by JAX
“Jenesis or Jena. Not Gina … Jen-ah.”
There was something to that well-practiced distinction. But just the same, Kincaid saw it as a form of progress. Maybe even a form of advantage. But he didn’t know to whom the advantage was. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.
“I should make you continue to call me Mr. Gregory,” he said, his smirk at her dirty look the closest thing she figured she would ever get to having Kincaid Gregory lighten up. She decided she would take what she could get. “But Kincaid or Kin works. Just don’t call me Rat Number One.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” she told him, this time succeeding when she tried to step away from him. Perhaps he didn’t realize it consciously, but personalizing her with a mutually agreed upon nickname gave her an altered status in his subconscious. It was enough to give her the right to a little bit of distance.
But she made no mistake about it. Kincaid Gregory had claimed dominance over her, and he would find a way to prove it if he could. She was starting to see the base characteristics of what he was up close, rather than reading about those traits from a distance. She might have wondered if this whole project was a matter of biting off more than she could chew, but she felt it was more than fair that she be made to face the ramifications of her work up close and uncomfortably. Besides, what better way of understanding what had happened than by putting it all under scrutiny? She couldn’t truly understand a creature if all she was going to do was study it behind the safety fences and glass of the zoo designed to keep her safe from it. She needed to work with the Morphates. To watch them eat, sleep, breed, and interact in all manners natural to them.
And most importantly, she needed to see how their humanity had survived in them. Nick and Amara Gregory, the Alphas of Dark Manhattan, seemed as normal and civilized as a human could be. They were intellectual and practical and well-spoken whenever they made public appearances or spoke for the needs of their breed.
But here was Nick Gregory’s very own brother, and while he was also intelligent, he was clearly not so able to manage his baser side. He certainly made very few public appearances. That was why she had not been able to place his face when she’d first seen him.
“I was wondering …” she began awkwardly, not knowing what would set him off next.
“Morning, folks.”
The lab tech sauntered into the room, hitting the lights as he went, for the first time making Jenesis realize she had been maneuvering with only sunlight from the outer windows to light her way. Considering the vastness of the lab, that was highly insufficient. But Kincaid Gregory had had her so flustered from the start that she hadn’t even thought about it.
“There’s bloodwork to be analyzed,” she said, gesturing to the tubes and their colored stoppers that spoke for themselves as to which tests would be wanted.
“Sure, Dr. DeBruehl.” He clapped his hands together, rubbing them eagerly. “Let’s get this show under way, eh?”
His eagerness made her smile. His name tag said, TAD UNDERWOOD, SENIOR PHLEBOTOMIST. That meant he was going to be in charge of her phlebotomy lab.
“Thank you, Mr. Underwood,” she said with a smile.
But her smile faded instantly when an aggressive sound rolled out of the Morphate who was suddenly standing up against her once more. Her entire back half was plastered with muscle and heat and the implied aggression that came with it. Jena’s heart leaped up into her throat, her whole body going hot and cold all at once. The sensation was too overwhelming to sort out and the moment too dangerous to waste time thinking too deeply about anything.
Tad went instantly stiff at the aggressive sound, but a moment later he lowered his head and eyes, bending his neck and completely submitting to the other male in the room much the way a wolf in a pack would show submission to its leader. The action fascinated her, as did the way Kincaid significantly relaxed behind her, although he was still preening with dominance.
In a heartbeat she had learned that Tad was Morphate and she had just learned something about Morphate social structure. If it truly was akin to the ways wolves behaved, then that meant Tad knew who his leader was. But the interaction had gone a step beyond that. Of course Tad would know who his leader was. They all would. The only reason for Kincaid to feel he needed to set Tad down with a sharp reminder would be if he was marking new territory.
Or more specifically, warning a male away from a female he had claimed for himself.
Jenesis’s face burned with embarrassment and anger. She reached behind herself and grabbed hold of Kincaid’s shirt along the button line, using all of her strength to jerk him forward in her wake. He was so surprised to be manhandled in such a way that he stumbled along obediently. She had no doubt that he was surprised. For the past seven years he’d probably had people, Morphates, bowing and scraping at his significant dominance. He’d probably gotten used to no one countermanding him in any way.
She yanked him into her office at the center of the labs, slamming the door shut so hard that she might have shattered the glass in it if not for the metal reinforcement running through it.
Then she turned on him.
“You listen to me, Kincaid Gregory,” she railed. “I’m going to have a hard enough time earning the respect of the people in this lab on my own merits. I don’t need your Morphate posturing and whatever the hell that was supposed to be undermining my authority here!”
“This is a ninety percent Morphate-populated lab, Dr. DeBruehl,” he said with an almost wickedly mischievous smile. “They know who you are, what you’ve done to help them become what they never asked to be. There’s only one way they’ll ever respect you, and that’s if a stronger Morphate than they are tells them to.”
“I don’t believe that,” she argued hotly. “By your theory, you’re all no better than animals following instinctual demands. But in just a half hour in your company I can tell you that you are better than that! Like all humans, you have tendencies to be savage and the ability to be civilized. You are the one in charge of which you choose to indulge in from one moment to the next!”
