Selfless

by Sherri L. King

  An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

  www.ellorascave.com

  Selfless

  ISBN 9781419922756

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Selfless Copyright © 2008, 2009 Sherri L. King

  Edited by Kelli Collins

  Cover art by Darrell King

  Electronic book Publication May 2009

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http://www.fbi.gov/ipr/). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Selfless

  Sherri L. King

  Prologue

  Cold and wet. Her hands pressing against the restraining glass, the fingertips shriveled like a crone’s. Or a newborn’s…

  When she opened her eyes she couldn’t see. Everything was blurry. She blinked and blinked again, harder this time, to clear the lenses of her eyes. Still blurry.

  She swallowed…and gagged. Something was in her throat, her mouth. She looked down at herself and saw the thing—a tube, as wide and round and slippery as an eel—hanging from her lips. Past her lips and down into the blurry bottom of the tank, the white plastic rippled in places like an accordion straw. Again past her lips and down into her, into her throat, deeper inside her chest it rested, rooted.

  The tank, the tube feeding her air, the stubborn smear of her eyesight…she had no memory before them. She gasped, feeling her diaphragm expand as oxygen traveled down the tube and into the spongy tissues of her greedy lungs. Panic stung, like the serous liquid in which she found herself suspended. And it was cold.

  Like any confused creature trapped as she was, she beat at the glass with her fists. Kicked it. Her muscles felt weak at first and then, exponentially stronger. More powerful still until the feel of her blows against the imprisoning glass no longer hurt or bruised her tender hands and feet, strained her trembling muscles, but began to feel almost sensuous. The glass seemed to expand, like cellophane over her knuckles…and then the shatter!

  Until that moment she had been floating in the fluid, suspended, like a buoyant balloon, but when the glass gave way gravity won. She fell, outward and downward, as if from a great height. The floor rushed to greet her.

  Blackness, like before, only now she was aware that the blackness existed. That she existed.

  And then the light. She blinked several times in rapid succession and her eyes began at last to clear. Her body was cold, dripping wet, her skin smooth and unblemished, like a scaleless fish escaped from its aquarium.

  Hands grabbed her. Rough. Textured. Disoriented, she rubbed her own fingertips together and, as the wrinkles faded away, understood that her skin had no such texture. No roughness at all. Her determined handler dragged her away from the wet puddle on the concrete floor, from the biting glass shards, his hands beneath her arms, digging into her armpits.

  His hands. She sniffed the air, smelled the masculine odor of him—thuja, vetiver, honest sweat and suede. Yes, this was male.

  Brighter pinpoints of light struck her eyes like nails. Murmured whispers, rushed and hurried words sounded through her compacted ears. She reached up, past other hands that swatted away her efforts, with a strength that must have surprised them as much as her because the hands fell away. She reached up unhindered now and dug in her ears, pulling out the plugs she found there.

  Amplified sound—but only ambient sound, she understood—still shocking and too loud to bear, made her cry out. A hand covered her mouth before she could make the noise. The textured fingers slammed over her lips, pressing hard.

  These hushed voices, these shapes around her, wanted secrecy. There was a reason for that and until she knew what it was, she would keep silent too. It did not bode well that she’d awakened in a sort of prison…these people seemed intent on freeing her and that was good enough for now.

  What concerned her most was why she’d been in the tank. And…why didn’t she have a memory before it?

  The tube was crushed, her oxygen cut off by the pressure of the hand. She tried to breathe through her nose but choked on the glob of crud and liquid that slid down her sinuses into the back of her throat.

  She coughed. Gagged around the tube.

  “Goddamn it. Be quiet!” The hand lifted from her mouth. She swiftly grabbed the length of tube that lay on her chest and jerked it determinedly. It was seated in farther than she’d known. The pain of tearing it out made her lungs burn, her throat shred and her eyes water, but at least the liquid that blurred her vision now was her own, her tears, and not that strange antiseptic fluid she’d awakened in. The tube slid free, her lungs, her mouth were free, now she could breathe on her own. And the air was cold.

  Was it all cold like this?

  “Silence!”

  She’d asked the question aloud? Odd…she didn’t remember the sound of her voice in the strained silence.

  “We’re gonna get you out of here. But you have to be quiet.” This voice, this was different from the first. This voice was softer…female. “That means stop thinking, too.”

  Stop thinking? How?

  The rough hands lifted her and they were up and running. She heard rather than felt her own feet slap against the hard floor. She faltered at first on unused muscles, then, after a dozen steps, she was running so fast the hands that supported her now held on to keep her from getting away.

  She had to slow to allow the blurred shapes to show her the way through the dimly lit labyrinthine corridors.

