by Jade Kerrion
John’s denial was a barely perceptible shake of his head. A thin sheen of sweat coated his palms. His heart raced, pounding in his chest. “I didn’t know…”
“I am your greatest contribution to humanity, your most triumphant legacy, and you never knew?”
“No, I swear. If I knew, I would have… I—”
“To top off your affection, Father, twenty-eight years ago, you voted to deny me my humanity.”
John stammered, “It was an unanimous vote in the Senate and in the House. Your birth forced us to confront the questions we’d been avoiding. The people needed assurance. They needed to know they would not be supplanted.”
“By me? But isn’t that the point and purpose of evolution? To ascend ever higher? Other living creatures accept that the strong will thrive, and that their genes will pass to the next generation. But humans have created societies to protect them from change. The weak cluster to protect themselves from the strong, never thinking that the strength they reject could be theirs and their children’s, if they would only embrace it.” He paced with the grace of a prowling tiger around John’s recliner. “Your shortsightedness will doom this country.”
“In America, individuals matter. We don’t tread over their rights or dismiss their concerns when a new and better model comes along—”
“Ah, the tired, old song of individual rights. You tread over the rights of derivatives, and you don’t even realize its dissonance. There is nothing just, nothing equitable, about protecting the rights of the weak while trampling over the rights of the strong. Nothing moral about denying an innocent child his claim on humanity.”
John released his breath in a shuddering sigh. He knew he would not survive the night. “What are you going to do?”
The man’s smile was a flash of white teeth in a face of sculptured, unparalleled beauty. “You must atone for the dual roles you played in this travesty—”
“But you have your humanity now. The legislation the president passed three years ago—”
“Do you think humanity is something bestowed by legislation? What a child doesn’t receive, he can seldom later give.” The man completed his predatory assessment and stopped in front of the senator. He shook his head. “What is the perfection that Rakehell saw in you?”
John suspected he knew the answer: conviction of belief, a willingness to accept the entirety of his strengths and weaknesses, and the lack of ego to aspire beyond them. In the man standing before him, however, he saw no such humility, no such acceptance.
He found no evidence of humanity in Galahad.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunlight did not greet Danyael when he opened his eyes. Instead, the soft glow of florescent lights lit the windowless room. Teeth gritted against the shafts of pain pulsing through his skull, Danyael dragged himself upright in his bed in spite of the protests of his crippled leg.
His dark eyes searched the room. The closed door had neither handle nor lock; it was likely sealed from the outside. The large room, an attractive hospital suite that included a sitting area, had no identifying features, but the medical equipment surrounding his bed was state-of-the-art.
No hospital would have extended charity care to him and placed him in a room so perfectly suited to monitoring his condition and containing his empathic supernova if he died. He had little doubt as to where he was—the Mutant Affairs Council headquarters. Danyael’s gaze traveled to the camera swiveling in a corner of the ceiling. “Hello, Alex.”
The lack of an immediate response did not irk him. Danyael glanced at the analog clock on the wall; it was half-past midnight. The thankless task of monitoring him had likely fallen to a junior enforcer, and it would likely be a while before Alex Saunders, director-general of the Mutant Affairs Council, could be called away from his daily responsibilities or his comfortable bed.
He glanced up, surprised, when the door slid open.
Zara strode in. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“Jacquie called me when you passed out in your office. She said you healed a girl who had been shot. Is that your definition of ‘cutting back’?” She glared at him. “Lie down. You’re not going anywhere for awhile.”
“My surgery’s tomorrow at eight.”
She shook her head. “Your appointment with Harris was yesterday.” Her rich voice trembled with emotion as she gripped his bedside. “It’s noon, the following day. You were unconscious for forty hours. Do you have any idea what it was like for me—not knowing if you would pull through, and not allowed to stay beside you in case you died?”
His mind tripped as it wrestled the passage of time. “Forty hours?” No, it was impossible. There was no way he could have slept for that long, not unless he had been drugged.
Abd-al Rahman stepped into the hospital room. The recently appointed director of mutant health, a middle-aged and smooth-shaven man of Saudi Arabian origin, was casually dressed in denim jeans and a heavy sweater. “I gave you oxymorphone to take the edge off your pain and help you sleep. We didn’t count on you sleeping for nearly that long, though.” He moved to the foot of the bed and folded his arms across his chest, his face stern. “Your body’s trying to compensate for the abuse you’ve put it through all these years.”
“I can cut back on my hours at the clinic.” And it would take longer to pay off all his financial obligations.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Abd-al said. “While you were resting, I ran some blood and cell culture tests.” His fingers tapped on his computer tablet. “Have you been feeling tired recently, more than usual even though you’ve been careful not to push too hard?”
“Yes.”
“Extreme fever and chills when you heal, and when you don’t?”
“Yes.”
“The pain is chronic and the nausea is persistent, even when you haven’t extended your empathic healing powers?”
Danyael nodded.
