Hard As Steele(9)

She leaned back in the car seat. “Ever since that car accident, I’ve been having hallucinations and blank spots in my memory. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I literally don’t know what’s real and what’s not any more. I can’t even be completely sure that I’m really here. It feels real, though.”

“Well,” Steele said as he drove. “A head injury can have lasting effects.”

“I’ve been to doctors,” she said. “My friend Katherine took me after I got back from the funeral, because I kept having these weird flashbacks. I had an MRI, I had a CAT scan. Nothing abnormal showed up, but it keeps happening.”

“How did you end up coming to Timber Valley?” Steele asked. They were driving down a rural road, hemmed in by towering pine trees on either side.

“Where are we going?” She was trying to get her bearings. Timber Valley…when the name had first started popping into her head, she did internet searches for it, looked on maps…it didn’t seem to exist.

“We’re going to my house. How did you find us here?”

That was an odd question, Roxanne thought, with a ripple of unease. The town didn’t exist on a map, and the sheriff of the town sounded concerned that she’d been able to find the town at all. Then there was the weird way that everyone had looked at her when she’d walked in to that bar – as if they’d literally never seen a stranger in their town.

All right, she told herself. Let’s assume that I’m not crazy, dreaming or hallucinating. Let’s look at all the facts objectively.

“How did you find us here?” Steele repeated urgently.

She shot him an angry look. “Tell you what. I’ll tell you, as soon as you give me a satisfactory, honest explanation for why you would tell me that you loved me and then leave me by the side of the road, drive away, and never contact me again.”

“All right. I will. I just need a little time to gather my thoughts.”

“You’d only say that if you needed time to come up with a good lie,” she snapped.

He didn’t try to argue with her.

She folded her arms and shut her eyes. Think, Roxanne, think, she told herself.

First of all, she was a twenty four year old woman who’d never had a history of mental illness, and nobody in her family had a history of mental illness. So the odds of her suddenly being crazy were pretty slim.

Secondly, this all felt way too real for her to be dreaming or hallucinating. She could feel physical sensation. She could smell things, like the scent of Steele’s cologne and the new car smell of the patrol car.

Sixteen months ago, she’d gotten in a car accident and had been rescued by Steele, who seemed to have superhuman strength. Then she’d seen him turn into a wolf. She’d seen that. She was sure of it now.

Now she was in a town that apparently was on no map anywhere, a town that never got visitors, and she’d seen two children turn into animals and then turn human again. She was sure of that too. There was only one logical explanation for all of this.

Suddenly, it all came back to her. She gasped and clutched at her seat.

“I remember,” she choked out, as they glided down a long driveway towards a gray clapboard house.

“What do you remember?” Steele demanded.

She turned to glare at him accusingly. “I remember everything.”





Chapter Seven




Steele felt cold fear wash through him, a sensation that he’d never felt before. If Roxanne remembered everything, she was in danger.

She was staring at him, wide eyed. “Did you bring me here to kill me?” she demanded.

“No! Of course not! Why would you think that?”

She walked towards the house, not looking at him. “Because you’re a werewolf, and you live in a town full of werewolves and werecats, and you are trying to keep it a secret.”

“I would die before I let you come to any harm,” he said fervently, and he meant it to the core of his soul.

“But I’m right, aren’t I? I remember everything now, including the fact that you brought in some man to erase my memory. It obviously didn’t work right. And I think it messed up my head somehow; it’s been causing weird bouts of amnesia and hallucinations.”

She was standing on his front porch. He opened the door; they didn’t bother with locks in Timber Valley.

She followed him in to the living room and they sat on his brown leather couch. Being so close to her but not being able to touch her made him ache with need. He wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her, to feel her softness against him and hear her moans of pleasure, but he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He had no right.

“What kind of hallucinations are you experiencing?” he asked her.

“I keep feeling like I was in some kind of…place.” Her expression turned anxious. She clenched her hands and shifted in her seat. “I can’t leave. I want to leave, but I can’t. There’s an older man, and he wants me to go find help. And…” she frowned, as if concentrating. “That’s it. I don’t know where he is, and I can’t picture the place that well. I don’t think it was even real.”

“After the police picked you up, you made it safely back to your home town. I know that much; I checked up on you,” Steele said. “When would you have been imprisoned?”

“I don’t know. I really think that part is a hallucination.”

“Is it possible that you’re remembering being in a hospital after your accident?”

“No, I don’t think so. I didn’t stay overnight in the hospital at all. I went there for tests, but that only took a few hours each.”

She looked up at him. “Let’s get back to the original issue here, Steele. You’re a werewolf.”

Steele took a deep breath. There was no point in lying; she’d seen too much.

“I’m a shifter,” he said. “Our survival depends on keeping our existence secret from humans. If we were discovered, humans would panic. We’d probably be forced onto reservations and subject to being tested like lab rats. Our kind would fight back, and as a result, a lot of humans would die too. It would be a worldwide disaster.”

She nodded. “I get that. I understand why you’d need to keep your existence hidden, but Steele, if you’d just told me that, I would have never said a word to anybody.” Her face fell, and she looked hurt. “You said that you loved me. If you’d asked me to come here with you…”

Anguish clenched at his heart. “I want that more than anything else in the world. I fell for you the minute I laid eyes on you, and I wasn’t lying about that. I haven’t been with another woman since I left you, not even on a coffee date.”

“So why…” her voice trailed off, and she looked woebegone.

“Our people have a Covenant. It’s the book of rules that we live by, and to violate those rules is punishable by death. One of the most important rules of all is that shifters never reveal their existence to humans. Another is that we never mate with humans.”

She glanced up at him, biting her lip, and said nothing.

“The feelings and desire of one shifter are not as important as the safety of our species. We can’t enforce the rules for one person and then not enforce it for everybody.”

“I see.” The hurt expression still pinched her face. It made him feel physically ill to know that he’d hurt her. “Who was that man who erased my memory?”

“He was what we call a shaman. Every pack has at least one. They’re men who are born with special abilities, and they can make humans forget. We believe it evolved as a defense mechanism that allowed our race to survive, like a chameleon’s ability to change color to blend into their environment.”

“What went wrong?” Roxanne asked. “Sometimes I can remember, sometimes I can’t, and I also seem to be remembering things that never happened. Is it possible that my head injury somehow interfered with what he did?”

“I aim to find out what went wrong,” Steele said. “Unfortunately, our shaman, Cody, is not in the country right now. He’s at an annual worldwide meeting of shamans, in Europe. He’s literally the best that I know of, in the entire country, and there’s no-one else that I know of that I’d trust to take a look at you. I’m going to call him and see how quickly he can get back here.”

She looked around the room, her expression bewildered. “Have you ever heard of something like this happening before?”

“No, I haven’t. Let’s go over what happened after you got back home.”

“Well, my friend Katherine dragged me to the doctor’s office because she was worried about the fact that I couldn’t remember the entire weekend. He seemed to think I was fine. I went back to work at the diner, I got a new car because my old one was trashed…” she frowned in concentration. “Then I started having these weird memory flashbacks, remembering being at that cabin with you. I also started having bouts of amnesia where I’d forget several days at a time. I’d suddenly be standing on a street corner and have no idea how I got there, or I’d be working at the diner and the next thing I knew I’d wake up in my bed and not remember how I got there.”