Page 1 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

Indy

They should have been morecareful about who they let in here. A room full of fragile, recovering addicts should not have been open to a backsliding junkie with a fun tablet dissolving in his mouth. My mouth. I sat in the back row of the community center room in a cold metal folding chair, working my tongue around the pill that grew more chalky and bitter by the second.

I wanted to hate it. Really, I did. And the flavor was definitely not growing on me, but I was willing to endure it, treating the damned thing like a breath mint and somehowsavoringit. It was worth the taste that made me want to gag. Worth lying to Sully about being clean. Worth staring dead in the eyes of everyone in this meeting and nodding while they talked about their journey to sobriety.

Because drugs helped me remember my life before the overdose.

Drugs helped me fill the blanks in my crossword puzzle of a memory.

Drugs would help me find Loren.

I hadn’t been sober since he left.

By the time I got back to New York, I was well on my way to undoing what I’d accomplished in eight weeks of rehab. I’d also overcome the fear of accidentally killing myself again. Dying was apparently the thing I did best.

I wasn’t sober, but I came to the meetings because Sully insisted on it. It was a condition of staying in her apartment because I didn’t want to be in the trailer alone. And it was good for me. Even if it didn’t do any good.

Venturing away from Sully’s place two nights a week gave me an excuse to meet up with Chaz. Thankfully, he’d taken to rendezvousing in the alley next to the club so I didn’t have to pay the cover charge every time I needed a fix. After three weeks of routine use and steadily upping my dose, those urges came more frequently than ever.

Expensive ass habit. I needed to sell more art to afford it, which meant I needed to paint because I wasn’t about to break into that vault of a storage unit Loren took me to. I didn’t want to see paintings of him when the real him was glaringly, painfully absent. I needed new work, but it seemed my muse had gone along with everything else. Another piece missing from my life.

At the front of the bland white room, the moderator was talking about next steps. Everything was a step. Forward, backward, fucking lateral… Because even staying in place was better than falling behind, and didn’t I know it?

But he didn’t understand. I was different. I was a fucking magical phoenix with literal fire power and cleansing tears and a reset button that put me back to zero every ten years. I died, I lived, and I forgot, but drugs helped me remember.

I rolled my tongue over the shrinking pill that would take me to a place higher than this one. It would let me dream of people and places I knew in lives before this one. Sully told me I’d had several. Incarnations, she called them. When I was high, I could revisit them and, briefly, relive them. But I couldn’t controlthem. It wasn’t something I could channel, so my mind tended to wander to warm, cozy moments, recalling nights spent tangled up in bed, dragging my fingers through Loren’s long hair while his tanned skin skimmed over mine. I felt him so near it was like he’d never left, like he was still holding my hand and cradling me close.

Mate.

The voice in my head sounded weak and withering. It had faded along with my hopes of seeing Loren again in this lifetime or the next.

On our way out of Pennsylvania, Sully and I found his truck, or what remained of it after a multi-car pileup on the interstate reduced it to scrap metal. Black blood had splattered the bench seat and driver’s side window, but there was no body. The cleanup crew trying to clear the mess said there never had been. Like the driver had vanished. Or been dragged to Hell.

The last time Loren left, he came back in tatters. Scarred and scared after being caged for days by a cruel owner I knew little about. Sully was a bit more informed and had shared details that made what Loren had already told me a thousand times worse.

What I felt most keenly, though, and remembered most poignantly, was seeing the hellhounds piled on top of him at the automotive store in Ohio, tearing him open and making him bleed. Because of me. He was protecting me, crossing the country for me, and he got caught instead.

The moderator finished his speech and beckoned us to our feet for dismissal. I stayed seated, watching the others file out. Mostly familiar faces. There was a gaunt woman who’d lost most of her teeth to the battle with meth and a girl who quit crack for her daughter. Cute kid. I’d seen pictures. One of the last to leave was a soft, pillowy-looking dude a few years older than me. He had a full beard and a tuft of hair creeping out of the collar of his polo. Grizzly bear situation.

I didn’t know much about him. Drug of choice, reason for change, none of that. Padding down the narrow aisle between the chairs, he slowed as he drew close to me.

Dodging his gaze, I hooked my thumb under one of the suspenders running up my torso and gave it a snap. It stung the bare skin of my stomach, and I pulled harder the second time, stretching it inches away from my body then letting it fly.

“Hi.”

I peered up.

The bear stood before me with his hands in his pockets and his head hung low. He gave me a sheepish smile.

“You’re Indy, right?” he asked.

Besides a serious case of self-loathing, the other reason I’d taken to keeping my mouth busy during meetings was to stop the flow of word vomit that found its way out of me at every opportunity. Talking about my problems raised questions I couldn’t answer. But I’d rambled enough at some point that this fellow had clearly managed to learn my name.

Gulping down the speck of E that remained intact, I rose from my seat.

“Got it in one.” I flashed a grin. “Don’t think we’ve met, though.”

The other man’s face splotched with blush that spread all the way to his hairline. “I’m Travis,” he said shyly.

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