Page 30 of Full Moon Frenzy

She hated the smell, hated the slowness of this place. She hated how the clinic staff — Shileen, in particular — looked at her when she gave an instruction, as if she were asking the goblin to go work on the plumbing or to change the oil in every car in the parking lot, and not reasonable, clear expectations, like taking patient vitals without the task necessitating conversation. The whole staff was like that. Every interaction was plodding, laced with endless niceties that had nothing to do with the patient’s reason for coming in, slowing down the schedule for everyone.

She had watched a middle-aged satyr chattering away with the receptionist as they’d checked in, discussing some children’s summer program at the community center. Then, once the satyr’s name was called, they’d stopped midway across the room, asking a troll who’d just come in about their knee replacement, the conversation transferring to Shileen as they moved into the interior hallway to be weighed, stretching as vitals were recorded, putting the appointment six minutes behind before a single thing had been entered on the chart for her to work with.

No one here moved with the hyper-focused, military precision she had spent years drilling into her own bones. They shuffled. They murmured about how a gnoll named Dr. Grigor used to do things before he retired to a beach down south, when the old clinic closed.

And the worst of it — they looked at her like she was the strange one, a dangerous scavenger that had slipped its cage and settled in their breakroom.

Adriana didn’t know what else to do. She’d been there for a full month, and things weren’t any different than they’d been her first week. She was as methodical and efficient as she’d always been, giving the staff plenty of time to acclimate to what was evidently a hitherto unknown pace, driving a sense of urgency in every patient interaction, but it didn’t seem to make a bit of difference.

Her nose twitched at the smell of something sweet as she entered the clinic that day, noting the already nearly full waiting area — homemade muffins. In the city, such a gift would have gone directly into the trash behind a closed door. Not to cause offense, but for safety reasons, given the risk of accepting food from an unknown and potentially unstable source. Here, though, in this town that looked like it had wandered off a movie set, the muffins sat on the counter, the basket already half-empty.

Adriana had watched movies featuring towns like this, keeping them on as background noise in the scant hours she was home — small town romances and murder mysteries set against a backdrop of cozy B&B’s, diners where everyone knew each other’s name and regular order, and the beloved town librarian, a surrogate grandmother to all with a murderous gleam in her eye, her prized zinnias trod on by the mailman one too many times for sanity.

She wondered what role she had been cast in, here in Cambric Creek. Here at the clinic? You’re the villain of the week. She snorted at the thought. Too fucking bad. She wasn’t going anywhere, and they would adjust eventually or die trying. Snagging a muffin as she passed the desk, she only hoped it wasn’t a mistake and that she wouldn’t wind up as a victim of the week instead.

“Dr. Brunelli?”

Adriana nearly choked on the bite of muffin she’d just taken as Eyla, the Orcish nurse, popped out from around the corner, her face settled into the mask of polite disapproval that Adriana had grown intimately familiar with since she’d started. The nurse was holding a tablet, her pen tucked behind an ear, lips pursed.

She sucked in a controlled breath once she’d swallowed, forcing her mouth into what she hoped was a friendly smile. “Yes?” The orc continued to purse her lips in what she could only assume was disapproval for several seconds, and Adriana felt a muscle jump beneath her eye.

“I just wanted to let you know there’s an ambulance on the way,” Eyla said at last. “Coming from the Stratos campus.”

Her exhalation was just as controlled, not allowing Eyla to see that the news affected her in any way, even as her pulse kicked up at the mere thought. She had not seen him since that day here at the clinic, the day he’d had the fucking audacity to argue with her in front of a patient.

She had been trembling in fury when the ambulance pulled away that day, and once they had the geriatric werewolf in for X-rays, she had marched to the office, thinking about the woman she’d met out on the street.

Don’t take anyone’s bullshit. You let the folks around here treat you like you’re lesser and they’ll never stop.

She had no intention of letting Trapp Hemming make her feel small. Not now, not here. As it was, she’d already let him get under her skin, invading her thoughts anytime she wasn’t with a patient, making her doubt herself!

After the very first time she’d been made unpleasantly aware of his presence in Cambric Creek, she’d gone back into the clinic determined to set things right with the elderly faun — blood work, imaging, everything he’d suggested, a treatment plan she did agree with . . . only to find the clinic didn’t have a CT machine. They could do basic X-rays and little more. Which he would fucking know. She’d written the orders to have the faun and her glaring daughter brought next door to the main hospital for imaging, her fists clenching again once a grinning mothman wheeled the old faun away.

She had no way of knowing what the fallout had been from her complaint against him, if there had been any fallout at all, which was unlikely. Once she had gotten her head out of her ass and started paying attention, Adriana realized Trapp Hemming wasn’t merely the golden boy antagonist from med school — the majority of those shining bronze plaques she had noticed all around downtown bore the Hemming name. Of all the fucking places in the world to move to.

“Oh, honey,” her giggling neighbor had said the night she’d been invited over by the bewhiskered catwoman. “His family runs this whole town! His brother is mayor now, and his father . . . well, Jack is in charge of everything. Everyone knows that.”

Jack. The Jack who’d paid for her lemonade? She’d helped herself to a tiny pickle from the cheeseboard the catwoman had put out as she considered it, allowing her glass of sangria to be topped off.

It had been exciting, being invited over to the neighbor’s townhouse, the notion of actually making friends leaving her giddy. Muffy lived in the unit directly to the left of her own, while Avrille, a curvaceous mothwoman with beautiful sunset-colored wings, lived across the street. Adriana didn’t like to admit that friendship was a bit of a loose concept with which she was only slightly familiar.

She’d been a lonely child, a bookish outcast in her pack, and loneliness had followed her through undergrad and medical school, residency and every city in between with the faithful consistency of a family pet.

In university, school had been all that mattered. She was there on an academic scholarship, and what that didn’t pay for was covered by a need-based grant, humiliating and alienating once she realized most of her classmates at Mercy had trust funds and took glamorous ski vacations. Once she’d entered her residency and afterward, when she was full-time in the emergency department, she didn’t have time for friends outside of work. Friends at work were just as tricky, for hospitals ran on bureaucracy and politicking, always who you knew and not how good you were, and making lasting friendships hadn’t seemed wise.

Loneliness wasn’t a stranger; never had been.

Being invited over for sangria and gossip shouldn’t have felt as thrilling or as exciting as being included in the coffee shop chatter, but there was nothing she could do about that.

“They’re all very good-looking, but Trapp is the most handsome.”

“Nope. Disagree,” Avrille cut in, drinking deeply from her oversized wineglass before continuing. “Trapp is technically the hottest one, but he’s too nice. I like the mean one. He looks like he could split you in two. It’s very unfair that invitations to his parties are so hard to get. I’ve been trying for years! My neighbor gets an invite, but he’s never once taken me, that goaty asshole.”

“You actually have to be able to run at those things, you know. I don’t think they’d let you just lie there with your legs open.”

“Well, now he’s getting married, so at this rate I’ll never find out!”

Both women hunched, lost in laughter again. Adriana had no idea who or what they were talking about, deciding that draining her glass would save her from feeling like the odd one out.