In My Blood

Warning

WARNING:

Hello my readers, and welcome to book two in the Cognition Chronicles! If you have not yet read the first book, it can easily be found by clicking on my profile. If you'd prefer not to...

LET'S GET CAUGHT UP

Last year, Will Byers was taken by the Demogorgon. Rachel, Jim Hopper's adopted daughter, was spending one of her normal mornings chatting with the other deputies and venturing through the woods for photography when she ran into a girl with a buzzed haircut. She gave the girl directions on a place to go as she couldn't help her at the time and continued on her way to school. Her friendship with Nancy Wheeler led to her helping the sophomore study for an upcoming test, but as she was leaving, Mike inquired her help to try and find Will that night. Rachel and Mike's friends didn't find Will, but they found someone else... Eleven.

As time progressed, Rachel became closer to the girl and invested in finding the young Byers boy. Steve Harrington, a classmate of hers she merely tolerated at first, started to try and befriend her but she pushed him away. In only a matter of days, their relationship as friends both grew and broke in ways no teenager would think possible. Rachel quickly became familiar with the scientists hunting Eleven down, even learning that they also were trying to track down her friend Anya Turner (who revealed that her time trying to track down her own parents ended up with her getting weaker powers of her own.) Spending all this time around Eleven and Anya triggered something inside the girl. First, her vision healed, then she was pushing bullies away with enhanced strength, but when Mike almost died, she learned something about herself.

She, like her friends, somehow had powers as well.

After saving the boy's life and almost losing her own as the scientists tried to kidnap them,  Rachel stayed behind with Nancy, Jonathan, and Anya to try and kill the Demogorgon for good. The inter-dimensional beast left a permanent mark: claw scratch wounds that ended up rendering the girl unconscious and almost killed. When she woke up in the hospital, she was told that the efforts to save Will and kill the monster had finally come good. The only problem was that both Anya and Eleven had disappeared immediately after.

Rachel, ordered to act as if the events never happened, filled her time by being around Nancy and Steve, but she wasn't ready for what would happen Christmas afternoon. Steve, a person she was just realizing she had feelings for, knocked on her door and admitted he felt the same way with a kiss. Wanting her friend's happiness more than her own, Rachel told him that the two of them would never work out.

Now, it's been almost a year, and Rachel Hopper has changed. Theater classes have been replaced with cheer practices, and friends have been swapped for parties and dangerous new boys in town. New problems are about to arise, and she is finally going to learn that while family doesn't have to be biological, it's time to return to her roots. To find out why she developed powers like Eleven after years of nothing. To find out how to save the people she grows to love... because for some reason, it's in her blood.