Thankfully, Cooper had led me in a relatively straight line from the medical station to the meadow, and the few twists we’d taken hadn’t been enough to take us away from the general direction of the road. After what felt like an eternity, I stumbled out of the trees and onto the hard-packed dirt. The brilliantly manmade form of Riley’s SUV gleamed in the afternoon sun about twenty yards away. Twenty short yards, after what I’d just been through. I walked toward it as fast as I could with Cooper still weighing me down, and let out a sigh of relief when I saw the medical station exactly as we’d left it, down to the closed and locked front door.

“Sorry about this, buddy,” I said, and lowered Cooper until he was halfway on the hood, allowing me to rummage through his pockets. He kept trying to slide off my shoulders, forcing me to hoist him up again. I nearly dropped him twice. I was starting to be afraid that I wouldn’t have the strength to catch him when the third time inevitably came, and then my fingers hit the rounded outline of his key ring, and I stopped worrying about silly little things like gravity. Playtime was over. It was time for me to really get to work.

After carrying Cooper through a forest and searching him for keys without dropping him on his head, balancing him on my shoulder while I unlocked the door was practically child’s play. Jett immediately stuck her head outside, giving one of those shrill, piercing barks of hers as she took in the muddy, aconite-and-blood-covered outlines of her master and me. It must have been very confusing for her, because she barked one more time before retreating to her corner and sitting back down.

“Good call,” I said, and carried Cooper inside.

The operating table was covered in the supplies I needed to save our lives. Pushing them onto the floor would be stupid to the point of becoming suicidal. Instead, I dumped Cooper in the station’s one small chair before heading to the cabinet where I’d spotted the emergency first aid kits. I couldn’t give him back the blood he’d lost. I could at least try to keep him from losing too much more.

Jett whined. I looked up, trying to sound sympathetic as I said, “I know, girl. It’ll be okay, you’ll see. I’ll fix your human.”

Assuming anything could fix her human. I might be able to keep him from dying before Riley and Shelby got back, but so what? Was it really fair of me to make that decision for him? We’d been bitten.

There it was, bald and bloody as the handprints I was leaving on the walls: we’d been bitten, both of us, by a werewolf. Possibly two werewolves, if the other one had survived even after we’d poured so many bullets into it that it should have qualified as a lead hazard. We’d been unconscious and covered in werewolf saliva for an unknown period of time, and since we had open wounds, our chances of contracting lycanthropy were even higher than usual, and that meant—

No. That meant I had to do my job, and if Cooper wanted to hate me for saving him, that was a problem for later. I still took a few seconds to look around, searching for a phone. I needed to warn Shelby about the werewolves, assuming she hadn’t been attacked already.

I couldn’t think about that. She could take care of herself, and I needed to focus on the situation at hand. Besides, there was no wall phone. I didn’t have an Australian SIM card for my cellphone yet, and a quick check of Cooper’s pockets showed that his phone had been lost somewhere between the meadow and the medical station. I didn’t have time to go out looking for it.

Grabbing the first aid kit from its place on the wall, I moved to kneel in front of Cooper. “Again, I’m really sorry about this,” I said. “I didn’t want us to be traumatic injury buddies until much later.”

There was a good pair of scissors in the kit. I carefully worked the blades around the cuff of his shirt and began cutting.

It takes a certain amount of skill to cut the clothing off a living person without hurting them: you’re basically using conjoined knives right next to their skin. I focused past the pain in my own arm, forcing myself to move nice and slow as I stripped Cooper’s upper body one piece of fabric at a time. The more I cut away, the more of his injuries were revealed. I knew from the way my own injuries pulled and ached that the werewolf had bitten down hard on my arm, but that was where it had stopped; for whatever reason, it hadn’t decided to continue working until it ripped me open.

It hadn’t been that kind to Cooper.

The entire front of his torso was covered in claw marks and scrapes that could have been made by anything, but were likely to have been made by teeth. His right shoulder was a mauled mass that looked almost like hamburger. Images from An American Werewolf in London were all too happy to present themselves to me as I used a piece of peroxide-soaked cotton to wipe away the worst of the mud and aconite pulp before starting to wrap his injuries in gauze.

Even as field dressings went, this wasn’t a good one. The chance of a secondary infection was ridiculously high, and no matter how much gauze I slapped on, I wasn’t going to stop the bleeding completely. It was enough better than nothing that I kept going. Shelby and Riley would come back eventually; they had to, I had the SUV. When they got here, we could move Cooper to a better location, one with more advanced medical facilities. All I had to do was keep him alive until they showed up—and give us both a fighting chance at overcoming the infection.

I stood once the last piece of gauze was taped off and walked back to the operating table, my own blood loss making my head spin. My field bag was there, and the smell of crushed aconite flowers wafted out to greet me, sweet and acrid at the same time. I looked at them, swallowing hard. They were incredibly poisonous even in their untreated form. What I was going to do to them would only concentrate those toxins, making them even worse.

It was the only chance we had. I took a deep breath to steady myself and reached into the bag for the first handful of flowers.

The recipe for lycanthropy-w antiserum is surprisingly close to several of the old folk remedies that were supposed to either kill or cure a newly infected werewolf. As is so often the case, necessity had been the mother of invention, and while we might someday have something synthetic that does the job, for now, we stick with the tried and true.

I fed the aconite leaves in clumps into the small blender I’d packed for the purpose, stuffing it until the lid barely stayed in place. Two quick buzzes on the chop setting gave me a lot of diced vegetation, which I decanted into a larger bowl before stuffing the blender a second time, this time with flowers, which I proceeded to blend into a sort of horrifying aconite smoothie. The air turned sticky-sweet with the smell of crushed flowers. Normally, that would have been upsetting. At the moment, the fact that it was covering the smell of blood was a blessing.