Prologue
I always felt different. My senses were so much more sensitive than everyone else’s seemed to be. Any perfume made my eyes water and my nose burn. I could hear a whispered conversation on the other side of a room and any loud, jarring noises made me want to rip my ears off.
Not to mention I slept walked. I would wake up in random places around my apartment, things occasionally chewed or ripped. My best friend always joked that I must dream of being a wild animal. I just learned to live with it, chain locks on the front door, nothing pointy or breakable in plain sight, and never sleeping at someone else’s house.
After 21 years, I resigned myself to never figuring out why it was happening. The idea of being poked, prodded, and studied to find out what was causing it made shivers run up and down my spine.
I grew accustomed to my strange way of living, got a job at a butcher in Coeur d’Alene in Northern Idaho.
It was a nice place, not so busy it drove me crazy. There were forests with hiking trails, but you had to be careful of wolves, though they never scared me.
Life was good, until my twenty-first birthday. After that, everything changed.
