Free Hyde, an Urban Fantasy by Lauren Stewart

he wondered if she was counting.
     
    Shit, he was doing this wrong. “Has it happened a lot?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
     “Aside from being in a different location, how do you know?”
     
    “I see flashes of doing things, like memories that never were.”
     
    He took a deep breath. Now comes the hard stuff. “Picture what the woman you saw looked like. Where she was. Where you were. Can you see it?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Good. Tell me what you see.”
     
    “She is in a doorway, leaning against the side, sleeping.”
     
    Sleeping? He wiped his forehead. “What does she look like?”
     
    “Long hair. Black or close to it. Pale skin. Red shirt.”
     
    Mitch didn’t know if Shelly had been wearing red that day. Everything in the memory seared into his brain was red. Blood-red. But he didn’t know how much of that was real.
     
    “Is there anyone else there?”
     
    “Yes. Another woman. Pretty. Wearing a green shirt and tan pants. High heels.” That could have been Jolie.
     
    “Anyone else?”
     
    “A man. But she can’t see his face.”
     
    She?
     
    Before he could ask which ‘she’ Eden was speaking of, she spoke again. “His face is hidden by the bushes in front of her. His body is tucked in towards the sleeping woman.”
     
    Me, that was me. Or him, maybe. No, he needed her to go back further. “Go back a bit. To before the woman was . . . sleeping. What do you—does she —see?”
     
    “The pictures are all jumbled. I don’t know which comes first. She saw the sidewalk, stores, the house, the lawn. I think she went around the side, but I don’t know why.”
     
    She twitched. Then a full-body jerk.
     
    He leaned forward and held her hand, ignoring the current he felt as their skin touched. “Eden, you’re okay. You’re safe. Nothing bad is going to happen.” He squeezed her hand, stroking the back of it. His stomach dipped as he thought, Please, don’t let anything bad happen to her. He dropped her hand and sprung back from her, his heart beating a rhythm foreign to him. Focus.
     
    “Tell me what you’re seeing,” he said, adjusting himself further back in the chair.
     
    “Nothing. All she sees is the woman sleeping. They can’t wake her up,” she said, shaking her head.
     
    He was nauseous. “Did you touch the woman? To make her go to sleep?”
     
    “I can’t see it, don’t know if she moved. It’s just flashes. But, I don’t think so.”
     
    No matter what questions he asked, what way he phrased them, she didn’t—or couldn’t—answer differently.
     
    He lifted his hands off the arms of the chair. They were sweaty and stiff from gripping so tightly. She’d picked the wrong person to come to for help. The one person who would’ve given anything for a ‘yes’ answer. So he’d be able to pass his guilt off onto someone else.
     
    After a few more questions that got him nowhere, he said, “Tell me about the other flashbacks. How they appear and what you see.”
     
    For ten more minutes, she spoke of broken images, random people, various places, but nothing tangible or even truly understandable.
     
    As far as he could tell, and Eden seemed to know, she wasn’t a murderer. If she knew more than she was saying, he didn’t know how to get it out of her. She’d seen something—Jolie, Shelly. Maybe Hyde, maybe him. But did that mean she’d done anything?
     
    He needed to think. To know. One way or the other. His hope that she’d been involved wasn’t enough. There was definitely some freaked-out shit going on here—her use of pronouns was too messed up to be normal.
     
    Multiple personalities. That had to be it. Could another personality be responsible for Shelly’s death? Could he keep Eden close enough to figure it out? He needed to keep his mouth shut until he could figure it out, keep her guessing. But that would also mean she’d be close enough to cause more problems with Hyde. Fuck .
     
    Ready to bring her back into consciousness, he stopped