The packets held the required tube and needle doctors used to extract blood. He opened another packet and removed a rubber band.
“Gloves,” he told Maia, who practically tripped over herself to do his bidding.
The rubber band was securely fastened around my upper arm. He tapped the curve of my inner elbow with two fingers.
“Please,” I tried again.
Maia appeared gloves in hand. Garrison snapped them on. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as the needle pierced my flesh.
“This could have been different, Fallon,” my eyes flew open, surprised he was speaking to me again. “We could have… I don’t want to hurt you.” He was looking at me with that strange look on his face, the one he’d worn yesterday morning at the breakfast table, like I somehow reminded him of something tragic.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, not bothering to conceal the quiver in my voice.
Something shifted on his expression. It became soft… loving. But that was nothing to the jolt of feeling his hand stroking my head. It was the act of a parent soothing an upset child.
“I won’t do it again,” I promised.
He sighed, opening his mouth, but Maia quickly interjected. “She’s lying, Boss! She’ll say anything to save him.”
At the mention of Isaiah, Garrison’s gaze flickered to the screen, to where Isaiah was still standing trapped in that closet with the spikes. Anger blistered behind his glower. All signs of the loving man were gone when he turned to me again.
“You don’t even know why you’re so hell-bent on protecting him, do you?” he hissed. “You only want him as badly as you do because I willed it! Because I planted it in your head, in your genetic coding. You wouldn’t even…” he dragged in a sharp breath, relaxed himself before continuing. “He wouldn’t want you if you weren’t who you are. He only wants you because of me, take that away and you’ll mean nothing to him.”
Oh how I wished he’d just left me to the mercy of Maia. Whatever torture I could have suffered under her hands would have been a picnic compared to the punishing words hitting me square in the gut.
But he wasn’t finished. He leaned in close, smacking my face with the stench of fried bacon. “You were always defiant, even when what I did was for your own good. But I was right in the end, wasn’t I? He’ll betray you again.”
I blinked. “What?”
Garrison stiffened, jerking back. “We’re finished here.”
“What do you mean betray me again?”
He glowered at me, but spoke to Maia. “Get her dressed and bring her to the parlor.”
All merciless glee on Maia’s face vanished into a sullen, little girl pout. “But—”
“Parlor, Maia. I think it’s time we got a few things straight.”
Maia’s shoulders drooped. “Yes sir.”
The needle was removed from my arm. No band-aid was offered. The four vials of my blood was gathered up by Garrison, handled as though it were the most precious thing in the world.
“What about Isaiah?” I shouted after him when he made a beeline for the door.
He didn’t answer. The door snapped closed behind him and I was alone with Maia and the dark cloud hovering over her head.
“Don’t even think of doing anything funny, you hear me?” she pinched a black blossom just over the puncture mark left behind by the needle. I yelped. She smirked coldly, working agilely to unhook my straps. “This doesn’t mean anything you know. You’re still going to die in the end, and I’ll be right there, watching every minute of it.”
I was yanked off the table and shoved forcibly to where my dress lay in a black puddle on the floor, the only splash of color in the entire room next to the flat slippers. I pulled the garments on, dragging it over my head before ripping off the paper gown and tossing it aside.
The dress was a simple black with a U collar and teacup sleeves. It was somewhat cinched around the middle and fell just a little past my knees, but after being manhandled, the sleeves fell off my shoulders and there was a tear in the hem that went nearly to my hip. It wasn’t a big deal, I was still covered, but I didn’t like that it was wrecked.
“Come on!” Maia muttered, grabbing my arm and dragging me from the room before I had a chance to put my shoes on.
I let myself be hauled, reminding myself that they had Isaiah. If I wanted to see him out of there alive, I would have to play their game for a while longer.
Garrison was already sitting in a high back chair, waiting for us. He motioned me to the sofa on his left. “Isaiah will be joining us shortly.”
