I must have been losing my damn mind. My fists curled around Dr. Benny’s baseball bat. He didn’t work here anymore, but he’d left the bat behind, saying we “girls” could never be too careful.

“Hey!” I called venturing further into the alley. Dr. Kennedy’s d-bag boyfriend squealed his tires as he backed up and drove down the street.

“Good riddance,” I muttered under my breath as I leaned the bat against the wall and walked a few steps forward. Where in the hell was that guy? He’d come out of nowhere. It seemed impossible for a guy that big. He had to be six three, maybe taller. One giant hunk of muscle with ginger-brown hair and brooding eyes. He looked like he could have been a model on one of those politically incorrect cigarette ads they used to have in magazines. All leather jacketed smolder and testosterone.

I wanted to thank him. I had things well in hand with Zeke, but I knew damn well Dr. Bess was probably going to end up going home with that asshat later tonight anyway. I warned her last month if she came into the office with one more bruise on her that hadn’t come from a bitey chihuahua, I was gonna use that very baseball bat.

All I found in the alley before me were empty shadows and hamburger wrappers from the fast food place down the street. “Pigs,” I muttered. The damn dumpsters were two feet away. Actually, that wasn’t fair to pigs. I picked the trash up, holding it as far away from me as I could before lobbing it over the side of the open dumpster.

That’s when I saw the blood.

More accurately, I stepped in it. There was a lot of it, running in a small river until it filled a crack in the pavement. I jumped to the side, but I’d already gotten some on the side of my canvas Converse.

“Shit,” I said, lifting my foot. No amount of bleach was going to get that out. “Are you back there?” I called out, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. Cigarette Model Man was long gone.

Was this his blood? But Zeke hadn’t touched him. The guy had moved so fast I didn’t think Zeke even got close to him. My heart raced, wondering whether this guy had really gotten hurt.

“Molly?” The back door to the clinic cracked open and Bess stuck her head outside. Her skin was still pale and she cast a furtive glance down the street.

“He’s gone, Bess,” I said. “Hightailed it outta here. I don’t know what that guy said to him, but it scared him good and plenty. Can’t say as I’m too sad about that.” I glanced back down at the trail of blood. It was the heaviest right where Zeke had been standing. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe he was the one bleeding. I know it wasn’t charitable of me to think so, but I kind of hoped he was. He deserved it. Maybe he’d think twice about sniffing after Bess anymore.

“Come on inside, Molly,” Bess said. She edged her torso into the space where she held the door open, but wouldn’t step outside herself. I was glad. For some reason, I didn’t want her to see the blood. She might worry about Zeke or try to call him.

“Yeah,” I answered. I turned my body toward her but kept looking over my shoulder. I had the oddest sense that someone was watching me. A strange tingle shot straight down my spine.

“Yeah,” I said again, quickening my step. “We’re gonna have a hell of a time playing catch up if we get any later of a start.”

Bess gave me a weak smile as I moved around her and went inside. It was just the two of us this morning. The rest of the techs wouldn’t come in until a little later. I had to process at least three admissions this morning. Two dogs for X-ray sedation, a third coming in for a spay.

“Did we get the labs back on the Sphinx?” Bess asked. She walked next to me, chewing on her thumbnail.

“Just came through,” I answered. “Everything looks good. As soon as they get her here, she’ll be ready to go back. Jason and Lynette will be in by nine. I can do the rest of the prep work.”

Bess nodded, still distracted by her thumbnail. “You should have had Lynette come in early. You don’t have to handle all these admissions by yourself, Molly.”

“Uh huh,” I answered. Except Lynette had three kids she needed to get to daycare. Jason worked third shift down at the lumber mill before he came in. I was the only tech who was currently single, childless, and only working this job.

“Bess,” I turned to her, blocking her path down the hallway.

Bess took in a great breath and leaned against the wall. “Don’t,” she said. “Not this morning, Molly.”

“Right,” I said, slapping my hand against my thigh. “Not this morning. Not any morning. What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t been here, huh? Zeke was fixing to hurt you, Bess. Bad. Again. He’s got a problem. He’s not going to change. You’re not going to fix him. Ever.”

Bess was looking right at me, but she didn’t seem to see me or hear me. All I got was a slow blink and a pasted on smile. It’s all I ever got.

I let out a bitter laugh and shook my head. “I’m wasting my breath,” I said.

“Molly.” Bess reached for me, but I shrugged her off, turning to the front door. At the same time, Jason walked in from the back. God bless him for coming in early anyway. He was big, burly, standing over six feet and change and looked every inch the lumberjack he moonlighted as except for one thing. Jason Calhoun had a high-pitched soft voice. It worked wonders on the animals as well as half the humans.

“Molly!” Bess called after me again, but our three admissions were already lined up at the door. I shot a look back at Jason. He widened his eyes over Bess’s head. He must have caught the tail end of our conversation. Dr. Bess’s bad boyfriend was the office’s open secret. He’d never change. She’d never leave him. And we all knew there was only one way it could end.

