The clinic door swung open with more force than necessary, admitting a gust of air and a cerulean blue pony in a battered hat. He carried a wire animal carrier, which he set down on the reception counter with a clang.

  "Morning, Strawberry. Is Tabby around?"

  "Cazador!" Strawberry peered at the carrier's occupant and winced. "Oh dear. That looks... not good."

  "Found him by the highway. Something got to him before the carts could." Cazador pushed his hat back. "Tabby!"

  Tabby emerged from the back room, a half-eaten can of cherry pie filling in her hoof. She stopped when she saw who it was. "Oh. Hey."

  "Got a live one for you."

  "Are you sure about that?" She set the can down and approached the carrier, frowning at the bloody mess inside--the striped tail identified it as a raccoon. "What did this, a lawnmower?"

  "Coyote, maybe. Does it matter?"

  "It matters if there's a rabid coyote running around."

  Thomas appeared in the doorway, drawn by the commotion. He took in the scene—the animal control officer, the carrier, the blood—and his expression shifted into professional assessment mode.

  "Let me see."

  Cazador glanced at Tabby, then stepped aside. Thomas lifted the carrier and took it into the exam room, and proceeded to examine the raccoon with practiced efficiency.

  "Multiple lacerations. Probable internal trauma." He palpated the abdomen gently. The raccoon chittered weakly. "Treatable, but we're looking at full surgery. Two hours of work." He straightened up and looked at Cazador. "Who's paying for this?"

  Cazador's easy demeanor flickered. "Ah. Well. Town doesn't really cover wildlife cases."

  "Doesn't really cover, or doesn't cover?"

  Cazador winced. "Doesn't cover."

  Thomas waited.

  Cazador's eyes slid toward Tabby. A look passed between them—expectant on his end, something more complicated on hers. Thomas caught it, but Tabby said nothing.

  The raccoon's labored breathing filled the silence.

  # # #

  Tabby grabbed Cazador's foreleg and hauled him into the hallway, out of Thomas's earshot.

  "What are you doing?" she hissed.

  Cazador blinked. "Bringing you an injured animal? Like I've done a hundred times?"

  "That was different. That was at Tiny's. Or in the field. Not here."

  "What's the difference? You're still you."

  "The difference is I'm on someone's payroll now." Tabby jerked her head toward the exam room. "His payroll. I can't just—" She made a vague gesture. "You know."

  Cazador's expression cooled. "Wow. Okay."

  "What?"

  "Nothing,” he muttered. “Just didn't realize you'd gone corporate so fast."

  "I'm not—that's not—" Tabby sputtered.

  “Tiny never charged.” Cazador gave her a significant look. "Tiny didn't make a raccoon fill out insurance forms before he'd look at it."

  "Nobody's asking for insurance forms!" Tabby threw up her hooves. “It’s a business--you know as well as I do that we can’t use our resources on every wild animal that gets beat up!”

  “Do you hear yourself talking?” Cazador snapped. “You’re refusing to do a task you’re perfectly capable of, on account of rules and regulations that don’t matter here!”

  Tabby's jaw tightened. "That's not fair."

  "Isn't it?" Cazador shrugged, but his eyes were hard. "Used to be, I found something hurt, I knew who to call."

  "I'm not saying never. I'm saying not here. Not on his—" She struggled for words. "I can’t just undermine him like that.”

  "Right. Sure." Cazador stepped back. "Well, let me know when you've got your corporate policy sorted out. The raccoon will wait."

  He turned and walked back toward the exam room, leaving Tabby alone in the hallway, hooves clenched.

  # # #

  Tabby found Thomas in the back room, scrubbing his hooves at the sink. The raccoon was still in its carrier on the exam table, breathing shallowly.

  "So," she said.

  Thomas didn't turn around. "So."

  "What if—hypothetically—I handled this one?"

  Now he turned to look at her. "Handled it how?"

  "Just... handled it. Off the books. Cazador would understand it's a one-time thing."

  "That's not an answer." Thomas dried his hooves, watching her. "What does 'handled' mean, specifically?"

  Tabby shifted her weight. "Stuff Tiny taught me."

  "Magic."

  "Yes."

  "For multiple lacerations and internal trauma."

  "I've seen worse."

  Thomas leaned against the counter, crossing his forelegs. "Walk me through it. What exactly would you do?"

  "I'd... stabilize the wounds. Address the internal damage. Support the healing process."

  "With magic. On internal trauma. In a building with no surgical backup if something goes wrong."

