Conception

by Sarah McCarty

  “Let’s keep it believable.”

  He brushed his lips over her hair. “This is my story. You will let me tell it as I saw it.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes.”

  Another violent shudder shook her. He suspected her lack of argument came from lack of strength. “There was a moment when I could only stare in wonder, and then I knew I had found my mate.”

  “Weren’t you disappointed?”

  Deuce had to ponder for a minute what she could possibly think would disappoint him. “That you were human?” He could not tell if she was nodding or shaking again, but he took the abrupt movement of her head as agreement. He did not know how to explain it to her, the wonder of finding his other half, of knowing she existed, of years of yearning that had faded to despair only to have hopelessness obliterated with the blinding proof of her existence. “No.”

  Eden moaned and convulsed. He caught her head before it could snap back. He checked her vitals. Her respiration was growing shallower. Her blood pressure dropping.

  Bohdan. Come now.

  Deuce stroked her back, untangling his fingers from her hair as they caught. He had not allowed her to ingest too much. She should not be reacting this way.

  Bohdan entered the room on a glide of power.

  He reached for Eden immediately. His hands almost swallowed her rib cage. Edie cried out and flinched away. Her instinctive aversion to another’s touch raised Deuce’s beast.

  “Release her.” The words slurred through the baring of his fangs. Whether he was baring them at his brother, or the loss he could feel looming, Deuce was not sure. He only knew that Eden could not bear to be touched by another, so there would be no touching.

  Bohdan eyed him warily as he withdrew his hands and pulled away. “I cannot help her if I cannot touch her.”

  Deuce clenched his teeth, fighting back the need to strike out. He nodded. Bohdan slipped his hands beneath the comforter. Eden’s resistance was immediate.

  The shake of her head was an extension of her next shudder.

  “Do not defy me in this!” He thought she muttered “Bastard”. It was hard to tell through the chattering of her teeth. She collapsed at the end of the next shudder, her head rolling with exhaustion. He nodded to Bohdan. “Do it.”

  Bohdan’s face took on the surreal composure it always did when he entered another. Deuce measured the minutes the probe took in the shudders that racked Edie’s small frame.

  Bohdan pulled back, his hands lingering on Edie’s bare back. “She needs blood.”

  “You said blood would kill her.”

  “It will, but she does not have enough now to sustain the change that is commencing.”

  “She will not die!”

  The look Bohdan turned on him was sad. More than any other of the Chosen, Bohdan knew the pain that came from losing a mate. He only lived because the union had not been completed. He existed each day knowing his one chance had come and gone. He now faced forever alone. “If we cannot balance her blood, there will be no saving her.”

  “Then we will balance her blood.” There was no other choice. Deuce raked his nail across his chest. Blood flowed freely. Horror rounded Edie’s eyes at her body’s immediate reaction to the sight and smell. He registered her disgust. She saw her need as something evil. Not understanding the beauty of their union because he had not had time to ease her into it. The hot liquid spilled down over his abdomen, pooling in the hair at the base of his hungry cock before seeping to his thighs. A desperate hunger overrode the horror on Edie’s face. Everything in him commanded that he satisfy it. He reached for her as she lunged forward.

  Bohdan grabbed her upper arms and pulled her back out of his reach. Edie fought his hold. Her pain and desperation flooded Deuce in a crushing wave. Energy gathered in and around him, seething with the rage coiling within. The growl sprang from his gut. “Let her go!”

  Bohdan shook his head, his demeanor calm as always, unswayed by Deuce’s rage. “It cannot be that way.” He nodded toward Deuce’s chest. “Close the wound.”

  Deuce did not want to close the wound. He wanted to bring his mate to him, strengthen her in the way the Chosen had been making their mates strong for ages. By giving her his blood.

  Edie lunged again. Bohdan held her by simply crossing his arms over her chest from above. As he pulled her back against him, his hair fell over her chest, cocooning her in an intimacy that had everything in Deuce tensing in outrage. “Let her go.”

