and twelve ounces. Everyone’s healthy and fine, they are resting now and I’m sure Tex will want to show him off to everyone in the morning.”
The entire restaurant exploded into happy conversation. Liam escorted Caroline to a seat beside his and pulled out her chair as Breck brought her a plate of fresh food.
She fell upon it with shifter appetite and by the time she had finished, most of the rest of the staff had moved to celebratory drinks. Breck brought James sparkling cider with a wink.
“I didn’t do the hard work,” Caroline said demurely, when congratulated, but her eyes sparkled with happiness, and Liam thought that she looked very relieved.
Most of the shifters had trickled out, back to the village in groups and couples as the night grew silky and dark. Liam would have liked to linger, but Darla was starting to collect up the elders, and Mr. Danby was starting to kick up a fuss.
Caroline was watching him in concern. “He’s...the mammoth shifter? Non-verbal, you said?”
Liam glanced over. “Yes. He sometimes gets frustrated—”
Caroline abandoned the last of her dessert and got to her feet. “Something’s wrong…”
Mr. Danby was clutching at his neck, his breath short and shocky. There was an unusual sheen of sweat on his brow, and he was pushing with his other hand weakly at Darla, who had been helping him to his feet. Concern was just beginning to rise in Liam as Caroline swiftly closed the distance between them and pressed fingers to his pulse point. “He’s having a heart attack,” she said urgently. She reached to her side, for a purse she wasn’t carrying. “Aspirin, does anyone have aspirin?”
“There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen,” Breck said, as the mood in the restaurant abruptly changed.
“What can I do?” Darla asked, in the same breath as Liam.
“Keep them back,” Caroline said, holding Mr. Danby in his chair with surprising strength. “Just give us space.”
Breck returned, the rest of the kitchen staff at his heels, with a bottle of aspirin. Caroline dumped half a dozen into her hands and began feeding them to the weakly resisting mammoth shifter.
“How many are you giving him?” Darla asked in shock.
“He’s a shifter,” Caroline said. “A normal dose won’t do a thing. Chew them, don’t swallow them whole!” She peered into his eyes and felt for his pulse again. “I have some better drugs at the clinic, but we’ll never get him there—”
“I’ll get Mal—” Breck started.
Before he could finish, there was a crackling rip in space and Mal was stepping through, grim-faced.
Caroline was not sure how long it would take to get used to a place where people walked around easily as shifters. It was going to take even longer to get used to a place where magic was so casual and common.
As suddenly as the portal had appeared, it sizzled into nothing behind the lawyer.
“What has happened?” Caroline hadn’t seen Scarlet come through the portal, but there she was, somehow both concerned and cool-looking.
No pressure, Caroline thought, in sudden panic. It was just her first day as a doctor at her new job and here were incredibly powerful people with her entire life in their hands watching her lose her first patient. More keenly still, she was aware of Liam, watching anxiously as he comforted one of the elderly women who had been sitting next to Mr. Danby.
“Heart attack,” she said briefly, returning all of her attention to what was important.
Already, he seemed calmer, his heart beat stronger. The aspirin would keep the damage from getting worse.
To her surprise, Mal stepped closer and shook back his rolled up shirt sleeves. There were rune tattoos spiraled up his forearms. “Can I help?” he offered unexpectedly. “I...know how to knit bones and repair muscle damage.”
“It’s a blockage of blood to his heart,” Caroline said, pushing through her surprise. Why shouldn’t he be able to heal? “The idea is to get the blood flowing again. But wait…”
The look of hesitation in Mal’s face was some salve to Caroline’s own uncertainty and she was immediately moving through all the familiar motions, focused entirely on her patient. “His heart rate is strengthening. He’s already stabilizing.”
The change was apparent. Mr. Danby still looked weak, but his motions were more deliberate, his eyes sharper.
There was a sag in the anxious energy around them and a low chatter of conversation rose up. Caroline looked up at Mal. “For a shifter of his age and health, I would normally just give him a treatment of thrombolytics.