Chapter 5: Wet Hands

We carried him into the bay on a door I had been using as a workbench.

It took Remy and two of the wolves, and the man weighed nothing.

I swept the carburetors off the steel table and they laid him down on it under the shop lights.

His chest rattled with every breath.

His lips had gone from blue to gray.

"Call a doctor," I said.

"There's a human one in Pierre Part."

"He can't go to a human doctor," Remy said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because his blood doesn't read like a person's, and the doctor would have a lot of questions."

He was kneeling at the man's head with his hand under the man's skull.

"Odalie, I'm asking you," he said.

"For what?" I said.

"I don't know."

He looked up at me, and his gray eyes had gone ragged.

"I've sat with two of these already this month.

"Both of them asked for you before they stopped talking."

I did not understand that.

Nobody in that pack had said my name to me in eight years except to sentence me.

"Why would they ask for me?"

"I don't know that either."

The wolf's hand moved on the steel.

It was an old man's hand, spotted, with a wedding ring that had been bent once and hammered flat.

I took it.

I did not know why.

I had never healed anything in my life.

My mother used to say the Broussard women had warm hands, and that was all it ever meant, a warm palm on a feverish forehead.

The man's skin was cold as the steel under him.

I laid my free hand flat on his chest, over the breastbone, where the rattle was.

"I don't know what I'm doing," I said, to nobody.