. It's still a nasty injury, but better than if a werewolf attacked her." I shrugged.

We started down the hallway. I had patients to check in on, but there was a little time for me to go get a drink from my water bottle before I had to do that.

"You know there was a rumor that the reason you do so well with the supernatural ones is that you're secretly a supernatural. I doubt I would have been as convincing. You have a sure way about you that makes it seem like you definitely know."

I waved a hand in the air as if waving away that silliness. "Once you know what to look for, you know what you're seeing. The one important thing is telling people that most of these are genetic. The only thing that can turn you into what it is, is a vampire."

Though that wasn't entirely true. But I couldn't tell her that fae have a way to turn someone into a fae. It wasn't something other supernaturals were supposed to know, and the fae largely treated it as a myth to avoid people trying to get turned. It only worked on people who had fae in their genetics somewhere and it didn't work on fae who had been turned into vampires.

When I left for school, my friends at the pack hospital warned me that no one could know I was a werewolf. I would have to hide it from undergrad until I was back home. Humans were still dealing with prejudices from long-held beliefs. They thought a werewolf couldn't control themselves around injured humans and that we would attack.

It wasn't my job to fight against it. There were wolves out in the world who were. It was my job to learn everything I could from human medicine, then go back to my pack to learn more from them and the doctors in the clinic for the rogue collective.

We got back to the desk, and I got my drink, then went to check on how my patients were doing. I ordered discharges, did some follow-up exams, and ordered tests based on results from other tests. It was all fairly typical.

The rest of the night was fairly active, but insanely slow at the same time. We had eight more werewolf cases brought in. Either people claiming to be bitten by a werewolf or people claiming to be werewolves.

Two actual werewolves came in. One was escorting a patient, the other had a boyfriend who insisted she come in after an accident that probably would have severely injured a human.

That one was a rogue, but she didn't bother me. She was a member of the Eaten Heart Collective and I belonged to the pack where their Queen was mated to my Alpha. I had been told that our pack scent had a wild side to it that rogues responded to, especially the ones who belonged to the collective.

In the morning, I updated my replacement on the patients who were still with us, the ones who were ready to go, the ones who needed to be admitted for something, and the ones who I'd had little chance to see. I was dead tired as I headed to the locker room to change.

Once I was back in my street clothes, I said goodbye to people as I left through the hospital, instead of the ER's main doors. I parked in the back of the hospital and just badge through it.

The morning air was crisp and cool once I left the building. The moon was still up and I could see that it was nearly full. My next shift might be worse. Humans got crazy on full moon nights. I didn't know why, but it seemed like we saw three times as many patients on full moons as on any other night.

I got in my car and headed home. Well, home for now, at least.

Soon, I could go to my real home and work at the pack hospital at Lune Rouge. I was doing my third year of residency with the humans in Northern California. It was the closest I came to Oregon, which was a lot better than my last match, which was in Nebraska.

Mac, my best friend, hated Nebraska, so I worked on getting somewhere on either coast as soon as I could. Nebraska was too far inland for him. He liked this city, though. It was a quick run to the ocean for him.

He used to be a water fae, one of the original fae, the first supernatural creatures to exist, until he pissed off a vampire. That vampire, Dark, changed Mac into a vampire and later sold him to a satyr for experimentation. My dad, Dillon, had been on the team that freed all the supernaturals Pronomos had collected and experimented on.

I had been the one to help Mac find his new name, Magnus Caldwell. We decided to be friends at that first meeting. Though he was a little pushy and annoying at first, he was genuine. He wanted a friend and a purpose in the world.

Of course, I didn't realize that his purpose would end up being me. Mac went to high school with me and became my roommate when we went to college. He scared off anyone he felt wasn't worthy of me with his cold looks and equally cold demeanor.

It got to the point where I wouldn't tell him I was going out until I was already gone and I wouldn't tell him who I was going out with if he found out before I left. It was like having another very overprotective father in my life. Two was more than enough; I didn't need three.

For all that, though, I loved Mac. He made me smile when I was sad and took care of me when I missed my home and family. It wasn't a romantic sort of love, but it was a love beyond what I felt for my family and my other friends.

We were renting a condo on the edge of town. Something where I could go running in my wolf form and didn't have to drive to a forest. There was a running trail that went through the woods and out toward the ocean. It was a perfect place for the two of us.

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