  Bohdan shook his head, his hair brushed across Edie’s breasts in an intimate caress she should know from no one but him.

  Deuce bared his fangs. He curved his nails into his palms against the rolling blackness of all-consuming rage. “I cannot promise not to kill you, if you do not.”

  Bohdan’s response was a sweep of calm. Close the wound, brother.

  The order echoed in his mind, the force of compulsion behind it. From between Bohdan’s arms, Edie watched him, her expression frantic, her face ghostly pale against the black of Bohdan’s hair. Her breath came in rasping pants, not as deep as they should be. Too fast, too hard. She was dying. She needed help. He had to do what was right for her.

  Bohdan’s order came again, finding and weaving along a shimmer of logic, Close your wound or she dies.

  Deuce tamped down the animalistic rage, struggled for, and then found reason. He closed the wound. His instincts howled a protest. Edie moaned in despair.

  Bohdan cautiously straightened. “You are yourself?”

  “Yes.” Barely.

  He felt the touch of Bohdan’s mind as he ascertained the truth of the statement before he lifted his arms. “Then take her.”

  Edie leapt for him. Deuce caught her, some of the turmoil inside abating as his flesh made contact with hers. He turned her so her back was to his chest, closing his ears to her despairing moans. They could not both be acting on instinct at the same time. Carefully, he reduced her heart rate and once again the adrenaline pumping into her system as he folded her back against him. Her skin slid across his as she tried to turn. Despite the gravity of the moment, his body sang with the erotic pleasure.

  Bohdan reached for the bag he’d brought into the room.

  Deuce bent to whisper in Edie’s ear. “Be easy, my mate.”

  Edie showed no sign of quieting. Bohdan pulled a syringe from the bag.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Deuce asked.

  “We’re going to give her blood.”

  Deuce eyed the needle as Bohdan approached. “Why cannot I feed her as is custom?”

  “Because we cannot control the amount she will take, plus this is how they did it, so it is what her body is used to.” He jerked his chin at his arm. “I need to get at the inside of your elbow.”

  Deuce turned his arm. Bohdan wasted no time sliding the ugly needle in. Deuce watched his blood fill the syringe. “The stabbing with needles is barbaric.”

  Bohdan looked up. “Not to humans.”

  “So you say, but my mate is looking less favorably on the needle than am I.”

  Which was true. A new emotion welled beneath the hunger and desperation. It did not take deep delving to define it. Panic.

  “Edie?”

  She was staring at the syringe with horror. “Oh God, no!”

  Bohdan pulled it from Deuce’s arm and took her wrist gently in his hand, turning her inner arm up.

  Edie tilted her head and glanced at him, the terror in her eyes beyond reason for the small procedure. “Please, don’t let him do this.”

  “It is already done,” he whispered, merging his mind to the edges of hers.

  Nothing prepared him for the agonizing burn that shot through her body as Bohdan depressed the syringe. The pain swelled in a knot and then spread like acid along her veins. Her agonized scream ricocheted around the room.

  The door hit the wall and Harley and Dak broke into the room, guns down and ready to fire. Deuce shook his head and threw up an illusionary wall between th
em as Edie reared back and screamed again.

  Harley’s “Son of a bitch!” was as hot as Dak’s “What the hell are you doing to her?” was cold. Deuce felt the bite of the anger both projected. The ugly suspicion.

  He gritted his teeth against the agony he pulled from Edie to himself. The pain engulfed her, leaving her no strength for defense, facilitating his entry.

  “Do not interfere,” he warned the approaching Others.

  “Unless you speak up fast,” Harley countered, raising the muzzle of the machine gun, “I’ll do a hell of a lot more than interfere.”

  Dak, with the calm patience of his Pride ancestry, pushed the muzzle down. “Explanations before threats.”

  Bohdan retreated from Edie’s mind, his expression mirroring the fury Deuce could feel rolling off him in waves.

  “What did we do wrong?” Deuce asked, wrestling with the pain, and Edie’s efforts to detect his presence. He had to drop the wall between himself and the Others.

