She found a reason to snicker over that. “I don’t see you as the sort to do anything ‘willy-nilly.’ It has a whole skipping merrily through the meadow feel to it that just doesn’t suit you.” She smiled when he chuckled, lowering her attention to the injection, once again avoiding looking at him directly. Some people did that when they were going to lie. He was learning that she did it when she was going to be fearfully honest. “Morphates,” she said tensely, “those like Ambrose and most of his clan, often disgust me. They see humans as inferior domesticated animals. But unlike the way you might feel about a cat or a dog, they hold no love or fondness for human intellects and personalities. Morphates and humans look the same, appearing to be alike in most every way, and yet they know the difference instantly and react with prejudice bordering on ferocity. In some instances … even violence. It’s intolerable and they deserve to be brought down from their self-proclaimed superiority.”
“Why you, Devon?” he persisted gently. “Tell me why it has to be you.”
“Because I’m …” Liam watched her grit her teeth tightly together, her jaw clenching hard as she struggled with whatever it was she didn’t want to admit to.
But neither of them was going anywhere anytime soon, so Liam was more than willing to wait her out. She was so blunt and determined, but here she was bottled up tight and he dreaded what it was that could possibly be so hard to confess.
“How much do you know about the creation and evolution of Morphates?”
The question was unexpected. Liam looked at her with a wary sort of surprise, shifting in the bed until he had achieved something resembling an upright position. Her inquiry was tricky. She had to know the answer already, since she knew so much about his professional history. Was she fishing for data?
The idea of her working him for information flooded him with frustration. The heated irritation vanished instantly, however, as she began to stroke comforting fingers over his injured arm again.
“I know pretty much everything,” he said evasively.
“I figured you did.” She nodded grimly. “So do I. You can’t create weapons to kill and incapacitate unless you completely understand the target,” she explained needlessly.
He ought to have realized that a government contract would have given her access to a lot of secrets. Liam felt instantly crappy for suspecting her of manipulation. He counteracted the feeling by laying his hand over hers and toying with her fingers. Devon’s hands were long-fingered, capable, and graceful. While he ran his thumb over the soft contours of her knuckles, he imagined them painstakingly creating weaponry to fight a formidable enemy. An enemy that wanted her dead for daring to do such a thing.
“Very few people have a true concept of what it means to make a weapon,” she said very carefully, as if she were contemplating the impact every word would have. “There is a responsibility to it. A philosophy even.” She depressed the hypodermic of antivenin a few millimeters more. “When I created this antivenin, it was a task I took enormous satisfaction in. I believe eventually it can be refined to the point that recovery will be a mere two days if the venom is caught early enough. I’m especially glad I can use it to help you.”
It wasn’t until she turned the stark pale green beauty of her gaze directly onto him that he realized how intensely he had been waiting for it to return. There was a tenderness in her eyes that completed the meaning of her words and her gentle hands.
“Liam, when I created the weapon prototypes in the armory downstairs, I knew they would be used to threaten and possibly destroy a specific race of people. In my heart I wish they would only be used to provide protection, balance, and equalization, but I know humans too well to blind myself to the truth.”
“Yet you still made them. You made them. No one else. You saw to it that it was your hands alone that molded and crafted these weapons. Devon, I have been in this business too long not to know that that is as personal as it gets. What did the Morphates do to you that makes you want so deadly a form of vengeance?”
“No,” she sighed, the breath long and deep as he felt it rush warmly over his bare skin. “Not vengeance, Liam. A long-overdue punishment. The Morphates in question will come to heel. I swear it. If I have to pick up arms myself, they will be made to feel fear and caution. They will come to understand what it feels like, being alive just because it suits the whim of someone more powerful than they are.”
“That sounds … tyrannical,” he noted in a stunned tone. Her passion floored him. Even though she had numbed it with flat tones and even breaths, her fury went bone deep and he could feel it radiating off of her like the building energy of an impending explosion.
