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  Xany ignored my body language. “Have you seen those men down at the Double D Pub? All paws, I tell ya!” She giggled.

  “You work at that place?”

  “Mhmm, all the old coots hang out there, and I’ll be damned if they still don’t paw at you every chance they get.” She grinned. “So you see? I do know a thing or two about wolves.” She nodded in a matter-of-fact kind of way.

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Trust me, the coots at the bar are much safer than the wolves out in the woods.” Xany made her way over to sit on the windowsill, gazing outside.

  “You…you’ve seen wolves out there?” I tried to hide the quiver in my voice.

  “I’ve seen wolves, nothing out there though. I hear them howling at night, sometimes. Average folk can’t usually tell the difference between a howling wolf and a howling coyote.” She blew hot breath on the cold window to draw hearts in the fog.

  “And I take it you’re not average folk, if you can tell the difference.” I didn’t like Xany. Her ego was larger than her breasts and usually that’s a bad sign.

  “I’m as average as you are. You don’t get out much do you?” Her eyes wandered down my body, then back up to meet my gaze.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let your hair down.” She hopped off the windowsill to walk over to me and yank out my ponytail. “Maybe a little makeup, not that you need it, just to bring out your eyes. It’s not every day you see amber eyes on a Cherokee girl, but maybe that’s just ‘cause you’re a little scared.” She ended with a giggle.

  My jaw hung open at the violation of my personal space. Without thinking, I shoved her. “Get away from me! What do you think you’re doing? My hair is fine,” I huffed. “You’ve got to be the strangest person I’ve ever met. And besides, I’m only part Cherokee so you don’t know as much as you think you do.”

  “You’re right, but all I had to do was guess and you filled in the answers for me.” She quirked a brow.

  “Please leave.” I sighed, weary of the conversation and exhausted from my ordeal in the woods.

  Xany smiled victoriously; I got the sense that she liked winning. “Okay, okay. Just don’t go crying wolf so loudly or else someone might think you’ve got a one way ticket to the loony bin.” She skipped jovially toward the door.

  “It’s a psychiatric hospital, not a loony bin,” I shot back, narrowing my eyes at her.

  “G’night, Shawnee. Sweet dreams.” She grinned in a way that didn’t sit right with me. I followed behind her and secured all three chains.

  I put my hair back in a ponytail and stomped over to the window. Xany was annoying, and she invaded my privacy. I grabbed a dirty shirt off the floor and irritably wiped her drawings off the window before opening it to let in some air. I looked up at the moon with a sigh.

  In the distance, I thought I could hear the faint yipping howl of a coyote. I nodded to myself. My gaze dropped down to scan the woods, and I thought I saw Xany’s pink shorts disappearing into the shadow of the trees.

  “That’s enough hallucinations for one night,” I grumbled.

  I locked the window and went to bed. If I was lucky, I would forget about tonight just as I had forgotten about so many others.

  Chapter Three

  The following morning I was back at work, trying to keep myself busy so that I didn’t think about the events of the night prior. I was signing off on a few charts that had piled up on my desk when I was interrupted.

  “Doctor T?”

  “Hmm?” I continued looking over a chart as I waited for him to continue.

  “Reynolds wants you in the lab.”

  I glanced up at the twenty-something-year-old resident and nodded. His eyes lingered a millisecond too long. He looked at me as if trying to read my expression. I stood up, dropping the chart that I had been reading on the desk carelessly.

  “Had to send a messenger of course.” I smirked at him.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger.” He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

  “Noted. Thanks, Kurt.”

  “No problem.” He continued to stare at me.

  I ditched my stethoscope on the way to the door, stopping beside him. “What is it?”

  “You’re smart,” he stated.

  “So are you. Is that abnormal?” I furrowed a brow and crossed my arms over my chest.

  Don’t get too close.

  “Thanks. It’s not abnormal.” He held open the door for me.