“How interesting that you’re so sure of that after less than a few hours in Morphate company,” he said dangerously.
Next thing she knew he had hold of her beneath an arm and was hauling her up against the door. He slapped a button near the lock as he did this and all of the glass windows around them clouded over, going completely opaque with smart glass technology and blocking the arriving technicians from seeing into the room. They were instantly closed away. Jenesis was neatly cut off from everyone. As thick as the glass was, she doubted anyone would even hear her scream. Not that it mattered. With the pecking order being what it was, she doubted anyone would dare to challenge this Morphate male.
She doubted any of them gave a damn what happened to her. His blue eyes, so remarkably pretty and yet so bitingly cold, fixed on to hers and he gnashed his as yet fangless teeth at her, growling menacingly in her face.
“Fuck you too!” she blurted out, unable to hold her tongue or her temper any longer. She wasn’t going to get a damn thing done in an environment where she was going to be everybody’s scapegoat and whipping boy. She might feel guilty and have regrets, but she was going to make amends her way, not his.
Her surprising show of backbone brought him up short. No, more than that. It turned him on. As much as it impressed him, it excited him. A lot of things about her, he realized, excited him.
He wanted the realization to revolt him. He wanted the logical human she kept insisting still existed inside of him to find her offensive and insulting. Instead, she kept sinking into him with these claws of inexplicable attraction.
Purely physical, he told himself hastily. She was attractive, smelled good, and appealed to the beast inside of him with her smooth skin and gorgeous blond hair. He wanted to fuck her, he acknowledged. But he wanted to fuck a lot of women. It came with the Morphate genes.
“Hmm,” he rumbled in her face. “I can take tha
t as an invitation.”
That speculation made Jenesis catch her breath. He’d made no further overt moves on her, but her brain immediately started to recall his earlier blatant actions. And those recollections came with uncontrollable responses.
But despite all his threats and all the privacy and opportunity he had given himself, Kincaid suddenly pushed away from her, pulled her out of the way of the door, and yanked it open. The minute he did so, the smart glass went clear because it needed a continuous connection to maintain the current that excited the particles within it and made it go opaque.
He strode out of the door like a dark storm menacing the sky. The lab was still only lightly populated, but as she watched him leave she saw each person he passed react. She immediately could tell who was Morphate and who was human. The distinction fascinated her, even as she dropped into her desk chair and tried to figure out how to catch her breath.
And how she was going to spend the next several years in head-to-head combat with Kincaid Gregory.
* * *
4
Jenesis was exhausted.
She’d spent every minute of every day, weekend, and night in the lab. She wasn’t trying to prove anything to her staff by her behavior. She wanted her work to speak for itself. But the work had drawn her in in a way she had never expected. Sure, she’d always gotten a little obsessed with her work through the years. What scientist didn’t? Especially when they felt a breakthrough was imminent. But she was nowhere near any such breakthrough. However, the work she was doing was groundbreaking in many ways just in its infantile stages. Outside of the initial government testing the Morphates had endured during the exposure of the Phoenix Project, no other testing or work had been done on them. And certainly none of the information that the government had gleaned had ever become public information.
This she knew for a fact because she had searched exhaustively for it. And in ways normal people might not do. She knew how the government worked, and she was very certain that Kincaid Gregory wasn’t the only one wanting to know how to kill a Morphate. It was simply the darker side of human nature to fear what it didn’t fully understand, and in that fear want to know how to destroy it. Perhaps it was a self-preservation instinct … but she was more inclined to think of it as human ignorance.
Over the past two weeks she had seen very little of Kin Gregory, but she knew he was there. Knew he was watching her. She could almost feel his disdain following her around like a dogged, nasty pit bull that simply would not unclamp its jaws now that it had hold of her. The few times she had been in the same room as he, she’d made certain to walk a wide circle around him. It was just better that way.
The labs were in the same building as the condos the human lab members had been given, so she never had far to go to get home. The lab building had been designed that way to keep humans from wandering too freely in the Dark City. The entire building was like a mini human city in the heart of Dark Philly. The shopping was all inside the building, from clothes to food, including even boutiques, all Morphate-run and all heavily guarded by security. It was clear that the security wasn’t to protect the shop owners. It was there to regulate the interactions between the Morphates and the humans. At the end of the day, the Morphates left the building and the simple humans remained inside.
That wasn’t to say they couldn’t wander the City, but it had only been seven years ago that the Dark Cities had been hellholes devastated by criminals, addicts, and worse. The human and Morphate populations of Dark Philly were still a bit unnerving. Jenesis could easily see where some of her lab workers had come from. The scarring and the tattoos, the rough attitudes they had to work hard at keeping under control, made it clear that they had been reclaimed from the dregs of society.
In her opinion, that made the Morphates miracle workers. They had been able to give second chances to people who had otherwise been given up on. They had saved countless human lives.
