My fingers clench into bloodless balls in my lap. “I think we both know better, Mr. Storm,” I tell him frankly. I obey the rules. That’s what I do. And in this case I messed up. “And I didn’t exactly save my sister, did I?”
“Nolan. Call me Nolan,” he says. He places one big hand over my hands. His flesh crackles with a kind of heat I don’t understand. “Or Storm if you prefer. She’s alive,” he tells me in a grim voice. “She’ll survive.”
But I wonder, how much did they steal from her? And fresh on the heels of that tumbles another, more troubling thought: what is the price of living?
...
Once we arrived at Storm’s we were taken straight to a guest room, where they parked Margot in a queen bed. It looked huge in the little room with its floor-to-ceiling windows across one wall. The walls were cheerful pale yellow and covered in bright paintings with squiggly lines in primary red and blue and yellow. The windows looked up to sky, which I reckoned in daylight transforms the light in the room into fine opals.
The woman with the severe bun slipped in the door. This time her hair was a loose curtain of sable, and she wore a simpler dress, black and tailored down to her knees, a strand of freshwater pearls twisted around her neck. Her expression was strained as she pulled in a cart with water to wash my sister.
“A doctor will be here in a few minutes,” she’d said in the kind of voice you save for funerals. I went back to stroking Margot’s hair from her face. She’d said nothing, my sister, but then, she hadn’t had to. Her eyes were open but sunken, red rimmed. The woman had begun sponging off the makeshift bandages on Margot’s belly when I felt an electric zap course through my nerves.
“No.” I grabbed for the woman’s hand. The last thing I needed was Margot to get hysterical. “Margot has asked me to do it. If you don’t mind.”
She nodded and stepped back toward the door. I could see pity in her eyes, so bright and clear it hurt. “I’ll be right outside if you need me. I’ll knock when the doctor gets here.”
For the next little while I forgot everything but the feel of Margot inside my skin as I washed her, sang to her. Her raw nerves lay down and got quiet for a while, and we both started to relax. She wasn’t that hurt physically, but I’d known that. The hurt was tucked away, inside her body, where you couldn’t see it.
A little while later a sharp rap came and a small woman with wiry curls and bright blue eyes walked in. She carried herself like a practical woman, dressed in a turtleneck and slacks, a stethoscope around her neck and a large bag in her hands. Margot’s eyes flickered over to the woman before she zoned out again.
At least it was a woman. I think we were both thankful for that.
She introduced herself as she washed her hands. “I’m Dr. Dorian Raines,” she said in a clipped, efficient voice. She leaned over Margot and touched her hand. “I’m going to examine you now. I’ll be as gentle as I can be.” Margot blinked and gave the doctor a slight nod. We both jerked when the hands pressed down on her belly, the pain stinging and intense. It wasn’t the pain so much—the doctor was gentle—but anything was too much now. The doctor was quick, though, and within seconds she was removing her gloves and washing her hands.
“You’re going to be sore for a few days, but there’s very little real damage. I’ll bandage these,” she pointed to the incisions in Margot’s skin, “but you don’t need stitches. Whoever did this to you knew what they were doing. They didn’t necessarily want to wound you.”
Margot’s eyes glazed over. The doctor came back with some pills and a glass of water.
“Margot, I need you to listen to me for a moment. The people who did this—from the description Jared gave me—I think they were harvesting your eggs. There’s no way to tell unless I give you a thorough examination, and I’m not sure you’re up for that right now. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Did they say anything to you?” I felt my sister fight her terror as she took in the doctor’s words.
“It’s what they were after,” Margot said in a cracked voice. “They know when we’re ovulating. It’s part of Protocols.” The pieces began to fall into place as we sat in stunned silence. It hadn’t been an accident. All of it had been engineered. My sister licked her lips before confirming my worst suspicions. “We’d just been in the week before.”
Horror swamped me. “Why?”
Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch. “They kept taking Protocols, Lucy. Over and over. He knows exactly when we’re ovulating, when we’re not. He always knows.”
