It was all too true. He kept vacillating between the man he had been and the powerful beast he had become. As he watched a dead girl slowly right herself on what had obviously been a broken neck, he realized it went far beyond being a bigger, badder sort of animal.
The entire room was watching with rapt interest as, over the next half hour, Mina recuperated from her “death” enough to draw herself up onto her knees. She frowned, her wary eyes looking at the woman she had once called a friend in friendless circumstances.
“Well, hell, Amara,” she pouted, her voice rasping as if her vocal chords might still be twisted around a bit. “You didn’t have to get so bitchy about it.”
“That wasn’t bitchy,” Amara said darkly. “Come near him again and you’ll see bitchy. Next time, you stay dead. Got it?”
“I wasn’t dead,” she argued. Mina bit her lip. “I saw the whole thing. Saw him fighting.” She pointed to Nick, then thought better of it and snatched her hand back against her chest and looked down.
That was when Nick’s first victim stirred.
Eventually, all the Morphates fully recovered their lives and, with a bit of rapid healing, their total health. Not a one had the least desire to try his luck a second time, although there were a few permanent enemies made. Nick was determined to keep his eye on the big blond who sulked and glared from across the room. It was still an attitude of aggression and very near a challenge and Nick wasn’t going to turn his back on him until he started to respect the way things were going to be.
Mina departed for the farthest corner from Amara herself, but other than irritably shooing away any males who came sniffing after her, interested in perhaps licking her wounded pride, she didn’t show any obvious resentment for what had happened. Yet.
However, Amara was satisfied enough to relax in Nick’s grip.
It took only fifteen minutes before the next approach took place. Since it was a woman closing the distance, Amara’s relaxed state, such as it was, flew away instantly. She sniffed the air warily, but Nick didn’t scent any threat of sexual challenge from the beautiful brunette. She was tall and, like Amara, generously curved in all the right places. She had intriguing and intelligent eyes and was clearly a Morphate by the scent and sensation she gave off in strong waves as she came cautiously close.
“Devona,” Amara greeted her warily, making Nick realize they knew each other.
“Don’t concern yourself,” Devona said with a hand held out in calming encouragement. “I am not here to poach your territory, Amara. I don’t think Mina even meant to, really. You know what she’s like. She was a bitch in heat before she even became…well, a bitch in heat.”
Nick chuckled at that, and he saw Amara’s eyes narrow on him. He disarmed her threat by swatting her hard on the backside. “Come on,” he scolded her. “They aren’t all after our bodies.”
“I’ll believe it when I don’t see it,” she muttered, moving to cut him off when he went to extend his hand to Devona. She stood stubbornly in front of him, her arms folded tautly beneath her breasts. “What do you want, Devona?”
“To get out of here alive,” she said softly.
Chapter 10
“Well, by the look of it, it’s going to be hard for them to make us dead,” Nick observed.
“And don’t think they won’t try,” Devona retorted, her jade eyes sliding over all of the exits and the cameras. “Don’t you see how the guards are running about all freaked out? I think they expected us to kill each other, but not to come back to life. This is our only advantage, far as I see it. But not for long. We have to figure how to get out of this mess before they figure out how to kill us.”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the gates at all four compass points burst open and large contingents of guards poured into the room.
“Move! Back to your rooms.”
“No!”
Nick shouted the countermand before he could think about it. To his never-ending shock, every Morphate in the room halted.
“It’s like a pack mentality,” Devona whispered to him quickly. “Even I feel it. You made yourselves our Alphas today. That means unless you are challenged and succeeded, you are our commanders. It’s intuitive. It tells everyone where they are as a pecking order is formed.”
“How do you know this?” Nick demanded as guards began to approach them in force.
“Devona was a zoological veterinarian,” Amara said. “She’s one of the ‘brainies,’ as we call them. Most of us were taken off streets and out of workhouses, but some like Devona and you are the ‘brainies,’ intelligent, employed people who mattered, who for whatever reason were taken out of their lives for this. For you it was because you got too close with your investigation. Nick’s a Federation cop,” she informed Devona.
“And for me it was because they tried to recruit me to be a scientist on the team for this nightmare, my zoological expertise clearly needed. When I turned them down I found out there was a ‘no is not an option’ clause. They needed a multi-breed vet because, as you can see, they are messing around with some dangerous primal instincts. I don’t know what they did to us, but this isn’t all human DNA, I promise you that.”
“You! One more word out of you and you’re toast! You hear me?” the nearest human guard threatened Nick, waving the remote he held.
“Don’t back down,” Devona hissed. “Fight ’til you drop, Nick, but if you back down, you lose face. You lose Alpha. You’ll have to fight challengers off all over again. They’ll try and take Amara from you.”
“The fuck they will,” Nick snarled, turning on the human guard sharply. “Point that thing at me again and I’ll make lunch out of you.”
The guard went completely gray, and his hand with the remote in it shook as several more men flanked him and withdrew tasers. Nick felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir to attention as Morphates came up behind him. Great. Just what he needed. Trouble from the front and the back. Devona moved to his right side, flanking him while Amara stood on the left.