“Call it what you will.” She stood up suddenly, breaking all personal contact with him as abruptly as she extracted the now empty syringe. She discarded it, moving efficiently about as she checked things that didn’t need checking. Her body was tense with unspoken anger and frustration. “For all their airs of superiority, these particular Morphates are wild, undisciplined children running loose and threatening not only humans, but every future opportunity for them and others like them to be a civilized race among the other civilized races of this planet. Don’t you see? There is a war coming, Liam. And trust me when I say that without my weapons to stop them, the worst of my people will cut a swath through the very best of yours unlike anything you have ever conceived of. Humans will barely be able to blink before they will find themselves subjugated by the likes of Ambrose and his clan, used as slaves for purposes you don’t even want to envision. I know this because it already happens. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
Overcome with emotion and memories that flooded her features with horror, Devon sat down hard on the bed once again, shaking violently. He could see her hands trembling as she covered her face with them.
He sat up, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and the warning warmth of fresh blood soaking into the bandages. He reached out and grabbed her by the chin. With a hard tug he forced her face out of her hands and made her meet his hard eyes.
“What the hell do you mean by ‘my people’?”
Chapter Seven
“By Christ, Devon … are you a Morphate?”
Devon instantly lurched up off the bed, dismay at her unchecked confession written all over her. She staggered away from him, but Liam launched himself out of the bed and caught her by both arms. Unfortunately, the venom had taken its toll on his strength and his balance, and they toppled back onto the bed when both gave out on him. Liam’s IV catheter popped out of his arm under the duress of his movement, sending a fresh river of blood out from the puncture site.
He ignored that, along with everything else, and rolled Devon facedown beneath the significant weight of his body on the bed, trapping a wrist in each hand and pressing them in close to her shoulders. He might not have much in the way of strength and balance going for him, but he still had his brain, and she’d have a fine time trying to buck off a man of his size.
She wasn’t going anywhere until he was damn well ready to let her go. And that wasn’t going to happen unless she began answering the flood of furious questions running through his mind.
“Answer me right now, Devon! Are you a Morphate?”
“Get off of me!”
“Devon!”
“What if I am?” she shouted furiously, her head turning so he could see the angry flush of her cheek through a cloud of mussed hair. He felt her flex under him, her round bottom lifting up into his groin as she tried to find leverage with her knees. The contact sent a flurry of explosive input throughout his entire body that split up in two responses. One was an intense cramping of just about every muscle he had, and the other was a rush of male awareness that left his skin humming and his senses drawing all the more sharply to attention.
“What if I am a Morphate,” she demanded between gasps for breath. “Will you pull that gun on the nightstand and shoot me into vapor?”
Liam closed his eyes and gripped his teeth tightly together,
his forehead touching her shoulder for a brief moment as he tried to push down his outrage. He was breathing so hard, his body shaking with such a fury of spasms and emotion, it was a wonder he didn’t fly apart.
Instead he lifted his head and pressed a hot whisper against her ear.
“I am no murderer. And I told you before, killing is against the law. That includes the death of a Morphate … whether the law recognizes the possibility of it or not. The only reason I have not, and will not report the death of your assassin tonight is that I have sworn to my country that I won’t be the one who reveals the nature of the relationship between mercury and Morphates to the public. Explaining the assassin’s death and lack of body to the local cops would kinda go contrary to that promise. When you give me a way to incapacitate Morphates without killing them, Devon, you can bet your sweet ass that I will be using that instead of deadly force when given the choice. But since you were in such a goddamn rush to stick your neck out in public tonight without giving us the opportunity to prepare ourselves better, we had no choice in the matter.
“And if you’re implying that I’d up and blow away any Morphate that crosses my path, Ms. Candler, just because I am one of the few who know how to do so, I’m going to be forced to remind myself really, really strongly that you don’t know me well enough to realize that an implication like that would dangerously piss me off. And Devon, the last thing you want to do right now is piss me off. Are you getting that, or do I need to make the point clearer for you?”
