When the Night Vet Hungers

Stacy Kincaid woke up on a cot that wasn't hers, under a scratchy blanket that definitely wasn't hers, with her bra somewhere in the vicinity of a filing cabinet.

Thirty-four years old and she'd done it again. Slept somewhere dumb. Slept with someone dumb, possibly. The jury was still out on that one.

She sat up. The break room of the All-Night Mobile Vet Clinic looked the same as it always did. Coffeepot. Corkboard with a lost cat flyer from two years ago. The mini fridge that hummed like it was mad about something. Fluorescent lights overhead, buzzing away. The whole place smelled like antiseptic and dog hair, which was normal, which was fine.

What was not fine was that she was alone.

"Jodi?" she called. Nothing.

Her mouth tasted like a bad decision. She found her underwear draped over the space heater, which, okay, at least the room had a sense of humor. She got dressed piece by piece, doing inventory. Jeans. Check. Socks. Check. Shirt. Check, mostly, in the sense that it was Jodi's gray sweatshirt. Her bra stayed missing. She decided not to fight it. She'd gone braless at work before. Nobody at a mobile vet clinic at six in the morning was judging anybody.

There was a note on the coffeemaker. Jodi's handwriting, neat as a chart.

*Stacy. Emergency call came in. I'm with a patient in the back bay. There's coffee. Please drink the coffee. We should talk when I'm done. Don't panic about anything. Please.*

*J.*

Don't panic about anything. Sure. Great. That was a note written specifically to cause panic. Don't panic about anything was what you wrote when there were several things to panic about and you'd lost the energy to list them.

Stacy poured coffee anyway. It was burnt and old and she drank it standing up, because sitting down meant thinking, and thinking meant replaying last night, and replaying last night meant she'd have to admit that some parts of it made no sense.

Her pride was bruised, she noticed. Freshly. Being left without so much as a goodbye, just a note and an instruction, stung worse than it should have. Jodi Thompson was her best friend. Three years of friendship, built at a boring conference in a hotel ballroom where they'd both ditched the same seminar about tick-borne disease and split a plate of nachos instead. Three years of shifts together, of Jodi falling asleep on Stacy's shoulder in the ambulance between calls, of arguing about radio stations.

And now this. A note. *Don't panic about anything.* As if Stacy was the one who needed managing.

"Rude," she said to the empty room. "Just rude."

She rinsed her cup and made herself sit on the cot anyway, because where else was she going to go. Her shift didn't technically end for another two hours. Jason Ward, the owner, had a policy about not abandoning the vehicle, and Stacy had a policy about not getting chewed out by Jason, so here she sat.

Fine. Fine. She'd think about it. She'd think about it like an adult.

***

The night had started normal, is the thing. Genuinely normal.

Slow shift. Drew Santos had gone home at ten, hugging both of them on the way out the door like he always did, thirty-eight years old and still the dad friend of the whole operation. That left Stacy and Jodi riding around the city with no calls, parked in the lot behind the office, splitting a bag of gas station pretzels.

And somewhere around midnight the conversation had slid off the rails. Off the rails in a good way, at first. Jodi had said something about how Stacy looked in the porch light of their last call, and Stacy had said something back, and then they were both just looking at each other in the cab of the ambulance like a couple of idiots.

"You sure?" Jodi had asked. Actually asked. Verbal, out loud, waiting on an answer. That defined Jodi. She never assumed. "Because once we start this, I don't want to pretend it's nothing. I like you too much for casual."

Stacy had said yes. Twice, probably. She'd been clear-headed, one weak beer with dinner, that was all. She'd known exactly what she was doing.

The first kiss had been good. The second kiss had been better. And then they'd ended up on the cot in the break room, because the ambulance cab had a stick shift in a very rude location, and Jodi had laughed and said, "Follow me," and that had been that.

