Don't Run

The following night was worse. The day had passed in ordinary rhythms, patients and their humans coming in for checkups, treatments, and reviews, nothing out of the expected.

Chicken Nugget, ever vigilant, remained faithfully stationed at the wolf's side, even after I had set up an IV line to restore some measure of strength to the beast. Oddly enough, I no longer feared for him. Some quiet certainty told me that not even those long, lethal claws would ever harm him.

Still, when night fell, unease slithered over my skin like static.

The wolf stirred. His muscles rippled beneath his fur, his body twitching with a restless energy that set my own nerves on edge.

Chicken Nugget whined, pacing in circles, agitation bleeding from every step.

I drew closer, careful to keep a measured distance.

"Hey... it's okay," I murmured, voice low, uncertain. "You're healing. Just-just breathe."

But his body was anything but calm. His chest rose in jagged gasps, claws raked against the wood, and then-

It began.

At first, I thought it a seizure, the violent tremors jerking through him in waves. But as the seconds crawled by, realization clawed up my spine. His bones weren't just shaking- they were shifting. Joints stretched, ribs seemed to rearrange beneath his skin, and his muzzle snapped upward in a soundless cry that froze the blood in my veins.

"Oh my god..." My whisper fractured, caught between the urge to flee and the instinct to help.

His fur rippled like water disturbed. Limbs bent at grotesque angles only to reform, reshaping into something almost human. His growls twisted, deep and broken, until the noise threatened to shape itself into words.

Every primal instinct screamed at me to run, to leave this nightmare behind. Yet I remained, trembling but immovable. My hand shot out, gripping the table's edge as if my own presence alone could anchor him through this torment.

"You'll be okay," I whispered-desperate, fierce-clinging to a belief I didn't understand.

Sweat slicked my palms as the impossible unfolded before me. Fur receded. Paws stretched into hands. Muscle and sinew reshaped with grotesque fluidity, suspended between beast and man.

Minutes dragged into eternity. And then, at last, with one ragged groan, the creature collapsed onto the blankets.

I staggered back, lungs burning, heart rattling against my ribs.

I stood frozen, my breath caught in my throat, staring at the stranger sprawled upon the narrow bed of my clinic.

The room was dim, the lone lamp casting a pool of golden light that seemed to wrap him in a strange halo, as though he had been carved from another realm and placed here by some devine mistake.

He looked impossibly tall even in his weakened state, his long frame stretching nearly the full length of the cot. Broad shoulders rose and fell with shallow breaths, the sinews of his back tense beneath skin that gleamed faintly with perspiration. His body was a canvas of scars-old, silvery threads that spoke of battles long endured, and fresh wounds, still angry and raw, that I had tended just hours before.

My sutures, hurried yet careful, stretched across flesh that had no right to be human. Only moments ago, my patient had not been a man at all, but a creature cloaked in fur and primal strength-a wolf far larger and more fearsome than nature herself would allow. Now the bandage I had wrapped clung precariously to flesh that was now alarmingly human, every rise and fall of his breathing a reminder of the impossible truth before me.

Strong legs were moist from sweat and I dare not stare too long as my eyes landed upon his damp ebony hair sticking like wet swirls of velvet on the skin of his neck. The locks were long just past his shoulders.

And before I knew it my body had started moving on its own around the table as if examining an exquisite display at a gallery.

And then my gaze traveled upward as he shifted under the blanket that covered him from under his waist.

His face-gods, his face-was the kind poets would have broken their quills trying to describe. It was sharp, sculpted, as though the hand of some divine artisan had labored over every line.

A strong jaw shadowed with the faintest trace of stubble, high cheekbones that lent him an austere nobility, lips pale but full, their curve betraying both strength and torment. Damp strands of dark hair clung stubbornly to his forehead, but even disheveled, he seemed... otherworldly.

Yet it was his eyes that undid me as they opened, so fierce against the vulnerability of his wounded flesh.

They burned red, against the dimness of my little clinic, the very same eyes that had met mine hours ago when he had been a beast writhing in pain beneath my scalpel. A fire encased in amber. A predator's gaze, hiding something deeper and ancient, unyielding, and unrelentingly alive.

My knees threatened to give way, and I clutched the counter for support, my nails biting into the wood. "This isn't real," I whispered, though my voice trembled with a conviction I didn't possess. "It can't be."

The stranger stirred, a faint groan escaping him as he shifted again against the thin mattress.

His lips parted, and a voice rasped from within-low, rich, roughened by strain yet carrying a timbre that resonated deep in my chest.

"Don't run."