He felt her shudder hard beneath him and he closed his eyes again briefly. He’d fantasized about feeling her shudder beneath his weight more often than he’d care to admit the past couple of days, but never had he wanted it to be in fear or anger or whatever the hell it was that she was feeling right then.
He wasn’t expecting the emotional rasp of breath she drew in, so rough that it was close to a sob.
“Morphates used to be humans,” she coughed out. “Eric Paulson created the Phoenix Project in an attempt to unlock the secrets of pushing back the aging process. He never intended on the immortality I have heard some refer to as an ‘undesirable side-effect.’ His intention had been to destroy the thousands of living results of his Phoenix Project. Discarding them just like he might have euthanized a lab full of rats that were part of a failed protocol. Only we refused to die. His undesirable side effect was immortality, and we refused to die even though he did everything from poisoning us to shooting us in the head.”
She laughed with a breathy sound of bitterness that sounded tragically painful coming from her. Liam could tell she was visiting something or someone she had been in the past. Someone far more jaded and wounded than the woman he had been coming to know.
Liam had learned all of what she had told him and much more than he’d ever wanted to know during his service. He’d had to learn about the Morphates in minute detail because he was charged with protecting humans from them. Really, it had come down to how hard and how fast a human could wound a Morphate. Wound them bad enough that they lost consciousness as their ravaged bodies regrouped. Up until his accidental encounter with a Morphate in which that creature had ended up dead.
Truly, finally dead.
He’d been treated like a hero. A messiah. All because he had solved a deadly mystery. He’d been attacked in a lab during a visit by the President of the Federated States he was protecting. He had been there, one on one, his weapon thrown across the room and nothing but bare fists and ingenuity to protect him from the rampage of a Morphate male bent on killing him and his principal. He had been grabbing blindly for something, anything to use and all he had come up with was a vial of unidentifiable fluid. He hadn’t even cared what it was, he’d only wanted the glass vial. He’d shoved it into the Morphate’s eye, ramming it home as deep as he could, the vial shattering under the pressure. He scrambled free of his attacker, intent on using the distraction to get away and find his gun or more backup. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. It was a fluke. Only a goddamn fluke. By the time he’d gotten to his weapon, the Morphate had been screaming and then … poof. Like a magic trick. Now you see him, now you don’t.
It had sickened him at the time, both the death itself and the way he had been revered afterward. All for a stupid fucking accident. It had strongly motivated him in his decision to resign to the private sector.
But that wasn’t what was at issue.
“Five thousand, two hundred and thirteen men, women, and children,” he murmured gently against her temple.
Liam dug a knee into the mattress and lifted his weight. He turned her over beneath himself so he could see her flushed features. He pushed a mess of hair away from her face and took in the dampness around her eyes and the way her hands balled up into fists near her shoulders. She’d let them fall there even though he no longer held her, the position submissive and yet unwelcoming in its defensive and hostile tension. He couldn’t blame her. He had been the one to unlock the key to finishing the genocide that had been so impossible the first time humans had tried it.
“And you were there,” he realized quietly. “You are one of the original Morphates.” Not one of the new generations, those strange children that were hidden away from the public in the Dark Cities. “A lot of things have gone right and wrong since then, too. People are unpredictable, and nine out often are really damn stupid, but that’s true for all the races on this planet, Morphates most definitely included. But they don’t mean shit to me right now, Devon. All that matters is what you and I are going to get straight between us.”
Liam reached to palm her cheek, wanting so badly to touch her. But since he was bearing weight on his good arm, he reached with the bad.
“Shit.”
They cursed in tandem when he caught himself just in time to keep from dripping blood all over her face and hair. Liam flung himself back away from her and she scrambled for her kit the instant she was free of the cage of his body. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and she turned to stand between his knees as she put pressure on the wound left by the IV. Once she had taped that up, she leaned in to check his shoulder, pulling away the saturated bandages. The instant that sweet smelling hair brushed past to torture him, he reached out and secured his hand to the curve of her waist. He felt her hesitate. She went extremely still, under the guise of studying his wound, but he felt the tension in her every muscle.
