Page 2 of Accidentally Vital

"Twelve. If I don't have him in a carrier by then, you can do the dental in here, and I'll move him myself, and you never have to think about him again." I let a beat go by. "Twelve minutes isn't a lot to ask for a life, Mark."

The door eased shut. Not a yes. He'd gone to ask somebody with more letters after his name.

I went back to the cat.

He was already softer than the door opening had left him. I'd built the whole afternoon to make myself the one steady point in a room full of changing ones. It was working, the same as it worked on the kennel dogs and the trap-neuter ferals and the parrot that bit through a tech's nail bed and the snake nobody else would feed. I was very good at exactly one job. I was good at being the calm a terrified creature finally decided to accept.

"Where were we?" I asked, my voice low. "Right. You're terrible. I'm boring. Nothing's going to touch you."

A slow blink, from me.

A slow blink from him, faster this time, more eyelid, and his nose came forward off his chest a quarter inch to test what I might do next. What I did next was nothing. That was the gift, the whole eleven-year career nobody had ever written on a chart. The discipline to do nothing, on purpose, for exactly as long as the animal needed me to.

I let my hand find the floor and walk in his direction in increments too small to alarm a moth. Not at his face, never the face, but toward the front of the cage, low and flat, knuckles down so there was nothing to grab at and nothing to dread. I read his whiskers for the answer. Bunched forward and bristling meant back off. These eased. They came off the hard fan and settled along his cheek. One front paw, clenched tight beneath him, opened until I could count the toes.

"There he is," I said softly. "There's my brave boy."

I reached for the towel. It was soft under my fingers, worn down by a thousand washes. Mango watched it come and didn't flatten, and that was the moment — the actual one, the one I would have pointed to afterward — when I knew I had him.

Down the hall, Pruitt's voice said she swears she can. The dental drill whined to life in the next room. The clinic smelled of isopropyl and wet dog and the burnt coffee nobody ever cleaned out of the pot.

And then there was light.

Not the fluorescent tubes overhead. This came from underneath everything, from the floor and the air and the inside of my own hands, a white that didn't hurt to look at and didn't seem to come from anywhere a light is allowed to come from.

It poured up through the linoleum. It poured up through Mango's cage, and the cage went thin and far away. The cat went thin and far away with his nose still reaching toward a towel that dissolved out of my fingers like sugar in rain.

I had time for one thought. I didn't get him in the carrier.

Then the floor wasn't under me.

I'd like to say I was brave. I'd handled a thousand animals that wanted to hurt me, and I'd taught my own body to stay quiet through all of them. Some trained part of me tried to do that now, tried to go calm and sideways and slow. It didn't take. There was nothing to be sideways to.

The light closed over my head like water. I felt myself come apart at a level too small to have nerve endings. Every cell of me politely informed that it would be needed elsewhere. The last of me that still knew anything knew the burnt-coffee smell and my own voice still going, stupid and automatic, the three low notes I'd been singing into the bottom of a cage.

There you are. There you are. Nobody's going to touch you.

I came back together cold.

The cold was the first thing, because the clinic was always too warm. Wherever this was, it was not warm at all. The second fact was the floor, which had come back under me but had changed. It was stone, dark and warmer in patches than rock has any right to be, polished by a very long time into a low shine. It was nothing a veterinary clinic in Ohio had any business turning into.

I was on my hands and knees on it. I was still wearing my scrubs. There was still orange cat hair on my sleeve, three strands. I stared at it because it was the only honest detail in my whole field of view.

Then I did what I had always done in a place I didn't trust, which was to read the room before it could read me. Exits. Two I could see, both tall enough to drive a truck through, both guarded. Light. Low, which I approved of, though I doubted anyone had dimmed it out of kindness. Cold for them, I guessed, watching the nearest figures hold themselves tight and contained. And fear everywhere. It was in the flattened postures and the high tucked shoulders and the far set of doors that none of them would quite turn their backs on. A whole hall of apex predators, and every one of them was scared out of its skin. I'd walked into wards like this before. Never one where the patients could pick their teeth with my femur, but the fear was the same, and fear I knew.

The chamber was enormous.

I got that much before my brain would let me have anything else. Enormous, and dim on purpose, lit low from sconces that burned without smoke, the ceiling lost somewhere up in the dark. The air smelled wrong, layered over itself in a way clinic air never managed.

There was warm stone, and something green and resinous, and under it, sharp and unmistakable to eleven years of nose-training, the reek of a frightened animal. A big one. The musk-and-copper note a body makes when it has been afraid for a long time and hasn't been allowed to stop.

"It does not understand," a voice said, from above me and to the left, in English that arrived a half-beat behind itself like a badly dubbed film. "Look at it. We have spent the realm's last hope on a creature that crawls."

I lifted my head.

There were people around the edges of the chamber, except they weren't, not quite. My eyes kept trying to make them ordinary. They were tall. Really tall. The nearest one stood a careful distance back, chin lifted, loose-limbed and unhurried, watching me like a parcel delivered to the wrong address. The light moved on his skin in faint rosettes laid over the brown, the pattern of another shape worn underneath. His eyes were slit, vertical, the gold pulled down to a thin hard line as he looked at me. His upper lip had peeled back off a tooth longer and more serious than anything in a human's mouth.

Every fear reflex I owned stood up at once.