The man pushed through the doors of the emergency vet clinic twenty minutes before the end of Sam's shift, blood smeared over his bare chest. Sam's first thought, brief and meritless, was that the guy put way too much effort into his Halloween costume. Barely a moment later, it transitioned to concern that the man needed a real, human hospital. But as far as he could tell, all of the blood covering him had soaked through the plaid shirt tied around the front of a large brown and black dog in his arms. Sam quickly excused himself from going over aftercare instructions for Mrs. Patel's poodle's patellas and rushed over.

At a few feet away, he could see the dog trembling and panting; still closer, he heard a low, pained whimper rising and falling with its uneven breaths. By the time he met the man near the front desk, Kevin had vanished into the back, hopefully to get Amelia. Sam was a good general practice vet, but his wife was unquestionably the better surgeon.

"What happened?" he asked as he reached to help the man rest the dog—a long-haired mutt, he could see now—on the high counter. It whined loudly, then quieted as its owner gently rubbed along its head and ears.

"Coyote," the man grunted. "Goddamn idiot thought he could take it." His words and voice were gruff, but the soft, soothing motion of his hand kept up its reassurance, so Sam was willing to attribute it to fear and concern rather than the indifference it sounded like. And, of course, the fact that the guy had carried the dog in the way he had spoke volumes.

Sam heard the wheeled stretcher racing down the hallway toward them and pulled a pair of purple nitrile gloves from the pocket of his scrub top, snapping them on, and slid one hand into the crease of the dog's hip. As he counted off the pulse against his watch, he asked, "How long has it been?"

"Twenty, thirty minutes, tops. You guys were the nearest all-hours vet I could find."

"He up to date on his shots? Rabies?" Amelia rounded the corner, Kevin behind her with the stretcher, and Sam almost missed the man's guilty wince.

"No, but the thing that got him wasn't rabid."

"Coyotes can be asymptomatic for up to a few months, so we're going to need to administer post-exposure prophylaxis and quarantine him in recovery," Sam told the man. "The procedure has a one-hundred-percent survival rate for dogs exposed to rabies, but it's expensive and means multiple shots over two months, and quarantine continues for another month after that."

When he could see the man about to argue, even as they transferred his dog onto the wheeled metal cart, Sam added, "Your only other option here is euthanasia, unless you can bring me the coyote that attacked him. I can give you a day to decide, but no longer. If you know you're going to put him down, though, tell me now and we can skip the surgery."

The man blanched, and Sam felt briefly guilty for being so blunt. Only briefly, though, because he was annoyed at the guy for risking the dog's life over an easy and frequently subsidized vaccination. "Fuck, no! Whatever you gotta do, please. I don't care how much it costs, I swear I can pay. Just, please."

The man reached out to stroke his dog again, rubbing his thumb just under the panting jaw, and Sam saw his hand tremble for the first time. "Please, don't leave me," he whispered.

"We gotta get him to the back," Sam said gently. "What's his name?"

"Castiel. Cas."

As Amelia turned and pulled the stretcher away, Sam spared a moment to rest his gloved hand on the man's shoulder and give it a reassuring squeeze. "We're going to do everything we can for Cas, I promise. Have a seat and try to relax. Kevin will be out in a minute to help you get settled, and you'll see me or Amelia as soon as we have news. I'm Sam, by the way."

"Dean," the man answered. His whole body was shaking tightly, muscles tense and hands clenched, and he stared at the turn in the hallway where Amelia and Kevin had disappear with Cas. Sam pushed him gently toward the chairs, and he went without a sound.

On his way to the back, he stopped to check on Mrs. Patel and apologize again for abandoning her, but she wouldn't hear of it. "I can read, Dr. Richardson, and I'll call if I have questions. You go save that poor man's poor dog."

Amelia had already started the anesthesia when Sam got to their small operating room, but he took over, adding another line with a blood bag, so that she could cut away the makeshift bandaging and assess the damage. Kevin, scrubbed up so that he could lay out their apparatus, double-checked the setup and asked, "You need me to stay?"

"No, go ahead and hold down the lobby. Who's in tonight?"

"Trish and Andre."

"Okay. Send Andre back as soon as he clocks in, he can take over for me, then Trish and I will man the front so you can go home. For now, our owner out there is Dean. Try to get more details—dog's age, medical history, his last name, phone number, address. Payment info would be great, but not a priority."

The tech waved and left. "How's it look?"

"A lot better than it could," Amelia said thoughtfully. She always had a distracted air when she spoke during surgery, focused more on the patient than the conversation, but there was something different to her voice.

"What's wrong?"

"The owner told you this was a coyote attack?"

