Five months before Kukunniwi

“You’re late, Dr. Thug!” The little old nurse pursed her lips from her perch behind the nurse’s station and thrust a tablet at him as soon as Knight came through the Urgent Care’s revolving doors.

“AI got caught up on a valve replacement,” he responded to her sour look. “Had to go in for a manual assist.”

As he took the tablet from her he only just managed not to add, “and fuck you, too, Nurse Old Skool.” Most of the younger staff and his fellow doctors called him Dr. Knight or just Knight, when they were being casual. But a few of the older broads, insisted on calling him by a shortened form of the “Dr. Thuglicious” nickname that had somehow followed him here from med school.

“I see you had time to grab a coffee on the way over,” she answered with another pointed, sour look, this time aimed at the coffee cup in his left hand.

He didn’t bother to remind her he’d just come off a twelve-hour shift that included a lengthy surgery; one that had begun at 3:00 A.M. well before the butt crack of dawn. And now instead of going straight home as any sane human doctor might, he’d walked across the hospital plaza to consult on this case.

Instead, he kept his mouth shut. Two years into his residency he’d learned it was useless to fight back, especially against the older nurses. And this one looked like she was a few steps away from partial retirement. She probably still remembered the good old days when surgeons had to clock four years of med school on top of four years of college before they were allowed anywhere near a residency program. The glory days when paper was still part of paperwork, when doctors weren’t required to have robotic engineering skills, and when a surgeon would never dream of cornrowing his hair.

But Dr. Rasmussen Knight, as he’d decided to be called in the human world, had only needed to tack on a year of med school at KU to his robotics degree to get the M and D behind his name. Then the KU med program installed him here to replace a beloved Lister Award-winning pediatric surgeon twice his age who couldn’t keep up with the AI. And since cornrows were convenient as fuck for guys with long, curly hair, he’d decided to do that, too. So from the first moment she laid eyes on him, there was no chance in hell Nurse Old Skool would ever warm up to him.

“Maybe you should walk and read,” the nurse suggested as if just looking at him hurt her overly-nostalgic eyeballs. “The foster kid and social worker from Wichita Children’s Home have been waiting over an hour for you in exam room three.”

Knight took her up on her suggestion. Not because he cared about her opinion, but because the coffee was hardly doing shit for his current level of fatigue and he wanted to get this over with so he could go home.

But he stopped short in the doorway of room three. He’d been expecting to find a nine-year-old cub and Rita Olcan, the she-wolf who just happened to have a human job as a social worker at Wichita Children’s Home. She was another ancient, and she only tolerated him because he was the one wolf with pediatric skills within a 100-mile radius.

And yeah, as expected, there was a skinny nine-year-old wolf with dark floppy hair, seated on the exam table with both arms clenched around his stomach. But instead of Olcan, a tall hot drink of latte stood beside him rubbing his back.

Not a wolf. Definitely not an older she-wolf. But a much younger human woman with a huge head of dark brown curls that tumbled past her shoulders and down her back. She was dressed conservatively—if colorfully—in wide-legged red trousers and a pale-yellow bowtie blouse. The blouse looked like it was made out of satin—like real satin and not the shiny factory blends most women wore. And the color matched her ochre brown skin perfectly, making her look sun-kissed in the middle of winter, even beneath the exam room’s overly bright and unforgiving lights.

A groan from the boy tore Knight’s gaze away from Hot Social Worker, reminding him of why he was there in the first place.

With a slight frown, he made a preliminary scan of the patient. Dark circles under the eyes, profuse sweating. The kid was hurting. Bad.

Hot Social Worker made a sympathetic sound, squeezing the kid tight around the shoulder before looking up. “Will the doctor be here soon?” she asked with a polite smile.

He stared back at her confused until he remembered what he looked like to women who weren’t trying to coax him into bed. Dr. Thug—because of the cornrows and a particularly hard countenance that hadn’t fallen away after his time in the Marines. This woman wasn’t the first to mistake him for a nurse despite his white coat. A few of his patients’ mothers had even mistaken him for security.

“I am the doctor,” Knight answered, voice firm and brooking no argument. He’d learned since he’d started his surgical residency at the Children’s Hospital that this was the best way to deal with adults who were skeptical about his ability to dispense a diagnosis because of his brownish skin and brutish demeanor.

“Oh…” She visibly startled but unlike a lot patient parents, she didn’t argue with him or worse, demand to see his credentials. Instead, she reset with a bright smile and said, “Forgive me. I’m an intern with the Department of Children’s Services, here on behalf of the Wichita Children’s Home. Their usual social worker, Ms. Olcan, is out this week on vacation.”

Her hand returned to the kid’s back. “As you can see, Jandro is in terrible pain. But for some reason, Ms. Olcan has you down as the primary doctor in Jandro’s case file as opposed to Dr. Lillian who all the other children see. Perhaps because he only came to the home two weeks ago? I’m not sure. But we’re here now and I hope you can help him.”

Well, that explains it, Knight thought as he walked forward to get a closer look at the patient. The she-wolf social worker at WCH put a wolf doctor down as the kid’s primary… right before she went on vacation. Mystery solved.

Well, at least one mystery. The human social worker was still intriguing the hell out of him.

She smelled expensive. Like linen sheets and a perfume specially created to enhance her natural scent. Her skin was so porcelain smooth it appeared poreless. As if she’d been put on a beauty treatment regimen before a pimple could so much as think about appearing. Long arms and legs. The kind of fit-but-not-buff you could only achieve with a personal trainer and a body-specific, specially targeted nutrition plan. And unlike 99.9% of people her age, she spoke High Media, a super-succinct brand of hit-every-syllable, no-filler-words English you had to take years of special classes to learn.