  Her eyes were growing clearer with each blink of her lids. She could now see some details of the company around her. Four in all, three male, one female. Dressed in black, two wearing night-vision goggles, all equipped with technological gizmos that creaked when they moved, they were otherwise careful not to make a sound. They flanked her, like some prized POW they’d liberated…and perhaps that wasn’t far from the truth.

  Still, none of that mattered, none of them mattered, none but the one touching her. He was their leader—she could feel it in the way the others regarded him. Feel it in his hand on hers as he turned her this way or that. Hear it in his breath, the way he paced himself and the others, the way he was assured of his every move through the concrete maze.

  This one she would mind—the others meant nothing.

  They were underground. She realized it instinctively—and just as instinctively accepted that she knew it without being told. Knew that they were climbing. Rising. She could feel their ascension deep in her bones. Making their way toward the light.

  But the light of stars and moon…or sun?

  “Shut up!” The rough hand squeezed her shoulder so hard it should have bruised but her muscles felt elastic, the bone and gristle beneath doubly so. His fingers sank into her. She found herself growing weary of the rough treatment.

  She gr
abbed the hand and squeezed back, her own strength nearly crushing the bones. The man hissed but didn’t pull away. Nor did he slow their pace. She let him go at once. She merely wanted to warn him that she would only tolerate so much.

  Outside at last…liberation!

  The stars greeted them, but no moon. It had passed beyond their horizon. The pungent scent of river water permeated the air. She felt sad and didn’t know why.

  She was pushed into the back of a dark vehicle. Van…the word seemed alien in her mind, but she put a fuzzy mental picture with the word and knew it was fitting.

  The leader barked an order and the vehicle took off, throwing her off balance so that she fell onto her side.

  The leader’s textured fingers nearly scraped her tender skin raw when he caught her, righted her and held her stable. He draped a cloth around her and rubbed her arms.

  Her eyes met those of the leader—he had ocher eyes, bright eyes, glowing gold and warm beneath the black war grease he wore.

  Who were these people? What was happening to her? But most importantly…

  “What is my name?” She startled everyone when she asked the question aloud. Her own voice sounded unfamiliar to her. Metallic. Unused.

  The leader sighed and finally blinked his eyes. He looked sad for a moment, a fleeting ripple in a sea of time. But those eyes were steely once more when they refocused. “For now, we’ll call you Eva.”

  He turned away from her and the world grew colder.

  Chapter One

  “She’s nothing at all like I imagined she’d be,” Ryan Murdock observed from behind the two-way mirror. Watching as Eva flexed her fingers, cracking each joint over and over again, the sound like little fireworks exploding in the quiet of her room.

  Her black eyes regarded the mirror, alert, unwavering, as if she could see them through the glass. Maybe she could, Ryan reasoned, how would they know? They’d been testing her for days and couldn’t understand half the mystery of her.

  So vexing that not even his best psychics could read her thoughts.

  She was an enigma…and worse—for Sterling’s scientists—Eva seemed to want to remain so.

  “How did you imagine she would be?”

  “More acquiescent.” Ryan shook his head. “Curious, even. Certainly more sympathetic to our research and methods. She’s literally a newborn. She shouldn’t be so stubborn. So unyielding.”

  “That might be the reason she was cut off. Perhaps she wasn’t quite what her creator wanted or expected her to be.”

  “And what would that be, Dante?” Ryan rounded on him but Dante didn’t step back. Ryan’s anger wasn’t for him. Wasn’t for Eva, either, though she probably didn’t know it. “What purpose could she serve? An organ donor?” Ryan spat. “A bodyguard—she’s sure as hell strong enough for the work! Of what use could she be to the one who made her?”

  Dante shrugged, watching Eva closely through the glass. She was still. Watching. Listening. Only the popping of her knuckles gave away any sign of life. “Who can say?” he responded carefully. “She’s been a closed book since after that first night. She’s learned quickly how to hide thoughts from us.”

  “Why? What does she want to hide? I want to help her—I do—but how can I? She makes it too hard.”

  “Perhaps she has as few answers as we do,” Dante said softly, watching her watching them. “Perhaps she can’t help us.”

  “Or won’t,” Ryan snapped. “Is she so corrupt? Already? Was she born with the hate of her creator already alive inside her? Is her purpose then to create chaos for the scientific community?” He snorted. “Because she’s doing a damn fine job of it so far.”

  Dante almost missed the flicker of her eyes. Her lashes had grown so long, so fast…she’d been completely hairless when they’d first freed her. Now her hair was a canopy of straight blonde locks reaching to her shoulders. Her hair had grown so swiftly, in fact, that it had dreaded together at first, but her aides had been trying to keep her strands free of knots and tangles. Just as they’d been careful to help her exercise, to keep her quickly hardening bones from shattering or breaking. Eva didn’t know it, but she was being treated very carefully by some of the best doctors in the world.