I sat, if for no other reason than to keep from pacing anxiously. My gaze flittered to the door, to the carpet beneath my tapping foot, to the door and back. I picked at a hangnail on my thumb with my teeth, my stomach wobbling. I shifted on the sofa, finding the cushions too stiff, too unyielding. My bare foot rapped harder, sending an erratic pattering sound through the otherwise silent room. A scuffling outside the parlor doors had me darting to my feet, my heart pressed into the walls of my throat. Isaiah was shoved into the room by two heavily armed men. He staggered on his feet, but kept upright by sheer willpower alone.
Most of the injuries from his earlier beating had healed. The ones leaking fresh blood onto his ruined shirt, they were new, fresh, and I knew from the gingerly way he crossed the room, if I looked beneath his clothes there would be new bruises throughout his body. I tapered my anger. I bottled it down, saving it for when it was needed most — our escape.
I went to him, hands reaching but too afraid to make contact with any part of him. “Are you hurt badly?”
He snorted, the sound muffled between his bulbous lips. “I’ve had worse.” I didn’t want to picture that. I couldn’t control the demon if I thought about him worse than standing before me soaked in his own blood. He looked at me, looked me over. “How are you? Are you hurt?”
I gave my head a slight shake. “I’m okay. I—”
“If we could please get started?” I had forgotten we had an audience.
Taking Isaiah’s hand, I led him back to the sofa. We sat. No one seemed to care that blood was seeping into the beige cushions under Isaiah.
“I’m hoping we could start over,” Garrison said evenly, watching us flatly over the tips of his steepled fingers.
“Yes!” I said quickly, squeezing Isaiah’s fingers to keep him quiet. “Yes, we—we want to start over as well. We don’t want any more trouble.”
Garrison sighed, dropping his hands into his lap. “I really don’t like using force. I really don’t. It kills me to see you hurt… Fallon,” he faltered, seemingly having forgotten my name. “Fallon,” he repeated as if reminding himself. “I will take care of you if you let me.”
“We would like that,” I said, forcing a smile.
Isaiah squeezed my fingers, hard. What are you doing? It said. Trust me! I thought as hard and loud as I could, and hoped he did his mind connection thing and heard me. It might have worked because he didn’t comment again.
“What are you going to do with us?” I asked, hesitant, practically walking on eggshells in fear of angering him.
Garrison thought about it a moment, staring off somewhere over my head in deliberation. “Talk,” he said at last.
My smile wobbled. “What about?”
He jerked a shoulder, climbing gingerly to his feet. “I’m sure you have questions.”
I had so many questions; I was surprised they hadn’t started leaking from my ears. But what was the point in asking? He rarely ever answered anything and when he did, it was usually in the form of a riddle. Plus, there was no question that I could ask that wouldn’t set him off again, and I couldn’t take another repeat performance of earlier.
“We have a few,” I confessed.
Garrison moved towards the teacart parked just inside the parlor doors. The soft clink of delicate china filled the room as he poured himself tea, stirred in a single lump of sugar and stirred. He brought the teacup back with him, setting i
t down gently on the table next to the armchair. He regained his seat, smoothed a hand down his front and waited for me to continue.
I took a deep breath. “I would like to know a little more about what was done to us,” I said, picking my words very carefully.
His head nodded as if it was a question he’d expected, and why shouldn’t he? We’d only been asking the same question since we were brought here. “A lot was done to you,” he said simply. “I suppose you could say that whatever I couldn’t fit into Isaiah, I slipped into your Petri dish, and that was quite a bit.” He shifted in his seat, plucking up his tea and taking a tiny sip. The cup made a soft clink when it was set back on the saucer.
“Like what?” I prompted when he fell into silence.
He seemed to consider this a moment. “Well, Isaiah was given the accelerated healing formula. This helps him to heal faster than most people do, but the side effects caused rapid growth stimuli. We weren’t sure what to expect when he grew ten years in a matter of twelve months, not just in looks, height and weight, but in his mental capacity and his speech. It was incredible.”
