“Dilemma?”
“Conceiving,” he explained. “We specialize in genetics. At the time, we were searching for a cure to help women carry to full term, something your mother couldn’t do.”
“So you decided to toss together a cocktail of mixed DNAs in there for the fun of it?” Isaiah shot back, knuckles caps of white snow against his golden skin.
Lines appeared on either side of his mouth. His shoulders slumped slightly. “I can understand where you would think I did wrong, but there is a whole science behind what I do! You can’t just remove strands of DNA without replacing it. Sometimes, the only path to success is to push the boundaries, open doors. It’s what your father wanted! He asked me to remove several of your more… unique coding so I did.”
“What did you put in us? What unique coding?”
A new life sparked behind his eyes. “Oh, you two,” he inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled shakily through his mouth. “You will change everything anyone has ever known about life and creation. You… you are… perfect!”
A chill swept through me despite the balmy weather. Isaiah had said the same thing to me not too long ago, but it hadn’t made me feel violated. It was as if Garrison had reached out and touched me. Repulsion made me want to shower, to scrub every inch of myself until the phantom feeling was erased.
“What did you do?” I managed to push out.
His chair screeched against the slabs of stone making the terrace floor. He shot to his feet. Next to me, Isaiah tensed, braced for an attack. “I made you strong. I gave you abilities that nature wouldn’t. I made you powerful! I made you better.”
“What did you do?” The words lodged in my throat.
He turned to us then, eyes alit with an eerie glow. “Have you asked yourself why yet?”
I blinked, taken aback. “What?”
His smile was frightening. “Why!” he repeated. “Why are you able to do the things you do? See the things you are able to see? Smell, run, taste… want!” His teeth flashed. The smile looked painfully wide, like a clown’s twisted leer. He looked horrifyingly mad. “Have you asked yourself why you want Isaiah as badly as you do?”
I hadn’t, but then again, I was a sixteen-year-old girl, and Isaiah was gorgeous. Evidently, that wasn’t what Garrison meant.
He wasn’t finished. He turned his attention on Isaiah, eyes wide with intensity. “And have you asked yourself why her? Have you wondered how you are always able to sense her? Smell her? Hear her, even though she never says a word.” When we both remained silent, his smile vanished, and he heaved a burdened sigh. “Do you honestly believe that what you feel is normal? The insatiable hunger, the drive… the thirst?” He looked at me when he said the last part. “Have you ever wanted to taste anyone as much as you want to taste Isaiah?”
No. I had never wanted anyone the way I wanted Isaiah. The very idea of drinking from anyone else brought a wave of nausea coursing through me. With Isaiah, my mouth started salivating.
“You deliberately made us this way?” I whispered, disturbingly hurt rather than angry. “Why would you do that?”
“I warned your mother,” Garrison moved with the speeds of a whirlwind around the terrace, circling the table like a large dog, confining his prey. “I warned her of what would happen if she agreed. I told her. But she refused to take no for an answer. She wanted a baby no matter what the consequences.”
“She didn’t want this!” I shouted, twisting in my seat as he pushed around behind us. “She was on the run my entire life because of what you and my father did.”
“Ah!” he stopped next to his chair, pressing one hand on the glass for support and leaning across to stab a finger in my face. “That is where you don’t understand. Your mother knew! The minute you were injected into her body, she knew, but she didn’t care. Whatever sacrifices she had to make, she would deal with them later, she said.”
“She didn’t know!” I refused to believe it. My mother would never have done it if she had known what I would become. What I would have to face.
“I sent your father second-by-second details of everything we did, every process, every step, every single minuscule change. How is it my fault that he didn’t share them with her? My job was to bring you into the world, which I did.”
I was breathing hard, the buzzing in my ears growing to new heights. I blinked back tears. “What did you do to me?”
