For the Power (For the Blood Book 2)

by Debbie Cassidy

  The door behind us closed with a whoosh.

  “Welcome to Genesis,” a mechanical voice said. “Seven life forms detected. Please step up to the panel and place your thumb to the glass.”

  “Okay. Now what is this?” Kira asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Jace said. “It can’t be for identification purposes, because if it is, we’re fucked.”

  “There’s only one way to find out.” I stepped up to the panel and pressed my thumb to it. There was a sharp sting that had me pulling away from the glass. “Shit, it stabbed me.”

  The mechanical voice greeted me again. “Blood analysis in progress.”

  “Checking for the virus?” Logan suggested.

  “Yeah, that makes sense.” I sucked on my thumb to soothe the sting.

  “I’ll go next,” Logan said, stepping up so he was abreast of me.

  His arm brushed mine as he reached for the panel, but before he could make contact the door swished open.

  “Okay, that was strange,” Elias said. “Doesn’t it want to test the rest of us?”

  He had a point. But we’d come this far and there was no going back, because without this opportunity, there was nowhere to go.

  I crossed the threshold into the corridor beyond, white and clean and gleaming. Clinical and fresh like the hospital wing at the compound. It even had the antiseptic smell to it.

  “Welcome to Genesis, please follow the lights,” the mechanical voice said.

  Lights?

  The bulb above us switched to green, and then the next and the next. Okay, that light. We followed the green light as it skipped from bulb to bulb, down the corridor without any windows or doors, and to a lift, wide open and welcoming.

  “Please enter the lift.”

  Was there a hint of excitement to the mechanical tone now? No. How could anything mechanical get excited? Unless … Unless it wasn’t mechanical? The frown on Ash’s face as we crammed into the lift echoed my disquiet. The Fang remained close to me, his breath stirring the hair at my crown.

  “I said it twice and I’ll say it again,” Kira said. “I don’t like this.”

  The lift doors closed, and my stomach did a flip as we began to descend. Shit, how far down were we headed? I reached for Ash’s hand, and he wrapped his fingers around mine and tugged me closer. Kira’s disquiet was contagious, because now my gut was sending all kinds of beware signals to my brain. But Dad wouldn’t have sent me here if it was dangerous. I blew out a breath, gave Ash’s hand a squeeze, and then let go to signal I was okay.

  The lift came to a shuddering halt, and the doors opened directly into what looked like a high-tech lab. Sleek chrome and glass and equipment that I had no names for filled the space.

  “Bloody hell.” Jace was the first to exit, walking into the room to examine a machine to our left.

  Kira stepped out behind him. Logan went next, then Sage and Ash. Elias waited, sweeping a hand out to indicate I go first. There was that smile on his lips again, secretive and knowing, as if he was hiding something I was meant to know. I brushed by him into the lab and felt him right behind me. The hairs on the nape of my neck quivered at the proximity, and I hastily walked farther into the room to stand by Sage.

  “Hello?” I tilted my chin, looking for more cameras. “Anyone here?”

  “Well, well, well, haven’t you grown.” A figure stepped out as if from nowhere.

  Brown hair, spectacles, and a lopsided smile greeted me. My heart slammed against my ribcage so hard it would be impossible for the others not to hear it.

  I took a stumbling step toward the figure. “Dad? How … How is this possible?”

  He made an ‘o’ with his mouth and then winced. “I’m afraid there’s been some confusion, Eva. I’m not your father, at least not the one that raised you, although I am him in every other way.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “He’s a clone,” Jace said softly.

  The man that looked like my father glanced across at Jace and pointed a finger. “Bingo. Well done. Somebody give the boy a lollipop. Bravo, Jeeves.”

  What the fuck?

  He rubbed his hands together. “I’ve been waiting forever, and now you’re here in all your glory, bringing your wonderful blood. Fantastic.”

  My blood? “What are you talking about? What about my blood.”