"Yeah, why?"

He came around to the side and finally got a look at the damage: a set of parallel wounds gashed from the dog's left shoulder across its forechest, matted with fur and blood. Amelia gestured to them with the nozzle of her sterile saline squirt bottle before she resumed cleaning the tangled mess of fur. "These are way too far apart for coyote paws. That's got to be at least eight inches between the outer two, have you ever seen a coyote that big? I'll tell you what, it looks more like the bear injuries I used to see up in New England."

"But why would he lie?"

"No idea. It doesn't matter much, but it's weird. Also, and I'll have you check over again, there are a lot on shallower scratches but I don't see any bites—which is also a lot more like a black bear than a coyote. Did he say where he thought the bite was?"

"Actually, he didn't mention a bite," Sam admitted sheepishly. "I assumed, because I've never seen a coyote attack without at least one. I'll see if I can get the full story out of him when I go out there. What do you need now?"

Sam kept an eye on Cas's vitals as he passed Amelia more bottles of saline and a fine comb. Before long, Andre appeared in his cheerful yellow scrubs and shooed Sam out of the room. "What've we got for the owner?" he asked from the door.

"Outlook's promising," Amelia answered as she stopped poking around the claw marks and accepted a clipper from Andre. "These aren't too deep, only a few spots need internal sutures. I'm going with nonabsorbable on the external ones, since he'll be with us anyway and it's a bit of added sturdiness. Blood loss was mostly from the delay, he's stable as far as that goes. Once he's sewn up and that unit of blood is finished, we'll do the first PEP shot."

Sam saluted. Amelia and Andre ignored him. He paused at the opening to the lobby, taking advantage of the finally calm moment to really get a good look at the man slumped, still shirtless, in one of his chairs.

Dean seemed to be somewhere in his late thirties, maybe even forty, though Sam had a growing suspicion that he subjected himself to the sort of hard living that could prematurely age a person. Beneath the dark-drying blood, muscles shifted in his chest and arms as he ran a hand through his short, light brown hair. It, too, was stained red in parts—probably from fingers repeatedly passing over it as they were continuing to do.

His jeans and boots were plain and worn, but sturdy enough. The only notably distinguishing thing about him, other than looking like a Carrie extra, was a black tattoo over his heart of a star inside a circle, surrounded by flames. The ink disappeared behind an anxiously restless arm again as Dean dropped his face into his hands, unaware or uncaring of the flaky blood rubbing off on his cheeks and forehead.

Dean hadn't noticed him yet, so Sam stopped at the reception desk to talk to Trisha. "Did Kev fill you in?"

"Yeah, he just left a minute ago. We got a bit more on your Dexter and his boy, though," she nodded at their only client.

Sam blinked at her, eyebrows drawn down in a confused frown. "I could've sworn he said Dean before."

Pale brown eyes fixed him with a seriously unimpressed glare. "Dexter? Serial killer cop on Showtime, always covered in blood? Man, you are wasting your life. What do you even do with your time?"

Sam smiled at the friendly teasing, but waved at her to focus. "So, it is Dean?"

"Yeah, Dean Smith. Lives in, ummmm," she checked the clipboard by her hand. "Well, has a P.O. box in South Dakota. Patient is Castiel, unknown breed, not sure how old. Says he found the little guy as a stray about a year and a half back, and he was fully grown then."

Sam glanced over, seeing that Dean was still absorbed in his worry, and made a grabby motion as he asked, "He say anything else about what happened?"

"Didn't ask," Trish said. He could hear the rolling of her eyes as she shoved the clipboard at his outstretched hand, but then her voice gentled. "He's a wreck, Boss-man. Didn't want to go wash up in case he missed you or Boss-missus coming out. The kids who came by to trick-or-treat got a kick out of him, though he didn't do anything but stare. Man's worried as hell."

"I'll fix that," Sam promised. "His Cas is gonna be just fine." Trish flapped her wrist at him to get on with it.

Dean didn't look up as Sam approached, but his hands dropped between his knees and his shoulders stiffened in awareness. Up close, he looked closer to Sam in age, only a few years over thirty. Rough stubble darkened his cheeks, but his jaw was firm and square. When Sam greeted him—"Dean, good news."—the eyes that turned up hopefully were green, tinged with red and underlined with bruised exhaustion.

"Yeah?" Dean's voice came out scratchier than it had been, which Sam wasn't sure whether to attribute to disuse or guarded emotion. "Tell me."

"Things look really good," Sam assured him. "The main scratches on his chest missed any vital organs, and the rest were pretty superficial, so he's just getting stitched up. Come on, I'll give you all the details while you clean up."

