The outbreak hit on a Tuesday.
I know that because I'd just finished cataloguing my supplies — a habit I'd carried from the Silver Moon infirmary, the one useful thing that place had given me — when Carla came through the clinic door with blood on her hands and a look on her face I hadn't seen from her before. Fear.
"Three of the eastern camp leaders," she said. "They're bleeding from the inside."
I'd heard of hemorrhagic fever in rogue populations before. Theoretical knowledge, the kind you absorb from texts and never expect to use. The reality was worse than the theory. By nightfall, I had seven patients. By morning, eleven. The blood wouldn't clot. Wounds that should have closed in minutes stayed open and weeping, and the pack healers who'd passed through the Outlands before me had apparently taken one look at the symptom cluster and declared it fatal.
I didn't have the luxury of agreeing with them.
I worked for four days without sleeping more than an hour at a stretch. The herbal combination I needed — dried yarrow, black cohosh root, and a specific preparation of shepherd's purse that had to be processed in a particular order — wasn't something I'd read in a standard text. It was something I'd memorized years ago from an old healer's journal that Elder Carla had dismissed as folklore. I'd written it down anyway, the way I always wrote things down, because you never knew.
On the second day, one of the eastern camp leaders — a man named Brock, broad-shouldered and terrifying under normal circumstances — grabbed my wrist as I was changing his dressing.
"You're not going to let me die," he said. It wasn't a question. It was the specific tone of a man who needed to believe something badly enough to say it out loud.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
I meant it. That surprised me a little.
By the fourth morning, the bleeding had stopped in all but two patients, and those two were stable. Carla stood in the doorway of the clinic watching me clean instruments and didn't say anything for a long time.
"They're calling you the Miracle Healer," she finally said.
I pressed two fingers to my wrist. "They can call me whatever they want as long as they take their follow-up doses."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh.
I was elbow-deep in restocking when he arrived.
I smelled him before I heard him — something clean and grounded, like pine resin and cold water, cutting through the clinic's persistent medicinal haze. My wolf stirred. Not the wounded flinch she'd developed over years of Trevor's aura pressing down on her, but something different. Something that sat up straight.
I turned around.
He was tall. Alpha-built, the kind of frame that filled a doorway without trying. He was also, notably, not doing any of the things Alphas usually did when they entered a space that wasn't theirs — no aura flare, no chin-lift, no slow survey of the room designed to establish hierarchy. He was just standing there, reading the supply labels on my shelf with what appeared to be genuine interest.
"You've got your yarrow and your shepherd's purse separated," he said, without turning around. "Most healers store them together."
"They interact if they're stored in proximity for more than a week," I said. "Degrades the potency."
He turned then. Dark eyes, steady. A scar along his left forearm that someone had treated competently but not perfectly — old work, years ago.
"Nicholas Armstrong," he said.
I knew the name. Alpha of the Black Ridge Pack. I'd heard it in the same breath as words like principled and formidable and occasionally terrifying, depending on who was talking.
"I know who you are," I said.
Something moved across his face. Not surprise, exactly. More like a man carefully not reacting to something that mattered to him.
"I heard about the outbreak," he said. "I came to help, if you'll have me." He paused. "I have some training."
I looked at him. At the scar. At the way he was standing — not performing patience, actually patient, waiting for my answer without filling the silence with his authority.
"Some training," I repeated.
"Enough to triage. Enough to follow instructions without arguing about them."
Behind me, I heard Carla make a pointed noise and leave the room.
I had eight patients still recovering. Two who needed their dressings changed every four hours. A supply run I hadn't had time to make in two days.
I handed him a clean apron.
"Bed three first," I said. "Dressing change. The wound is on his left side — don't let him tell you it doesn't hurt, he's lying."
Nicholas took the apron without comment and moved toward bed three.
I watched him go. Sera watched him go.
Neither of us said anything. But for the first time in longer than I could remember, the silence inside me didn't feel like absence.
It felt like the moment before something begins.
