Page 19 of Blood & Ash

He picked up the old scalpel, held it a moment, and then opened the drawer beneath the worktable and placed it inside. The drawer slid shut with a soft sound.

He didn’t look satisfied. His jaw was set. His shoulders carried the same tension they’d carried since the crates arrived. He wiped down the steel tray with an alcohol swab and arranged the new instruments in a row. He placed the forceps on the left, the retractors in the middle, and the scalpel on the right, just as he had for ten thousand surgeries before this one.

The autoclave stood against the wall where the men had left it. Marcus pulled the remaining packing foam from around its base and dropped the foam into the trash. The machine was stainless steel, larger than his old one, with a digital display and a seal that clicked when he tested it with his thumb. It was the kind of thing that belonged in an operating room, not a carriage house with stone floors and a door that didn’t quite seal against the wind.

He filled the reservoir with distilled water from the jug he kept under the sink. The water poured clear. He closed the lid and pressed the power button. The display lit blue. He set the cycle for thirty minutes and pressed start.

The autoclave hummed to life. The sound was different: quieter, steadier than the rattle his old one made. He stood with his hand on the lid and listened to it. His eyes fixed on the middle distance, on nothing. The clinic around him held its familiar smells: alcohol, the copper note of shifter blood from this morning’s draw, the faint musk of old wood and stone.

He took his hand off the lid, went back to the worktable, and unpacked the diagnostic unit from its box. The screen was LCD, larger than his hand. He plugged it into the wall outlet beside the shelf and watched the boot sequence scroll across the display. The Ridgeport 400 series handled blood work, basic imaging, and vitals monitoring, all in a unit the size of a lunchbox.

He connected a sample cable to the port on the side. The cable was new. He hadn’t ordered it. Arrow had thought of that too.

Marcus set the unit on the shelf beside his microscope. The old microscope was German, circa 1948. He’d traded for it with a hunter who didn’t know what he had. The new diagnostic unit made the microscope look like something from another century. It was.

He wiped down the unit’s screen with a microfiber cloth from the box. His movements were efficient, with the same methodical care he applied to everything: wipe, check, set in place. He moved to the reagent shelves and rearranged two bottles to make room for the new consumables crate. The bottles clinked against each other. He straightened them and stepped back.

His hand went to the autoclave lid again and rested there. The machine hummed beneath his palm. Through the small view port steam formed, the interior going white with it. The cycle counter read twenty-four minutes remaining.

He didn’t pace or say anything out loud. He stood with his hand on the lid, eyes on nothing in particular, the clinic around him full of new equipment that gleamed under the overhead light: better forceps, better retractors, a scalpel that would make clean incisions without catching, an autoclave that would sterilize in half the time, and a diagnostic unit that would tell him what was in a shifter’s blood before the fever took hold.

All of it given by a man who wanted nothing.

Marcus took his hand off the lid. He went to the sink and washed his hands. The water ran cold. He dried them on the towel that hung from the nail and turned back to the worktable.

The instruments lay in their row on the steel tray. They were ready for tomorrow’s patients and for whatever came through the door.

The autoclave cycled. The hum filled the clinic. Steam pressed against the view port.

Marcus stood with his back to the door and didn’t move.

Chapter 5

Del sat at the worktable with the valerian root jar open beside her. The oil lamp burned low, throwing shadows across the scarred oak surface and the line of component jars she’d pulled from the shelves at two in the morning: valerian, oak gall, iron filings, birch bark, all of them labeled in her handwriting, all of them arranged left to right in the order they appeared on Arrow’s list.

She hadn’t slept. The shop was dark except for the lamp. The windows were closed. The air smelled of dried herbs and the sweetness that rose from the oak gall when she opened it. She’d been working since midnight, trying ratios she’d never tried before, combinations that made no sense for anything she’d ever compounded. Nothing worked. Every test sample sat inert in its vial. Every reagent turned the wrong color or no color at all.

The door pushed open without a knock. The bell above it rang once.

Elise Alcott stood in the doorway with her shoulders braced against the frame. She was nineteen, a wolf from the eastern edge of town, and she looked like she’d run the whole way. Sweat darkened her hairline. Her right hand trembled against the door jamb. She pressed her palm flat against her forehead, then did it again. The gesture was precise. Del had seen it from Petra, from Cole, from the young shifter she’d walked to Marcus’s clinic two days ago, and from every wolf who’d come through her door with this thing in their blood.

“I need something.” Elise’s voice wavered. The words came out off rhythm, like she was fighting to place each one. “For the fever. The shakes. I heard you...” She stopped. Pressed her palm to her forehead again. “I heard you might have something that works.”

Del’s fingers were on the valerian jar. She didn’t move them.

“When did it start?”

“Last night. Woke up and the room was spinning. Couldn’t stand without holding onto the wall.” Elise stepped into the shop. Her gait had the same unsteady correction Del had seen in the others. She caught herself on the counter edge. “My dad’s in bed with the same fever. Nobody’s answering at the lodge.”

“How’s your appetite?”

“Gone. Tried to eat this morning and threw it up.”

“Sleep?”

“Bad. Waking every hour. Sweating through the sheets.” Elise’s hand trembled again. She pressed it flat against the countertop to hold it still. The tremor ran through her forearm. “I just need something to get through until Marcus opens. Something to slow it down.”

Del looked at the jars on the table. The valerian root sat pale and fibrous in the wide-mouthed ceramic, the oak gall powdered and dark in its cork-stoppered vial, the iron filings in the labeled tin, the birch bark scraped thin. She knew every component by touch. She had measured each one. She had ground the valerian root in the stone mortar until her wrist ached. She had weighed the oak gall to three grams on the brass scale that hung from its hook above the table. She had folded the iron filings into paper packets and sealed them with wax.