“Then who?”

“Don’t know. But,” he pulled out his cell, “I better call Grigori just in case. He hates surprises, and I think he’s had enough for one night, don’t you?”

Marci Luntz, M.D., watched the chopper touch down. She motioned to her medical team, and they rushed over with two stretchers.

Micah Novikov stepped out of the front passenger seat and closed the chopper door. Marci remembered when the boy came to visit every summer. He’d grown into a good-size polar, but like his own father Yuri, smaller than Grigori.

Feeling sick in her stomach, Marci impatiently waited for her team to bring Bold off the chopper.

Marci had grown up with Bold’s father as she’d grown up with Grigori, but she hadn’t met Bold until the ten-year-old was brought back to town by his uncle. Both his parents had died, and the silent little cub had very little to say those first few weeks and months. When he left eight years later to embark on his career, she knew she’d see him again. But not like this. She never expected to see him again like this.

Her team rushed him inside, one of them trying to help him breathe. She started to follow, but Micah caught her arm, holding her back.

“The girl,” he said, and tilted his head toward the chopper. “She’s still breathing.”

Marci’s second team only needed one orderly to pull the girl out; Bold had needed four. There was less blood on the girl, but her body looked . . . wrong. The orderly placed her down on the stretcher, and his gaze met Marci’s. He shook his head, already giving up on her, but Marci wasn’t that easily dissuaded.

“Get her in and find Dr. Yu.”

“Marci,” Micah said next to her. “That girl . . . something’s not right.”

“Why? Because it looks as if every bone in her body’s been broken?”

“No. Not that. It’s something I heard—”

“Micah, we’ll talk about this later.”

She rushed off, following after the two teams, Grigori right beside her. By the time she reached the emergency room, Dr. Baxter was already working on Bold.

“I’ve got him, I’ve got him,” Baxter said before she could even walk in. “Check on the girl. She’s circling the drain.”

“Got it.” Marci turned and saw Dr. Yu heading down the hall toward her.

“We have a black female, wolfdog, in suite two.” They walked in together, the nurses already prepping the wolfdog. “It looks like catastrophic damage to—”

Both doctors stopped and looked around the room, wondering where that noise came from.

“What was—”

“I don’t—”

They heard it again, and this time the nurses jumped back from the patient, one of them snarling in startled panic.

Marci and Yu looked at each other and then back at the wolfdog. Slowly, they stepped closer, each womanleaning in with their right ears close to the girl’s body to see if they could catch the sound again . . .

Snap!

“God!” Marci jumped back and right into Michah who stood behind her. “That noise. It . . . it came from her.”

Yu, a Harvard- and Princeton-trained surgeon and Great Panda, leaned in closer. More snapping sounds had her standing up straight, the wolfdog’s body twisting with each sound.

Eyes wide, black and white hair falling out of her sensible bun, Yu said, “I . . . I think her bones are . . .”

“Snapping back together,” Micah finished for her. He looked down at Marci, shrugged in a way that reminded her of Grigori. “I tried to tell you.”

“How fast can your uncle get here?”

Ric let out a sigh. When he’d gotten the call from the team watching Blayne, he’d split off from Lock and Gwen—not hard since Lock wasn’t speaking to him—and headed into the office. Not even on the elevator yet, and Dee was behind him and asking him questions that did not make him feel comfortable.

“Why?”

“Want the bad news, the worse news, or the good news?”

He sighed again. It did not help Dee-Ann sounded so . . . perky. “Bad news.”

“No clue if the wolfdog is dead or alive.”

Yes. That was very bad. “Good news?”

“I know where she is.”

Okay. That held promise. But still . . . “And the worse news?”

Without actually moving, Dee still managed to shrug her entire body. “She’s in Ursus County, Maine.”

And when he slammed his head into the wall, hoping to stop the panicked screaming in his brain, Dee-Ann didn’t seem at all surprised.

Grigori watched doctors, the boars and sows he’d grown up with, patch up his nephew. He never thought he’d be here again. Not in this physical place, but back in this moment. The last time had been with Grigori’s brother, but then it had been full-humans trying to save the polar’s life, his feline wife already gone. There had been nothing they could do. Probably nothing a shifter doc could do, either. The damage had been too extensive. When it was over, all that had been left was the boy. His brother’s only child. Grigori had been in the Marines at the time, part of the rarely mentioned but well-known shifter-only Unit. He’d received immediate leave to go to his brother’s bedside, but Grigori had assumed his remaining older brother would take the boy in.

How wrong he’d been. His eldest brother had sworn he’d never forgive Bold’s father for some dumb argument they’d had years and years before, but apparently that had been true. He didn’t forgive him. And although he still lived a nice quiet life in Ursus County with four kids and a sow who could have easily handled one more kid who needed the man’s family, that would never happen.