"Huh?" Dean looked down at himself and grimaced, as though he hadn't previously noticed his blood-soaked state. "Right. Sorry. Your, uh," he nodded at Trisha, "tried to offer me the bathroom, but I didn't want to leave until..."

"It's fine," Sam said when he trailed off. "I know you're worried about Cas, but we're taking care of him. Let's take care of you now. We've got a shower in the back bathroom. It's tiny, you'll have to crouch a bit, but the water pressure's good. I've got some extra scrubs you can use. Might be a bit big, but they'll be a better fit than anyone else's."

"Thanks, man." Dean groaned as he stood, stretching his neck to one side with a pop. "I've got clothes in the car, but I'll take you up on the shower. Lemme go grab my shit—uh, things, and I'll be right back."

He insisted he was fine going to the parking lot by himself, so Sam watched through the glass doors as he walked over to an older black sedan and opened it without keys. He pulled a large duffle from the floor of the backseat, then hauled it around to the trunk. Sam's view was blocked when Dean propped open the lid, and the man spent a long time back there before slamming it closed and slinging the bag over his shoulder.

He was quiet as Sam led the way to the small employee bathroom and showed him the shower. Just after dropping the duffel with a surprisingly loud thud, though, he turned to Sam with such a beseechingly worried look that Sam's heart broke for him.

"He's really going to be okay?" The vulnerable quiver of Dean's voice almost slipped by Sam's notice, but he'd heard that question so often from so many children scared for their beloved pets that he was listening for it.

Taking a chance, he rested a hand on a relatively clean part of Dean's shoulder. "He really is. It looked bad, and if you hadn't made it here when you did, it probably would have been worse, but you got him here and he's going to be just fine. The scratches will heal and even if he was exposed to rabies, we'll be able to protect him."

Dean shook his head. "I'm tellin' ya, there's no chance of rabies."

"I really hope you're right, but it's not that simple. There are laws for dealing with potential exposures, and they err on the side of caution."

"Yeah, I get it," Dean sighed. "It's just, three months, really? You said the treatment's completely effective, so why the quarantine?"

"Honestly, it's mostly that the laws haven't caught up."

The weight on Dean's shoulders lifted, and Sam didn't think he liked the thoughtful look that accompanied the straightening shoulders. "So you think the quarantine isn't needed?"

"Doesn't matter what I think," Sam quickly backtracked. "Legally, be needs to be here or in another county-approved quarantine facility for that length of time. I'm sorry, we can work with you on financing if that's an issue, but I'm not risking my clinic by breaking the law."

Dean slumped again. "Right. No, of course not. I'll just..." He gestured at the shower, looking small and lost. "Will you come get me if anything changes?"

"Of course, and we can let you back to see him once he's in the recovery kennels." Sam had to leave quickly after that, because the pained sorrow on Dean's face made him feel like he'd just kicked the man's puppy. Which was ridiculous, because he and his wife and their practice had clearly just saved the dog.

Still feeling inexplicably guilty, Sam washed and gloved up again and ducked into the operating room to check on their progress. The fur on Castiel's chest and shoulders was entirely gone, along with patches bared around the less severe scratches. Amelia tied off what looked to be the second-to-last horizontal mattress suture on the smallest of the chest wounds and flashed him a tired smile.

"Want me to take over for the rest?"

"What, like I can't be trusted with a needle?" Andre complained. "If anyone is taking over, it's gonna be the guy who just had a good day's sleep. Go away."

Sam tried to obey, but his wife stopped him. "What did he say about the attack?"

Until that moment, Sam hadn't realized that he'd forgotten his main conversational goal with Dean. The other man had been so distraught, and so covered in his dog's blood, that even if Sam had remembered, he wasn't sure he would have been able to bring himself to interrogate him about the circumstances. The truth was, as Amelia said at the start, that it didn't make any difference to their course of action.

"Didn't seem like a good time to ask," he said after a moment's consideration. "He's showering now, and I promised he could visit in recovery, then my guess is he'll be as ready to head home—or wherever—as we are."

"Shouldn't be more than another half hour here," Andre said. He waited for Amelia to finish the last knot sealing up the large gashes on Castiel's chest, then took the needle holder and scissors from her and started on the smaller set on one haunch. "You wanna go get the kennel ready?"

The clinic's kennels ran along two walls of the room, which had doors connecting to the operating room and to the lobby. Smaller animal cages sat above them, and while those held a few cats, rabbits, and even a ferret, there was a surprising lack of canine patients. Out of habit, though he knew Trish would have already done so when she got in, he checked on each of the animals.