Garrison jerked back, looking oddly stricken, like I’d somehow wounded him. He stared at me, his head tilted to the side. Seconds ticked into minutes and still he remained frozen in thought. Then, he sighed, head dropping forward. His shoulders pressed inwards as he deflated into his chair.
“I see no matter what I tell you, you will continue to perceive me as the villain,” he slicked a hand back over his hair and sat back heavily. “I suppose it’s a cross I will need to bear,” he righted himself, tugging on the lapels of his jacket and smoothing a hand down his front. “But I will tell you this, everything I did, everything I will do, is for the good of mankind.”
Isaiah snorted. “How is playing God good for mankind?”
“Well,” Garrison splayed his hands open, palms up, “look at yourself for instance. You would not be here were it not for me. Neither of you. You would not be together. I made that happen. Not many would claim to have found their soul mates in their lifetime, but you have. You’ve found each other. The perfect match. Two pieces of a very important puzzle. Your existence is the key to the next evolution.”
My heart faltered in my chest. It may have ceased beating altogether. It was hard to focus on that when I was struggling to remember how to breathe, how to think. His words, they said so much, yet explained nothing. But it was the second time Garrison had called me the key.
“My father sent Isaiah to be with me,” I said at last, albeit it came out weak.
“Only because I sent Isaiah to him knowing he would use the boy to protect you,” Garrison said.
I swallowed the ball of nails wedged in my throat. “So… you did this? You made me fall in love with Isaiah?” beside me, I felt Isaiah stiffen, but I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. Behind the veil of pain and anger, I was fighting a new wave of tears, one of humiliation and I couldn’t face him. “Why?”
Garrison never so much as faltered in his response, nor did he seem affected by the single tear that slipped past my guard and rolled down my cheek. “Because I needed a key for my weapon and your already unique DNA was perfect.”
I rocked my head, shaking away the toxic fog hindering all rational thought impossible. “What?”
He leveled me with a stare, his face an arctic mask of hatred. “I forged the future, Fallon. It took me years of trial and error, but I was finally able to generate the essential elements needed to create the ultimate being. Isaiah’s high-speed regeneration abilities made him the perfect specimen. All I had to do was add a few minor perks and he was ready.”
“Ready for what?” Isaiah ground out.
Garrison wasn’t given the chance to answer when Maia sauntered into the room, clad in her usual spandex, this one in a cotton candy pink to match the strips in her hair and the pale shade shining her lips. She stopped just on the threshold and surveyed the scene with a sick sort of amusement, like she knew exactly what we’d been talking about and knew just how much Isaiah and I were hurting.
“I’m sorry to break up this warm heart-to-heart, but there’s a call for you in the office, sir.”
Garrison offered her what may have passed for a charming smile. “I’ll be right there. Thank you, Maia.”
Inclining her head, Maia turned on her ice pick heels, but not before slanting me a cutting smirk. Her hips swayed as she strolled out.
“Excuse me.” Garrison rose to his feet and left us.
He disappeared through the open terrace doors, leaving Isaiah and me alone for far longer than I could stand. I willed myself not to look at him as I rose out of my seat and crossed to the stone railing. I glanced back onl
y once when a shuffle of feet alerted me to the third party joining us. The guard said nothing, but stood watching me the way a chess player watches a piece on the board, like he expected me to do something. It didn’t take any real brains to guess what that was; he was worried I would jump, causing him to lose his job. Well, he wasn’t going to get that lucky.
“He’s lying, Fallon.” Isaiah’s chair shrieked against marble as he climbed to his feet. The soft, steady clap of his feet as he moved towards me, made my heart flinch.
I hugged myself despite the warmth, warding off an inner chill. “Why would he?”
“Because he’s evil,” he said simply. “Because he likes knowing he’s hurt you.”
I didn’t pull away from his touch when he rested his hands on my shoulders, although I wanted to. The feel of him through the fabric of my shirt had my blood singing in a way that only then did I realize probably wasn’t natural. Nothing about us was natural. Nothing that would apply to a normal relationship, applied to us. It only just then made sense why I was so obsessed. Why his touch made me melt in my skin. Why being away from him was like being skinned and salted alive. Why I felt like my very breath depended on his existence. None of those things was normal; not to the intensity with which I felt them.