“You need stitches,” she said after a moment. She stepped back a bit, clearly testing the determination of his hold on her. She cocked her head to the side and looked so purely puzzled, Liam had to resist a strangely powerful urge to scoop her up close and kiss the expression right off her face.
“Can you do it?” he asked instead, his gaze falling briefly on the complex and professional kit she’d been using so skillfully.
“Yes, but …”
“Then, you stitch and we’ll finish talking while you do.” He couldn’t help his next impulse. “Is it better for you from the front or the back?”
He’d asked the question with just enough innuendo to get himself slapped. But this was Devon, and she wasn’t exactly the shy and retiring type who got easily affronted. Her eyes widened a bit as she absorbed the intent of the remark, and he could swear he saw her mouth twitch at the corners.
“I think both,” she said softly, a tilt to her head adding speculation to the answer. “We can start from the front, and … assuming you don’t get too worn out, we’ll finish from behind.”
“And if I do get worn out?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Then I’ll just have to lay you out flat on the bed and do you like that.”
She turned to get her kit, but he saw the smile and impish victory in her eyes. He grinned like an idiot and didn’t hide it when she turned back to him.
“Turn your shoulder toward me,” she instructed. He did and she went about cleaning and disinfecting the area in preparation. He watched her prep to use another syringe.
“Now what the hell are you injecting me
with?” he asked, rolling his eyes with exaggerated trepidation when he saw the new needle in her hand.
“Subcutaneous anesthetic. Stitches, remember?”
“Don’t bother. A needle stabbing into my flesh repetitively won’t exactly be noticed among the burning, cramping, and screaming pain.”
“I hope you’re being sarcastic,” she said as she set aside the anesthetic and pulled on sterile gloves. “Isn’t there any relief now that the antivenin is on board?”
“Yeah, actually,” he agreed. “I’m moving, right? Coherent. And if I sit still and let you do that touching thing, the cramps ease to bearable levels. I wouldn’t mind more of that after you do this.”
Devon tilted her head, her eyebrows drawn down in so troubled an expression that he felt his chest constrict in empathy. “You …” She stopped and cleared her throat, straightening her posture as if she had felt too fragile in appearance. “You don’t … aren’t … bothered by the idea of me … h-helping you?”
There was a deep and tragic lifetime of pain and fear woven into that awkward statement of insecurity. Liam also knew she hadn’t meant to say helping, and that she really wanted to know if he minded her touching him. In that instant he understood completely why she would hide herself away from the world, and hide what she was from those she let in. The scorn, the prejudice, and the hostility she suffered from millions who feared and hated her had to be a daunting existence. Who knew what she had experienced in her lifetime? Hell, Morphates were immortal, for God’s sake. If she was one of those original five thousand, that would make her over seventy years old.
Christ.
And it wasn’t just Paulson who bore blame for atrocities against the humans that became the Morphates. However unwittingly, the government had given Paulson an unending supply of bottom-rung citizens on which he could experiment. And then after they had been liberated from the hell of the Phoenix Project, the Morphates had had to endure a second imprisonment by their own government as the Federated States tried to figure out who and what they were. Only Nick Gregory’s stellar gambit of bringing the press onto the Phoenix Project site during their liberation kept them from being swept under the rug altogether like some dirty little secret. Just the same, how must it have felt? To go from Paulson’s prison to the ‘interment’ labs, these ones government run? It was rumored that the government of the Federated States had tried, over a period of months, everything they could possibly think of to test just how far Morphate immortality went. And while it was damn near impossible to kill a Morphate, they felt pain as keenly as anyone else. They had psyches and they had memories, and Liam had realized long ago that they had a whole hell of a lot of good reasons to detest and distrust humans.
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