  “Then what’s with the weirdness?” I met his gaze for a moment. He seemed shaken; his eyes zipped back and forth over my face as if he were searching for some response on my part.

  “No reason I guess.” He averted his eyes, which made me even more suspicious.

  I stalked past him and decided to drop it. Thankfully, he didn’t follow me. I took the long way around the second floor of the hospital. I’d been working here for nearly four years, since my second residency. When I first met the hospital administrators, they said that I was the “youngest resident in nearly thirty years.” I was barely twenty-one when I graduated medical school. The hospital was happy to take me on and keep me.

  I used the private elevator to get to the lab. Kurt was one of only two residents who were allowed to work in this particular part of the hospital. It was not your ordinary lab. Or hospital. It required special security authorizations. I guess working with genetics, DNA, and microbiology is a Homeland Security issue. Everything is these days. There was no such thing as access cards for this part of the hospital. Retinal scans for the win. I placed my chin on the display so the little blue lasers could scan my eyes. It beeped after a few seconds, and the electronic doors swung open. With doors like these, you had to move fast or risk your ass being pinched off. The timer was set like that so no one else could jump in on your retinal ticket.

  The halls were long and dark. The overhead lights were always off unless movement was detected in the hallway, which not only alerted people at the other end of the hall that you were coming, it also prevented you from stumbling upon anything that was privy. Even if you happened to overhear a conversation from somewhere in the abyss, there was no face to put with the voice. It was creepy, but I was used to blocking things out. After a second retinal scan, I entered the lab to see a middle-aged, balding man standing over one of the incubators with his hands on his hips.

  “I’ve got an assignment for you.” Doctor Reynolds spoke without looking at me.

  I remained silent as I went over to stand beside him. Dr. Reynolds moved from the incubator toward the glaring lights of the analysis area where he had several rows of Petri dishes set about, as well as a color-coded set of viewing slides. With a grunt, he sat on a stool, a huge microscope in front of him.

  “Up for a challenge?” He lifted his gaze to meet mine, accompanied by a wry smile that made me uneasy.

  “Always. What have you got?” I asked casually as I slipped my hands into the pockets of my lab coat. I didn’t want him to catch on to the fact that I was interested in his alleged challenge. Dr. Reynolds took in a slow breath.

  “Doctor Twofeathers, what you’re about to witness is classified information. My sharing this information with you can alter your position here at the hospital and in the future.”

  “Your point?” My hand slid to my hip with a bit of attitude that came out when I was acting opposite to how I felt. Doctor Reynolds was the kind of person who made a big deal out of the littlest things. Good thing I could pretend to be a patient person.

  “Shawnee, do you understand what I’m saying to you?” he asked in a serious tone that I had heard nearly every time he lectured me about some bullshit experiment that he was failing at completing.

  “Yes. I understand. What’s the assignment?” I sighed impatiently.

  He shot a look riddled with doubt. Dr. Reynolds thought everything was a serious matter. It probably would be a lot more serious if his experiments held up through replication. His “breakthrough” scie
nces were funded by a grant through some donors to Mercy General. He was expected to produce results or risk losing his grant. I was not sure how he still had it to begin with.

  “Right. Well…it appears I’ve stumbled upon something. Something irregular to say the least.” He seemed frustrated. “Come, come. Look into the scope.”

  I glanced at him suspiciously before doing so.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “Grapefruit. What do you think I see?” I leaned back from the scope to scowl at him.

  “Live normal human cells.” He sighed as if he was losing his patience with me already.

  “Yes…”

  “Adolescent cells.” He was drawing this out painfully.

  “And?”

  “Observe.” He sounded so bizarre when he talked like this. I was not a five year old, seriously. I lifted my gaze momentarily to see that he was using a fine eyedropper to suction out a bit of fluid from a beaker. I looked back through the scope. He added a bit of whatever it was to the Petri dish, and I watched. Nothing happened.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Those cells are temperature controlled by the substance in the dish to mimic the average core temperature of the human body, ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, thirty-seven degrees Celsius. I will add heat to the sample.” He spoke through clenched teeth.

