CITY OF WOLVES - The Awakening

Chapter 6 - The Doctor

The Strange Doctor

Dr. Okafor had treated Elias for a dislocated shoulder two years ago and asked no questions he didn't need answered, which was exactly why Elias called him now instead of a hospital that would file a report.

His small private practice occupied the second floor above a shuttered dry cleaner, the kind of office that survived on referrals from people who'd learned, one way or another, the value of a doctor who kept things quiet. Elias had always assumed that quality was about avoiding insurance paperwork. Tonight he wondered, for the first time, whether it was something else entirely.

The doctor's hands were steady until they weren't. He pressed his fingers along the faint pink scar on Elias's ribs, checked it under a penlight, checked it again, and something in his professional composure cracked open.

"Tell me exactly when this happened," he said.

"Two hours ago. Maybe less."

"That's not possible." Okafor said it quietly, almost to himself, the way a man says something he needs to hear out loud to believe it's real. "This tissue has the maturity of a healed wound weeks old. There's no bruising pattern consistent with a fresh laceration. Your bloodwork—" he glanced at the small centrifuge behind him, at a vial of Elias's blood he'd drawn twenty minutes earlier that was already separating in ways the doctor clearly hadn't expected. "Your bloodwork doesn't look like anything I've seen before."

Elias leaned forward to look at the vial himself. The separation Okafor had flagged wasn't subtle. Where his blood should have settled into two clean layers, plasma above and cells below, it had instead formed three distinct bands, the middle one a color he'd never seen blood take, dark and faintly silver at the edges like oil catching moonlight.

"Doctor, what's happening to me?"

Okafor set down the penlight. He looked at Elias for a long moment, weighing something, deciding something, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped into a register Elias hadn't heard from him before, careful and low, the voice of a man choosing to trust a patient with something that could get them both hurt.

"I need you to answer a question honestly," Okafor said. "And I need you not to think it's strange that I'm asking it."

"Okay."

"When did you first start dreaming about wolves?"

The question landed like a hand closing around Elias's throat, because the truthful answer was that he had, in fact, had a dream two nights ago that he'd already tried very hard to forget, a dream of running on all fours through black trees with something enormous and patient somewhere behind him, and he had told no one about it, and there was no earthly way this doctor could have known to ask.

"Two nights ago," Elias admitted, the words feeling strange in his mouth, like a confession he hadn't known he was carrying. "How could you possibly know that?"

Okafor exhaled slowly and reached for a folder buried at the bottom of a locked drawer, a folder Elias could tell by the dust on its edges hadn't been opened in a long time. "Because you're not the first patient who's sat in that chair with a wound that shouldn't have healed and a dream they couldn't explain," he said. "You're only the first one who came back to ask me about it twice."

He was running before he understood he'd fallen asleep, running on legs that didn't feel entirely like his own through a forest so dark the trees existed only as absences where stars should have been.

Something followed him. He never saw it directly, only felt the ground shudder faintly with each distant footfall, only heard, somewhere behind the wind moving through black branches, a low sound that might have been breathing and might have been a growl held just below the surface of patience.

The dream had a texture he'd never experienced before, scent arriving before sight, the cold biting at something that wasn't quite skin, his own heartbeat a drum he could hear from outside his body as much as within it. He ran until his lungs burned in a way that felt real, felt like it would still be there when he woke, and just as the thing behind him closed the last of the distance, just as he felt hot breath ghost across the back of his neck, he woke gasping in his own bed with the sheets soaked through with sweat.

His hand was closed into a fist.

He hadn't fallen asleep with anything in it. He was certain of that, certain the way you're certain of very few things at four in the morning with your heart still hammering from a nightmare. He opened his fingers slowly, half expecting them to be empty, half expecting the whole dream to dissolve the way dreams do.

The apartment around him looked exactly as he'd left it, the same stack of unread mail on the counter, the same dish towel draped over the oven handle. Nothing had changed except him, which was somehow worse than if the whole room had rearranged itself while he slept.

A coin sat in his palm. Old silver, worn nearly smooth, stamped with an image he didn't recognize at first and then couldn't stop staring at once he did.

Its edges were worn soft, rounded the way old currency gets from decades of hands passing it between pockets, though the design at its center looked untouched by time, sharp enough to have been struck yesterday.

A wolf's head, mouth open in a howl, circled by symbols that looked less like decoration and more like a language he had never learned and somehow still understood one word of, the single word etched beneath the wolf's throat that translated, impossibly, unmistakably, in his mind, as *bloodmarked.*

He didn't sleep again that night. He sat at his kitchen table with the coin under the lamp, turning it over and over between his fingers, watching the wolf's engraved head catch and lose the light with each rotation. He had never seen the coin before tonight. He was certain of that the way he was certain of his own name. And yet some small, unwelcome part of him, the same part that had understood a foreign word he'd never learned, looked at the coin and felt something closer to recognition than fear, as though his hand already knew the shape of it, as though it belonged there.