Page 8 of Hunted

The instant she touched my arm, the sunny kitchen around us shattered. The floor dropped out from under us, my stomach threatening to heave up its contents as I clutched tightly to the sealed travel container of tea. Shards of light roared towards me in sharp fractals, blazing lemon yellow, tangerine orange and a white so radiant it needed a different name. They flashed past in a headache-inducing blur, faster than my human eyes could track. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear it another second, my feet slammed into solid ground.

Jori practically carried me to my desk in the back corner of the lab, shoving aside my pile of paperwork and the Six of Crows Funko pops Hayden had special ordered me off of Etsy for my birthday (my sister was all kinds of awesome that way), and an acorn squash that had mysteriously appeared in the night.

I growled, lunging for the squash.

“Down, killer.” Jori held me back.

“You don’t understand.”

“That this is some strange form of wolf courtship? I get it. I just think it’s weird. Has he never heard of flowers? You should sit down, by the way. You’re looking green.”

“Please. I didn’t even get sick this time.”

“Practically an honorary vampire.”

I snorted and she stepped away to check in with the night shift. Glaring at the squash, I rubbed my temples, remembering the nightmare from earlier.

The attacks always came at night.

Attacks was probably the wrong word. Dreams couldn’t kill you. What I was experiencing wasn’t real. It was a stress response, a byproduct of a memory wipe forced on me at the order of the werewolf council that had left my neural pathways unable to consistently sort out fact from lie, real from not real. In my head, there was the version of the truth my mind had tried to accept for over a year, the falsehoods River Caldwell wrote into my memory for my protection, memories so vivid they were virtually indistinguishable from ones I’d really lived. Warring against those memories was a faint, hazier version of the same time period. A fever dream come to life, hallucinations rising up from my nightmares to convince me I was going mad.

I was told this neural disconnect happened to all of us who recovered true memories after rewrites.

Headaches. Hallucinations. Nightmares. Blackouts.

Six months had passed since River lifted the memory block, and I was ruthlessly hunted through the streets of Austin night after night by the same dark visions. You’d think they would tire of it eventually.

They never did.

Three things about the nightmares never changed.

It was always night.

It was always raining.

And Matteo Rossi always found me.

Sometimes I fell to my death from the top of one of the skyscrapers downtown. Other nights I ran through a dark forest while wolves snapped at my feet. In other dreams, a faceless man tied my hands and dragged me before a bound and kneeling River, holding a gun to my head as he forced him to choose. My life or his.

There wasn’t enough data on those of us who had memory wipes reversed to have a road map or time frame for my recovery. My neural pathways could regenerate, allowing the false memories to fade into the background next week. Or it could be a year from now. And so every night, I battled the hallucinations alone.

For the next hour, I got my lab area set up, started some samples running, and checked in on my lab mice. Meera was our project supervisor, heading up the ALDD project and also serving as head of the microbiology department. For years, my sister Hayden had kept the truth about her infection with lycanthropy a secret from our family. Now that we knew what she was facing, as well as others in the paranormal community, we were all rallying behind her.

Except I was pretty sure one of my lab mice had tried to go all Cujo on me this morning through my safety gloves. This raised the disturbing possibility that rather than developing a new gene therapy to reverse myelin sheath degeneration, I was creating a new strain of were-mice. Because again, Mondays.

“How’s that sample coming?” Wiley, one of the post-docs, barely looked up from his microscope long enough to make notes.

“Sorry, yeah. I’m nearly done.” I carefully prepared two slides. “How was the birthday party?”

“Unicorn dresses. Unicorn cupcakes.” Wiley pulled out his phone to scroll through his pictures. I leaned over with Jori. A beaming two-year-old in a pink princess dress clutched a stuffed white unicorn with a sparkly silver horn in a death grip, beaming from her father’s lap. Wiley, I noted, wore a shirt that said Best Unicorn Dad Ever. “I’m actually pretty sure that blue frosting is toxic.”

“Not to unicorns.” That earned me a fist bump from Jori. “Sadie gets cuter every time I see a picture of her.”

“I can’t believe how fast she’s growing. My mom took about a thousand pictures.” Wiley’s expression darkened.

“What is it?” I threw a look at Jori.

He blew out a breath through his mask. “My wife wants me to switch to a different research team. The lab is a target and where is our security? Please don’t take offense, Jori. But I mean real security. Two people have been hospitalized in the last month. We should have campus police outside the lab. Security checks.”