  "Nothing's going to go wrong."

  "That's not a guarantee, that's a hope."

  "Tiny taught me better than that."

  "And is he—licensed? Accredited? Documented anywhere?"

  They stared at each other. The raccoon wheezed.

  "I know what I'm doing," Tabby said, quieter.

  "Maybe you do." Thomas's tone wasn't cruel, but it wasn't warm either. "But this clinic has my name on it. My license. If something goes wrong under this roof, that's on me. Not Tiny. Me."

  "So that's a no."

  "That's a 'not here.'" He held her gaze. "What you do on your own time, off this property, is your business. But in this building, we do things by the book."

  Tabby searched his face for something—judgment, maybe, or disgust. She didn't find it. Just a line drawn in the sand.

  "Fine," she said.

  She turned and walked back toward the front, where Cazador was waiting.

  # # #

  Cazador's "headquarters" was generous terminology for what amounted to a corrugated metal shack behind town hall. A faded sign reading ANIMAL CONTROL hung crooked over the door. Inside was a bare-bones setup of a metal table, a dented filing cabinet, a mini-fridge humming, and shelves stacked with nets, traps, and first aid supplies that had seen better days.

  "Home sweet home," Cazador said, clearing a stack of paperwork off the table.

  Tabby set the carrier down and opened it. She lifted the raccoon out carefully, laying it on the cold metal surface. It barely stirred. Not a good sign, but not hopeless either. She'd worked with worse.

  "What do you need me to do?" Cazador asked.

  "Stay out of my way."

  He whistled. "I can do that."

  Tabby closed her eyes and centered herself. Let the magic build—not the showy kind, not the flashy horn-glow that unicorns used to impress each other. This was internal and focused, the way Tiny had drilled into her over three years of thankless repetition.

  She placed her hooves on the raccoon and listened.

  The damage mapped itself in her mind. Lacerations—ugly but superficial. Muscle tears. A cracked rib. Internal bleeding, but less than she'd feared. The coyote had been interrupted mid-meal.

  She started by addressing the bleeding. Encouraged the vessels to close, the blood to clot where it should. The raccoon's breathing steadied slightly.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Is it working?" Cazador asked from somewhere behind her.

  "Shut up,” she snapped.

  The lacerations came next. Tissue knitting together, slowly, layer by layer. She couldn't rush this part. Rushing would mean scarring and weakness-- and an animal that would tear itself open again the first time it moved wrong.

  Minutes passed. Maybe twenty. Maybe forty. Time was slippery when she worked like this.

  The cracked rib stabilized. The raccoon's heartbeat grew stronger under her hooves.

  And then she felt it.

  Something else. Deeper. A mass in the abdomen, solid and wrong. Not trauma—this had been there before the coyote ever got involved.

  Tabby frowned and probed it carefully with her magic.

  It was encapsulated, dense, and roughly the size of a walnut (Tiny had his own particular nut-based measurement system). Attached to... the kidney? The liver? She couldn't tell without seeing it, and she couldn't see it without opening the animal up even more than it already was.

  She pulled back.

  "What?" Cazador had crept closer. "What's wrong?"

  "There's something in there." Tabby stared at the raccoon, willing it to make sense. "A mass. It's not from the attack."

  "So... take it out?"

  "I don't know what it is."

  "Does that matter?"

  "Yes, it matters!" Tabby's voice came out sharper than she intended. "If it's a cyst, I drain it. If it's a tumor, I excise it. If it's an absite, I treat the infection first. If I guess wrong, I kill the animal faster than the coyote would have."

  Cazador held up his hooves. "Okay. So what do you do?"

  Tabby didn't answer.

  She didn't have an answer.

  The raccoon lay on the table, stable, alive, and completely beyond her ability to fix.

  # # #

  Thomas stared at the test results he'd been staring at for fifteen minutes.

  The clinic was quiet. It was a slow day, with no appointments until three. There was nothing to do but paperwork, and think about things he didn't want to think about.

  Why had he given her that out? That made him complicit in whatever she was doing now.

  Oh, she would have left with or without his suggestion.

  "You're going to bore a hole through that paper."

  He looked up. Strawberry was watching him from the reception desk, chin propped on her hoof.

  "I'm reviewing Bugle’s test results."

  "You've been reviewing that chart since she left."

  "It's a complicated chart."

  Strawberry made a noncommittal noise and returned to her computer. The keyboard clacked. Thomas returned to not reading his results.

