Free My Delicate Destruction: Book One of the Wolfegang Series by Jillian Ashe Page A

pretend that they weren’t there.
    I closed the door to my emotions, and let action, logic, rationality, and strategies fill my mind instead. The logic that replaced the sea of grief was almost a relief, but I could feel it in the back of my mind, waiting.
    I didn’t have time for grief, not when I could be in danger. Maybe I could wallow in that pain later, but right now, I needed to move. I was starting to bring attention to myself, and I didn’t care to explain the blood on my hands or face. I would have to find out what happened to Kris later.
    I printed out the articles about my friends and one-time love, my heart breaking further as I saw my entire life rendered to a few pages. I quickly shoved those pieces behind that closed door in my mind.
    I needed to find the only living family member I had now. I got up slowly and walked silently at a normal pace to the exit. I slipped out the front doors and then quickly turned the corner so I was out of sight.
    I needed a car and a way to find Kris. I would go to a different library. I slipped into the garage of the first house I found and saw they had two of the uniform Lexus cars. There were no keyholes on the doors, so I tried the handle. The first car was unlocked, but I didn’t have the ignition key, and there was no panel to pull off to hotwire the car.
    I looked around the garage and found a small knife. If these cars were like the old ones, I could slam the knife into the ignition, and the metal would work as a conduit and turn it on. The only problem was I had to leave the knife in to turn the car on ever again. You couldn’t sell cars like that without having to replace the whole steering console.
    I took the knife and rammed it as hard as I could into the ignition. The lights on the interior of the car turned on. I was incredibly lucky. I turned the knife, and the car started. I pressed the garage opener and backed out, peeling out of the driveway as fast as I could before the owner became aware of the theft. There had to be something to tell them, to track me. I needed to move quickly.
    I didn’t have the tools or the time to find the tracker and remove it. I would just have to make it quick.
    I had the car search for a library. There were three other hits aside from the one I had already gone to. I drove there as fast as I could without being noticed.
    I parked and went in, looking around to make sure no one was watching me suspiciously, and then sat at one of the computers.
    I needed to find something, anything really, on my brother. Then, I needed a way to find him and figure out how to access some money.
    It was weird to me how so many things were the same, yet at the same time, so drastically different. There was still Google, but everything was in Japanese. While everyone still spoke English, I heard some people speaking Japanese earlier. Maybe they spoke both equally well. I was sure there was something else out there, waiting to knock me on my ass with shock. Like aliens. Was there an alien encounter? How about discoveries in space? Or maybe there was a huge war going on that I didn’t know about.
    I guess I had to study up on five hundred years of their history and my future. I snapped out of it and typed in methods of travel and destinations.
    There were a lot more places than I remembered. I took a closer look and saw names I didn’t recognize. I typed one into the search engine and clicked on the first listing. The article went into an in-depth explanation on the location of the planet and the native inhabitant species. I took a deep breath once I realized I wasn’t breathing. Well… I guess there was life on other planets. I stashed that one away to freak out about later.
    I sat there in the chair, spinning around and thinking, letting my eyes lose focus. I had no idea where to start. I felt so lost, so completely alone in that moment. My brother was out there somewhere, I had no idea where, and now I had a lot more ground to cover than I ever