  He pressed his lips together and squeezed his eyes shut. “Wait, wait. I need to rein it in. Frederick was very clear—give the background first.”

  “My dad spoke to you?” I hated the tremor in my voice.

  “Your dad was the one that made me. He cloned himself so that he could work faster, more efficiently on the cure. This was our haven. Our lab for most of the time. He would flit between here and the Foundation, leaving me to continue our work in secret.” He placed a hand to his mouth and giggled. “They never knew what we were up to. He didn’t want them to know. He didn’t trust their motives or their methods.” He walked around a counter, fingers trailing over the sterile surface. “It was right here that we finally came across the right combination.”

  “You synthesized a cure here?” Jace asked.

  He blinked rapidly, his gaze tracking to me, setting in motion a flutter of crazy butterflies in my stomach because my puzzler’s brain was putting together the pieces and not liking the picture.

  “We didn’t synthesize the cure,” Dad’s clone said. “But we created the organism that would eventually do so.” He smiled at me. “We created you, Eva.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We created you, Eva.

  Created Eva.

  Created …

  The world tilted on its axis and sturdy hands grabbed me, steadying me and pulling me to the heat of a familiar chest. Ash. Oh, thank God.

  Created.

  “Eva?” Logan’s face swam before my eyes. “Come on. Snap out of it.”

  He sounded annoyed, but that was his customary setting, and right now it was exactly what I needed to knock the shock out of my system and plant me back into the driver’s seat. This had to be a mistake.

  Get it together, Eva.

  I tugged the key from around my neck, snapping the leather to free it from my body, and held it out. “This is the key to the cure. This key unlocks it. Dad told me to bring it here.”

  The clone’s smile was reflective. “The drive to unravel, the need for knowledge, and a noble heart which will need to be circumvented—we knew about all these traits when we put you together.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “I’m sorry. I suppose it must be a strange notion to accept. The key was always meant as a talisman to get you to me, an initial identifier if, and only if, Frederick perished. His goal was to make sure you lived and teach you to survive. He was to teach you to trust no one and to fight tooth and nail to get here. You made it, but not alone. You came surrounded by allies.” He shook his head. “Nature prevailed, it seemed.”

  None of this was making sense, or maybe it was, but I didn’t want it to.

  “You were our last hope,” the clone said. “A prayer. And up until now, just a few moments ago, I wasn’t even sure our prayers had been answered. But the proof is here, in your blood. I infected the sample we took at the doors and the antibodies appeared immediately to eradicate the virus. We have it. We have the essential ingredient to create a cure.”

  The cure. The thing we’d come this far for, the thing that had been with me all along. My blood. Mine.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and fought back the rising panic. “What am I?”

  His brow crinkled. “Wait, did I not say?”

  He tapped his chin with an index finger as if running the previous few minutes of conversation through his mind. How long had he been here alone? At least as long as I’d been alive, that was for sure. Almost nineteen years.

  He made an apologetic face. “No, no, I didn’t say. So sorry. You’re a chimera, Eva. The combinations of several zygotes from differ
ent supernatural species. Your foundation was human and the rest …”

  I held up a hand. “Stop. What am I exactly?”

  “Oh, um, let me see. Djinn, a dash of Vladul, some Fang, and quite a bit of fey. We combined it all and wrapped it in a human package. Frederick created a DNA marker to stabilize it all, and voila, we had you.” He smiled. “Frederick was a genius. I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to create a marker to stabilize the DNA, but he did it. He found a solution, and he made it work. We created you, the perfect machine to synthesize a cure.”

  “She’s not a fucking machine,” Jace said.

  I looked across at him in surprise to see him practically vibrating with anger. He never lost his temper, not so far as I’d seen, but right now he looked as if he wanted to slam a fist into the clone’s face.

  The clone held up both hands. “I apologize, of course. It’s been a long few years alone, and, um, I suppose social etiquette isn’t really my forte.”