Up to a point, everything was normal. Good, even. Jodi, thirty-six, built like a swimmer, all long lines and careful hands. She'd pulled Stacy's shirt over her head after asking, "Okay?" and Stacy had said "Very okay," and it had been warm and funny and a little clumsy in the way first times with old friends always are.

Then the details started.

Stacy had put her hand flat on Jodi's back and thought, for one full second, that she was touching the side of a parked car. Jodi's skin was cold. Not dead-cold, not morgue-cold, but cold the way a doorknob in January is cold. Cold like the room had gotten into her and the room had won.

She'd pulled back. "You're freezing."

"Low blood pressure," Jodi had said. Fast. Too fast. "It's nothing. Do you want me to stop?"

"No, I want a blanket and your cold hands nowhere near me until they warm up."

Jodi had laughed at that, a real laugh, and gone to warm her hands under the space heater like a reasonable person, and the moment had passed. They'd kept going. It had been good. It had been genuinely good, and Stacy remembered it in specifics she was not going to write down anywhere. Mostly.

Jodi's hands, warm at last, had gone slowly up her ribs while Stacy lay back on the scratchy blanket. "Tell me what you want," Jodi had said against her collarbone. "Out loud. I'll stop whenever you say."

"Your mouth," Stacy had said, and then, because she was thirty-four and apparently brave, "Everywhere. Start with my neck."

Jodi had started with her neck. Then lower, taking her time, until Stacy's hips were lifting off the cot of their own accord. Jodi stopped at the waistband of her jeans. "Can I go down on you?"

"Please. Yes."

"One second." Jodi reached up to the supply shelf above the cot and came back with a flat square of latex. "Dental dam. For the dog cleanings."

"You are not seriously..."

"I'm a professional. It's a barrier. We talk about those." Her face was perfectly straight, and Stacy was laughing helplessly when Jodi's mouth found her, and then she was not laughing at all. Jodi was slow and patient and exact, asking "Here?" and "Is that good?" between long, unhurried strokes, and Stacy said "There, yes, don't stop" until the words ran out and she was just breathing, fistfuls of blanket in both hands.

"Can I use my fingers too?" Jodi asked, a little breathless herself.

"God, yes."

Jodi snapped a nitrile glove on from the box by the sink ("vet habit," she muttered), slicked it with the surgical lubricant from the shelf, and slid two fingers inside her, curling them up toward the place that made the cot springs complain. Stacy came with a shout she was glad the walls could not repeat, shuddering, her heels digging into the mattress, and Jodi held her through it until she pushed her gently away.

"Your turn," Stacy said, when she could talk. "If you want."

"I want." Jodi had looked almost shy. "Show me what you like."

Stacy showed her. Her own mouth, her hands, a glove of her own, Jodi's thighs trembling under her palms, Jodi asking for slower and then for harder, a low rolling sound in her chest like a purr when she finally came, her mouth at Stacy's ear.

It had been so good. That was the problem. It had been so good that Stacy had almost not noticed any of the rest.

But there were other things, now that she lay there and picked through the night like a raccoon through a trash can.

The scent. Jodi had a scent, up close, and it wasn't perfume and it wasn't soap. It was iron and wet earth. Like a garden bed after rain, if the garden bed had a mild hematoma. Stacy had noticed it and thought, huh, weird, and then gotten distracted by better things. But it lingered. She could still smell it on her own wrists.

And her skin. When Jodi touched her, Stacy's skin had prickled, a faint static crawl, the way it does before a lightning storm. She'd blamed the blanket. Scratchy wool blanket, static, sure. Fine.

And once, just once, in the dark, when Jodi had leaned down close to her ear, her breath had made a sound. Not breathing. More like a slow purr, low and rolling, a sound with a machinery in it somewhere. Stacy had been too far gone to care at the time. In daylight, on a cot, sober, it sat differently.

"Don't panic about anything," she muttered at the ceiling. "Sure. Easy."

There was one more thing. The worst one. She kept circling back to it.