The room went dim. I grabbed her hands and told her she was safe now, safe. Storm and his people had come for her and me. We were safe. And as I watched my sister gulp down her pills and sob herself to sleep, I wondered if it was true.
...
“His name was Clive,” I tell Storm an hour later. I study the man before me. His cheeks are raised with dark nubs of stubble. Shadows brush beneath his eyes, but despite that he looks remarkably well rested. Calm. “Our usual Protocols guy. Always giving us these flowers. I reckon I knew Margot had a thing for him but…” I leave off and shrug helplessly. Maybe later I’ll be able to trace back and find the thread that might have stopped this, but tonight I’m too tired.
“The easiest theory would then be that he saw what was happening to you and your sister with the Protocols and decided to see what was in it for him. Black market test tube babies.”
“Hmm.” I shrug and grace our rescuer with a tight smile. “He was the only one who was the same. They kept switching in all these stupid nurses, but he was always there.”
The air in the room drops a couple of degrees as Storm considers me. “He could have stolen eggs from anyone, but he chose Margot. He went to elaborate lengths to make her trust him. So what was he really after?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “But doesn’t it strike you…?” I start, then let the thought die. I’d just as soon not say it out loud in case it might be true.
Storm knows anyway.
“It’s always possible your parents had been receiving threats or interest, but I don’t think so. It could have been anyone from the Upper Circle, or Clive himself. Or the other two.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. At least there’s that. Still, the timing is too coincidental. All these Protocols just weeks before our Reveal. And Father’s mysterious business deal, my mind chirps at me. Don’t forget that.
“What about the other two? I’d not forget if I’d seen them before. Do you know them? Are they True Borns, too?”
The electric cloud around Storm’s body increases. I sit back as his eyes darken. His curt reply says it all. “No.”
“So they’re Splicers or something?” But when he doesn’t answer, I ask, “So what are they, then, some sort of test-tubers?” He sits there, stony and silent. And all at once I understand what he’s saying—what he’s not saying—in one horrifying gulp. Test-tubers. The men at the Clinic somehow were made to be different, engineered to be monsters. And as my head tries to wrap around that one, I come to the most important thought: what do they want with us?
We’ve never heard of anyone being put through as many Protocols as they’ve run us through. This isn’t just about harvesting some poor Splicer girl’s eggs. They’ve stolen from the daughter of one of the most powerful men in all of Dominion—who conveniently happens to be out of the country. What happened to Margot can’t be random.
This was about her, about us. And we can’t afford to wait for our parents to come home to take care of things.
“We’re not going to have our happy eighteenth Reveal party, are we?”
The words come out sounding as dull and flat as I feel. I walk over to the window and trail a finger across a rain-soaked window. The smeared drop reminds me of birds in flight. Something I’d love to be right now. Free, able to soar away from all these heavy burdens. “They say it changes everything. When they finally tell you.”
Storm doesn’t answer. He just silently
unfolds his long body from the couch and walks me to my room. If I glance at him from the corner of my eyes, I can still see the swirling mass of energy rising like sharp branches from his head. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear it looks like antlers.
Chapter Eight
I don’t know what time it is when I wake, shivering and confused. I’d been in my sister’s skin, living through her memories: rounds of testing, the long, snake-like syringe invading me, pulling from my body sticky, microscopic lumps. Then I was watching in dull-eyed horror from the bed as Jared ripped the room apart, his face a feral mask. From Margot’s perspective, he is a beautiful angel of death. All she can think is how peaceful it will be once he finally turns and rips into her.
That isn’t even the part that has me crying.
The dream transports me. I am in Margot’s skin. Her hands rest on her bedroom window as she watches a riot mushroom outside our gate. Bodies smash into the fence. Limbs sever from torsos in the panic and press of the crowd. This is it, a voice says. Through Margot’s eyes I stare at three figures standing just inside the gate, like they’re holding back the crush of humanity. It’s me, flanked on one side by Jared and on the other by Nolan Storm, a set of antlers rising from his head like a massive crown. Suddenly I’m bodiless, a massive tidal wave ripping through the city street, a tsunami that will swallow everything and everyone in its path.