  Jace simmered down slightly, his shoulders unknotting, but his fists remained clenched. “Go on.”

  “Right, okay. You have to understand that all other experimentation at the Foundation had failed.”

  “Yes, we know,” Logan said. “You’re looking at three of the failures.”

  “Oh, really? Oh, how fascinating. Yes, yes. I would love to, um …”

  Logan glared at him.

  The clone winced. “Right … probably not the … Anyway, every hybrid we’d created and then infected with the virus perished. Eva was our last hope.” He focused on me with my dad’s warm brown eyes, except they weren’t my dad’s eyes, they belonged to a version of him that had never known me. “We extracted a sample of your blood because we didn’t want to infect you directly; no, we weren’t going to replicate the Foundation’s horrific practices. You were a person now, and we were determined to treat you as such.”

  He sounded like he was reciting a quote. One he’d reiterated to himself on many occasions. Were they his words or my father’s?

  “We infected the blood with the virus,” he continued. “The virus and your blood cells interacted, and we saw the beginnings of a possible antibody, but in the end, the virus won. Frederick ran some tests and hypothesized that time was what you needed. Time for your body to mature, for your immune system to grow stronger. Time for the genes we’d built you with to begin to have an effect on your overall makeup.”

  “What do you mean? Take effect?” Sage asked.

  The clone’s eyes darkened in the way that happens before someone is about to deliver bad news, and my stomach clenched in anticipation. What more? What more could he throw at me.

  “The marker we placed inside Eva to stabilize her DNA was always a temporary measure. The combination of genes we used wasn’t meant to exist, and nature, as always, will take its course and destroy any true abominations.” He broke eye contact with Sage to settle on me again and my mouth was suddenly dry. “We’d synthesized you from scratch. You weren’t born from a template, you weren’t birthed from two templates, you were a patchwork of supernatural power.”

  “Spit it out,” Logan said.

  “We calculated the lifespan of the stabilizer as nineteen to twenty years. In between this time, Frederick was sure your blood would be ready to fight off the virus, as the stabilizer would have begun to break down, allowing the other genes to influence your blood. I’ve studied your bloodwork, and the marker is indeed dissolving; you have maybe a month left before it breaks down and the supernatural genes inside you begin their war for dominion over your body.”

  “And then what?” I forced the words out, knowing what was coming and hating myself for needing to hear it spelled out.

  “And then … It will kill you.”

  His words were like stones settling over my heart, and a strange numbness spread through me.

  “She’s dying?” Logan’s voice rose an octave in disbelief. “No. No. Fuck you. You can do something. You can fix this.”

  “I’m sorry.” The clone backed up. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Ash, no.” Jace stepped into Ash’s path and pressed a palm to his chest. “Dammit, hurting him won’t help Eva.”

  Dying. I was dying.

  But you can save everyone else before you go. Don’t fall at the last hurdle, sweetheart. You can do this.

  Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you.

  Anger flared in my chest, fury toward the man who’d raised me, who’d lied to me, who’d created me, and for what? To be used and discarded. To be a machine to synthesize a cure. To be nothing but what was in my blood? In that moment, there was nothing but hatred toward that man.

  But he’s gone, Tobias whispered. And you are what you are. Think of all the lives, Eva.

  His voice in my head was the best of me, the noble heart, the warrior, and the lover. His voice was the hidden parts of me that had been denied all these years by another voice, the voice of a liar, the voice of a man who’d claimed to love me with all his heart knowing I was nothing more than a collection of cells sewn together for a fate that I would never see the benefits of.

  Ash tried to sidestep Jace, and Sage joined him, advancing toward the clone of my dad as if hurting him would change anything.

  “Don’t.” I didn’t raise my voice, but the guys halted immediately. “Jace is right, hurting him won’t save me.” I fixed my attention on my dad’s clone. “How long will it take to make enough of the vaccine using my blood?”

