Never Wake Read Online Free

for it. She pushed through the front door, imagining the look of I-told-you-so on her mother’s face as Emma explained why she would be needing a small loan—one she could never pay back—to keep the clinic open another year.
    Emma let out a frustrated breath. Worrying about the impending conversation was making her head hurt more. This has got to be the suckiest day in recorded history . She stopped in front of her 1982 Mercedes Benz and hunted around in her backpack for her keys.
    The car was a gas guzzler. All conversations with her mother began and ended with, “Why don’t you trade that tank in for something with better gas mileage, maybe a hybrid or something? You look like a child in it, anyway.” She had to agree with her mother there. The car didn’t fit her, but it was yet another part of her grandmother that she couldn’t bear to part with.
    By the time she found her keys, her shivering and the throbbing in her head made it difficult to fit the key in the door lock. She turned it, first one way and then the other. “Damn it, not again,” she said under her breath. She tried it two more times but the lock didn’t budge. This was the second time since she’d inherited the car that she’d had frozen door locks. She would have to slide through the passenger side. She turned to do just that when a blinding pain shot from the back of her head to the front.
    She stumbled, dropped her bag, and backed up until the handle of the Mercedes pressed into her back. Her hand went to the warm area at the back of her head. Even before she brought her hand around to see it, she smelled the blood. Working in the clinic for so many years had given her a cast-iron stomach, but her stomach lurched now as she stared at her blood-covered hand.
    A man—a shaky, shadow of a figure—stood in front of her wearing what looked like a large rain poncho. He was holding something in his hand. A bottle? A brick? What was it? She squinted into the darkness trying to make it out. For reasons she didn’t comprehend, it seemed important that she know what he’d hit her with.
    The back of her neck tingled and her legs felt numb. How many times had she been hit? She should have known. She should have sensed…
    Her eyes were still glued to the object in the dark figure’s hand and, almost as if a microphone were zeroed in on it, she heard her own blood as it dripped from the brick onto the ground.
    “No,” she said with her hand out in front of her. This can’t be happening. It’s a nightmare, Emma—just a nightmare .
    “All you had to do was give me a little something,” he said.
    “Give you…” Her words were slurred, but in the instant before Joe Harmon hit her again, it unfolded behind her closed eyelids like a movie projected on a white screen. She saw Sharon tossing her lab coat into the trash as she walked out the door and she saw herself as she walked into the parking lot wearing her own white lab coat. In the dim light, she and Sharon would be hard to tell apart. But why hadn’t she sensed danger before she walked into the darkened parking lot?
    She was hit twice more before she lost count and had to block out the sound.
    “Wake up, Emma…” The voice was too calm. Was it her grandmother’s? No, it can’t be. She’s dead .
    “Just wake up now. Open your eyes.”
    “Emma? Wake up!”

Chapter Two

    Nickel-colored light spilled through the blinds and onto the floor. By the time Troy admitted to herself that no one would be coming to check on her, it had pooled like mercury in the center of the room. She thought she might have slept after trying to sit up earlier, but it was possible that she had fainted from the pain.
    When she’d moved out of her foster home on her eighteenth birthday, she had spent half of the five-hundred-dollar check from the state of Oregon on a deposit for her two-room cottage and a can of “oops paint” from The Home Improvement Co-op. The label on the top of the can had said sunflower