“So, how old is Isaiah exactly?” I wondered.
Garrison’s brows puckered in a thoughtful frown. “If I had to guess, I would say roughly eighteen, but that is a very sketchy estimate.”
“You don’t know?”
He sighed, stroking his chin. “Well, you were born a year after he was and you’re sixteen?”
“Seventeen,” I corrected.
He nodded slowly, going back to doing the math. “So, then yes, eighteen.”
“But you said he aged ten years his first year,” I said, trying to do my own math.
“Yes, in his physical and mental growth, but if we were counting in normal years, he’s eighteen.”
“And if we were counting the other way?” I asked.
He sighed, eyes rolling upwards as he mulled it over. “Well, after a year, he was ten. After two years, he was about eleven. His aging progress seemed to slow after two years and he aged fairly normal, but he was only two years old.”
“So he’s like thirty now?” I asked cautiously.
Garrison shook his head, flicking his wrist dismissively. “No, no! He’s still only eighteen. We don’t really count the rapid aging.”
“What else did you put in me?” Isaiah asked, breaking away from the topic of his age.
Garrison reached for his tea again. “Superhuman speed, reflexes, durability, strength, vision and lycanthropy. The telepathy and empathy were inserted after Fallon was born to match her brain waves.”
My eyes widened. “After?”
Garrison nodded. “The link only works between the two of you. Neither of you can hear other people or feel what they’re feeling. That’s something just between you.”
“Lycanthropy?” Isaiah interrupted. “What the hell is that?” I pressed his fingers, willing him to watch his tone.
Garrison, thankfully, missed the contempt in the question or he chose to ignore it. “Lycanthropy is the ability to turn into a wolf. It’s the only animal DNA we encoded into you.”
“The only?” Isaiah shouted, getting halfway to his feet before I pulled him down.
“What does that mean?” I quickly said.
Watching Isaiah, Garrison answered, “Your speed, your sense of smell, your strength, your ability to be a good hunter, a good protector, it comes from the DNA of an alpha wolf. Fallon has the alpha female gene, which, in a sense, connects all the dots where both of you are concerned. It’s what drives you to be together. It’s not the only thing, but it plays a key role. Granted, you won’t physically turn into a wolf or any such thing, but your senses are those of a feral wolf.”
Now Isaiah was holding me back from jumping to my feet. “I have animal parts in me?”
Thin lines appeared around Garrison’s pinched lips. “Not parts. DNA strands. It’s part of your makeup, like your mother’s nose and your father’s eye color. Most of what we did with you was specific orders from your father,” he said pointedly. “He insisted we remove as much of him as possible from you, except his eyes and the color of his hair and we tried. Lord knows we tried, but there were markers that refused to be removed, like your dependency on blood.”
My heart elevated, drumming impossibly loud in my ears. “You didn’t do that?”
“No, that was a gene you already possessed. It was one of the things that truly made you unique. But it did help us give Isaiah the final tweaks that made him invaluable to you. The downside is that the more blood you take, the more powerful your attraction will become and if it becomes too powerful…” he trailed off, splaying his hands open, palms up.
“What? What happens?”
Garrison hesitated. His green eyes darted from me to Isaiah and back. He did this for so long that I began to think he wouldn’t say anymore. That we would never find out what was happening to us. But then, he sat back, set his teacup aside, clasped his hands together in his lap and crossed his right leg over his left.
“You need his blood, Fallon. You will die without it.”
I sputtered, gaze shooting to Isaiah then back. “But I haven’t been drinking from him these past sixteen years,” my voice came out high-pitched and frantic. “I lived on normal, human food!”
