Page 54 of Primal Mirror

Jerking her attention away from the girders, she thought back to his question about her pregnancy. “It might’ve been high-risk when I wasn’t mentally competent,” she said, because to lie about this could endanger her child. “But while I’m now fully cognizant of my surroundings and my physical state, they continue to hover.”

She took a deep breath. “I do still suffer seizures, which is their explanation for the surveillance.” Skin cold, she didn’t look at him, not wanting to remember that morning at the cabin and the blank wall in her mind.

“But you don’t believe them.”

“No, because, most times, while they do a standard neural scan on me, they do multiple scans on my child. The tests they’ve run on her are extreme from a diagnostic angle—including full brain imaging.”

No matter how well Dr. Verhoeven treated her, he seemed to be following a plan her mother had set when it came to her baby. “The doctor in charge of me has also informed me of the full psychic sweep to be done on my baby after her birth.”

She pressed a hand flat against her lower back, arched it.

Remi’s shoulders stiffened as he went to raise his own hand.

She knew what he was about to do, craved to know what it would feel like. “Don’t.” Too many eyes. Too many watchers.

His fingers curled into a fist at his side. “What’s the purpose of a psychic sweep? Will it hurt the cub?”

“No, it’s more a fact-finding mission, same as the diagnostic imaging—but I’ve never heard it being used for babies. It’s most often done during Gradient level tests. Part of the system to determine power levels. Babies are too young, their brains too unformed. There is no reason to do this to an infant.”

Remi’s anger was in the slight growl of his voice as he stopped by a piece of machinery and put his hand on it, as if he was explaining an important factor. Up ahead, Charisma had stopped and was looking at them while Mliss spoke, but she was still too far to hear their conversation.

“There’s more,” Auden said past the rock in her gut. “I had a seizure twenty-four hours ago.” Fear closed its clammy hands around her throat and squeezed. “I haven’t had one since my return from the cabin.” And as with the others, she had no recall of the seizure itself. “I woke with a memory blank of eight full hours.”

Remi’s expression shifted, the corporate mask slipping to reveal the predator at his core. “You told me once you had a brain injury. Was that true?”

“Yes.” Panic beat at Auden for how much she was revealing, but she had no other choice if he was to have the knowledge to protect her child. “It was significant. I still have lesions on my brain as a result.”

“Could they be acting up?”

“It’s possible,” she admitted. “I have to rely on Dr. Verhoeven’s reports, and I don’t know if I can trust them.” Sensing Charisma’s gaze, she made a questioning face as she pointed to a machine. “But…and this could be paranoia caused by the same lesions, but I feel…wrong after a blackout. As if I’ve been doing things—or having things done to me—of which I’m unaware.”

She couldn’t stop her hand from curling into a tight fist. “I feel dirty and used, as if I have a film of stuff on me I can’t get off, no matter how hard I scrub.”

* * *

• • •

REMI’S blood boiled at the idea of such a violation. “Medical tests?”

“Possible.” She rubbed the crook of her arm. “I’m sure I was injected here once, but that was back when my mind was still fuzzy. This time around…I went to sleep as myself, and I woke up in front of my computer, and when I looked through the computer’s history, it had been wiped.”

Her lips tightened. “Even worse, I was given access to an organizer with my medical records on it. The information was dense and complex—I was going through it with painstaking focus, looking up medical terms line by line, and hadn’t gotten very far—but now that device is empty, too. Wiped using my own authorization codes.”

“Why would you wipe your own computer’s history, or erase your own medical files?”

“I don’t know.” Mingled rage and fear in those extraordinary eyes. “I don’t understand any of this—what I do know is that I need to get out of that house.”

Her cadence grew faster, more urgent. “It only ever happens at the house. I’ve never had an onset at the cabin, or when I was at a private medical facility at a different family home during the early stages of my pregnancy. But…” A hard swallow. “I do have brain damage. There is a minor chance that none of my information is reliable.”

Remi’s gut clenched, his mind flashing with images of another woman who’d lost piece after piece of herself as disease ate away at her. His mother’s slow decline had devastated Remi. And she’d never lost any of her sharpness, her mind acute till the end.

“You need to be in a controlled environment to test it,” he said through the heavy weight on his chest. “Somewhere safe, and away from your home.”

“It’s not my home,” was the pointed response. “It’s my mother’s house. There’s a difference.”

No home. No safe place to land.

Remi understood that in a way few changelings ever would. After his alpha kicked him out, he’d had not a chance in hell of stopping his mother from joining him in exile. She was the one who’d found them a new home in the pack associated with her own lost mama—but by then, Remi had been too wounded in the heart to trust any alpha.

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