At some point, deep in it, Jodi had pulled back to look at her, the way people do, and in the dim light from the hallway her eyes had caught the glow wrong. Not reflecting the light. Making a little of their own. A faint gold-green shine, deep in the pupils, like a dog's eyes in headlights. Like a raccoon at the end of the driveway.

Stacy had blinked and it was gone. Normal eyes. Warm brown, tired, human.

Probably a trick of the hallway light. Probably the fluorescents doing something weird through the door. Probably any of a dozen boring explanations.

Probably.

"Ugh," Stacy said, and flopped back on the cot, and stared at the ceiling tiles, and counted them. Fourteen. She'd counted them before, on slow nights. There had always been twelve. Either the clinic had added ceiling tiles overnight or her brain was doing something creative, and neither option was comforting.

She checked her phone. 6:12 in the morning. Drew had texted at five in the morning, asking how the shift went. She had not answered. She could not currently answer, because the answer was "my night went great and then my best friend grew raccoon eyes and now I'm sitting in her break room with no bra," and Drew had a wife and a mortgage and did not need that in his life before sunrise.

The back bay was quiet. Too quiet, maybe. The clinic was an all-night clinic, that was the entire point of it, and there should have been something happening. A pickup truck in the lot with a nervous farmer. A cat in a carrier crying. Something.

Instead there was just the hum of the fridge, and the buzz of the lights, and a sound from the back bay that was almost nothing. A soft, rhythmic shifting. Like something large turning over in its sleep.

Stacy stood up.

Okay, she thought. She was not going to panic about anything. Jodi had specifically asked. But nobody had said anything about going to look, had they? Nobody had forbidden looking.

She padded down the hallway in her sock feet, past the supply room, past the X-ray room, toward the back bay where the big ambulance doors stood closed. The light under them was wrong. Not the flat white of the bay lights. A warmer glow, pulsing very slightly, like the light was breathing.

From behind the doors, she heard Jodi's voice. Low. Not talking to a patient, not talking to a person at all. A steady murmuring, the way you'd talk to something you were trying to keep calm. Or keep still.

Stacy stopped with her hand an inch from the door.

Her pride said go in. Her pride had been saying go in all morning, hadn't it. Go in, demand an explanation, act like someone who mattered. Her pride was very loud.

Everything else in her, the part that had felt the static and smelled the iron and earth and seen the shine in the dark, said wait.

She stood there, hand hovering, sock feet cold on the linoleum, and listened to Jodi murmur to something behind a closed door, and tried to decide who she was going to be about all this.

The murmuring stopped.

Then, quiet as anything, Jodi's voice came again. Clear. Directed. Aimed straight at the door, and through it, at Stacy.

"You can come in, if you want. Or you can go back to the cot. Either one's fine with me."

A pause. Then, softer:

"I'd just rather you not decide while hovering at the door like a ghost. It's unsettling."

Stacy looked down at her own feet, betrayed by their total silence, and sighed.

Stacy went in. Of course she went in. Her pride would not have shut up about it otherwise.

The back bay was warm. Not heater warm. Body warm, like standing too close to a crowd. The big ambulance doors were shut, the van parked inside like always, but the lights were low and amber instead of the usual flat white, and Jodi was standing at the tailgate with a dog stretched out on a padded table.

A big mutt. Brown and gray, some kind of shepherd mix, one ear folded. There was a long tear along its flank, and Jodi was stitching it, calm as Sunday, her hands moving in a slow steady rhythm.

"Hey," Stacy said.

"Hey yourself!" Jodi didn't look up. "How's the cot?"

"Fine. Firm. Full of questions." Stacy came closer, arms crossed over her borrowed sweatshirt, which was Jodi's, which was a whole other thing she was not thinking about. "Who's the dog?"

"Found him on Route 9 around four. Hit by a car, or chased into a ditch, hard to say. He'll be fine." Jodi tied off a stitch and clipped the thread. "Somebody's going to be real happy when we get ahold of his people."

The dog thumped its tail once against the table. It looked sleepy and unbothered, which was not