Hands clamped on the steering wheel, Dawn stared out the windshield at the interstate unrolling beneath the SUV and marveled at how a three-thousand-year-old woman such as herself could understand so little about life. Maybe because she was dead for most of those years. Mere hours ago, she’d languished inside a glass tank in a scientific laboratory, a specimen devoid of life. Now she hunched in the driver’s seat of a stolen SUV. A fugitive. Confused, adrift.

But not alone.

She glanced at her companion. Her heart sank into her stomach. Jake’s muscular body slumped in the passenger seat, his pallor tinged with a jaundiced overtone. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Fine.” He shifted position, twisting his shoulder, and winced. Raking a hand through chestnut hair, he winced again. “I told you it’s a flesh wound.”

Images unreeled in her mind — a motel room, Jake’s lips on hers, the door bursting inward. Commandos flooding into the room, driven by orders from Redeo Biotech. A gunshot exploding. Jake tumbling to the floor. Blood on his shirt, near his heart. Then Saxon, a vicious man, shoved a needle into her neck, plunging her into darkness.

She checked the rearview mirror. Nothing there. Yet the hairs on her neck stiffened as goosebumps prickled her arms. Maybe she was paranoid. Then again, a team of brutal pseudo-soldiers pursued them at this very moment, and despite her success in shaking them off her tail, they would be back.

Jake’s cinnamon-colored eyes focused on her, though with a bleariness that shot ice through her veins. He nodded toward her right hand. “How’s your cut?”

“Screw my itty-bitty cut. You’ve got a bullet wound, for crying out loud.” But her finger did burn like someone held a lit match to it. Paper cuts were evil. In the future, she’d exercise more caution when handling road maps. She wiggled the finger, spotting a bead of blood on the cut, and shoved it in her mouth to lick it clean. When she withdrew the finger, she froze.

The blood was gone, yes. But so was the cut. More than healed, the wound vanished with no trace, not even a faint scar. Impossible.