“They are backing you up,” Devona whispered. “Challenges only come when the pack isn’t being threatened and only if you show weakness. Of course, they’ll be happy to take your place if you die….”
“Fuck all,” Nick spat.
“But not for lack of their help. They want to live too and their instincts tell them you’re the one who will make it happen.”
“Nick…,” Amara said anxiously.
He knew she could feel the tension of building aggression in his body. But it wasn’t as though he had much choice in the matter. Fangs were already descending into place and talons curved with deadly intent, and Nick didn’t even need to create the need in his thoughts. His body knew even before his mind did what was needed of it.
“Take him out!”
The lead guard fired first. He pressed the remote, sending a painful electroshock through Nick’s body. Amara yelped as her contact with him bridged the gap between nervous systems and she took part of the charge. Hearing her hurt was all it took for whatever was human in Nick to utterly vaporize.
Nick didn’t remember much of what happened after the third external taser dart plunged into his body. He reached for the barb and yanked it out just as he had the others and kept marching forward. Suddenly there was a wall of Morphates and guards clashing. It didn’t take long for the humans to realize they were in trouble and their weapons were insignificant against this new breed of animals. The Morphates took pain and injury without flinching. Tranquilizers flooded their systems, staggering them, weakening them, and just as quickly leaving them.
Nick was the first to grab a human and make a meal of him, as promised. His fangs sank true and he tasted his first human blood. It was nothing compared to what his luscious Amara was on his tongue, but it was enough to push back the pain of electricity and shed the nibbling lethargy of tranquilizers. Revitalized, he drew back and growled a command to the others.
“Feed. Do not kill. Despite how they’ve
treated us, we aren’t the animals they would make us.” He turned back to his appetizer and made certain the rest of his feast saw the intent in his eyes. The scent of fear and aggression flooded the room. Nick halfheartedly licked the guard’s wounds closed and then discarded him for the next.
When he became sated, he bit and clawed, punched and kicked. Every so often he would swing around to spy Amara.
“Keycard!”
She held up the prize and he watched her run for the south door.
“Amara!”
Nick was knee deep in human discard and Morphate fighters. He struggled to race after her. He knew all she wanted to do was open up a path they could fight through, but he also knew it would never be that easy. When he suddenly caught Paulson’s scent, then saw the bastard step into the frame of the south doorway, he knew she was in trouble.
That was when he caught a smell he had known perfectly well even as a human.
Gun oil.
Paulson drew the heavy-caliber handgun, and aimed through the bars at Amara even as she tried too late to skid to a stop in her bare, tractionless feet. With one arm held casually behind his back, Dr. Paulson pulled the trigger and shot Amara right between her eyes. The bullet’s enormous caliber blew a hole out of the back of her skull and sent blood and gray matter spraying everywhere.
Nick didn’t realize the roaring scream of denial echoing into the large room was his own.
He was shoving and lurching through the crowd around him, his horrified eyes never once leaving the sight of Amara’s slowly crumpling body. She hit the floor on her back with a hard smack and her copper-penny eyes stared up straight and cold at the ceiling. The keycard in her hand dropped uselessly to the floor.
Nick finally broke free and ran to her, dropping to his knees and skidding to a stop at the same time as he reached her body. He was a cop. He knew…he knew what that bullet had done to her. He knew what the next one was going to do to him as Paulson took aim at him.
“Stop them, Agent Gregory, or you will be next. Not even a Morphate can survive a .44-caliber bullet at point-blank range. I think I just proved that.”
Nick didn’t hear any of it. He didn’t care. He was too busy struggling with the screaming urge running through him to throw back his head and howl out with his pain and loss. He grabbed hold of her hand, shoving her limp knuckles against his lips as he stared in disbelief at her blankly fixed gaze. Nothing else penetrated his awareness, just that unnaturally still expression and the perfectly neat little hole in the left center of her forehead.
Blood was beginning to pool beneath her head now, the circle of it widening and seeping into her golden hair.
“Oh, honey. Oh, God…baby…,” he choked out, his chest on fire with things he had never felt in all of his life. A level of rage like no other. Grief so deep and so wide it couldn’t be crossed. Love.
Love.
Beyond lust. Beyond mating. The utmost and absolute purity of the only instinct that truly mattered, the only one he’d never experienced as a human male, but instead had needed to become an animal to know the depth of it.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he rasped as he gripped her too tightly between his hands. “It’s not enough.” It wasn’t enough. They couldn’t do this. Paulson had given her to him, but he couldn’t take her away!
Yet he had.
Nick flicked cold, deadly eyes up to meet the superiorly smug gaze of Dr. Paulson.
“I’m going to suck the blood straight from your heart.” The threat came out with the cold dispassion of wrath beyond visible expression. Paulson found it amusing and laughed.
“You’re going to die with your brains blown out all over her, you idiotic Neanderthal. You might be the best breed I’ve ever created, but I am still the god that created you and I can just as easily destroy you. If you had realized that sooner, you wouldn’t have gotten her killed.” Paulson shrugged and pulled the trigger. The bullet blew into Nick from the side of his chest wall.
