Chapter 4

When Felicia called the vet’s office the following morning, she was able to get an appointment for Shadow that same afternoon. Making the appointment had been the easy part, the hard part would be wrangling Shadow into his cage. Felicia was able to lure him out from underneath the bed with treats, but when she made a move to actually put him in the cage, he would dart away from her.

She chased him all that morning, every time that Felicia had him cornered and pinned, he would scratch and claw at her in order to get away. She finally managed to capture him when he ran past her, and she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.

“Gotcha!” She said triumphantly, holding him out at arm’s length so that he wouldn’t be able to scratch her further.

“You’re going to the vet, whether you want to or not.” She managed to get him into his cage, barely being able to keep herself from being bitten again. “We’re not going through that again, I’m not having an over-worrying Kirk drag my ass back to the emergency room.”

Her bite hadn’t gotten any better, but it hadn’t gotten any worse, either. She just had to let the oral antibiotics run their course.

Sabine called as Felicia was carrying Shadow out to the car.

“I called you last night,” Sabine said abruptly.

“Did you? I’m sorry Sabine, last night was extremely hectic, my cat bit me, and it was a pretty nasty bite, so Kirk was convinced that I needed to go to the emergency room. I’m about to leave now for the vet to make sure that Shadow doesn’t have rabies or anything like that. What’s up?”

“I need you to come in early on Monday, there’s a meeting with the bigwigs.”

Felicia groaned. “Already?” They had to have semi-annual meetings with the higher-ups, just to make sure that everything was running smoothly. That wasn’t the reason why Felicia was dreading the meeting, she was dreading it because they were the kind of people who didn’t know anything about the field that they were in, but pretended that they knew everything. Like a company’s board of directors, the only reason they were in their position was because they provided all of the funding, which meant that if Felicia wanted to keep her job, she had to play nice to a bunch of egotistical old men who always looked at Felicia and Sabine in ways that made Felicia want to kick them where the sun didn’t shine.

“Relax, it’s only going to be for a couple of hours,” Sabine replied. “We tell them how things are going, pretend to be flattered by their old-fashioned flirting, and then we can leave. We’re women in a field that has been dominated by men for years, which means this is one of the things that we have to put up with.”

“Yeah, I know,” Felicia muttered. “If I didn’t love this job so much, I’d have punched at least three of them in the nose by now.”

Sabine chuckled at that. “That makes two of us. I’ll see you bright and early on Monday morning.”

“See you Monday.”

~

Shadow howled the entire way to the vet’s office. Needless to say, it was a very long twenty minutes for Felicia. Two vet techs had to help her keep Shadow down on the exam table.

“I can see why you’ve brought him in.” One of the techs commented as he strapped a muzzle onto Shadow so that he couldn’t bite anyone.

When the vet came into the room, Shadow tried even harder to get away.

“Well…it’s clear why you’re here today.” The vet said, blinking his eyes in disbelief. “I think that we can rule out rabies already. While irritable behavior is common in animals that have rabies, this is more than irritable, this is downright feral. I’d like to sedate him and get some bloodwork, maybe keep him a day or two to monitor his behavior.”

“Of course,” Felicia responded. “Whatever you need to do, I just want him to get back to his normal self.”

“I can certainly understand that. Has he bitten anyone, by any chance?”

“He’s bit me, but that’s it.”

“Have you been feeling any adverse side effects?”

“It itches like crazy, and the area is red, but nothing other than that. I went to the emergency room, and they gave me some antibiotics, but they haven’t kicked in yet.”

The vet nodded his head, writing something down on a pad of paper. “Is Shadow allowed outdoors at all?”

“No, I make sure that he’s indoors at all times.”

“Any other pets in the household?”

“I had a fish, but Shadow ate him the other day.”

“I would say that maybe this is some adverse reaction to ingesting the fish, but this is something that I’ve never seen before. It might be something viral, but we’ll need to run tests to make sure. We’ll keep him for a few days, then I’ll call you and let you know what we find out.”

Honestly, Felicia was glad to be leaving Shadow in the hands of the vet. They knew what they were doing, and with him being there, she didn’t need to worry about him attacking her out of the blue, which meant that she could focus on the upcoming meeting.

~

Felicia woke up early on Monday morning so that she could shower before the meeting. She began unwrapping her wound so that she could clean it out while she was in the shower, but it seemed that things had taken a turn for the worse. The bandage had stuck to the wound, and it was looking less like a bite and more like a chunk of flesh had been ripped out of her arm. The edges of the wound were tinted in green.

“What the hell….” She lightly pressed a finger to the wound, hissing in pain as she quickly withdrew her finger, her arm feeling like it was on fire. It definitely hadn’t looked like that when she had gone to bed the night before.

Her shower was a quick one, each droplet of water that hit her arm felt like a tiny dagger piercing the skin. Wrapping a towel around herself as she stepped out of the shower, she grabbed some hydrogen peroxide, gritting her teeth in pain as she applied it to her arm, letting out a string of curses that would surprise even the most seasoned of sailors.

She wrapped it in fresh dressing before getting dressed, wearing a simple pantsuit, shoving some more comfortable clothes into a bag that she would change into once the meeting was over.

Even though it was early, traffic was still rough, and Felicia grumbled to herself as she found herself stuck in the middle of a traffic jam. A car honked behind her, a young, blonde woman shouting at her to get moving.

Something inside of Felicia snapped. She rolled her window down, leaning her head out.

“Don’t you think that I would have done that by now?! We’ve all got places to be, so how about you get yourself comfortable and zip it before I decide to play a round of bumper cars!”

Felicia had never experienced road rage, or any kind of rage, really. She liked to think of herself as a very calm and patient person. She sighed as she sat back, blaming her sudden bout of rage on the upcoming meeting. Yeah, that had to be it. She was just stressed out, that’s all.