Chapter 6: Overcompensating

[SLOANE]

The morning clinic ran fast and efficiently until noon.

A standard inflammation case, an allergic response three prior consultations had missed because nobody had questioned the new supplement, and an elderly wolf with persistent fatigue that turned out to be a sleep architecture problem rather than the age-related decline he'd been told to accept.

"No one mentioned checking for that," he grumbled.

"Now someone has." I handed him the protocol. "Four weeks. Return regardless of improvement."

Isla met me outside the room. "Eleven minutes ahead of schedule."

"The supplement case was straightforward once you asked the right question."

"It had three failed prior consultations."

"They asked the wrong question."

"Which was not obvious to anyone else."

"It was obvious. They just didn't ask."

She fell into step beside me. "Do you remember when I started working here, I told you I thought you were either the most talented healer I'd ever met or an extremely confident fraud?"

"You told me that directly. At the end of the second week."

"I was building rapport."

"You told me to my face."

"I said it warmly." She held the next door. "The Whitmore case is when I knew for certain."

"Joint degeneration. Previous healer called it permanent."

"You asked him to walk to the window and back. That was your entire physical assessment. Then you told him it wasn't degeneration at all." She shook her head. "He cried in the waiting room."

"He was relieved."

"You handed him the corrected diagnosis and said, and I quote, 'It was always treatable. Someone should have seen this sooner.'"

"Someone should have."

"You are constitutionally incapable of false modesty."

"Modesty requires pretending I know less than I do. I don't."

"That is either inspirational or exhausting."

"Probably both."

"My sister still wants to know if you take walk-ins."

"No."

"She said you should reconsider."

"Tell her I've reconsidered. Still no."

I'd been at my desk for forty minutes. The clinic was quiet. Quiet in the way working spaces got after eleven—not empty, just settled.

The ventilation hummed in the ceiling. A patient two rooms down had been sleeping since eight and would sleep through until six if left alone, which was exactly what I'd prescribed. Everything was predictable. Ordered. Under control.

I turned a page and kept writing.

My notes on blood correction took another twenty minutes. I marked four places where the original analysis had missed an obvious inflammatory pattern, added two follow-up recommendations, and initialed the bottom.

Everything seemed straightforward. Another healer had simply not looked at the right thing.

I slid the file into the completed tray.

My mind replayed something Dr. Jackson had said three years ago, during a case review that had run long and turned into a conversation neither of us had planned.

We were discussing a request from a regional council affiliate who wanted her to consult on a border dispute framed as a public health matter.

"The council doesn't ask," she'd said, not looking up from her own notes. "When they send official correspondence, they're not requesting. They're notifying you that the decision has already been made and inviting you to participate in the paperwork."

I'd thought it was cynicism at the time.

I understood it differently now.

Dr. Jackson had a way of entering rooms before you realized she'd done it. Not stealthy—deliberate. She moved like someone who had decided a long time ago that announcing herself was an unnecessary allocation of energy.

She'd corrected my IV technique on day three. Not unkindly. Just efficiently. Like she did everything.

"You're overcompensating for the patient's discomfort," she had commented unapologetically. "You need to compensate for the vein."

I'd adjusted. Never had I made that mistake again.

She hadn't praised the correction. Instead, she had moved on to the next thing. That was her entire teaching methodology, and it was the most useful one I'd encountered.

Healing is not neutrality, she'd told me once, during a late-night session that had started as a pharmacology review and ended somewhere more complicated. It is selection under pressure. You are always making a choice. The question is whether you're making it consciously.

I was twenty years old at the time. I'd written it down and looked at it every time I was tempted to frame something as merely procedural.

Lunch was the forty minutes Isla had been protecting since month two of her employment, because a version of me that hadn't eaten was not, in her words, a person she enjoyed being around.

She'd said it to my face. Week six. I'd given her a raise.

We ate in the back office. She had a sandwich. I had leftover rice and the sixth council letter, which I had finally opened.

She saw it the moment she sat down. "You're reading it."

"I'm eating."

"Simultaneously."

"I'm efficient."

She set her sandwich down. Quietly. Not making a scene of it. "What does it say?"

"Statistics. Stage breakdown data. Casualty projections across seven confirmed packs, eight suspected." I turned a page. "A photograph on page four."

She went still. She'd seen page four when she opened the letter I'd put under the case files. We hadn't discussed it.

The boy was seven. Dark lines branched from his wrists to his elbows like something growing inside the skin. Eyes half-closed. The healer's notation beside the photograph said: Stage 2. Accelerated onset. Non-responsive to current protocol.

Seven words. Everything in them.

I put the letter down and finished my rice.

"I'm going to respond this afternoon."

Isla didn't celebrate. Didn't say "finally" or "I knew it" or any of the several things she was clearly holding. She picked up her sandwich. "I'll start clearing Thursday's non-urgents."

"I haven't committed to anything specific."

"You said you're responding."

"I'm opening a dialogue."

"Right." She took a bite. "Thursday's non-urgents."

The boys arrived at three-thirty. Oliver first, already mentally restructuring the afternoon. Remy was forty-some seconds behind him, somehow both louder and less organized. Kai last, with a school paper in one hand and an expression.

"Ms. Fenwick gave us a family history assignment." He held it up. "It asks for parents' pack of origin."

I took it. Read it. Handed it back.

"Write Blackthorn for the paternal side."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"We're Blackthorns?" Remy said.

"Your fathers are."

Oliver looked at me with the careful, measuring expression he'd been developing since he was old enough to understand that some questions required a specific kind of attention. "Which pack is that?"

"Northern territory. Old bloodline."

"Why don't we live there?" Kai inquired.

"Because we live here."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I have right now." I looked at all three of them. "After dinner. Set the table."

Kai stared at the paper for a long moment. Then, with great deliberateness, he wrote it in. He studied what he'd written.

"Blackthorn," he mumbled. Mostly to himself. Like he was testing how it felt.

"Table," I repeated.

They went. From the dining room I heard Remy asking Oliver what he knew about the northern territory, heard Oliver say he didn't know yet, but he could find out, heard Kai say he had already found something and would compile it by morning—as though the information had become a project with a timeline and a deliverable.

'You're going to have to give them more than that eventually,' Eira interjected.

'I know.'

'Today wasn't eventually.'

'No. It wasn't.’