Page 42 of Hunted

“I’ll be fine,” I mumbled to Fallon. “Get us what we need.”

It was the other reason I’d wanted to be the one to crack the vampire’s mind. Fallon was better at detail work. If one of us had to unravel the fine fibers of memory from the mass of snarling thorns Rossi typically left behind in the wake of one of his memory wipes, I wanted it to be her. Her surgical skill in lost memory recovery was almost savant like.

There were no nights that I walked away from what I did without regrets. Every mission had a human cost. How many shifter lives had I protected by erasing memories of humans? How many did I protect by breaking into the mind of this vampire, who didn’t look to be older than seventeen or eighteen? Hundreds, maybe thousands. But his mind would forever be a scar on my own, a memory I would bear with me until the day I ceased to exist. I wasn’t naïve enough to pretend we lived in a world where people like me weren’t needed, where if I left military service and decided to live a civilian life, someone wouldn’t be required to take my place.

Our packs had survived nearly two hundred years of war with the Vampire Nation, and now faced a growing conflict with humans. If living with a few stains on my soul meant families like West’s or Dallas’s could sleep easier at night, so be it.

Except I couldn’t help but see Ellie’s haunted gray-green eyes when I stared down into the face of that vampire. Ellie, who represented what could happen when we went too far.

“We need to get you to a hospital for an MRI,” Topher said in a low voice. “I don’t like the looks of your pupils.”

“I’m fine.” I shook my head, jerking my arm free of the blood pressure cuff he’d somehow wrestled me into while I was distracted. “This is normal.”

“Yeah, you’re bleeding from the nose and ears, dude. That’s all kinds of not normal. I don’t care if you’re the world’s scariest psychic, if I don’t bring you home in one piece, my mate is going to write every nasty orc in his next three fantasy books as a brooding, dark-haired paramedic, then have them all fall off a cliff into a lava pit or suffer some other grisly death.”

I snorted. West would do that, or worse. Dallas had once tried to expand his very limited culinary palate (Translate: my brother ate no condiment except ketchup) by tricking him into eating a veggie dip that may have contained the tiniest bit of homemade spiced mayonnaise. When West had found out, he’d narrowed his eyes and passed the plate of offending baby carrots and broccoli silently to Topher. And the following week, Dallas’s elf character, Dagnar Silverleaf, had been captured and tortured by trolls in his serial fantasy series.

“I’ll go after Fallon and I get the intel,” I mumbled, the street swimming before me. The voices in my head had sharpened to a siren’s wail, indistinct and reedy like someone was scraping foil down a plate of glass. Something wasn’t right.

Topher glanced across the street. Fallon had the vampire on a stretcher and was directing two of Cris’s people to evac him to one of the SUVs.

“Pretty sure she’s got this.”

“I have to get to Rossi.” I tried to rise, only to sink back onto the pavement. The left side of my body wasn’t working right all of a sudden.

“Okay, that’s it. We’re going to the emergency room.” Topher’s voice sounded like it was a thousand miles away. “River, hang on.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I tried to get it out, swiped at the screen, but couldn’t get my eyes to focus. Beside me, Topher swore.

“What is it?” I could see in his eyes something had happened, but his voice in my head was a screechy record player with the needle sliding off track. “What happened?” When Topher hesitated, I demanded, “Tell me.”

“It’s August. West just texted. He had a bad attack. They’re transporting him to the hospital in Austin.”

I opened my mouth, wanting to ask which way my SUV was. The street had grown strangely dim. The last thing I heard was Topher shouting for me as the world went black.

* * *

I STARTLED AWAKE AT THE SOUND OF VOICES. The hospital room smelled sharply of disinfectant and the unmistakable plastic smell of a saline drip. Machines beeped around me. A blood pressure cuff attached to my arm began to automatically inflate. I growled.

“Glad you’re back with us.” A short black man in surgeon’s scrubs leaned over the bed to shine a penlight in my eyes. I recognized Simon, who was a trauma surgeon and one of the North Austin pack’s werewolf doctors. He was also engaged to Lacey’s mother, Juliet. “I’m going to do a quick series of neurological tests.”

“Tests?”

“We need to see how your shifter regeneration is progressing with healing the damage now that we’ve relieved the pressure on your brain.”

“August,” I slurred, trying to push the blankets back.

“Sit your ass down, soldier,” my oldest brother’s voice barked from across the room.

What the hell was Brody doing here? I immediately let my head drop back against the pillow—which hurt like a bitch. Maybe I wasn’t okay.

“August is fine, which is more than I can say for you,” Brody continued. “We both know if I let Mom through that door right now, she’ll skin you alive and make your wolf into a rug to lay in front of the fireplace.”

“That would be a bitch to regenerate.”

“Think she won’t do it?”

We exchanged a look. Like the rest of my brothers, I’d survived to adulthood by figuring out pretty damn quick not to ask questions like that when it came to Mom.