But that didn’t mean Dark Philly was a garden city to be safely strolled around. However, the Morphate cops, known as the Watch, were very diligent. Especially, no doubt, as the Dark City allowed more and more humans in to fulfill specialty jobs like hers.
All of this raced through her head in a dizzying swirl as she dragged her feet into the elevator.
She didn’t even register the man who entered the elevator with her. Not until he hit the Stop button between floors and abruptly cornered her at the back of the elevator. She heard the bell going off distantly, warning of the stopped elevator, but what she was focused on was the dark eyes of her assailant.
“Dr. DeBruehl, I have a message for you,” he said quickly, his hand coming out to clamp on to her shoulder. The grip was painful, in contradiction to his next statement. “I am not here to hurt you. Only to tell you that there are interested parties who would be willing to reward you in impressive ways if you were to give them the results of your research instead of giving them to the Morphate.”
Not Morphates. Morphate singular. It struck her that there was contempt in that acknowledgment of Kincaid Gregory.
“What people?” she demanded.
He smiled, but there was nothing comforting or amusing about the expression.
“No one you haven’t already been willing to work with,” he said. “Suffice it to say, there’s a great deal of advantage for you in this proposition.” His grip tightened so hard then that she cried out and her knees buckled. “And it would not be in your best interest to ignore this opportunity.”
As he spoke, he hit the Continue button on the elevator panel and pressed the button for the next floor as well. He didn’t let go of her until the doors opened. Then he released her and hurried out into the hallway.
She slid down to the floor of the elevator, sitting there numb and scared as the doors shut and the lift continued on its way to her top-level apartment. As her floor approached, she picked herself up, cradling her left shoulder in her right hand. When the doors opened she made a cautious movement outside, looking into the hallway, cautiously inspecting both directions. She was in a bit of shock as she plodded onward to her apartment, nervously looking over both shoulders all the way to her door, where she pushed into what she hoped was the safety of her apartment.
The building was, for all intents and purposes, heavily secured. Where had her assailant come from? How had he gotten into the building past the notoriously thorough Watch? As dangerous a job placement as this was, she had felt ridiculously safe because of all the security measures, both Morphate and technological, that had been put in place. She should have known not to let her guard down, she thought bitterly. And what had he meant by—?
Jenesis dropped back hard against the door of her apartment, frightened fingers fumbling with the deadbolt lock, as if it would stand up to anyone really determined to get in. The ridiculousness of her action made her laugh until tears blurred her vision. She sank down onto her heels, her hand nursing the shoulder that still hurt. She suspected it wouldn’t hurt so badly if she hadn’t been so terrified.
The only person she could think of whom she had worked with in the past who would play such a ruthless game was Dr. Eric Paulson.
The rumor was he had turned himself into a Morphate. That he was as indestructible as they were. That there would never be any way of making him pay for his atrocious crimes. The understanding that he was out there was bad enough, but the prospect that he was out there doing the same kinds of experiments as he had been before was mind-numbing and fearfully paralyzing. And if he was looking for a way to kill other Morphates, then Kincaid Gregory and his people were in a great deal of danger. Especially considering that Paulson was powerfully persuasive enough to convince one of his agents to breach Morphate security in order to get to her.
Jenesis wouldn’t be half so afraid, she supposed, if she wasn’t already anticipating the fact that she would rather cut her own heart out than give that maniac one iota of her research ever again. That meant that somewhere in her future all she had waiting
for her was the other side of Paulson’s ultimatum.
Join or die.
She took a deep breath, gathering herself together as she picked herself up off her heels. She shook the tears out of her eyes, lifting her chin. So be it. She would deal with that when the time came. If the time ever came. So far no conventional method short of the intense equivalent radiation dump of a radical bomb had proved capable of killing Morphate cells. As it was, they had been forced to develop a special chamber in the lab to dispose of blood specimens. On the positive side, they didn’t have to refrigerate Morphate blood. It never separated into serum and cells under normal conditions. It took a centrifuge, whereas human cells immediately began to break apart when taken out of the body. It had changed the protocol for preserving blood specimens completely.
Meaning there was no need for protocol. No need for preservatives. No need for any of it.
Moving to her kitchen, she pulled open the fridge door and looked for something to calm her nerves. The sight of almost completely empty shelves reminded her just where her priorities had been for these past few weeks.
She looked at the clock. It was nearly 3 A.M. Everything was closed. There would be no delivery services, no stores would be open, and she sure as hell was not setting foot outside of her door until daylight.
She tried not to give in to the urge to cry as she closed the refrigerator and looked around the room for something … anything … to help steady her nerves.
And there, written across the whiteboard she’d pinned above the countertop, was Kincaid Gregory’s phone number. She’d written it there after she’d grown tired of looking for it every time she’d needed to call him to report the progress of the day. For some reason, she had always felt better making the call from her apartment instead of the lab. Frankly, whenever she heard his voice while she was in the lab, her skin went damp with a sensory memory of what his rough, dominant hands had felt like on her skin and his heated proposals had felt like against her ear. He had infected her like some kind of virus that day.
