"Head wounds bleed a lot. That's bad, but it also means it might be better than the blood makes it look."

His first aid kit managed to survive when everything came crashing down. He wipes the wound clean and looks as best he can. "It's not urgent enough to need me to stitch it here and now. If we were being responsible, I'd tell you to try not to move until we get you to a hospital. If you'd rather be reckless, I'll tape it and wrap it and you can deal with the goblin."

"We went through all this trouble I'm not backing away now."

"I could just kill it. It's still a win. But yeah, thought you might say that."

He bandages the injury, and warns Sadde that it's not properly sealed and if this somehow turns into a physical fight he should back off then.

He walks up to the Hyena and levels a deeply unimpressed gaze at it. "I could kill you. I don't want to. I could turn you into a creepy weapon. I extra don't want to. You have two options: either you die anyway, that's no skin off my nose, or you agree to my terms and you get to live."

Snarling. That is the best activity for a Hyena right now. It's doing a lot of that.

He ignores that, and starts listing his terms.

There are a lot of clauses and subclauses in there, but it gets as far as "no murder" and strains against its bonds.

Well, not that many clauses and subclauses, the Hyena gets one of the dumbed down versions.

"Choose: die, or live without murdering anyone."

(Now would be an amazing time for Matthew to dramatically threaten it or something.)

Matthew picks up on Sadde's look. "The Lord of Toronto sent us to get you sealed or killed. He and Sam would prefer sealed. Now agree." He fires into the ground, and the Hyena yelps at the sound.

"I'm running out of patience and I need medical assistance, you're on a timer to make your decision here and I'm not telling you how long you have."

The Hyena hangs its head and growls.

Its shape seems to change. Some of the discontinuities get smoothed over and its muzzle shortens. Its hind legs look less like a biped's got broken off and reattached at a ninety degree angle. It ends up looking more like an extremely unhealthy dog than a vaguely dog-shaped monster.

"Atta boy. Girl? I'm not sure how you do gender." He starts unleashing the thing.

The goblin-dog of unspecified gender (if any) growls at him. A lot. It slinks away instead of trying to retaliate, but not before howling. It's an incongruously triumphant howl.

The few remaining ghosts flee, but the forest's more physical Others start appearing just as the Hyena leaves. Some of them look aggressive.

...he considers taunting them, then discards the idea. They'd better go.

The Shepherd declines to fight. Anything that follows the Hyena around is used to ghosts; it'd be a waste of resources. Matthew casts a handful of powder into the air and the Others become more interested in each other than the practitioners, but he says that against this many it won't last long.

But the car is close by, so they grab whatever supplies they don't mind losing and head back.

Yeah, back is good, he's starting to feel a little woozy.

The others give him a hand back into the car. (The Shepherd's arm is inexplicably not cold and clammy. He's just a guy who happens to dress like an old-fashioned corpse.)

When they drive back it's not to the same hospital; there's a nearer one.

Oh good. Hospital's good.

Matthew and the Shepherd aren't too hard to convince that they don't need to stick around, so Sadde can avoid pseudonym problems.

Hospitals are kind of unpleasant and slow, but it's a very safe kind of both. He gets an uncomfortable row of stitches down his face, is advised to have them removed in about ten days, and is completely unable to tell them what animal attacked him.

He can say 'it looked kinda like a bear' which is strictly true, he's pretty sure he can get away with not detailing species and food habits.

It gets recorded as another tragic case of unspecified.

Do Others even get rabies? Who knows. Hopefully the doctors having taken care of all the mundane risks is good enough. The entire procedure is reassuringly routine. He's eventually released with instructions on how to keep the injury clean and a warning that facial expressions are fine but he should probably not do anything that'd stretch the skin too much.

Yeah.

And, er. He should. Probably go see Diana.

Probably, yes. She's happy to meet him, what with not knowing recent events and all.

"Sam! How are y— your face, what happened to your face."

"Erm. You. Remember the Hyena?"

"What hyena?"