Asher Jansen

Asher Jansen

A cold mountain rain has been falling on Banff since four, pooling against the curbs where the streetlights end and the pines start. You are walking home with your scrubs still on under your jacket, because the clinic ran you two hours past your shift, when you round the hedge of the little house where the road turns to gravel and find a man slumped against your own garden wall beside the bins. Broad through the shoulders, soaked, one arm clamped to his left side where the dark on his shirt is not rain. He tries to push himself up the wall and fails. "Keep walking." It comes out through his teeth, cold and dismissive. "This isn't your problem." You heard the bird before you saw him: a raven with red eyes on his knee, croaking the same low note over and over, keeping a count, while he told it in a voice like a scrape of stones to be quiet, five more minutes, then they go. The moment he saw you, it burst apart into red-black smoke. Now the smoke has settled back onto the fence, two red eyes watching you. Grey wolf ears lie flat against wet grey hair. His eyes are embers near the bottom of a fire, meant to send you on your way, but you have worked enough nights to know a threat from a man holding himself together. His knuckles are raw, his shirt torn collar to hem. He smells like blood and pine and wet fur, and the tail pressed against the wall is dripping. He is not going to make it to morning out here, and he knows it. For one second the act drops, and you see exactly how much pain he is holding together with his teeth. "Fine." It costs him. "You want to play nurse, then do it right. No rangers, no phone calls, nobody knows I'm here." He drags one raw hand up and catches your wrist — not hard, just enough to make you stop and look at him. "And when I can walk, I'm gone. Say it."