“When you touch me, do you feel it?” I asked, staring far into the horizon, at the spot where the world dipped and vanished from sight, kind of the way my sanity seemed to want to do at that moment. “Do you…” I trailed off, biting my lip, trapping the single word that could unleash all my insecurities. The magical L word all girls wanted to hear from the boy they were crazy about.
His nose grazed the side of my face as he leaned in to murmur into my ear. My eyes closed and I steeled myself against the shiver that rippled along my spine. “Yes.”
Yes.
He said yes and my chest heaved with the first of many heartbroken sobs because it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real!
The thick slab of stone separating the abyss from the lavish manor cut through my palms like shards of ice as I leaned into it, using it to support my dead weight. I all but tore my heart out of my chest. I was only half-conscious of Isaiah holding me up, holding me back from falling over the lip, but his touch was unbearable. He may as well have wrapped me in barbwire and rolled me down a field of cactuses. I tried to break away, to push him back, but his arms only tightened, pulling me, enfolding me into the security of his chest. He didn’t say anything, which I was thankful for. I wasn’t sure I could stand any sort of openhearted confession, not when I was so close to losing my mind. The little he’d already told me sat like a cluster of nails in the pit of my stomach. Anything else and I may have jumped.
Garrison took that moment to reenter the terrace, idly fiddling with the cufflinks on his jacket, oblivious of the danger awaiting him. It was probably why he wasn’t prepared when Isaiah unlatched himself from around me and dove for him, tackling him to the ground with a vicious roar.
It all happened so fast. I went from crying into Isaiah’s chest to stumbling as my support seemingly disintegrated in my arms. The guard, much more vigilant, got to Isaiah before I could finish righting myself. I wasn’t nearly quick enough to warn Isaiah when the guard drew back a heavily booted leg and drove the steel toe straight into Isaiah’s ribs. The world seemed to blister red at the cry of pain that burst from Isaiah’s lips as his entire body arched off Garrison. The guard, triumphant now, pulled back for another blow.
“Don’t touch him!” I lunged, slamming my whole weight into the guard, sending us both crashing backwards into the glass doors. The tinkle of glass mangled with the roar in my ears. Everything from there, us landing in a mess just beneath the broken frame to my nails tearing into his face, gouging holes, twisted in a blur of motion lost to me. I heard him howl, his agony a symphony in my ears, his suffering pure bliss. Sticky warmth spattered my face and ran down my chest. Bitter copper tainted my tongue. I hissed my pleasure.
Vaguely, I was aware of raised voices somewhere in the distance. Something scuffled. Footsteps clapped all around me. Something clicked it was faintly familiar. Then there was a pop and a pinch in my side. Before the darkness swung up to claim me, I heard a snarl of mindless rage somewhere far away followed by two more pops. Then nothing.
Chapter 23
I woke up with a mouth full of cotton. My head buzzed with the shrill of a blender. I opened my eyes and winced at the dappled rays of sunlight, peeking through the lace curtains, reflected off the shining surface of the hardwood floor and stabbed me straight in the brain like a knife. I groaned, twisting around on the mattress of feathers, pulling the silk sheets up to my ears, when I stopped.
There was someone else in bed with me.
My eyes flew open for a second time, round and wide as I blinked back crusty sleep and squinted at the face barely concealed by shadows.
Isaiah!
Memories backhanded me straight into the present. I sprung upright, wooziness forgotten, replaced by crippling fear as I took us in.
Someone had changed me.
No.
Someone had bathed and changed me. My hair was still damp around the ends. My skin smelt of jasmines, a soap I never used. My skin was scrubbed pink, and I was wearing a long, white nightgown. My stomach churned as I remembered a similar dress, flapping in the wind like a flag, as Amalie took her last stand on the terrace.
