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The shapeshifter had been masquerading as Dr. Harlow for three hours before anyone noticed.
Hazel noticed.
She'd been working the night shift alone, and yes, stupid, she knew, but the night differential paid better and she needed the money when "Dr. Harlow" walked into the nurse's station with that too-wide smile and asked about the patient in Room 4.
The real Dr. Harlow never smiled. Plus, he wore a mask. The real Dr. Harlow had maybe three facial expressions, and "welcoming" wasn't one of them. Body language makes up for it though.
Hazel's hand had gone to her pocket. The salt pouch was there. The iron ring was on her finger. But she was alone in the station, she doesn’t have the taser like the others or let alone a gun, and the thing in Harlow's skin was looking at her with those too-bright eyes, and her brain-
Her brain short-circuited.
"You're not supposed to be here," she said, which was the stupidest thing she could have said to a shapeshifter, because the shapeshifter knew it wasn't supposed to be here, that was the whole point of shapeshifting.
"Excuse me?" The thing's voice was a perfect mimicry of Harlow's clipped, professional tone. That was somehow the worst part. It had learned the voice. It had practiced.
Hazel's hand found the back of the office chair, one of those cheap, wheeled things with the peeling faux leather, and she didn't think. She just reacted.
The chair went flying.
It wasn't a graceful throw. It wasn't even a good throw. But it was a loud throw, and it connected with the shapeshifter's chest with a satisfying thwack, and the thing stumbled backward into the hallway.
Hazel grabbed her salt pouch. Her hands were shaking. She threw salt in a line across the doorway, barely aiming, and then she grabbed another chair, this one a flimsy plastic thing from the waiting room, and held it up like a shield.
The shapeshifter was... laughing? It was laughing. A wet, wrong sound that Harlow's throat had never made.
"You're going to fight me with furniture?"
Hazel's voice came out high and terrified. "I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO!"
The shapeshifter took a step forward. The salt line held. It hissed, skittered back.
And then a voice came from the end of the hall, dry and perfectly flat:
"Did you just throw a chair at an entity?"
Ron from Accounting stood there in his wrinkled white shirt and loosened black tie, coffee cup in hand, looking for all the world like he'd just come to check his spreadsheets and found his coworkers having a very weird Tuesday.
The shapeshifter turned. So did Hazel.
"It was the closest thing!" she said.
Ron looked at the chair, now lying on its side in the hallway then at the salt line, then at the shapeshifter wearing Harlow's face, then back at Hazel.
"...Huh," he said.
He took a sip of his coffee.
And then he turned around and walked away.
"WAIT," Hazel shrieked. "WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
"Nowhere." Ron's voice drifted back down the hall. "I'm just going to pretend I didn't see anything. You handle it."
"HOW DO I HANDLE IT?!"
"I don't know." There was the faintest hint of amusement in his tone. "Throw another chair?"
The shapeshifter lunged. Hazel threw the other chair. It hit the shapeshifter in the face.
"THAT WORKED BETTER THAN I EXPECTED!" she yelled.
From the end of the hall, Ron's voice drifted back one last time: "Good talk. Have fun. Don't die."
And he was gone.
Hazel, armed with nothing but salt, three more chairs, and an overwhelming sense of betrayal, faced the shapeshifter alone.
(She lived. Ron never admitted he'd watched the entire thing from the security camera feed and was ready to intervene if the chairs stopped working.)
(The chairs worked.)
Ron bought her coffee the next morning. Hazel glared at him for a solid thirty seconds before taking it.
"You could have helped," she said.
"I did help." He took a sip of his own coffee, deadpan. "I didn't tell anyone you threw two chairs at a shapeshifter."
"That's not helping."
"That's my kind of helping."
He almost smiled. Hazel almost smiled back.
It was the beginning of a very strange, very terrible, very wonderful thing.