Chapter 1 #2
My house came into view twenty minutes later, small and set back from the main pack grounds where the forest pressed close. There were no lights on, no signs of life. Just the faint grey of early morning making everything look washed out and temporary.
The door was unlocked.
That stopped me cold.
I never left my door unlocked. Never. I pushed it open slowly, listening for movement inside.
The silence was total.
The house was exactly how I'd left it. Coffee mug on the counter, still half full. Book spine-up on the arm of the couch. Jacket hung on the back of the chair by the window.
There was no sign of forced entry, no sign anyone had been here except me. Which meant I'd left it unlocked myself. Which meant I'd walked out of my house at some point during the night, left the door open behind me, and gone—where? To a field full of wolves I didn't remember killing?
My stomach lurched again.
I locked the door behind me. Drew the deadbolt. Checked it twice, then a third time because my hands were still shaking and I needed to be sure.
Then I headed for the bathroom.
The shower was small, barely room to turn around, but I stripped out of my ruined clothes and stepped under the spray before the water had time to warm up.
The cold hit like a fist to the sternum. I stood under it anyway, watching pink water spiral down the drain, watching it turn red, then pink again, then finally clear enough to see the porcelain beneath.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
I cranked the temperature up and let the water go from cold to scalding, let it turn my skin red and tender and new. I scrubbed at my arms, my chest, under my nails where blood had dried black and stubborn.
The water kept running, kept washing blood away in pink spirals. But it didn't wash away the emptiness in my head where memory should've been.
I'd killed those wolves. Had to have. There was too much blood, too much violence written on my body for it to be anything else. Seven rogues dead in a field and me waking up in the middle of them like I was the aftermath of a storm I couldn't remember riding.
The thought settled cold and heavy in my chest.
I pressed my forehead against the tile, letting water pound against the back of my neck, and tried to breathe through the panic climbing up my throat like fingers.
I didn't remember leaving my house. Didn't remember the fight.
Didn't remember killing anything, but the evidence was written in blood I'd just scrubbed off my skin and the bodies I'd left behind in that field.
Which meant the time was missing. Which meant there was control of me that I didn't have over myself.
I turned off the water and stood there dripping, hands braced against tile that was still slick with steam, staring at the drain like it could give me answers.
It didn't.
There were no answers. Just water circling down into darkness.
I dried off mechanically and dressed in clean clothes that felt wrong against skin that was too aware, too awake, too full of sensations I didn't trust anymore.
The sun was coming up properly now, pale light creeping through the bathroom window and turning everything the color of old bone.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror.
Same face. Same scars cutting through my left eyebrow and down my cheek. Same eyes staring back at me like they belonged to someone who understood what had happened.
I didn't understand anything except that I'd lost time, that I'd killed, and that I had no memory of any of it.
And the worst part—the part that made my hands shake and my breath come short—was that I didn't know if it'd happen again.
Or if next time the wolves in that field would be people I knew. People from town. Pack.
I gripped the edge of the sink hard enough to make my knuckles go white.
I didn't want this. Didn't want to be a thing that lost time, that woke up covered in blood with bodies at my feet and no explanation except the gaping void where my memory should've been.
But wanting didn't matter anymore. Wanting was for people who had control over their own bodies, their own time, their own actions.
I wasn't people anymore. I was an instrument. A weapon aimed at targets I couldn't see and fired by hands I couldn't feel.
The only thing I knew for certain was that seven wolves were dead, my hands had killed them, and I couldn't remember a single moment of it.
I looked at my reflection one more time.
Then I walked out of the bathroom and sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall while the sun came up outside and the town started waking and the question pounded behind my eyes like a second heartbeat.
What am I?
The silence gave me nothing back.
I stared at my hands in the grey morning light.
They looked like they always did. Scarred knuckles. Calloused palms. Fingers that knew how to hold a wrench, how to throw a punch, how to do a hundred ordinary things.
But I didn't trust them anymore.
Didn't trust myself.
And I didn't know if I ever would again.