Later in the afternoon, as I checked Bess’s post-op notes, Jason finally found me and asked for the details. I sat in the back office with my feet propped up on the desk and two stacks of files. Bess Kennedy liked to do everything the old fashioned way. She hated the tablets and preferred charting her notes with pen and paper. I was pretty much the only one capable of deciphering her handwriting and digitizing everything.

“Thumper the cat is resting comfortably.” Jason’s sing-song voice echoed through the room. When I looked over my shoulder at him, I couldn’t help but laugh. A diabetic since he was a little kid, Jason was blind in his left eye. When he focused those brilliant blues at you, it gave him a look of permanent exasperation that was imminently endearing. Doubly so because Jason kind of was permanently exasperated.

He reached over me and grabbed the iodine out of the top shelf. “Yowza,” I said. He had three red lines on each of his massive forearms. Thumper the cat must have gotten in a few swipes before he went down for the count.

“Here, let me,” I said, dropping my feet to the floor. I grabbed the gauze and took the bottle from him. Jason plopped down in the chair next to me and held his arms out and gave me a pout. God, he looked like a giant toddler. I dabbed the gauze in the iodine and started to debride his cuts.

“So, what the hell did I miss this morning?” he asked, lowering his voice to a whisper. Bess was already gone for the day. It was just me and the other techs now. She claimed she was taking the bus home, but I knew it was a lie. Jason said he saw Zeke’s pickup parked at the end of the street.

“Same shit, different day,” I answered. “One of these days, that asshole is going to kill her. I don’t even know what to do about it anymore.”

Jason winced as I dabbed more gauze to his cuts. “She’s in love with the fucker. Plain and simple. You know, her own family won’t even talk to her anymore. I saw her sister-in-law a few weeks ago at the grocery store. They’ve thrown up their hands. Say they won’t enable her bad life choices anymore.”

I bit my lip past the mean things I wanted to say about Bess Kennedy’s family. The Kennedys were big in this town. Money and power in local politics. “It makes me sick. She has everything. Went to college and grad school on her daddy’s dime. He got her this gig right out of the gate when Benny retired. And she’s willing to piss all over it and throw it all away over that loser. Meanwhile…” I stopped myself. God. Watching Bess and Zeke Redmond seemed to bring out the worst in me.

“It’s all right, you can say it,” Jason said. “We’re all thinking it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are barely scraping by. You’re working two and three shifts covering for everybody else, including me. You live in a damn trailer park by the river and can barely afford that on the shit pay we get here. It’s hard to watch, Molly.”

I sat back in my chair and tossed the gauze into the wastebasket. I’d put sterile wraps around Jason’s cuts. He held his arms out in an awkward Frankenstein-esque posture. When I gave him a nod, he rested them on the desk and gave me a sheepish grin.

“I just don’t like seeing a nice person get shit on, that’s all,” I said. “I don’t begrudge Bess Kennedy or anyone else any advantage they’ve ever gotten. We all have our own struggles. Nobody’s life is any easier than anyone else’s. It’s just…”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Like I said, it’s hard to watch. But did you really go after that douche-pickle with a baseball bat?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, somebody had to.”

Jason cocked his head back and laughed. “Man, I’d like to have seen that. It was ballsy. But how do you know that fucker didn’t have a gun or a knife?”

My blood went a little cold when he said it. I didn’t have a good answer for him and I couldn’t stop thinking about Bess’s would-be protector from the alley shadows. Obviously, the blood I’d seen on the pavement hadn’t belonged to Zeke since Jason saw him just an hour ago without a scratch on him. So what the hell really happened out there?

“I know,” I said. “It wasn’t one of my finer moments on the common sense scale. But it sure as hell felt good. You should have seen the look on Zeke’s face. I think he about pissed himself.”

“Well, I for one think you deserve a damn medal. But, be careful, baby girl. I just wouldn’t want to see you caught up in Dr. Bess’s drama just for trying to be a good friend.”

Jason leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. He really was a big, damn teddy bear. “You want me to walk you out?” he asked.

“I’m good,” I said. “I’ve got about three more files to transcribe and I’m outta here. You go. You need to get some sleep. I know you’re at the mill tonight too. I don’t know how you do it. You part vampire?”

Jason made the most ridiculous face, tucking his upper lip at the top of his front teeth. I burst out laughing.

“Seriously, though,” he said. “Just watch your back, huh? I meant what I said about Zeke. I love Bess as much as you do, but I don’t want to see you getting hurt because of her bad choices.”

It was my turn to lean forward and kiss Jason on the top of his head. “I know. And I will. Now get gone. If you hurry home, you might get to spend twenty quality minutes with Michael before you fall asleep in your soup. Tell him I said hi and give him a kiss for me. We need to have a cookout again soon. My place. I know how you two love slumming in my trailer park.”

Jason gave me another goofy grin as he got up to leave. He sang off key all the way down the hall before the back door shut and muffled his voice.

Alone again, my mind drifted back to this morning’s events. Jason had a point. Confronting Zeke might have saved Bess, at least temporarily, but there was no question I was on his radar now. I’d never backed down from a bully, and I wasn’t planning to start now. Still, I grabbed the baseball bat and carried it with me out to my car later that night.

