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Setting the money in my proffered palm, I again turned back toward the house, but Mark brazenly stopped me, placing a hand boldly on my ripped bicep.
Startled and irked at his touch, I jerked back, scowling.
His hand curled over his bag of chimp protectively, and I eyed him warily.
“No, man, never!” he chuckled. “I just wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
Mark beamed at me too brightly, and alarm bells sounded in the back of my mind.
“You got anything stronger?” the teen asked.
I blinked, a chill overcoming me. “What?” I growled again.
“You know, stronger, not as… natural.” He waved the bag in his hand. “Like… stow or Caramine, maybe?”
Anger colored my line of sight red, and without realizing it, my fangs extended. The change scared me almost as much as it did the kid. The shifting of my body, the morphing into a wild animal, still had not become any more commonplace since fighting my way to the surface of my shallow grave two hundred years earlier when I’d come to stand alone as a new man without any memories.
The beast I was becoming still frightened me, even if Mark couldn’t see that. I had no idea what I was capable of, what the man I’d been before had done to earn himself such a fate. I figured my memory loss was the penance I paid for some life of irrevocable sin that my own psyche had chosen to forget rather than relive.
“Hey, man—” Mark tried to backpedal. “I’m just trying to give you the business—”
“NO!” I roared, jutting my neck out, veins popping in my neck. “GET OUT!”
Mark yelped in fear, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nate break into a run toward the tree-lined road, away from my remote property.
“Okay! Geez, man! I was just asking!”
“Don’t ask me again!” I snarled. “If you do, I’ll never sell you anything. Now get the fuck out of here!”
Mark almost tripped over his own feet trying to get away, but he left me panting in fury, my heart in my windpipe for a full minute before my pulse returned to any semblance of normalcy.
Little shits,I cursed, stomping through the back door and smashing it closed at my back. They were lucky I sold them chimp, and now they were looking for harder stuff? I should have known this day was coming.
They’re just going to get it from someone else,a little voice in my head reminded me as I flopped onto the faded plaid of my sofa, dust flying off the cushions. I dropped my socked feet onto the armrest, shaking off the guilt of the encounter. It had always been a slippery slope, selling the chimp to the teenagers, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
A faint rustling at the front window stirred me from my newfound spot, and my head jerked up, my eye catching a fleeting movement, but it was gone just as quickly as it had come.
“Who’s there?” I yelled, racing to throw open the front door.
A startled firebird whipped her head up to gape at me before spreading her magnificent wings and soaring away, but beyond that, I saw no one around. My gaze spread over the secluded yard, the tree line unmoving, the road beyond silent. Even the stupid cock had finished his wayward cawing for the moment, the small flock of chickens moving toward the shade of their coop as the sun rose higher in the morning sky.
But the sensation that someone had just been on the property lingered.
“I told you little punks to go home!” I yelled out, unsure that it was Nate or Mark I was calling to. Uneasily, my stare fell back toward the wood stoop beneath my feet, and for the first time, I saw the postcard.
What the hell is this?
Slowly, I leaned down to pick it up, eyebrows knitting into a vee as I tried to make sense of the odd-looking city-town on the front, the picture painted in black and white with red accents. I drew the picture closer to my eyes, taking in the strange boardwalks crisscrossing over a dusty street. Storefronts boasting bright neon signs stood weirdly out of place to my sheltered eyes, and a peculiar feeling tingled down my spine, déjà vu-like, but that was impossible. I read the name printed on the front in bold, italic lettering.
Pario City
A spark ignited in my brain, akin to an explosion, capturing my breath like it had in the depth of that grave I’d dug myself out from two centuries ago. Fleeting, elusive—and gone before I could grab it again. But it had been there.
Even after two centuries of living without any recollection of my past, I hadn’t aged. I’d watched shifters and people around me age and wither away, while I remained the same. But still, I had no memories of my life before clawing my way out of the dirt grave.
The postcard was my first clue in centuries. I knew this town, this city, or whatever it was. Pario City. It triggered a sense of déjà vu in me, at the very least.