Wetness tracks down my cheeks. My eyes tiptoe through the darkness until they bump into a strangely familiar sight.
“What are you doing here?” I don’t mean to sound so scared as I bolt upright.
Then again, Jared sits not more than three feet away from me, in the armchair near the small glowing fireplace. In my room. Alone.
Arms crossed, he cocks his head and stares like he’s heard an insect whine. “Boss was worried about you,” he finally says. His eyes are bright green pennies in the dark, pupil all but disappeared.
“He sent you to watch me sleep?” I say it with as much contempt as I can muster. Jared doesn’t even bother to reply. He continues to stare at me.
“You were having a nightmare,” he tells me, as if I didn’t know.
I sigh and curl up my knees. “I’ve been having them all night.” He nods as though he understands. Since he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, I lean over and switch on the lamp to make conversation. “What time is it?”
“A little after one, I think.”
“When are we going home?”
“Soon.” Jared clasps his hands between his legs, clearly warming to this topic. “Couple days, I guess. Boss wants to make sure Margot is okay.”
I somehow resist the urge to tell him Margot will never be okay again, and neither will I. “Will our parents be back by then?”
“Not sure.” Jared scratches his chin. “If they aren’t, I think the plan is to be a little less remote than we signed up for.”
Whatever that means. I take him in then, really look at him. He’s changed his clothes but that’s about it. The blood-soaked shirt and pants have been replaced by a pair of dark trousers. He’s in a powder blue, long-sleeve shirt. I’m shocked it doesn’t have a cartoon scrawled across the front. His blond locks are tousled. But more than the blond, ashy stubble on his cheeks and the deep rings of exhaustion around his mouth and eyes, I notice the strange expression. Like a lost little boy.
He gets a good gander at me, too. I must look silly in the oversize white shirt Storm lent me, my hair a nest of dark curls.
Jared clenches the arms of the chair as though he’s physically holding himself back. “You are such an unbelievable pain in the ass, Princess. You know that?”
“What’d I do now?”
“Are you really that naive?”
I blink in confusion, wondering what has set him off this time. “What?”
“You haven’t so much as asked about it. You haven’t said a word.”
Oh. The penny drops. I draw my legs up tighter against my chest. Jared jumps out of his chair and leans over me menacingly. “What, you’ve been raised to be so polite,” he mocks, “you’re just going to sit there and pretend you didn’t see it?”
I peer up into his livid, beautiful face. He’s worried, I suddenly realize. Not angry—terrified. I marvel at the thought. I’d never have imagined that a man who rips people apart with his bare hands would worry much about what others thought, let alone someone he seems to dislike as much as me.
“Wasn’t much to say about it, I reckon.” Jared peers back at me as though I’m an alien species. Which, if I follow Storm’s logic, I just might be. So who am I to sling arrows? I sigh. “You saved Margot. You saved me. As far as I’m concerned, you could be a ten-foot fire-breathing lizard and I wouldn’t give a damn.”
Jared steps back with a deep intake of breath, looking halfway between trapped and wild. He turns and paces for a moment. Then he sits back down in the chair across from me, hands clenched in his lap. He glances down at his feet, which I see now are bare. His toes are long and white, like the rest of his massive feet. Those bare toes make him seem absurdly vulnerable.
“I’ve never changed in front of someone before,” he confesses. “I mean, a Laster. I mean—someone I was going to let keep breathing.”
“Thanks,” I toss back. I don’t think he hears the sarcasm.
“It confuses me. Part of me thinks I ought to kill you,” he tells me slowly. Catching the look in my eye he stumbles on irritably. “Now, cut it out. Storm would snap my neck like a twig if I laid a hand on you.”