He could almost feel it rattling around inside of him like a vicious little pinball. The hollowness inside of him was confirmed by the painless sensation.
Paulson had blown out his heart long before he’d even aimed the gun at him.
Chapter 11
“Nicky, you’ll get yourself killed if you keep up this cowboy bullshit of yours,” Jamie Mulloy said with a resigned sigh. “Then I’ll have to lie my way through a eulogy at your funeral so people will think you weren’t an asshole.”
“Anyone who comes to my funeral will know perfectly well I was an asshole. Don’t lie on my account,” Nick chuckled.
“Your brother will hunt me into the tomb beside you if I let anything happen to you. I’m begging you. Kincaid Gregory scares the piss out of me. You know that.”
Nick smiled slow and wide. His big brother was a bit intimidating at that. “Kin won’t kill you. He’ll just bat you around a little. Then he’ll dig my ass up and kick the shit out of it for getting myself dead.”
“Nick! You wake up right now, or so help me I am going to kick your ass!”
Nick opened his eyes and drew a breath, not realizing it was his first in nearly two hours. Previous to that, his lungs had contained too many holes to hold air. His chest hurt like hell, and he had the weirdest sensation that his heart wasn’t beating quite right.
Or at all.
“Am I dead, or what?”
“Or what.”
Nick sat up sharply, ignoring the savage backlash of pain it caused as he turned to stare into copper eyes that were filled with tears. They spilled over onto her cheeks and it was the most amazing thing Nick had seen in all of his convoluted life. Tears. Crystal-clear drips of emotion so normal, so common, and so alive. Tears falling from beautiful, blinking eyes completely unmarred by an off-center bullet wound.
Yet…her hair was stained red and crusted with the heavy remnants of her own blood. Possibly even his as well as he had bled out on top of her body.
“Amara?” he said dumbly, reaching out to touch her and see if she was real. His wrist snagged on the zipper teeth of the plastic surrounding him. That was when he looked down at himself and realized he was stripped naked.
Again.
And he was in a damn body bag.
“Holy hell!”
Nick jolted so clumsily to get out of the creepy plastic covering that he fell off of the autopsy table and onto white, sanitized floor tile. Amara, just as naked as he was, bent to put her hands on her knees, and peered at him with a sniffle.
“I did the exact same thing,” she noted with a shrug as she held out a hand to him. Nick took it automatically and she helped him coordinate getting to his feet. When he was up, he immediately saw the second metal table and the empty body bag. God. She had woken up alone zipped up in that thing!
“Honey, are you okay?” he demanded, using their clasped hands to drag her up against himself. She was warm. She was pliant and soft, her heart beating against his chest beneath her breast. He couldn’t bring himself to make a visual check, so he cautiously reached up to slide his fingertips into the hair at the back of her head. It crackled with dried blood and she tried to shy away.
“Nick, I’m icky and crusted…and I have weird goo in my hair,” she complained, trying to draw back.
“That goo is probably half of your damned brain, Amara! What in hell were you thinking! You got yourself killed!”
“Only for a little while!”
They stared at each other when they realized the absurdity of the argument.
“My God, I think we’re zombies,” she said with a shudder.
“Mara,” he chided her, finally chuckling with the peculiarity of it all, “we aren’t zombies. Just…remarkable healers. Man, even your hair is growing back,” he marveled as he stroked his fingers over the very solid bone of her skull under her scalp. Finally he turned her around and looked for himself. No hole. No gore—discounting what was stuck in her hair. He looked around the autopsy room and saw an empty tab
le with the handheld spray nozzle they used to wash cadavers before beginning the postmortem. “Come here.”
Nick drew her to the welled metal table and gave it a pat.
“Nick, we don’t have time for this,” she said, eyeing the table skeptically.
“If there was a reflective surface in here, you’d disagree with that. Get up.”
Sighing, she did as he asked. He arranged her so she was leaned back on her elbows with her head closest to the drain. He didn’t think she needed to see what he was about to clean off of her.
“Close your eyes. Let me take care of you,” he said softly. He grabbed the nozzle and squeezed. It took him a minute to figure out how to adjust the temperature so he wouldn’t freeze or scald her. He started at her feet and with the pressure of the spray and the thorough stroke of his free hand, he cleaned her of all the evidence of her violent “death.” He didn’t stop until her hair ran crystal clean and both sides of her body had been tended to. The room was very cold, and she was shivering even before he turned the nozzle loose and stopped the water. He spied piles of fresh towels and crossed to grab some. Better still, he saw freshly packaged scrubs, each set conveniently marked for size. He held up both in triumph and she smiled as she eagerly reached for the towels. He helped her to dry off, buffing her skin to a warm, rosy glow.
It wasn’t the time or the place for it, but Nick couldn’t help the way his whole body seemed to grow tight with need for her as he dried her under her breasts, across her chill-hardened nipples, and up the elegant curve of her throat. Her pulse beat sluggishly there, making him realize that despite her recuperation, she had lost a great deal of blood and probably needed to replenish her energy and regenerative resources with a supply of blood.
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