“That was then, this is now. You were safe until you broke the seal the first time, which I know you’ve done just by looking at the both of you. You drank from him. The chemicals in your body now recognize the singular thing it needs to survive. It will no longer accept regular human food. When is the last time you even had normal food?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You can only deny it for so long before it becomes unbearable. Any longer and you will grow weak and eventually waste away. You will always need him if for no other reason than because you will die without him.”
I shook my head, more to shake away the urge to murder him then denial. “Why did you do this?” I demanded. “Why is it so important that we be together?”
Garrison climbed to his feet. “I think that’s enough. We can discuss this more possibly tomorrow. For now, I’m sure you both need some time to talk,” long, bony fingers tugged on the collar of his jacket. “I’ll have Maia take you to your rooms.”
In the process of rising, I stilled. “Rooms?”
Garrison cleared his throat. “It’s a safety precaution.”
“I’m not going anywhere without Fallon!” Isaiah snapped, already on his feet and dragging me up with him.
Garrison raised his pointy chin, eyes narrowed with the familiar loathing he only seemed to show Isaiah. “This isn’t up for discussion.”
“It’s fine!” I said quickly, grabbing Isaiah’s arm as though it were a lifeline in the midst of a storm. “It’s okay!” I insisted when he opened his mouth to protest. “Please,” I whispered, nails etching into his golden skin.
The rage boiled behind his eyes, along the set muscles of his jaw and in the slight flare of his nostrils. But he resigned himself from arguing, warning me darkly with his eyes that we would talk.
Chapter 25
“What are you doing?” Isaiah demanded the second the door closed behind us, leaving us alone in Amalie’s room.
“I had to!” I cried, stuffing clammy fingers back through my hair.
“What did he do to you?” he grabbed my arm when I tried to turn away. “You would never have given in that easily unless he did something!”
I wrenched my arm from of him, twisting around so I was glowering up into his face. “What do you mean what did he do? You were there, Isaiah! You saw what he did.”
Isaiah jerked back as if I’d struck him. His head cocked to the side, brows knitted. “This is about me?”
Disbelief colored my voice before anger claimed it. “Of course it’s about you! I can’t watch him do that to you again! I can’t watch him…” I rubbed a shaky hand over my dry mouth. “I will do whatever I have to to never see that again.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Well, you don’t have to do all the things you’ve done to keep me safe, but you do it,” I said finally.
He shifted from his right foot to his left foot. “Yeah, well… that’s different.”
I frowned. “How? How is that different?”
A sigh rushed from his lips as he turned away, ruffling a hand through his hair. “It doesn’t matter I guess. We have bigger problems anyway.”
I watched him amble to the terrace windows, saw him reach for the latch, flip it and push.
“It’s locked,” I told him when the doors resisted against opening. “He had it bolted closed after…”
Isaiah stopped and turned to me. “How do you know all this?”
I shook my head, staring down at my pale, dirty feet. “I don’t know. Whenever I’m in this room, I feel like I’ve always been here. Maybe not in person, but in spirit or something.”
“Well, would you happen to know of any secret passageways leading out of this place?”
A chuckle escaped me. “I wish. It only works in this room. Amalie was locked in here for most of her life. She was born here, died here, and spent most of the time in between shut away in here. I think it’s a link to her somehow.”
Isaiah narrowed his eyes. “He kept his own daughter locked in here?”
My gaze roamed over the room, settling on the enormous bed, the dark furniture, the stone fireplace as if something there held the answers. I finally settled on the painting of the mermaid over the bed. “Yes.”
“Why?”
I rocked my head from side-to-side slowly. “I don’t know.”
Being in Amalie’s room without Isaiah was a torturous experience. The room felt colder… meaner, as if it didn’t like me being there alone, and frankly, I didn’t like it either. I wanted Isaiah there. Instead, he’d been taken away by a glowering Maia to the room furthest from mine and trapped inside by the guards stationed outside both our doors. It wasn’t David, I noted, but these guys had clearly heard what happened to the last guard, because they were dressed in SWAT gear from head-to-toe — including face shields.
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