Three of the cats and two rabbits had come in for the clinic's discounted spay and neuter event, which they held early on the last Saturday of every month, and there had been no complications with any of the routine ovariohysterectomies. They would be cleared to go home in the morning. The remaining rabbit was responding well to antibiotics; his temperature had stabilized and he was breathing much more easily. The ferret's broken leg had been set in a cast four days ago, but his owner had failed to come back or answer their calls since then. Sam planned to give it a full week before starting the process to claim the animal as abandoned, but he was sure that at the end of it, Kevin would be going home with the smelly little beast he'd grown attached to, while Sam and Amelia ate the cost of treating it. Stroking the soft fur he could reach through the bars, though, he didn't have any regrets.

The final two cats, housed next to each other but as far away as possible from the rest, were perfect illustrations of why Sam had come to hate Halloween since starting veterinary school. The two black kittens, no more than three months old, had been brought in by a shop owner who found them tied up in a partly charred sack left in his dumpster. Though they had both suffered significant burns, and the female's tail was broken in two places, they'd made it through the afternoon and were sleeping, with IVs in their tiny arms giving them a mix of nutrients, antibiotics, painkillers, and a mild sedative. The cocktail was risky, given their size and malnutrition, but getting shocky would definitely kill them, and that was an even higher risk due to the nature of their injuries.

He noted down the readouts from each of their monitors, then got to the work he was actually meant to do. It was quick and easy enough to set a clean blanket and a fresh bowl of water into the kennel he picked for Castiel—on the wall only occupied by the kittens, but on the opposite end to them—but by then he'd taken so long that Andre wheeled in the stretcher moments after he straightened from crouching in front of the cage.

"I'll get him settled, if you want to bring the papa back," the other vet said. "Amelia's cleaning up."

Trish waved a stack of cash at Sam as he got to the lobby, nodding at Dean. He was back in the same chair, cleaned and fully clothed, with his head tilted back against the wall and his eyes closed. They opened as Sam neared. "Hey."

"Hey. He's all set, if you want to come visit for a couple minutes. He probably won't wake up late tomorrow morning, though."

"Yeah. Um." Dean looked uncertain, almost sheepish, as he unzipped a pocket at the end of his duffel and pulled out a worn stuffed bear before standing. "Is it okay if I leave this with him? It's his favorite."

Despite that being the last thing he would have expected from the gruff man of an hour ago, Sam couldn't help the smile that broke over his face. "Of course. I'm sure he'll appreciate having it there when he wakes up."

Andre smiled as Sam showed Dean into the recovery room, but slipped out the other door without more than a quick wave. Dean zeroed in on Cas's kennel before Sam could point it out, kneeling in front of it and resting a hand on the closed gate. "Hey, buddy," he whispered.

Sam stood beside him. "I can open the door, if you're careful to only touch his head. There weren't any scratches there."

"Please," Dean answered, but he didn't look away from the unconscious dog. He moved just far enough for Sam to get the kennel open, then leaned in and stroked gently over Cas's nose and beneath his ear. Sam couldn't hear most of what he was murmuring, but his voice rose slightly as he finished, "—because you know exactly what I'd do to get you back."

Dean settled the toy delicately next to the dog, resting it against an unmarred patch of fur along his belly, then pressed a soft kiss to his muzzle and rocked backwards to his feet. Sam closed the kennel up, taking his time so that Dean could hide the traces of moisture building in his eyes if he chose to. Sure enough, when he turned back, the man had collected himself again.

"I'm going to be leaving soon," he told him softly as they left the room. "Do you have somewhere to stay? I get the feeling you're not from around here."

"Yeah." Dean's voice cracked a little, and he cleared his throat. "Yeah, we're in a motel not too far. Is it cool if I come back in the morning?"

"Of course. Here." Sam took a business card from the desk and pressed it into Dean's mildly cold hand. "You can also call if you have any questions or concerns. Andre and Trish should be able to answer anything for you, but on the off chance they can't, they'll be able to reach me at home."

"Okay. Good. Uh, thanks." Dean half-turned, looking at the door leading to the kennels with a combination of concern and longing, then ran a hand through his short hair and moved to grab his bag instead. "Really, thanks for everything. I'll see you tomorrow?"

Sam nodded, and Dean walked slowly to the glass double doors. He hesitated briefly, but then pushed one side open and lifted his other hand in a small wave without looking back. Amelia walked out as he got into his car, coming to stand next to Sam and lean against his shoulder.

"He gonna be okay?" she asked quietly.

Watching the broad black car slide out of the parking lot, Sam pressed a kiss to the side of Amelia's head and said against her hair, "I think so. Come on, let's go home."