  And so he did. Dr. Reynolds placed a heating coil beneath the sample under the microscope. I watched carefully. At first nothing happened. I was growing more impatient by the minute.

  “I’m elevating the temperature to exactly one-hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit, forty degrees Celsius.” He seemed to sense my impatience. “You will know when I have reached optimal temperature.”

  I had to admire him for the details at least. Doctor Reynolds didn’t have the best track record when it came to recreating matters of the irregular. But this time, something did happen.

  As the temperature neared 104 degrees, the cell structure began to change. It was a rapid succession of multiplication, growth, expansion—you name it. The entire sample in the dish changed, and my jaw dropped. The cells became unrecognizable as human cells, and I looked from the microscope to Dr. Reynolds, my mouth still hanging open. When he spoke again, his voice was monotone, like he was trying to hide his excitement.

  “Your assignment is to prevent this reaction from occurring. You are to create a substance to stop the mutation of these cells when the chemical reaction occurs.”

  I looked back into the microscope for a moment. “What was the reactant?” My poker face was long forgotten as I allowed my shock to seep through.

  “The cells went through puberty. I added the proper combination of growth hormone, calcitonin, et cetera, to age the cells. And I induced a high fever.” Sometimes he sounded so arrogant. Which, quite frankly, he had nothing to be arrogant about. With all the failed experiments, wasted money, and lack of anything better to do with his time, Reynolds was not the vindicated scientist everyone thought him to be. I wondered how much people actually knew about his lack of success or if Kurt and I were the only two to bear the burden of this knowledge.

  “You’re telling me that you’ve been able to create a non-spontaneous chemical reaction using a normal human developmental process with the addition of heat to make the entire cell structure change and mutate into something else?” I asked.

  Don’t ask questions.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Clearly this doesn’t happen in all human beings.” A niggling sensation inside me insisted that this should sound familiar, like I was missing something so obvious but I couldn’t seem to place it.

  “You’re right. However, that’s not your problem. Your assignment is to use the samples I have provided with the formula to induce this reaction and then create a serum to stop it.” He tossed his latex gloves in the biohazard bin and put his stethoscope back around his neck.

  “You weren’t able to create this serum yourself, I take it.” His lack of information pissed me off, but I was determined.

  “No. But I believe you can. What do you think?” he cleared his throat.

  “Of course I can.”

  “Shawnee…if you’re able to develop the serum, your life will be changed forever. You’ll be rolling in riches one can only dream of.” He had a maniacal look on his face.

  “I’m not interested in riches. Leave me to it then. This is going to take a while.” I turned back to the microscope, watching the reaction continue as the heat remained under the sample. Dr. Reynolds spun around without another word and exited the lab. There was something eerie about his reaction, but I didn’t care. Crazy old man. I could do this; it was a piece of cake.

  Chapter Four

  “Shawnee! What are you doing home so early?” Xany exclaimed from the door of her apartment. Had she been waiting for me? I tried to hide my exasperation, glancing over my shoulder as I opened my door.

  “It’s 1:30 a.m. That’s hardly early.” I stepped inside and dropped my bag on the floor. Xany skipped in behind me. So intrusive.

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m awake.” She giggled. “C’mon. There’s someone I want you to meet!”

  Before I could protest, she grabbed my arm and tugged me out of my apartment and into hers. I stumbled along with her, jerking my arm away just as we entered her living room.

  “Obnoxious, seriously.”

  Xany offered me a sweet smile and rocked on her heels, attempting to put on her best innocent act. I glared at her, then suddenly realized we weren’t alone in the room. There were two hulky Indian men standing by the sofa. My heart sank. I was clearly outnumbered by these strangers. I suddenly didn’t trust Xany. What was she dragging me into? She noticed my discomfort for once and slipped her hand into mine, squeezing. I was too overwhelmed to fight her touch.

