Now there was no way to tell what was water and what was tears.
The urge to get clean began to crowd out all the rest of my physical
complaints. I grabbed my soap and washed every possible inch. Then it was rinse and repeat, then repeated again. Finally, my legs folded, and I slowly slid
down the smooth tile wall, until I was a huddled ball of misery. With nothing left
to distract me, the deluge of fragmented images, the babel of half understood voices, and the shitstorm of emotional upheaval crowded in and set up shop.
Exhausted beyond measure, I couldn’t fight back, so all that was left was to endure.
As the storm raged around me, time passed without meaning, but like any
other storm, it finally waned. Deep inside my psyche, I was hunkered behind the
strongest mental wall I could manage. The taunting whispers began to taper off,
and the images stopped striking like wind-tossed missiles. Quiet replaced the mental noise. Either I was in the eye of the storm, or it had finally, blessedly passed.
Not wanting to chance reawakening it, I kept my mental barriers up, and
started to poke at what I could remember. The blank spots hurt, so I didn’t push
too hard. Not yet. I ranged further back, where the pain wasn’t, until I finally found the last thing I could remember that didn’t make me want to pass out.
Ramirez’s snarling face. Kayden’s voice yelling in my ear.
A violent shiver snapped my mind back to the present where cold water
washed over me. I swiped my eyes clear and uncurled from my huddle. It took teeth-gritting effort to get up, turn off the shower, and wrap my trembling body
in a towel. My limbs were numb with cold, but I didn’t waste time getting dressed. Instead, I snagged a throw from my chair, and wrapped it around me.
Then I crawled into bed, pulled the comfort to my shoulders, and curled against
the headboard.
Only then did I begin to work my way through the maze of my mind. But no
matter how I came at it, a big, black pit of nothingness swirled where the last twenty-four plus hours should have been. I had memories of Kayden watching Hobbes, me tailing Ramirez, Wolf and Bishop heading to Hobbes’s home, and then dark streets, A NO TRESPASSING sign, a broken building filled with
shadows, then finally, a sense of panicked desperation.
And that’s where I kept stalling.
What happened in that building? Based upon the physical evidence, I knew I
had been beaten.
Raped? I paused as the word echoed in my head, and tightened my hold on
my blanket, allowing my subconscious to weigh in.
No, not physically.
Something warm dripped on my lip and I wiped it away with a blanket-
covered hand. The crimson smear held my attention. My stomach clenched.
Kayden said nosebleeds equaled psychic overload. I reached for a tissue and held it to my nose. As far as I knew, I hadn’t used my ability.
So, a psychic rape, then? Maybe, but with the gaping hole in my memory there was no way to tell what ability had been in play or who wielded it. I knew
Ramirez had been there, but had he been alone? Something told me no, not alone. Okay, so had Ellery joined him? Dread rose as my mind offered twisted
ideas as to what it would mean if Ellery had been present. I shoved them away,
refusing to get lost down that nightmarish path, and kept pushing.
If it had been Ellery, why dump me in that alley? Hell, why let me leavealive?
Letting me go made no sense, it didn’t follow his established pattern. I sucked in a deep breath as fear clawed at me but kept trying to scratch away the
shadows hiding the past. I finally gave up when my efforts resulted in a head full of white noise, another blinding headache, and a pile of bloody tissues.
Indecipherable whispers crawled inside my skull, dragging pain in their wake.
Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. Something had happened, something
