Chronic Fear Read Online Free

sure the molecular compounds had beneficial uses. The chemicals themselves had done nothing wrong, because compounds didn’t possess morality. It was Briggs’s twisted use of them that was evil.
    Mark had forced her to flush the pills down the toilet after he’d discovered them hidden in her jewelry box, but he didn’t know about the single pill she’d given to Silver for analysis.
    “The doses you found were the last ones,” she said. “I promise.”
    The lie had mutated for so long that it now felt like the truth, and she wondered if a similar evolution had justified Sebastian Briggs in his sick research. But Mark wouldn’t understand her work, and he would never accept her help voluntarily. Especially if that help came in the form of Halcyon.
    But he also wouldn’t accept that he’d changed since the Monkey House. The Mark that had gone in had not come out.
    And his only hope— their only hope—rested in Alexis’s race to synthesize a better form of Halcyon, one that wouldn’t wipe his mind of all he’d been.
    But the race had been interrupted.
    Somebody knew.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
    Roland opened his eyes and, for the hundredth time since his last drink three years ago, wondered why God didn’t grant exemptions for control freaks, the cowardly, and the foolish. At times he’d been all three, and he still wasn’t sure he understood the Serenity Prayer and which things he could actually change without fucking them up. All he knew was that he was grateful to be here and to be sober enough to struggle with it.
    He was sitting in his rocker, laboring over a laptop, but the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountain evening stole his concentration. And his gaze kept roaming over to the painting Wendy was working on.
    Well, it roamed over Wendy a lot, too.
    She was wearing a thin cotton blouse, off-white and splotched with multi-colored stains, and Capri pants that accented her petite Asian shape. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she looked more like a teenager than a woman soon to enter middle age.
    “That’s pretty cool, sweetie,” Roland Doyle said.
    Wendy frowned and stepped back from the canvas, brush in hand. “Anything looks good in this light.”
    Which was true. It was the kind of sunset that cast the world in perfect pink, the ultimate rose-colored glasses. Flaming clouds billowed over the forest in the west while the coming bruise of night claimed its turf to the east. The wet, loamy aroma of the forest added to the magical dusk, and a more fanciful person might have imagined faeries and sprites would come spilling out at any moment.
    But Roland didn’t care for games of the mind. He’d played enough of them.
    “Personally, I’d go in for some cadmium yellow,” Roland said. “It’s getting a little bleak.”
    What he really meant was maybe she should try some new subject matter. For the past year, she’d been indulging in surreal and claustrophobic imagery, jagged and dark shapes full of menace. It was how she chose to deal with the Monkey House experience, but he hoped she would shut that door for good and paint over it with the thickest layer of black.
    He had, as best he could.
    But then he was the only one who seemed to remember much about it. For Wendy, it was bottled up and stored in a sick wine cellar of the soul, its fermented pulp turning to slow poison.
    “I’ve never had much use for critics,” Wendy said, a slight resentment riding under the humor. “I’ve got something to say. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
    Artists. God help ’em, because nobody else can .
    When you loved somebody, you had to put up with a few idiosyncrasies. And Wendy certainly had to endure her share. After all, she was married to a murderer.
    “You’d better clean up,” Roland said. “It’s getting dark. Sleep on it and I’ll bet you feel