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.