I gulp past a short burst of panic, unsettled that that seems to be his only reason. “Can you control it?”
“Not always. I’m safe here with my own kind—which you most definitely are not.”
But the way he says it, I’m suddenly not sure we’re talking about his ability to become cat man.
I flash back to the monster and the albino. “Are all True Borns like you?”
Jared shakes his head. “If you mean do we all have the ability to turn into a jungle cat on two legs, then no.”
Can his whole body turn? Curiosity itches at me. But I know how impolite it would be to ask. And besides, he’ll just shut down. So instead I ask, “I mean, are they all shifters?”
The corners of his mouth turn down but his eyes soften. “I haven’t met ‘them all,’” he mocks with air quotes, “but of those I have met, all I’ve got to say is there are no rules. You saw Penny tonight. She doesn’t turn into a zebra or whatever the hell she shares her gen-code with. But you can be damned sure not all her genes are certifiably human.”
“Oh.” I look at my hands. My cheeks flame. With a start I realize I don’t want Jared to talk about Mohawk.
“And those two guys at the Clinic who were trying to grab you two. Just one whiff of those guys was enough to tell. Splicers smell all kinds of wrong, but those guys reeked.” There’s a pause before he continues. “And then there’s you.” I look up to catch him frowning furiously at me. He leans back, like it can help him get me in perspective.
“What about me?”
Frown deepening, Jared bounces a hand off the chair arm. “You know you’re different, Princess. And it’s not just because you’re some fancy, spoiled rich girl. Hell, you don’t smell like anyone else. Money can’t buy that smell.” I assume he wasn’t talking about my expensive perfume, which money did in fact buy. I watch his chest rise with another inhale, like scenting me is an instinct. He seems to mean it as a compliment, but I am irritated. Of all of the aspects of myself that I have been trained to control, my scent is not one of them.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m not spoiled.”
“Me either. Lie down and go back to sleep, Princess,” he grouches, though suddenly I’m not sure which statement he’s agreeing with.
I do as he says, if only to get away from those eyes of his, eyes that want to solve me and put me into a neat little box. I turn off the lamp and squeeze my eyes shut, but if anything, my head whirls even m
ore. He hasn’t said the words, but they hang between us in invisible parentheses: True Born.
My mind chases down the same old arguments. Wouldn’t we know? Wouldn’t there have been some clue before now…like one of us turning into a tiger or something? Wouldn’t we feel it, deep down in our bones?
But then, there’s always been something about us.
An image floats behind my eyes. Margot lies in the darkness across the narrow bed, eyes unseeing. Alone. The shot the doctor gave her must be wearing off because the pain is starting to return, pulling through my abdomen in long, aching threads. But it’s the pain in her heart that undoes me. I sit up again, blinking back the tears.
Jared lets out an exasperated, “Lucy, go to sleep. You’re going to need it.”
“I can’t,” I confess. “Every time I close my eyes…”
His exasperated sigh hisses through the dim room. As he makes his way over to the bed, his hair picks up on the little light there is, turning him into a dim angel. He settles his weight on the edge of the groaning bed and awkwardly rubs my back.
“There. Better?”
I snort dismissively but lie down. His hands slow, the awkwardness evaporating as something else takes its place. Everywhere his hands touch my skin feels like it lights up parts of my body I didn’t know were connected.
Like a languid cat, Jared props his back against the wall and pillows my head on his lap. “There, that’s more comfortable,” he says as with one hand he trails a finger over the sensitive skin on my neck. I shiver as the sensation burns through me. Ever so light, his fingers wind a trail down my back. I arch against his fingers, lost in the exquisite sensations.
“You’re like a little kitty cat,” Jared purrs. “All cuteness and claws.” His breath stirs the little hairs on the back of my neck. I shiver again, rocking back, and meet the hot brand of his flesh. I’m instantly electrified, even more so as I hear his sharp inhale. I move away as fast as fire, though I can still feel the burning imprint of his flesh against my head.
True Born Page 7
