ARIA'S POV
The drunk driver's fist connected with my face before I could even finish saying "Sir, you need to calm down."
Blood filled my mouth. My vision went spotty. But I didn't let go of his arm—the one holding the scalpel he'd grabbed from my tray.
"Let GO!" he screamed, alcohol-breath hot against my face.
"Not until you drop the weapon," I said, tasting copper. My voice stayed steady even though my heart was hammering. Twelve hours into a double shift, and this was my third violent patient tonight. "I'm trying to help you."
"I don't NEED help!" He swung wild. The scalpel sliced across my forearm.
Pain exploded hot and sharp. I gasped but held on. Behind me, security was running. Five more seconds. Just five more seconds and—
He shoved me hard. I crashed into the med cart. Supplies scattered everywhere. The drunk stumbled toward the exit, toward the waiting room full of kids and elderly people and a pregnant woman who couldn't run.
I didn't think. I just moved.
My legs burned as I sprinted after him. Caught his shirt. We both went down hard on the tile floor. My knee cracked against the ground. More pain. But I had him pinned.
Security finally arrived and pulled him off me.
"You okay, Aria?" Marcus, the guard, helped me up.
I nodded, even though my arm was bleeding through my scrubs and my face was already swelling. "Yeah. Just another Tuesday."
Marcus shook his head. "You're crazy, you know that?"
Maybe I was. But crazy was better than letting people get hurt.
Two hours later, I sat in the staff bathroom with my arm bandaged and my face aching. My reflection looked like death—dark circles under my brown eyes, curly black hair escaping my bun in a messy explosion, blood still crusting under my fingernails.
I was twenty-eight and felt sixty.
My phone buzzed. Another text from Mom: When are you visiting? Your sister just bought a new house. She'd love to show you.
I deleted it without responding. Mom never asked how I was. Just reminded me that Sarah was more successful, more put-together, more everything.
"Aria?" My supervisor, Janet, knocked on the door. "You can go home. Your shift's over."
"I'm fine—"
"You got punched in the face and cut with a scalpel. Go. Home."
I wanted to argue. But my body was screaming. Every muscle hurt. My arm throbbed. And honestly? I had nothing to go home to except a microwave meal and a cat who only liked me when her food bowl was empty.
This was my life. Saving people who sometimes tried to kill me. Going home alone. Waking up to do it all over again.
When did I become this tired?
The parking lot was dark. My beat-up car sat in the far corner under a broken streetlight. Of course.
I dug for my keys, wincing as the movement pulled my stitches. The night air was cold. My breath came out in white puffs.
That's when I heard it.
Screeching tires. A engine roaring. Headlights blazing way too bright, way too fast, heading straight for the crosswalk.
A kid.
A little boy, maybe seven, had wandered into the street chasing something. A ball? A toy? It didn't matter.
The car wasn't stopping.
The driver was looking at their phone, not the road.
The kid looked up. Froze like a deer.
Time slowed down in that weird way it does during emergencies. I saw everything at once—the kid's wide eyes, the car's speed, the distance between them shrinking fast. Too fast.
Nobody else was close enough.
Just me.
My exhausted, beat-up, barely-functioning body.
I didn't think about it. Thinking takes too long. I just ran.
My legs pumped. My lungs burned. The kid was ten feet away. Five feet. The car was twenty feet out. Ten feet.
"MOVE!" I screamed.
I hit the kid like a linebacker, shoving him hard toward the sidewalk. He flew safely out of the way.
And I couldn't stop my momentum.
The car slammed into me.
Pain. Everywhere. All at once. Like being hit by lightning made of knives.
I flew backward. Hit the ground. My head cracked against concrete.
Everything got fuzzy. Sounds became muffled. I saw the kid sitting on the sidewalk, crying but alive. Good. That was good.
People were screaming. Running toward me. Someone was crying my name.
I tried to breathe but my chest wouldn't work right. Something was wrong inside. Very wrong.
This is bad, my nurse brain whispered. Internal bleeding. Maybe worse.
"Stay with us, Aria!" Marcus was suddenly there, pressing his jacket against my chest. "Ambulance is coming!"
I wanted to laugh. I'd spent twelve hours saving people tonight. Now I was the one bleeding out in a parking lot.
The irony was almost funny.
My vision started going dark around the edges. Not the fun kind of dark. The permanent kind.
"I don't want to die alone," I whispered. But nobody heard me. Everyone was too busy trying to save me.
Just like I'd spent my whole life trying to save everyone else.
At least the kid's okay, I thought as the darkness swallowed me. At least I saved one more.
The world disappeared.
Then, impossibly, I opened my eyes.
But this wasn't a hospital ceiling.
This was... sky? Three moons—THREE MOONS—hung above me in colors I'd never seen before. Purple. Silver. Gold.
I sat up, gasping. No pain. My chest didn't hurt. My arm wasn't bleeding. I wasn't even wearing my scrubs anymore.
I was in some kind of rough dress made of leather and cloth. And I was lying on moss in the middle of a forest that glowed with bioluminescent plants.
"What the—"
A roar cut me off.
Not a human sound. Something animal. Something big.
I scrambled to my feet, heart pounding. The roar came again, closer this time. Trees rustled twenty feet away.
Then I saw it.
A creature that shouldn't exist. Massive. White fur with black spots. Cat-like but the size of a small car. A snow leopard, but wrong. Its eyes were too intelligent. Too human.
And it was covered in blood.
Black veins crawled across its fur like poison. It stumbled toward me, those human-intelligence eyes locked on mine.
It collapsed five feet away. Shifted. Changed. The fur receded. The body morphed.
Suddenly it wasn't a leopard anymore.
It was a man.
A naked, bleeding, devastatingly beautiful man with silver-white hair and pale skin covered in scars. His eyes—silver like moonlight—stared at me with desperate hope.
"Please," he whispered in a voice rough with pain. "Please... help me."
Then his eyes rolled back.
And I realized three things at once:
One: I was definitely not in Kansas anymore.
Two: I had somehow ended up in a world where men could turn into giant cats.
Three: The glowing golden mark that had just appeared on my palm was pulsing with light that seemed to respond to the dying man in front of me.
What. The. Hell. Was. Happening?