Now that the melody of her healing potion had faded, Mel could hear Arthur taking steadying breaths. A laugh of pure wonder escaped him. It was soon followed by a groan.

He turned to look at Gus. Arthur’s broken nose had healed. For the first time since she’d known him, he looked as though he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Even the cigarette burn he’d carried on his forearm since childhood was gone.

“Why didn’t,” Arthur stammered, taking a step. He looked at Mel. “Why wasn’t Gus healed?”

“Because he’s gone,” Mel answered.

“But he deserved it.” Unspoken but understood was the other side: that Arthur had not deserved it. He hadn’t realize yet that she’d done him no favor.

As Arthur stared down at Gus’s body, Mel knew she didn’t have to ask whether he finally felt regret for what he’d done. His expression of horror and shame was so far from anything he’d had ever shown before that he looked like another person entirely. He might well have been- in removing the damage, Mel had all but torn a hole in his psyche.

He asked, “Why did you heal me?”

“Because,” Mel answered at length, “I wasn’t lying when I said that I once thought we were friends. I needed you to see how you hurt people.”

He closed his eyes, breath hitching, and nodded.

“There’s something I want to know. How did you find out Gus was a werewolf?”

“His, ah, his foot. There’s a bite mark on his foot. I saw it when he was getting ready to leave. Changing into thicker socks for the cold. You remember that day it got so cold?”

Mel didn’t answer, only listened. His voice had changed, too. It was no longer a bludgeon against imagined rebuttals; Arthur spoke softly now, inviting a response. He went on:

“Gus said he got it as a kid. Neighbor’s dog. But I pushed him… he’d turned down night shifts… It all started to come together in my mind… I kept pushing him and I thought he was getting angry and that made me so angry. I don’t understand what I was so angry about. He was just scared. How did I not see that?”

“Since the healing potion has let you see it now, I think it’s safe to say that you were acting out of pain,” Mel told him.

“And now it’s just gone?” He asked this searchingly, as though he no longer recognized the inside of his own mind. “Does that mean I’m a different person now?”

“You could be, I think, if you wanted. You should know I’ve never made a potion like that before. Maybe no one has. It took away whatever wound you were carrying that made you behave that way. You must have some idea what it was?”

“I have some idea,” he echoed, touching the place on his arm where the scar used to be. Arthur knelt in the water and scooped Gus into his arms, asking, “Was he always this small?”

“Carter, would you…?”

Nodding, Carter stood on his back legs and went to take Gus’s body from Arthur, cradling him like a sleeping child.

“Wait,” Arthur said, and took off his long coat. “Please.” He draped it over Gus’s body, covering him as best he could. “I’m… I’m sorry,” he said weakly.

Mel signaled to Kit that it was time they left. As she climbed onto his back, she said to Arthur, “This isn’t how the kind of psychological problem we’re talking about would normally be treated. The mind is complicated. I don’t know what will happen to you now.”

“I don’t want to be that person anymore.” Fear tinged his voice. “I won’t be that person again.”

Mel believed in his sincerity because she recognized the worry behind it. She didn’t want to be the person she had been before, either. “I hope that’s true, Arthur. The hunters will be after you. Take care of yourself.”

Mel, Kit, and Carter left in the direction they’d come from. Mel looked back only once, a good distance away, to see Arthur’s motionless silhouette looking up at the moon from the water.