  “Shawnee, this is my brother Michael, but we call him Mal, and his friend Caden.” Xany led me closer to the men.

  Mal was a good six-two, lean, and well muscled. He wore his long, black hair in twin braids with a beaded leather headband, worn jeans, hiking boots, and a red flannel shirt. He spoke to me first, extending his hand in greeting.

  “O’siyo, Ms. Twofeathers.”

  I shook his hand, my own grip loose and weak like a floppy old fish. Hearing someone speak in my native tongue scared the crap out of me. His eyes, hazel and earthen, seemed born out of the wilderness. I couldn’t understand why I would even allow myself to look into them. I flinched when I heard the sudden screech of an eagle echo in my head. I dropped his hand, rubbing my clammy palm against my jeans as I tried to work out the tingling reminder he left on my skin.

  Our gaze was broken when Caden stepped toward us. I took a step back, my stomach knotting up. Caden was huge. He stood at least two inches taller than Mal, with a thick, muscular build, soft, chocolate eyes, and skin to match. His hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. He wore a casual T-shirt, cargo pants, and work boots. Somehow he sensed my fear and loosened his posture to extend his hand.

  “Hello, Shawnee,” he said, accompanied by a warm smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I hesitated before shaking his hand quickly, not daring to meet his gaze.

  I glanced at Xany, who whispered in my ear, “Caden is so sexy.”

  I squeezed her hand nervously before letting go and wrapping my arms around myself. When I looked back at the men, Caden pulled his gaze away from Mal and caught Xany’s eye giving her a faint nod to which her reaction was immediate. She squealed in delight and hugged me. I pushed away from her with a frown, confusion and fear warring with me. They were acting suspicious, and it made me want to hide.

  “I’m leaving.” I stepped away from the group. I was not about to let these people interfere with what I have built for myself.

  Weak little walls. Watch them crumble…crumble.

  “No! You can’t. Not yet! There’s so much to talk about.” Xany bounced up and down with excitement; her breasts followed her body oppositely.


  “No, there isn’t. Whatever sick games you three are playing, I’m not into it.” I turned to leave, terror fueling my movement.

  “Shawn—” Xany’s voice stopped abruptly, and I glanced back to see that Mal had his arm around her waist.

  In a quiet voice he said, “You’re scaring her.”

  Caden stood watching the brother and sister with a stoic expression before speaking. “Dude, so are you. Everyone relax.”

  I sighed, feeling defeated when I relaxed at Caden’s command. Mal let go of the wiggling Xany when I was standing half in and half out of the threshold of the door.

  “Shawnee, why don’t you have a seat and join us for a while.” Caden made a gesture toward the sofa just as he sat down on one of Xany’s oversized armchairs. I was careful not to meet his gaze. Mal sat on the sofa while Xany plopped down on the carpet, squirming around like a kid waiting to open Christmas presents. She was watching me with wild, excited eyes. Mal was calm. Even though Caden seemed to look the most relaxed, he scared me the worst.

  “C’mon, Shawnee! They won’t bite. Well, not unless you want them to.” Xany giggled.

  I glared at her and stepped back into the apartment. I didn’t know what they wanted or why Xany thought it was a good idea for me to “sit and talk” with two Indian men, but I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. Our bloodlines had gotten so mixed in this day and age it was uncommon to see two men who were clearly identifiable as Native American in the same room in the middle of the city. We usually blended in with people of other cultures. I didn’t blend in, however, nor did Caden or Mal. Xany did though. I was sure most people mistook her for South American or Hawaiian. I cautiously made my way into the living room. Mal gave Xany a chastising glare at which she turned up her nose. I sat on the arm of the sofa farthest away from all of them.

  “Just get to the point. What’s the purpose of this not-so-random powwow?” I crossed my arms over my stomach. I didn’t want them anywhere near me. My arms were the only means by which I was holding myself together.