  Tabby would close the wounds. He had no doubt she could do that much. The raccoon would look fine.

  And then it would die slowly, from the damage underneath, because closing the surface over internal trauma wasn't healing — it was cosmetics.

  "She's been gone almost an hour," Strawberry said.

  "I'm aware."

  "You could just check on her."

  "I'm not checking on her." Thomas set down the inventory notes. "I'm concerned about the animal."

  "Of course."

  Strawberry just looked at him.

  Thomas grabbed his medical bag.

  "I'll be back," he said. "It's about the raccoon."

  "I know," said Strawberry, in a tone that suggested she knew no such thing.

  # # #

  The shack door squeaked when Thomas pushed it open.

  He'd prepared himself for the worst--blood everywhere, a half-healed mess of scar tissue over dying organs, Tabby in denial.

  What he found was none of those things.

  Tabby stood motionless over the metal table, hooves hovering inches above the raccoon's body. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow, measured. The air felt charged.

  The raccoon was alive—its breathing steady, its chest rising and falling in a rhythm that spoke of stability, not decline.

  Cazador sat in the corner on an overturned bucket, watching. He looked up when Thomas entered.

  "Doc," he said without making eye contact.

  Tabby didn't open her eyes. "I didn't call you."

  "I know."

  "So why are you here?"

  Thomas approached the table and looked at the raccoon.

  The lacerations weren't healed, but they weren't bleeding, either. The wounds hung in some kind of suspended state, the edges holding together, the tissue stable but not fused. It was like she'd pressed pause on the healing process itself.

  He hadn't expected that.

  And she was maintaining it, even while talking to him. The faint glow around her hooves, the tension in her stance—she was actively holding the animal in stasis.

  "I came to check on the animal," he said.

  "It's fine,” she said, grinding her teeth.

  "I can see that." He kept his voice neutral, but his mind was racing. How long had she been sustaining this? How much energy did it cost? "What stopped you?"

  Tabby's jaw tightened. For a moment, he thought she wouldn't answer.

  "Mass," she said finally. "Abdominal. I don't know what it is. So I'm holding position until I figure out the next step."

  She said it flatly, stating a fact. But he heard what was underneath: I didn't seal up an animal I couldn't finish treating. I'm not an idiot.

  Thomas pulled on examination gloves from his bag. "May I?"

  There was a pause, and then Tabby stepped back, just enough to give him access. The glow around her hooves remained steady. The magic field held.

  He palpated the abdomen gently, feeling for what she'd described. There—a firm, encapsulated structure nestled against the liver with distinct edges, not fluid-filled.

  She was right. And she'd been right to stop. And she'd been smart enough to leave herself a way forward instead of healing the animal shut.

  He didn't say any of that.

  "Tumor," he said instead. "I can remove it, but I need better light and actual instruments."

  Tabby's eyes opened. Something flickered across her face—relief, maybe, or resentment. It was hard to tell.

  "There's a kit in the cabinet," Cazador offered from his bucket. "Basic surgical stuff. We had a budget once."

  Thomas looked at the cabinet, looked at the flickering fluorescent light overhead, and looked at Tabby, who was looking anywhere but at him.

  "All right," he said. "Let's see what we're working with."

  The surgical kit was older than Thomas, but serviceable--scalpels, forceps, retractors, and sutures all present. They may have been sterilized at some point in the last decade.

  "I need more light," Thomas said.

  Cazador dragged over a desk lamp with a crooked neck. "Best I've got."

  "It'll do. Hold it steady. Higher. No—higher than that."

  "My leg's gonna fall off,” Cazador grumbled, but the beam raised, wobbled, then steadied.

  Thomas looked at Tabby. "I need you to monitor breathing."

  She moved to the raccoon's head, positioning herself where she could watch its chest rise and fall.

  Thomas made the incision.

  His movements were precise, economical, with no wasted motion. He'd done this a hundred times in proper operating theaters with proper equipment and proper lighting. Doing it in a corrugated shack with a desk lamp held in someone's hoof was just a variation on a theme.

  "Retractor," he said.

  Tabby handed it over.

  The tumor came into view—small, pale, nestled against the liver exactly where he'd felt it. They'd caught it early, probably by accident. The coyote attack might have saved this raccoon's life in the long run.

  "Forceps."

  Tabby handed them over.

  "Breathing?"

  "Steady."

  Thomas clamped, cut, lifted. The tumor came free in one piece. He deposited it in a specimen tray that Cazador had found somewhere—an old food container, rinsed out and pressed into service.

