Page 10 of Hounded

Whitney nodded, and his blond hair swished against his cheeks. I should have done the same but couldn’t bring myself to offer assurance before Moira retreated into thedressing room. The door latched, the lock clicked, and I spun away. I made it exactly two steps before Whitney’s voice halted me.

“Where are you going?”

Home, my hound thought.

Indy was waiting.

Whitney’s green eyes narrowed while he waited for my answer.

There was nothing I could say to explain my departure. Moira told us to wait, and that should have been the end of it. For him, it was. But I had stronger pulls on my heart than my mistress’s commands or anything Hell had to offer.

With my hands poised to open a portal on the wall between the gilded sconces, I glanced back at Whitney and told him the truth.

“I’m going home.”

4

Indy

“Good luck,” Blake toldme, but I knew he didn’t mean it.

After spending the first five weeks of my rehab stint alone, I was thrilled to have someone occupying the second bed in my drab, beige room. I’d talked to myself enough that I was afraid the staff would decide to commit me to a mental institution. So, the idea of company was a relief… until I got to know him.

Blake had been to Hopeful Horizons twice before. He said he’d be here again. In and out like a revolving door because rehab was treatment, not a cure.

At least he was decent at making conversation. As someone with no memories, I was, objectively, boring, but Blake came up with all kinds of things to talk about.

“Where are you from?”

“What’s your drug of choice?”

“Are your eyes naturally that color?”

While I packed my bag the morning I was being discharged, Blake sprawled on my bed, smacking loudly on a piece of gum.

“Maybe you figured it out,” he said with a snort. “Maybe I oughta fry my brain, too. Then I won’t remember how fucking good it feels to get high.”

His cackling laugh was a sound I would not miss.

Two months of therapy had been largely unproductive. At first, the counselors didn’t believe me when I said I’d forgotten everything. They asked my name, my age, and how I got here, but I had no answers.

In group sessions, the other patients talked and cried. I cried, too, in my room at night, overwhelmed by feelings with no thoughts behind them.

I knew that I was lonely. My bed was cold, and my bare room was dark. Some nights I woke up grasping, reaching for something that didn’t have a name. Someone? But my hope of finding out who dwindled as weeks went by with no calls, no letters, and no visitors.

I had no one, which made release day far less celebratory than my therapist tried to convince me it would be. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was in or out of this place, and I wondered what I would find when I returned to whatever home I’d left behind.

My downer of a morning took a slight turn for the better when I shuffled out into the waiting area, and the receptionist, Gina, waved.

We’d talked a few times in the cafeteria while she ate brown bag lunches she brought from home. She told me about her dog, a flat-faced pug named Chips. She had an album of snapshots on her phone dedicated to him. I listened. I should have been great at listening because I didn’t have much to say, but words tumbled out anyway. Sometimes, they ran away with me and, when I caught upto them, my head was too muddled to make sense of any of it.

Wandering over to the reception window, I peered through it at Gina’s desk. A magazine flopped open atop her keyboard with a crossword puzzle in progress. She worked those on her lunch breaks, too. The questions tended to be about pop culture or modern history, so I was never much help.

Gina tucked her pen behind her ear, then smiled at me. “Have you talked to your friend yet today?”

“What friend?” I asked.

Rolling her chair backward, Gina reached into a low filing cabinet and dug out a large Ziploc bag. She raised it to show my name written on it in marker. Gina scooted forward and stuffed the bag through the gap at the bottom of the window.

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