  Bohdan’s expression went carefully blank. He capped the empty syringe. “Nothing.”

  “She’s in agony.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said this was how they did it.”

  “I did not press deep enough for emotional memory for fear of instigating another bleed.”

  Deuce put it together at the same time that everyone else did. Their curses cut through the last echo of Edie’s scream, overriding the whimpered notes as he found the path to block the last of the pain from her consciousness. He closed his eyes as the agony spread to Edie’s chest and seized her lungs, taking it into himself. He did not have time for swearing as he fought to keep her heart from stopping at the shock sweeping through her. He felt the touch of Bohdan’s presence and then Edie’s heart beat again. Once, twice and then steadily.

  “I’m calling a hunt,” Harley said when he stopped swearing.

  Deuce locked Edie’s life functions to his, leaving the healing to Bohdan, raising his heart rate to match a normal human one. He opened his eyes. Both men were in battle stance, frustration and rage shimmering around them in a red haze of contained energy.

  “The Pride will join you,” Dak said with a calm that was belied by the sharp claws extending around the stock of the machine gun. Others only lost control of the change when under extreme emotion.

  Deuce lifted Edie’s lax body into his arms, balling his rage into a cold, hard knot to be drawn upon later. “The Chosen will exact the revenge on behalf of my mate.”

  Edie’s head lolled to the side as he stood. Her slender neck appeared too fragile to bear what she had. Her pulse shimmered under her skin in a bare thread of life. He would kill them all. His revenge would be long, bloody, and the men who had harmed Edie would suffer well into their death throes. That the Coalition had subjected her to that agony over and over while she lay helpless was inconceivable. He crossed to the bed. How she had survived it, he did not know.

  He laid her on the red sheets, away from the bloodstains. He turned the comforter and covered her with a clean section, keeping her unconscious. He would not allow her to wake until the pain was gone. He brushed a curl out of her face, rubbing his fingers over the silken strand as it wrapped around his finger, binding him to her.

  “You cannot kill them.” As always, Bohdan was the voice of reason.

  Deuce spared him a glance as he stepped up beside him. “You cannot stop me.”

  “You cannot kill them,” Bohdan repeated with that same irrefutable calm that demanded attention. Deuce dragged his gaze away from Edie, quelling the panic that said to do so sentenced her to death, that she only lived because he held her here.

  What he saw shocked him. Bohdan was at the edge of his strength. Healers were the strongest of the Chosen. They had to be for the effort it took to restore heath. But from the pallor of Bohdan’s skin, keeping Eden alive had drained him. As the sun was upon them, he would not be able to replenish until nightfall. Deuce touched Edie’s cheek, the agony whipping through her body tearing at him. The situation was bad. Very bad.

  “Give me one goddamn reason why we can’t gut the whole lousy bunch,” Harley snarled, fangs flashing.

  Bohdan’s gaze met Deuce’s, his calm soothing over the violence of the Pack leader’s question. “She bore a child of the Chosen. They made it happen. They cannot die until we know how.”

  It was a very good reason.

  Chapter Nine

  Eden awoke in darkness. Complete and utter darkness. Restrained to the bed, for one horrifying moment she thought she was back in the lab. Except for the darkness. The lab was never dark. It was always lit in sterile white unrelenting light. She tested her restraints. They seemed to be limited to her torso and thighs. Unevenly so. A quick exploration revealed a heavily muscled arm and thigh draped across her. Very heavy appendages that lay unnaturally still.

  “Deuce?” She couldn’t think of anyone other than Deuce who would dare crawl into bed with her as if it were his right. He probably justified it with his claim of being her mate. He didn’t answer. Didn’t move. She lifted his arm—definitely dead weight. Eden elbowed him in the side. No grunt marked the impact. Now that she listened, she couldn’t hear anything at all. Not even a breath.

  She slid from the bed, wrestling free of the covers, her skin crawling with an awful suspicion. His arm hit the bed with a thump just before her feet hit the floor. Was he dead? Was this another of her grandfather’s sick games?

