Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

Chapter 5

Alec Graves
Clean and Tidy Chain Hotel
St. Louis, Missouri

The clock said it was eight a.m. when I woke up in what was obviously a modest hotel room, but there was no way to know for sure how many days I'd been out. I pulled my sheets back and gingerly probed the bandages that had been liberally applied to my side. They didn't hurt, which was a good sign, so I stripped back the corner of the biggest bandage back to verify that the flesh underneath had knit back together.

The wounds had scarred over already and were starting to trade in the pink of recent scars for the white of old scars. Given that Kaleb had wanted us down at the border less than twenty-four hours after we arrived in St. Louis, that was bad news. Normally I'd have said that it would take roughly twenty-four hours to swing that much healing, but that didn't match up with it being morning rather than evening.

The only answer was that I'd been more injured than I'd realized and I'd been down for at least thirty-six hours. I'd heard plenty of the older members of the pack quietly complaining that Kaleb's troop deployments never seemed to include any leeway for injured people, so I already knew that he'd be pissed that we'd missed our scheduled flight down to Arizona.

There wasn't much to do but go find someone and figure out just how much trouble we were in. I pulled some clothes on, grabbed my phone, and walked out into the hall. Our rapid healing was sure nice when it came to getting us back up and mobile after a fight, but it tended to leave muscles sore and subject to cramps, so I gingerly stretched my arms and torso as I walked.

The hotel was a single-story, sprawling structure that was kept clean enough that I was having a hard time picking up scent trails from any of the other shape shifters, so I walked to the front desk and tapped the girl manning it on the shoulder.

She turned around and I nearly gasped in surprise. I'd spent so many weeks and months wondering about the girl from my dreams and here she was. I was at such a loss for words that the silence stretched out into something uncomfortable.

"Can I help you?"

It was like I'd been punched in the gut. The voice wasn't right. It was silly, I couldn't remember my dream girl ever having spoken, but the voice I'd just heard didn't belong to the person I was looking for. That realization caused the rest of the illusion to unravel. This girl looked very much like my blonde, but there were differences. The eyes weren't quite the right shade of blue and her lips were slightly too full.

"Sorry, for a second I thought you were someone else."

The semi-annoyed, startled look was gone from her face. Her expression was much more inviting now.

"I'm pretty sure that we've never met—I think that I'd remember you."

I made it off of the estate so infrequently that it still took me by surprise when a female showed interest in me. Part of me wanted to respond in kind, to get to know her, to pursue the possibility of a relationship, but I refused to be so selfish.

It was impossible for my kind to have a normal, healthy relationship with a human. If I'd had any doubts of that watching my mother and Kaleb for so many years would have cured me of them. Actually, now that I thought about it, the odds were overwhelmingly on the side of the blonde from my dreams being a human as well.

The thought was depressing enough that I didn't manage to keep my feelings entirely off of my face.

"Are you okay? You suddenly look like someone drowned your puppy."

I mustered a smile that I knew from experience was believable for anyone that didn't know me well and shook my head wryly. "I'm sorry, seeing you made me take a stroll back down memory lane, which is always a dangerous thing to do when you've had as rough a week as I've had."