Page 9 of Hunted

“Not going to argue with you there.” Jori held up both hands.

I opened my mouth, and she shot me a warning look. So maybe I’d witnessed the demonstration where Vlad had tried to take her out and she’d thrown him like a sack of potatoes, but River had warned me to keep quiet about the abilities of my protection detail. The fact that Jori looked like a wide-eyed freshman art history major rather than a badass vampire who could handle herself helped her blend in and protect me better.

“She doesn’t think any of this is worth it,” Wiley continued. “I have the greatest respect for Dr. Patel. You know how much I want to see this research through, to publish our findings, but what does it mean to get my name on a paper if I’m the next one hurt or even killed? We just found out yesterday my wife and I are expecting again.”

“Wiley, that’s wonderful,” I began, but he cut me off.

“You should know I’m not the only one thinking about leaving.” He shook his head, expression bleak. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this. I mean, whose side are you even on? We all know your sister is one of them.”

A sick, shaky feeling shriveled my stomach. I forced myself to take deep breaths even as my heartbeat raced out of control.

“It’s not about choosing sides. And Hayden has nothing to do with the attacks.”

“If you say so.” He took the sample from me, moving to another station.

Eyes suddenly burning, I hurried back over to my desk and began typing in notes from my first round of testing that morning.

“Are you hungry?” I asked Jori, nodding to Piper’s breakfast sandwiches. “You should eat.”

“You go ahead.”

“I can pop them in the microwave if they’re cold.”

She leaned against the wall. “While I’m guarding you, I don’t take breaks. If I have to use the bathroom, if I have to eat, I’ll call someone to take my place. I have to have my hands free at all times. I can’t get distracted even for a second.”

I pushed my glasses up and rubbed my eyes. “Right. Of course. I didn’t think.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I should tell Piper.”

“No, don’t.” Jori toyed with my Kaz Brekker Funko pop. “It’s nice, you know? I lost my mom to ALDD when I was six. I don’t remember her very much. Just little things. The way her fingers felt combing through my hair at night. How she would hold me in her arms and whisper fairy tales to me until I fell asleep. Fae princes and cursed forests. Dragons and wizards and always a brave vampire girl who kicked ass and freed the kingdom. She could tell the best stories. We had so little, just a single room for five of my family members to share, which was typical for lower caste, but I never felt like my childhood was bleak as long as I had her.”

“I’m so sorry.” ALDD had taken so much from the Vampire Nation, but the lower caste had been disproportionately impacted. “Is she the reason you became a bodyguard?”

“I never thought about it that way.” Jori chewed her bottom lip, flashing a hint of fang. “There aren’t so many options available that pay well if you have sick family members. Everyone wants to work as a nanny or a domestic of course, since those postings don’t require you to go out in the sunlight, but there’s fierce competition and lots of abuse by the aristocracy, who know the people they employ won’t dare complain no matter what they do.”

Now I was kicking myself. “It was a dumb thing to ask. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. The covens are very secretive. Not many know what life is really like. I lost my aunt a few years after she passed. The resistance is the only family I have left. Piper isn’t my family, but having someone care enough to make sure you’ve eaten… sometimes it’s nice to pretend even if it’s only for a few seconds, you know?”

I wrapped my friend in a quick, fierce hug. “You never have to explain to me. You know how things were for me and Hayden growing up with our dad’s struggle with addiction and mental health issues.”

Piper had done everything she could, swooping in on the weekends with bags of groceries from the church or food bank. I’d been eager to escape the trailer where our dad was often passed out and Piper took us to eat homemade sandwiches at the park where we’d pick wildflowers and look at the ducks. There was never much money to spend, but she somehow made fun days of walking around the mall, looking in all the windows, stopping off at the library or for a snow cone on the way home. She’d let us choose nail polish from the dollar store and found conditioners that would tame my wild mane of curls when the only shampoo we could afford turned my head into a tangled snarl that tried to eat Hayden’s face across our shared pillow at night. At the time, I hadn’t understood how hard it had to have been for her, still in her teens herself, struggling to work her way through community college on loans and grants.

“Don’t let Wiley get to you.”

I shot Jori a pointed look. “It’s not like he’s the only one saying it.”

“Everyone’s freaked out about the latest round of attacks. It isn’t about you.”

She was right. The rational part of me knew it. But science labs had always been the one place I felt like I fit in. When I was looking through a microscope examining slides, I wasn’t the girl from the trailer park. I wasn’t the girl who kept getting in trouble for reading under my desk because I’d finished my work too soon. I wasn’t caught between two worlds, never quite feeling welcome at gatherings with my sister’s wolf pack where I was the only human, despite how many times I was invited over for Sunday barbecues. Now I felt like an outcast here, too.

My entire life I’d planned to become a veterinarian. But everything had changed the night Hayden had been attacked by a feral werewolf after playing a gig with her band, Daisy Addiction, in downtown Austin. Being a year older and having been convinced from birth that her job was to protect me like a fierce Doc Marten-wearing, guitar-wielding Valkyrie, Hayden had lied, run away from home, and done everything possible to protect me from the truth and keep me safe. But you don’t grow up together in a one-bedroom trailer in a tiny Texas town with six stoplights without learning how to tell when your sister is full of shit.

I’d figured out the truth, gotten trapped in a corn maze with feral werewolves at the town’s local Harvest Festival, and been brought before the werewolf council. Guillermo Montemayor, uncle of Hayden’s mate, Ethan, ordered me to make a choice. I was either to be changed into a werewolf, or have my memories erased.

Maybe if I’d been braver that day, willing to follow my sister into the abyss, things would have worked out differently. Maybe if I hadn’t been born with a brain hard-wired for anxiety, I would have reached for the red pill, taken a chance in seeing how far the rabbit hole went.