  "That's it?" Cazador asked, peering at it around the lamp.

  "That's it."

  Thomas began closing—and Tabby had to look away.

  This part she knew--reconnecting tissue, encouraging vessels to seal, coaxing layers back into wholeness. She could have done this in her sleep. But she'd had to stand there and watch him do it with sutures and clamps because she couldn't do the part that came before: deconstruction, controlled damage, the precise art of cutting something apart without killing it.

  Tiny had taught her to heal, to build, to restore. Not to unmake. She'd never thought to ask why.

  "Done." Thomas stripped off his gloves. "It'll need monitoring for the next forty-eight hours. Infection risk is moderate given the conditions, but manageable with antibiotics."

  "I've got some," Cazador said, finally releasing the lamp. "Expired, but only by a month."

  "That'll do."

  The raccoon lay on the table, alive, tumor-free, breathing steadily. It was a success by any measure.

  Cazador grinned, the tension of the last hour finally breaking. "See? Teamwork."

  Thomas didn't respond. He didn't gloat, didn't lecture, and didn't even look at Tabby. Somehow that was worse. Tabby said nothing.

  Thomas wiped down the instruments and returned them to the kit. "Keep him warm. Check the incision site every few hours for swelling or discharge. If the wound starts weeping or he develops a fever, call me."

  "Got it." Cazador was already lining the carrier with fresh towels. "How long until he's ready for release?"

  "A week, minimum. Two if you want to be safe. He'll need to regain strength before he can survive in the wild."

  "I can keep him here. Done it before."

  Thomas nodded and snapped the kit closed. The professional part was over.

  Cazador glanced at Tabby, who hadn't moved from her spot by the table. She was staring at the specimen tray, at the tumor--the thing she couldn't have removed.

  "Hey," Cazador said, softer now. "You did good."

  Tabby didn't look up.

  "I mean it. Thomas couldn't have operated on a dead animal. You stabilized him. Kept him alive long enough for the rest to happen."

  "Right."

  Cazador tried again. "Look, I'm sorry about earlier. The corporate stuff. I was out of line—"

  "Just leave me alone,” she said, flat and final.

  Cazador's mouth opened, then closed. He looked at Thomas, as if expecting him to intervene.

  Thomas said nothing.

  Tabby turned and walked out. The shack door banged shut behind her, the sound sharp in the cramped space.

  Cazador exhaled. "She gonna be okay?"

  Thomas watched the door. "I don't know," he said.

  He picked up his medical bag and left.

  # # #

  Tabby's front door slammed behind her. She didn't bother turning on the lights.

  She went straight to her bedroom and flopped face-first onto the mattress.

  A snuffling sound came from the corner. Claws clicked on hardwood. Something cold and wet pressed against her ear.

  "Go away, Othello,” she mumbled into the pillow.

  The hodag did not go away. He butted his head against her shoulder, making a low rumbling noise that might have been concern or might have been hunger.

  Tabby turned her head just enough to glare at him. "I said go away."

  Othello sat down next to the bed and stared at her with his beady eyes.

  "Fine. Stay."

  She buried her face in the pillow again.

  The day replayed behind her eyelids—the shack, the tumor she couldn't identify, Thomas walking in calm and competent and completely unsurprised by her failure. She saw his hooves moving with that irritating precision, the sutures going in straight and even while she just stood there holding a retractor and watching.

  Teamwork.

  She punched the pillow.

  Cazador had tried to make her feel better. You stabilized him. That's not nothing. As if "not nothing" was something to be proud of. As if keeping an animal alive long enough for someone else to save it was an accomplishment.

  She punched the pillow again.

  The worst part—the part that made her want to scream—wasn't that Thomas had been right, that Cazador had put her in an impossible position, or even that she'd failed.

  It was that she'd wanted to impress him.

  Him. The uptight, by-the-book, "that's not how we do things" newcomer who'd been in Misty Hollow for five minutes and acted like he owned the place. The one who looked at her credentials and saw nothing. The one who thought Tiny was a backwoods quack.

  She'd wanted him to see her pull off something impossible, and to look at her with something other than skepticism. She wanted him to admit, even silently, that she knew what she was doing.

  And instead he'd seen her stuck, frozen, out of her depth.

  Tabby rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

  Othello paced along the side of the bed, then settled on the floor against its side. His presence was reluctantly comforting.

  "I don't care what he thinks," she told the ceiling.