  Eden backed up a step, disoriented in the dark, and bumped into something sharp. Wood clattered against wood and the corner of something gouged her hip. A table. The unmistakable sound of a lamp teetering had her spinning around. She caught it, fumbling up the curve of the base until she found the switch. With a prayer it would work, she turned it. Soft yellow light filled the room, illuminating the massive sleigh bed that dominated the large space and the lethal looking swords displayed on all the walls. No doubt about it. This was definitely a man’s bedroom.

  And no doubt about it, it was definitely a naked man sprawled on his stomach on the gleaming burgundy comforter, his cheek resting on his forearm, the long, thick length of his hair obscuring his face. Nothing could disguise who it was, however. There was only one man she knew who had that perfect build setting off the thick ropes of muscle that started at impossibly broad shoulders and flowed inward to the base of his spine in deep, shadowed channels that narrowed until one by one they blended into a single point just above the tight, hard rise of his buttocks. Eden followed the channel below with her eyes as it curved with the angle of his bent leg, dipping into an inviting shadow beneath, finding the darker hue of his heavy balls. Round and slightly compressed, they lay against his thigh and the bed in a tempting display. Her fingers twitched and saliva flooded her mouth. Deuce.

  He must have changed the bedding while she slept. The golden cast to his skin glowed against the deep maroon, while the stark white sheets accentuated the power in the arm stretched across them, as if reaching for her. Except he wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving? Between her getting out of bed and the sudden influx of light, he should be waking up. Eden leaned forward and tapped the back of his hand.

  He didn’t move. She opened her hand over his. His flesh was cold, lifeless, without the vitality she was so used to feeling. She stepped back, black horror devouring hope. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t see any sign of breathing. That gorgeous back lay as still as the rest of him. Crossing her hands over her chest, she gripped her upper arms. Goose bumps chased over her skin, prickling the flesh under her palms, reminding her that she was naked. Taking another step back and then another, morbidly fixated on his ribs, she waited for them to expand with signs of life. She’d taken five breaths and the man had yet to take one. Nausea welled as she fought back the sickening surety that she’d been sleeping with a corpse. Horror blended with a soul-deep pain. Deuce couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t. Digging her fingers into her upper arms, she bit her lip. She needed him. Her baby needed him.

&
nbsp; Oh God, her daughter.

  Eden wiped the tears from her eyes and turned around. She had to find her daughter. Yanking open the biggest drawer of the mahogany dresser, she found a large selection of T-shirts inside. She grabbed a blue one and yanked it on. As the hem fell over her thighs, she hauled open the next drawer. Inside were sweats and shorts. Grabbing a pair of gray sweats, she just as quickly discarded them as they were twice as tall as she needed. Tossing them aside, along with the next three pairs, she settled on a well-worn pair of athletic shorts. She dragged them on under the shirt, tugging the bunched-up folds of the shirt out of the too loose waist.

  Eden tightened the drawstring on the shorts before darting to the door. Pressing against the wall, she took three deep breaths, tried to contain the betraying rasp of her breathing, and cautiously opened the door a crack. She peeked through, and immediately gasped. Staring back at her, one brow arched in amused inquiry, was the man she’d seen in the kitchen a year ago. She fumbled for his name. One look at the gun in his hand and she remembered. Dak Lyons.

  He pushed the door open with the barrel. She leapt to the side, glancing at the bed. Deuce still hadn’t moved. Staying behind the door as it opened, she glanced around hopelessly for a weapon. The swords beckoned in a glint of light. The only ones she’d be able to reach were those on the far side of the room above the small table and chairs. The door stopped moving halfway open. Dak stepped around. His dark blond hair was longer now, but he still wore that lethal arrogance with a natural manner that did nothing to settle her nerves.

  Eden glanced at the swords again. She’d never make it to them in time. Clenching her hands, she cast another glance at the bed and blurted out, “I didn’t kill him.”

  Dak’s glance followed hers to the bed. A slight smile curved his lips and his left eyebrow quirked up. “It would serve him right if you did.”