  He smiled softly. “I can see Frederick did a great job of raising a noble, brave woman.”

  Brave? Fuck, he had no idea. My insides were quivering, and the urge to scream was trapped at the base of my throat, but yeah, we’d go with brave for now.

  I blinked back the heat gathering behind my eyes. I’d be damned if I’d break down now. “We should get to work, but before you do you need to know that the virus may have mutated. Humans are turning Feral. We’ll need to go out and find one, get you a blood sample so you can extract the mutated virus.”

  “No need.” He puffed out his chest. “I have what we need. I’ve been taking short excursions outside, sunlight and fresh air, you know.” He ducked his head. “Frederick said not to, but …”

  He’d disregarded the warning and taken a sojourn that could have gotten him killed. It could have meant there was no one to synthesize the fucking cure, and all for a little sunshine. But from the look on his face, he knew all this.

  My smile was strained. “It’s okay, because you’re okay. I assume you came across a Feral human?”

  “Yes. I was attacked two days ago. The Feral had made it halfway up the mountain. I put him out of his misery and took some samples. I’ll need to make two batches of the cure, one to combat the original virus and hopefully one that can take care of the mutated version.”

  I exhaled in relief. “Good. Real good.”

  He winced. “There is one other teensy thing.”

  “What now?”

  He wrung his hands. “So, just to clarify, the vaccine is also a cure. The reason the Feral are, well, feral, is because the virus is inside them mutating their genes and blocking access to parts of their brain that would give them higher reasoning. The cure will eradicate the virus and act as a vaccine for those that are uninfected, creating immunity. But the quickest, surest way to dispense it is as an airborne agent. It was what the Foundation had planned, and they have the drones to do it. Hundreds of drones preprogramed with routes. They have the facility to replicate the cure a hundredfold and—”

  “Wait,” Sage interrupted. “Are you saying you can’t make enough of the cure here?”

  “That’s exactly what he’s saying,” Jace said in disgust.

  “This facility is a small research base. I just don’t have the equipment. But the Foundation—"

  “Is overrun with Vladul,” Logan said. “We can’t just waltz in there and ask to borrow their equipment.”

  The guys were in rage mode—their stances, their tone, the very air crackle
d with it, and it really wasn’t to do with the possibility of having to go back to the Foundation. No, this was to do with my imminent demise.

  Laughter, totally inappropriate and uncalled for, clawed at my throat. Dammit. Not now. Instead, I focused on the plan— on my blood, which was the cure; on Elias, who was our way into the Foundation; and on Sage, who was our armory.

  Time for a reality check. “We were going to infiltrate the Foundation anyway. We’ll just have to do it sooner.”

  “Without the manpower curing the Feral would have given us.” Sage shook his head.

  “We have the Claws,” Kira said. “And there are two Fang bases we can contact for help.”

  Sage rubbed his jaw. “Maybe.”

  “And you have me,” Elias said. “I can map the place out for you. I can get in and disable the security systems.”

  We could do this. They knew we had a real shot.

  Dying.

  No time to think about that. “Let’s get to work. I need you to make as much of the cure as you can. We need to make sure we have backups in case.”

  The clone nodded. “I’ll take some more blood, and then you can rest. It will take an hour or so to make the cure.”

  I rolled up my sleeve. “Take what you need.”

  Frederick, my father, had named his clone Jamie, and now Jamie had my blood.

  He pocketed the vials and smiled. “The door to the left will take you to the cabins; we have five, so you may have to share, but you should get some rest.” He patted my shoulder, and I resisted the urge to pull away. “The more you exert yourself, the faster the deterioration will occur.”

  His matter-of-fact tone made my heart ache.

  “Thanks for the warning.” There was no hiding the bitterness to my tone.

  I closed my eyes and reined it in, willing numbness to take its place, because why rage about something that I had no control over?

  Jamie retreated through a door at the back of the lab, leaving me with my back to the guys.