“If everyone gets here?” Riley had scratched the back of his head. “Seventeen.”

She’d sighed. “Then I’m going to need a lot more bedding.”

* * *

I didn’t remember much after that, just accepting an armful of clothes and sheets from the lanky woman and being directed upstairs to a small, cozy room with two twin beds. I’d paused long enough to strip out of the thin white hospital gown I’d still been wearing from the lab and pull on the oversize T-shirt before collapsing onto one of the mattresses. I’d been out almost before my head hit the pillow, but being unconscious hadn’t stopped the dreams. Dreams of Dante, and the Elder Wyrm, and Talon looming over us all, ready to strike. And myself, strapped to a table, waiting for the Elder Wyrm to move into my body.

Shivering now, I pulled the covers around myself and sat there for a moment, waiting for the fear to die down, for the faint, nagging sense of horror and despair to fade away. I was the Elder Wyrm’s vessel. A thing, created in a lab, just like the clones. And those memories the scientists had taken—had I lost anything important? I didn’t think I had—I still remembered Garret, Riley, Dante, Crescent Beach, the rogues, Talon and St. George—but if I had lost anything, I wouldn’t even know what it was.

My stomach roiled. I felt dirty suddenly. As if those scientists were still in my brain somewhere, poking around. Seeing things they had no business seeing, secrets and memories that were mine alone.

I needed a shower. Something to wash the clinging taint of the scientists, the lab and the Elder Wyrm from my skin. The bathroom, I remembered, was down the hall, past several bedrooms like this one: small and quaint, with wooden floors and checkered blue-and-white curtains. It was quite bare, only holding a dresser and a pair of beds, as if it hadn’t been lived in for a long while. If ever.

Throwing back the covers, I rose and found a set of clothes on the dresser, trying not to grimace as I pulled them on. The flowery, yellow-and-green sundress wasn’t something I’d normally wear, but it would have to do. Everything I owned, the very clothes on my back, had been taken away by Talon.

Including my Viper suit.

“Dammit,” I sighed, feeling a brief, unreasonable stab of loss. Not the worst thing Talon had taken from me by any means, but it was a blow nonetheless. The Viper suit had been the last thing I’d owned that was mine. Now I had nothing.