Abd-al shook his head, his expression grim. “Next time, get help earlier, though in this case, I’m not sure how early detection could have helped.” He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “Danyael, you have cancer. T-cell-prolymphocytic leukemia. Symptoms include—”
“Fatigue, fever, chills, pain, and nausea,” Danyael completed. He turned his face away from Zara’s searching stare and exhaled, the sound jagged. The cancer symptoms had been buried, disguised behind the physical cost of empathic healing. Disbelief plowed through him. His perfectly cultivated equilibrium quivered from the concurrent assault of shock and denial, but through sheer willpower, he quenched the panic and fear. Information…he needed information. He could fall apart later. “What’s my prognosis?”
Abd-al sighed, more motion than sound. “T-PLL is aggressive, you know that, and yours is advanced. Without intervention, I’d say six to eight weeks, and that’s assuming you’re not wearing yourself out working at the clinic.”
“And my treatment options?”
“I don’t know,” Abd-al confessed. “T-PLL is hard to treat, and the advanced state of your cancer rules out most forms of chemotherapy. Gene replacement therapy is probably your best shot, but you’d need a fairly precise genetic match—”
Zara cut in. “The council has healers. Can’t they heal him?”
“Most healers can’t handle cancers—”
“Danyael does, all the time,” Zara said.
“Danyael is exceptional. Few healers can repair cellular and nuclear damage; certainly none in the council.”
“How close of a genetic match would he need?” she asked.
“At a minimum, 50 percent for a shot at success, though nothing’s guaranteed, not even at 99 percent.” Abd-al returned his attention to Danyael. “The fact that you’re a mutant significantly complicates the procedure. Gene therapy will change your cells at a genetic level, and there’s no way to predict how gene therapy will affect your empathic powers.”
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world
to lose them,” Danyael noted with a wry smile.
“No, but you could lose your exquisite control over them, which would be far worse than just losing them.”
Zara glanced at Danyael. “But if that’s the only way…”
Abd-al nodded. “I think it is, if you want to live.” His dark-eyed gaze darted between Zara and Danyael. “I’ll leave you two to talk it over. Danyael, Alex wanted me to assure you that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Regardless of your treatment decision, I’ll prescribe painkillers and anti-nausea medication. They’ll alleviate most of your symptoms and keep you comfortable.” With a final nod of his head, Abd-al left the hospital suite.
Zara did not wait until the door closed behind the doctor. “How can you stay so calm?” she demanded.
“How is panicking going to help?” Danyael countered.
She shook her head. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s cancer. People get cancer all the time. Trust me, this isn’t a conspiracy on the part of the universe to wreck my life.”
“But after you’ve come so far…” She pressed her lips together and looked away.
Were those tears glistening in her eyes? Startled by Zara’s emotional response, Danyael reached out and brushed away a single tear that escaped and rolled down her cheek.
His touch yanked her back into her abrasive personality. She shook his hand off like a skittish foal. “Luke would be a perfect genetic match, of course.”
Luke Winter was the child Lucien Winter, Danyael’s former best friend, had cloned from Danyael’s genes. Luke was a perfect genetic match, but one thing stood in the way: Lucien. Danyael shook his head. “Luke is a year old. I can’t put him through a bone marrow extraction—”
“I can.”
“Lucien would never permit it.”
“Oh, I think he would, if you let me do the asking.”
“You don’t threaten people into making a donation—especially not for something as personal as their cells and their genes.”
“I would,” she said. “What about Laura? She’s a 50 percent genetic match.”
Damn. He turned his face away.
Zara caught him by his chin and turned his face to her. “You look away only when you’re bracing for a lie. What is it?”
He had envisioned many scenarios in which he would tell her the truth, but his imagination had evidently not been up to the task. He had never imagined telling her the truth under such strained circumstances. The words caught in his throat. He swallowed hard and forced them out. “Laura’s not my daughter.”
“What?” Zara’s jaw dropped. “But five paternity tests confirmed that you’re her father. You’ve been paying child support—”
“I know what the tests said, and I can’t explain them, but we’ve never had sex.”
“But that night…”
“You believe I raped you. I didn’t. You wanted Galahad, not me. I can keep my hands off a woman when I know she wants someone else—even if that person looks like me.”
“But I didn’t imagine the best sex of my life.”
“I touched your emotions, but not your body.”
“Bullshit.” She snapped out the word, her violet eyes narrowed and glittering with fury.
“You were disoriented from halothane that night; I have no control over what you imagine.”
“You lied to me.”
“I told you the truth. When you found me with the Mutant Assault Group, I told you that I wasn’t her father.”
Her eyes widened. Did she recall, too, the conversation in her cell after the Mutant Assault Group had taken her and Galahad into custody? She must have, because her face relaxed. In her eyes, cold calculation replaced hot anger. “You never mentioned it again after that. Not even when the judge slapped you with child support and a year of back payments. Why?”
He exhaled. “It was something Galahad said after I spoke to you.”
She sat on the bed, within arm’s reach of him, but did not touch him. “What did he say?”
“That the intense media scrutiny on Laura faded when the paternity tests indicated that I, and not he, was Laura’s father.”
“You did this for Laura?”