---

The next morning, I lingered at the curb behind the clinic on my way in. The pool of blood I’d spotted had dried there. That same feeling of unease crawled up my back, as if I were being watched. I straightened and looked over my shoulder. There was no one there. There hadn’t been the night before either.

Still, something had been nagging me since the episode with Zeke. That loser at least had the decency to stay away this morning. Dr. Bess drove in by herself. She was bright and cheery, pretending like everything was perfectly normal. She was always like that after a bad fight with Zeke. I had no doubt if I cornered her and lifted her hair off her collar, I’d see bruises there. Or maybe she hid them beneath her long-sleeved shirt. Bess Kennedy had become a master of deception. Except everyone who knew her best was no longer fooled. A part of me could understand why her family had given up on her. But, it made me feel even more sorry for her. Zeke Redmond had succeeded in isolating her from the people who cared about her the most.

I didn’t ask her about Zeke because I didn’t want to hear another lie. So, we went about our day pretending. Like always. For her part, Bess managed to avoid me as much as she could. She had three spay surgeries scheduled and a whole slew of appointments in the afternoon. It meant I’d be staying late again dealing with transcriptions.

“I don’t know why you enable her like that.” Tina, Bess’s intern, hovered at my shoulder while I worked on the latest batch of bloodwork on tomorrow’s admissions.

Tina had been at the clinic for the shortest amount of time. She was quick, smart, and abrasive. In other words, she was a lot like me.

“Pray tell, what do you mean, my child?” I said, raising a wry eyebrow in Tina’s direction.

“This.” Tina flipped the pages of Bess’s yellow notepad. “It’s the twenty-first century. She should learn how to use a fucking computer.”

“She knows how to use a computer,” I said. “It’s just her mind works better on pen and paper. And she doesn’t need to use the computer because she has people like you and me to transcribe this stuff for her.”

“Aren’t you sick of it, though?” Tina said. She helped herself to Bess’s desk, propping her feet on top of it. “I mean, it’s so menial.”

“Shit flows down, baby girl,” I said, borrowing a phrase from Jason.

“Not for long,” Tina said. “I’ve got six more weeks and I am out of this backwoods town. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

I gritted my teeth. Tina was young, I reminded myself. In her third year of veterinary school, she’d be eligible to pass her boards in one more year. God, I envied her. Like Bess, she had someone else to carry her water and pay her bills for her. Me? It was going take me at least three more years to save up just one semester. At this rate, I’d get my D.V.M. the year before I was eligible to retire.

Mercifully, Tina got up and bounced to another part of the office before she could piss me off any further. I put my own foot up on the desk. My eyes were drawn to the splash of dried blood staining my left tennis shoe. I’d forgotten about it yesterday. When I closed my eyes, I could see Zeke in the alley with the mystery man.

I hadn’t imagined it. I’d seen a flash of silver. He doubled over in shock or pain. I’d heard flesh tearing, hadn’t I? But he’d moved so fast after that, he couldn’t have been hurt like I thought he was. Except for all the blood.

When I finished the last of Bess’s notes, I powered down the computer and grabbed my purse from a hook by the door. Once again, I was the first one in and last one out. Tina hadn’t even bothered with a friendly goodbye before she left for the day.

I was just about to lock up the lab when the sound of metal crashing to the floor sent fear racing through me.

“Tina?” I clutched my purse in front of me. My heart pounded inside my chest. Something fell over in the back room. I could have dismissed it as one of our overnight patients knocking over a water dish, except I knew we were vacant tonight. Tina had discharged the last one, a yellow labrador, over an hour ago.

“God, I’m losing my mind,” I told myself. It was just the stuff with Zeke shuffling my cornflakes.

I put a hesitant hand on the door then pushed it open. The room was quiet and dark, not a tray out of place. Still, the hair prickled on the back of my neck as if someone had just been in here. I checked the cabinet doors. We kept the more potent medication locked up back here. The first four cabinets were locked tight. The fifth gave way when I pulled the latch.

“What the hell?” Jason must have gotten sloppy. I locked the door and tested it one last time before heading out. I had made it through the back door. If I’d just kept on going into the cool night air, everything might have gone differently. But, I didn’t. Instead, I stopped near the alley. The familiar scent of blood hit my nostrils. A shadow in the corner moved and took shape. No. It wasn’t possible. I took two staggering steps sideways and there he was.

Mr. Cigarette Model from the other night.

He stood in the shadows by the dumpster right where I’d seen him the morning before. He froze, eyes flashing. He was just as tall as I remembered with those smoldering eyes. His fingers closed around my wrists as I got to him. Heat seared through me, making me weak in the knees. He stared at me with eyes. Those eyes. They were an impossible color. Glinting gold with pupils far too big to be normal.

My own traveled down his rock solid chest beneath his taut t-shirt. There was a large, jagged hole at the front of it, and the edges were caked with dried blood.

“My God!” I went to him, unthinking. “You are hurt!”