Julien treats the injured Nemrod in a rooftop emergency that turns a chance encounter into an act of care, and then into the first step toward a consequential bond. Newly arrived in Montréal and isolated, Julien finds Nemrod gravely out of place in the winter night: striking in appearance, but wounded and bleeding green. His nursing training gives him a practical way to respond to a scene that resists ordinary explanation.

Rooftop Encounter and Emergency Care

A sound interrupts Julien’s thoughts on the rooftop. When he turns, he is startled by the man standing behind him, whose bare torso and dark, disordered hair initially hold his attention. The encounter’s glamour gives way to danger as Nemrod steps forward, groaning, and green fluid runs from his torso onto the roof. Julien then notices the wounds along Nemrod’s flanks. Nemrod identifies the substance as blood, but its unnatural color leaves Julien aware that the stranger has not explained everything.

Nemrod soon buckles and falls headfirst. Julien catches him before he hits the ground; Nemrod lands against him, confused, with his head resting on Julien’s chest. Attraction briefly competes with the emergency, but Julien recognizes that Nemrod needs attention and that, as someone trained in nursing, he has a duty to help. In the freezing night, he carries Nemrod into his apartment and lays him on the bed.

Julien draws on his nursing-school experience rather than waiting for an explanation of the green blood. He retrieves sterile compresses and gauze from his medical kit, returns to the bedroom, and cleans the wounds while trying not to be distracted by Nemrod’s appearance. The injuries on either side of Nemrod’s rib cage prove shallow enough that they do not require stitches. Julien dresses them with broad bandages instead, completing the immediate treatment through a careful, practical response to an extraordinary injury.

Care Becomes a Bond

The bandages turn Julien’s improvised nursing into something Nemrod recognizes as more than temporary aid. After waking, Nemrod approaches unexpectedly, wraps both arms around Julien’s back, and pulls him close. The gesture shifts the scene from the practical distance of caregiver and patient to intimate physical contact: Nemrod’s warmth sends a thrill through Julien, who is already struggling to separate concern for the injured man from attraction to him.

Nemrod then declares Julien his and says he has marked him. The claim is made through a bodily act rather than through an explanation Julien can fully understand. Nemrod uses his own semen to mark Julien, then leans in to smell him; Julien returns the gesture, recognizing scent as another way Nemrod asserts possession. The sequence makes the change in their relationship physical and sensory before it is fully intelligible to Julien. Nemrod’s attention to the bandages links this claim directly to the care Julien has provided: he touches Julien’s cheek and calls him his companion because Julien looked after him.

Julien accepts the new designation emotionally even while its meaning remains unclear. He wants to belong to Nemrod, and Nemrod’s gentle kiss reinforces a bond that has moved rapidly from emergency care to an asserted partnership. Later, once Julien learns that Nemrod is fighting to lead a united pack of werewolves and jaguar-garous, this private attachment acquires political stakes. Julien decides to help Nemrod win the clan war, extending the rooftop rescue into a commitment to stand beside him.

The Rescue’s Consequences

The treatment later changes how Julien reads a hospital assignment. Asked to give a patient morphine in room 639, he takes a sterile needle upstairs and finds a blond man covered in bites and bruises. The patient’s jaguar tattoo resembles Nemrod’s, though it lacks the wolf; the chart identifies him as Sam Stanton, 27, found in the street after a suspected fall that he has not confirmed. Julien recognizes him as the jaguar-garou Nemrod had thrown from a balcony, now back in human form. The rooftop injuries Julien had tended were therefore part of a wider conflict, not an isolated accident.

Julien’s nursing knowledge, first used to clean and bandage Nemrod, now gives him the means to threaten Sam. He exchanges the prescribed syringe for one containing potassium chloride, which can stop the body if too much enters the system, and uses the threat of an injection to demand Nemrod’s whereabouts. Sam tells him that Nemrod usually stays in the alpha cave in Jarry Park. The scene reverses the ethical meaning of Julien’s clinical competence: knowledge deployed to preserve a stranger’s life becomes leverage against an injured patient, under the pressure of loyalty and anger over Nemrod’s attack.

The rescue’s consequence is thus larger than Nemrod’s immediate recovery. Julien’s care creates the personal bond that makes Nemrod’s danger matter to him, while the later hospital encounter draws that bond into Nemrod’s struggle for leadership. The same practical competence that made Julien useful on the rooftop helps carry him from private caregiver to active participant in the conflict surrounding Nemrod.

Narrative Significance

The rescue binds together three kinds of recognition without making them simultaneous: Julien first sees Nemrod as an astonishing stranger, then responds to the visible injury as a nurse, and only afterward learns that the care has become part of a supernatural and political relationship. The green blood marks the limit of what Julien can explain medically, while his decision to act rests on familiar nursing practice. Later, the hospital scene reveals how far the bond has carried him: faced with the man who attacked Nemrod, Julien turns medical knowledge toward coercion and chooses loyalty over the ordinary duties of his workplace. What begins as an improvised response to a wounded man therefore becomes the hinge between Julien’s isolated new life in Montréal and his decision to enter Nemrod’s conflict.