I hastily shoved aside the bile working its way up my throat, focusing my attention instead on the unmoving figure beside me.
So still, was my first terrified thought. Why was he so still? Why was he sleeping? He never slept! Panic wedged in my chest. What had they done to him? Had they hurt him because of me? No. There were no marks on his face. His hair was as damp as mine, and he no longer wore the same black t-shirt. This shirt was white, a color I hadn’t seen on him before.
I reached for him, my fingers trembling. “Isaiah?”
My fingers lightly skimmed the side of his face. Relieved by the warmth I felt there, I roamed down to the curve of his neck, seeking the pulse hidden there. The hard clamp of steel-like fingers around my wrist startled a squeak from me, then a yelp when I was forcibly shoved onto my back and pinned there by a rock-hard torso, my arms pinned above my head.
“Isaiah!” I gasped, staring wide-eyed up into his thunderous face looming over mine.
He blinked, the savage gleam in his eyes instantly vanishing into one of instant concern. “Are you hurt?” His hold released and he shifted up onto his elbow to peer down at me.
I shook my head, trying not to rub my wrists. “Are you?” I reached for his face instead, touching his cheek.
He combed his fingers through his hair. “No.”
My tongue roamed over my dry lips. “What happened?”
The sheets rustled as he sat up. “I think we were tranquilized.”
“And cleaned,” I said, picking at the front of the dress with just the tips of my fingers as if it were moldy garbage sitting out in the hot July sun.
Isaiah peered down at himself, raised the corner of the sheets and peeked under. I caught a glimpse of white boxers before he quickly pulled the sheets back down over his lap.
“I hate white,” he muttered.
Despite the circumstances, I giggled at the disgust curling his lips.
He glanced over at me, a grin touching his lips. It was such a beautiful smile, so warm and sweet. It was golden and pure like being touched by sunrays on a winter morning. I wanted to stay and bask in it forever when, too quickly, it melted away and his brows drew together. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
I stared. “Giggled?”
He shook his head. “Jump on that guy.”
I struggled to an upright position. “He hurt you!” I protested.
“He could have hurt you! He could have shot you,” he said, his voice tense.
“Then you shouldn’t have jumped on Garrison,” I said. “He could have shot you, too!”
Isaiah looked at me, really look
ed at me like I was the only thing in the whole world. “I wanted to kill him.”
My heart stuttered in my chest at the ferocity vibrating in each word. “Isaiah…”
His nostrils flared with every panted breath. “I wanted to rip him to pieces for what he said to you, for the way he hurt you…” he trailed off, stuffing both hands through his hair. “For the way he made you…” A muscle twitched in his jaw as he looked away.
“What?” I whispered, fisting my itching fingers into the sheets to keep from touching him, not trusting myself if I did.
His eyes met mine, bright with unbridled fire. “For the way he made you doubt me.”
My breath caught in my throat. I did reach for him then, resting my hand on his forearm. “I don’t doubt you, Isaiah. I just don’t know what to think right now. This is all too much for me.”
He settled his hand over mine, covering my fingers entirely. “You know there’s a chance we might not get out of here, don’t you?”
I swallowed the prickle of fear and nodded. “I know.” My next words lodged in my windpipe, refusing to be released. It took several minutes of convincing myself before I could blurt them out. “I couldn’t stop myself,” I said, meeting Isaiah’s gaze hesitantly.
“What?”
I looked away to our joined hands. “That guy. I couldn’t stop myself. I saw him kick you and… It was like I lost control. I wanted to tear his throat out for touching you,” I looked down at my free hand, stared beneath my nails, my stomach protesting the sickening memory of flesh squishing beneath them. “I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t help it.”
“I don’t think we can help it,” he murmured. My lashes dropped at the tender glide of his knuckle along the side of my face. “It’s like Garrison said, protecting each other is what we do.”
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