“And for you. You wanted to believe that I was her father.”
“So you let me believe a lie.” Her brisk tone turned sultry, a warning.
Danyael shrugged, a careless motion that belied the dull ache, impervious to painkillers, which lodged in his chest. “Lucien once said that sometimes lies are easier to live with. If you wanted the lie, who was I to force the truth on you?”
Zara shot to her feet. She flung her arms out, nearly striking him. “‘Who was I?’ You inserted yourself into Laura’s life, into my life—”
He cut off her tirade with a quiet confession. “I wanted the lie too. I wanted you and Laura. It seemed the only way I could ever have you.”
Her violet eyes widened, and the expression in them was both stunned and vulnerable. Had he ever seen Zara speechless? Not that he could recall. He reached out to her, but caught himself before he made contact. She had pulled away too many times before, and his ego could only handle so much rejection.
The silence stretched between them until she broke it, the heels of her boots tapping against the tiles as she strode out the door.
Danyael cursed under his breath. His hands clenched into fists. Damn. Damn it all to hell…
~*~
Danyael rested for another half hour; he did not think he could spare more time. Bracing himself, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and waited, eyes closed, until the dizziness passed. His crutch was propped against the wall, out of reach. Gritting his teeth, he stood, balanced on one leg, and hobbled forward. He had just positioned his crutch under his arm when the door opened and Alex Saunders walked in.
Alex’s pace was slow, his stride heavy. The director-general—an alpha telepath and precognitive—was still built like the championship wrestler he had once been, but his hair, cropped short, and his neat beard were streaked with gray. His smile was genial, but his expression in his eyes guarded. “Leaving so soon?”
“I have to get back to work.”
“Did Abd-al not explain to you the dangers of pushing your body too hard, especially given your situation?”
Danyael shrugged. “Live or die, the bills have to get paid, and gene therapy is expensive.”
“That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” Alex gestured at the lounge area tucked in a corner of the hospital suite. “Will you sit?”
Since Alex had been kind enough to open with politeness instead of threats, Danyael complied. Alex waited until Danyael claimed the armchair before lowering himself onto the couch. “We’ve been monitoring you, Danyael. I’m sure you know that. You’re one of the world’s most powerful alpha empaths, and you don’t have the luxury of privacy.”
Danyael said nothing.
“I know you want nothing to do with the council, and I’ve done my best to respect your decision.” Alex looked pained. “When you went to Nelson Harris to schedule the amputation, it was all I could do not to interfere. We both know the council healers could have healed you. In fact, they want to help. You have many friends, whether or not you know it, or care. You’re a fighter, Danyael. I don’t doubt your will to survive, but this…this newest crisis is beyond you. You’ll have enough difficulty finding a donor. Paying for gene therapy—”
“I may not be able to afford gene therapy but I can’t afford the council’s favors either.”
“Danyael, we can help. We want to help.”
He looked away, a bitter smile twisting his lips. “You need stronger psychic shields, Alex. I can sense the lie. What is the trap that you want me to walk into?”
Alex shook his head, the gesture sad and slow. “We need you to bring Galahad in.” He slid a tablet across the coffee table.
Danyael picked up the tablet and perused the article as Alex continued speaking. “You know Senator Sullivan’s daug
hter, don’t you?”
“Yes, Chloe. We dated briefly when we were at Harvard University.” Danyael’s brow furrowed. “What does Galahad have to do with the senator’s death? The article specifically says that he died of smoke inhalation.”
“John Sullivan was one of Galahad’s genetic donors, and the twenty-fifth of thirty donors to die in the past three years since Zara freed Galahad from Pioneer Labs. We don’t have physical evidence to tie Galahad to any of their deaths—”
“Yet you’ve judged him guilty based on circumstantial evidence.”
Alex winced. “You must understand. We have an obligation to investigate and to keep his surviving donors safe. If he’s guilty, if he is indeed hunting down his donors, you’re the only one of the five remaining donors who can stop him. No one else stands a chance against the epitome of perfection.”
“I’m surprised you think I do.”
“No one else can kill with a touch.”
Danyael’s dark eyes flashed. “I will not be an assassin for the council.”
A flicker of motion drew his attention to the door. Zara lounged against the doorframe, her pose seemingly indolent, but her eyes were narrow slits.
Alex extended his hand to Danyael, as if to beseech him to stay. “We will cover the cost of gene therapy—”
“Not interested.” Danyael pushed to his feet and reached for his crutch.
“Don’t be a fool.” Zara’s voice was low and sultry, a voice that could leave a man breathless with anticipation. The assassin was clearly in a foul mood. Her husky “porn-star” voice typically kicked in moments before she sent a blade into a heart or a bullet into a brain. “You’re almost out of time, and you’re out of options.”
Danyael shook his head and turned back to Alex. “What will you do to him if I bring him in?”
“He’ll be held in custody until we gather enough evidence to convict him or clear him.”
“I heard that once before.” Bitterness crept into his voice despite his efforts to modulate his tone.
Alex stood up too. “Galahad’s situation is different from yours.”