Page 47 of Hunted

Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell stood facing out the room’s single window. At the sound of us, she turned.

“Thank you, Ethan. Is August any better?”

“Not really.” She was one of the few people he was ever soft with, which always surprised me. But maybe in some way, their hard edges served to balance the other’s out.

She wrapped my brother in a fierce hug, kissing the side of his head. “Tell Hayden that Ben and I are coming to her next concert this Saturday. We’ve got tickets and everything.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Dad does know it’s in a club, right?”

She snorted. “We’ll be sure to stop by one of the tattoo parlors first.”

I’d managed to get myself back into bed while they were talking. The door clicked shut. My mother turned to face me.

The thing about my mom? She was literally a legend in the werewolf community, one of only a handful of known projectionists in the past century. For decades she and Guillermo had led the Tracers through the worst of the Blood Wars, years when thousands of shapeshifters had been used as blood slaves by the Vampire Nation, kept in underground cells and brutally tortured. Neural manipulators rewrote memories one at a time and the changes we made were permanent unless we went back in and rewrote them. Projectionists could affect multiple minds at once, but only as long as that magic user actively held the minds in their grip. The moment a projectionist stopped projecting an alternate reality into your mind, you woke up and returned to the real world.

My mother’s projectionist gift was so strong she could grip the minds of dozens of vampires at once. She’d fought with the Tracers for decades, then retired in order to raise me and my brothers in a little Hill Country Texas town she and my dad had believed would be far from the vampire-shifter war.

People looked at Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell and saw the polished woman with the sweep of long black hair and trim figure and assumed she spent her afternoons flipping through magazines or checking her social media feed. They had no idea the contents of the gun safe in my dad’s study was ninety percent hers.

“If you’re going to yell at me, can you just get it over with?” I said at last. The giant mosquito buzzing in my head was driving me insane. It was like knowing a knife attack was coming and having to be blindfolded for it.

She set her jaw, coming over to the bed. “How are you feeling? And don’t give me your usual tough guy routine.”

So that was how this was going to go. “I can’t hear anything.” I filled her in about the creepy buzzing in my head, and what Simon had told me. “The neurologist from Dallas is checking over my scans. They want to do another MRI tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry you’re blocked right now, but I’m thankful this wasn’t worse than it was.” She shook her head. “Have you talked to Guillermo?”

“Not yet. Alek said he was away from the compound when the call came in that I’d been injured. He was going to have the neurologist research other cases where neural manipulators had been hurt and temporarily lost the ability to mind read. But given that my abilities are out of the scope of what they have in the database, there probably isn’t anything comparable.”

“So you’re looking at a rest and recovery period while you wait for your body to heal itself.”

“Most likely.” I looked down. “I know you’re pissed at me. I’m sure you probably forced Fallon to tell you what happened at the safe house.”

My mother’s expression hardened. “You knew what you were doing was dangerous. That’s what I can’t square in my head. You aren’t stupid, River. You knew cracking one vampire mind was a risk, but within bounds. No one, absolutely no one would consider breaking three vampire minds over the course of three nights safe. Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because we couldn’t get in. We tried and failed the previous two nights. This was the only way. We were going to lose our only lead in tracking down Rossi.”

My mom’s eyes flashed shapeshifter gold. “That’s not good enough. The Tracers have strict safety protocols. You should have let Fallon or another team member do it.”

I shook my head. “Fallon tried. She can’t get past Rossi’s shielding.”

“She’s gotten through before. She did with Quinn.”

“Quinn’s a werewolf. It’s always harder with vampires. You know I’m right. Fallon tried the first night. She tried again the second night. Both times she failed to make any headway.”

“She couldn’t get in at all?”

I shook my head. “She said it was like hitting a concrete wall.”

“That makes no sense to me. This isn’t to knock your skills, but Fallon is a powerful neural manipulator. Her talents are slightly different than yours, but she’s exceptionally powerful.”

“I agree,” I admitted. “It didn’t make sense to either of us. Something about the whole thing just felt… off.”

My mother looked down. “Tracers don’t talk about the personal toll this job takes. We’re trained to think of the mission, of the people we’re protecting, of the good of the pack. We are trained to block out pain, to fight through conditions that would cause most people to black out.” My mom paused, tracing the scar that ran along her collarbone, disappearing beneath her silk blouse. “And all of those things are important. We are the last line of defense for shapeshifters everywhere. But you can’t lose sight of the fact that at the end of your service, and there will be an end at some point in time, you will still be you. A son. A person. A brother. And I hope someday, someone’s mate.” She held my eyes. “You’ve seen what happens when soldiers are no longer able to fight and can’t stay at the compound?”

I swallowed. “They go back to their packs.”

“And you’ve seen the condition some of them are in?” I didn’t answer. We both knew I had. My mom continued, “Wolves are pack hunters. We’re natural protectors, driven to do whatever it takes to protect the pack, those within the societal structure who can’t defend themselves. The Tracers are almost all Alpha wolves, and Alpha wolves are conditioned to fight through pain, through stress, and through physical agony, to push themselves to the point anyone else would black out if that’s what it takes to see a mission through.”