This woman was well-designed. The kind of classic his brother, Rafes, would be happy to have on his arm for the human events he was expected to attend as President of the North American Lupines. But here she was in an Urgent Care exam room with a foster kid, because she was interning for a children’s service department in a non-drone state.

The kid groaned again, distracting him from his speculations about Hot Social Worker.

“So, what’s going on here?” he asked, not bothering to try and match her elevated language levels like a lot of people did with High Media folks.

She gave the boy’s shoulders another sympathetic squeeze. “Jandro told me he woke up this morning with intense stomach pain and started vomiting soon after that. He’s not keeping food down and as you can see, he’s not doing well.”

Knight nodded in agreement with her assessment about the state of his health, but not for the reasons she probably assumed.

“Alright, I’ll need to run a medical wand over him and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to be comfortable getting undressed in front of you, so why don’t you wait outside?”

“I’m sorry but that won’t be possible,” she answered with an apologetic dip of what seemed to be a permanent smile. “He’s deaf and you’ll need me here to translate since he can only sign.”

He raised an eyebrow, “You know ASL?”

Ever since the introduction of bioware into the general population, ASL had become all but obsolete. Didn’t need to sign if everyone could text and often speak directly into everyone else’s head. But this kid didn’t look like the kind whose parents shelled out for a complete bioware system in his birth package.

“Yes, I know ASL,” she assured him with another bright smile. Like bright smiles were her personal punctuation mark.

“You lucky boy!” he signed to Jandro. “You got sick the week a hot social worker was subbing in for O-L-C-A-N.”

Jandro answered with a weak chuff before unfolding his arms to feebly sign back. “Yes, she hot. But I vomit in front of her two times. Now I probably have no chance with her.”

“Inappropriate but funny,” Hot Social Worker signed back to both of them with a smiling shake of her head.

“Seriously,” he said and signed at the same time so Jandro could see, too. “I need you to wait outside. I can take it from here. Right, Jandro?” he asked, hoping the kid was smart enough to back him up on this one.

“Yes,” Jandro signed to her. “You can go. I okay with him.”

“Are you sure?” she signed back, also speaking out loud. “Because if you are uncomfortable, I can tell Doctor Cornrows where he can go.”

So she’s not all smoking hot sunshine and rainbows, he thought to himself as he watched Jandro sign back, “Don’t make me laugh. Hurts my stomach.”

“I’ll be right outside,” she spoke signed to both him and the kid before finally leaving out.

He watched her go, admiring the swing of her hips as she let the room. But as soon as the door closed behind her he spoke signed to the kid, “So you ran out of meth?”

“Yes. Police take when they find me with my dead mom. She O-D.” Jandro admitted immediately.

Sad story. But the kid’s face had lost all expression as he signed. Just stating the facts like he was used to his life taking turns for the even shittier. The deaf version of monotone.

“You addicted, too?” he asked matching the kid’s expressionless sign-tone.

“No,” the kid signed back. “But withdrawal pains get worse after every full moon.”

Yeah, this had become a common story within the wolf community over the past few decades ever since shifters discovered they could suppress the full moon shift with methamphetamine. And the story was especially ubiquitous in the poorer, or as they were more colloquially known, “mange” pack states like Kansas.

Basically, it went something like this: Wolf decides to live among humans in order to make more money than if they stayed with their rural pack. To make life easier, wolf uses meth to stave off the full moon shift. It works…for a few months or so, but the withdrawal pains start to get worse and worse over time. So instead of going to the woods on full moon nights, the wolf starts taking more meth to bypass the withdrawal pains. The rest of the story plays out pretty fast after that. Within a year of that first hit, wolf becomes a full-blown addict and loses the job wolf started taking meth for in the first place.

The best case scenario of that story ended with the wolf OD’ing in some alley. The worst case was sitting right here in front of him: a special needs city kid left behind by a single mom who’d probably been human before getting scratched by her fellow meth-head/shifter boyfriend.

Knight heaved a weary sigh before signing to the kid, “Antacids and drink A LOT of water. Understand?”

Jandro answered with a miserable nod. But at least he didn’t complain about getting the same advice he would’ve from a human doctor as a lot of wolves did. Meth users always come in hoping for miracles and it all boils down to a roll of Tums and lots of water. Anything else would be too risky to prescribe in a high risk for addiction case like this one.

“Sorry I can’t do more,” he signed, meaning it. “When the shifter social worker returns from her vacation, tell her to find you a foster family in the Kansas state pack FAST. Preferably BEFORE the next full moon.” He put an extra emphasis on the “fast” and “before” signs so the kid would understand how important it was.

“Okay,” the boy signed back, still looking morose.

Knight could have left it there but after a second he asked, “You know how to read?”

“A little,” the boy signed back.

So he pulled one of his Dr. Knight business cards out of his lab coat pocket and wrote his home address and private number on the back. “If this happens again, don’t let a human bring you in. Card has my number and home address.”

He held the card out to the kid who blinked with surprise before taking it.

“Never before meet nice male wolf,” he signed with the card in his hand, his expression somber.

“Not nice. Just decent,” he signed back. Leaving it there though he could have added he already had enough on his conscience and didn’t want to add finding this kid OD’d on the street to his current roster of recurring nightmares.

“What will you do about L-heart?” the boy suddenly asked, tapping the L-sign over his heart with more facial expression than he’d used when talking about his dead mother.

“Who’s L-heart?”

“My name sign for Hot Social Worker.”

Oh. He’d been so wrapped up in getting the kid help that he’d forgotten about the high-class hottie the boy had arrived with. “I’ll tell her you have the stomach flu and need lots of fluids and antacids to recover. This won’t go on your record.”

“No, I mean what will YOU do? Will you ask her for date?”