  Still, she looked like a wild thing. Pale and dangerous…all of her the color of the autumn sun but for the blackness of her eyes.

  Such strange eyes. They appeared to see everything, while giving away nothing of her inner thoughts.

  Her pupils had not yet contracted. They’d been wide like the maw of a demon’s gasp, gaping huge since day one. None of Sterling’s finest could figure out why, or how to make them contract so she could at least have a light on in her room without getting halos in her vision.

  “She’s neither human nor monster.” Dante said the words with flat, unyielding honesty. Eva turned her face away and regarded the shadows in the corner of her room. “We can’t judge her as either.” He watched as she swallowed, the movement of her throat compelling some hidden protective urge deep within him that he had to stomp on to immediately kill.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d made him feel so off-kilter.

  “You’re right,” Ryan agreed. “But we need answers now. We don’t have time to let her adjust, or to learn to adjust our own prejudices.” He sighed. “I want another run of tests. I want you to call for them.”

  “I’m not a doctor, Ryan,” Dante pointed out quietly. “Have someone else—”

  Ryan’s gaze was almost threatening, though the man was shorter than Dante by a few inches. “Call for them and join me in her room. I want you there. I’m going to speak to her myself. And then…I want you to speak with her.” Ryan glanced back at the too-still subject of their conversation. “She understands authority. Power. Even the lowliest beasts do. If she won’t respond to me, perhaps she’ll respond to you—the others said she deferred to you on the trip here.”

  “It wasn’t that long of a trip to make that assumption.” But Dante had noticed, too, that she’d listened only to his commands on the dark trip from Maine to Sterling’s headquarters in Cleveland. He’d heard echoes of her thoughts—even as she’d built mental barriers to shield them—and known she dismissed the others in favor of his authority. It had, at first, made him more confident in the face of her alien stillness…but as the hours had passed, he’d felt something else. Something that had nothing to do with his duty or his purpose.

  It had felt good, in that animal part of him, to feel his dominance over her. Her willing acceptance of it. She’d watched him the whole time, her black eyes never wavering, and he’d found himself returning her stare more often than was necessary or healthy.

  It had taken every ounce of self-discipline not to look lower, at her naked flesh barely concealed by the covering he’d draped around her haphazardly.

  Ryan was speaking again. “It’s better than what we’ve gotten from her since her arrival. If she’s going to suddenly cooperate with anyone, I’ve got a hundred bucks that says it’ll be you.”

  Dante reached out before Ryan could brush past him. “This isn’t my field of expertise. I did what I was supposed to do—I freed her and brought her here.”

  “You were the one who found her in the first place,” Ryan pointed out mercilessly. “Don’t you feel some responsibility to see this through? Are you no longer interested in finding out about her maker?”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Dante growled, hearing the psychological prodding in Ryan’s words.

  “We don’t have time to play any more games!” Ryan snapped back. “We need to know some things. Now. Before all this shit gets too real.”

  Grunting, Dante glanced one more time at Eva, at the gentle curve of her face and neck, and followed Ryan out of the observation room.

  He missed the glittering tear that traced a path down her cheek.

  * * * * *

  I’m not a monster.

  But according to them—to him—I’m not human either.

  Eva shuddere
d, cold in her thin, sterile gown, and smeared the moisture of a hot tear across the soft skin of her cool cheek. The heat dissipated quickly, making her damp flesh even cooler after its absence.

  What am I then?

  Was she safe here at Sterling? Here where strangers poked and prodded her and asked question after question without mercy? Had they taken her from the darkness of the womb into the light? Or had they awakened her from quiet, peaceful dreams to the banshee wail of reality?

  Were they her liberators? Or tormentors?

  Her fingers furtively searched the planes of her belly, as if by scratching there, she could change something.

  If she surrendered all her knowledge, answered every question, what then would they do to her? She who was neither human nor monster?

  Her finger glided over soft, velvet tissue. A plane, unmarred.

  She had no bellybutton.

  What am I?

  Not even the depths of her mind would reveal the answer to that secret. She knew everything, it seemed. Math, geography, history, biology…these were not unknowns to her. But no matter how hard she tried to understand, no matter how clever she appeared to those who tested her, she could not understand the mysteries she most longed to unravel when she tested herself.

  The mystery of what she was.

  What was her purpose?

  Who had decided that purpose for her—who had made her?

  Both she and Sterling wanted to know—she knew her motives, but what were theirs?

  Eva didn’t know that either. With each day that passed, she felt the burn of that uncertainty, the heat amidst the cold of this—her life—and she relentlessly stirred the warm embers, uncaring that those embers could at any time burst into a blaze of ravenous flame.

  She liked the heat.

  Chapter Two

  “Think hard. How do you know all these languages? How do you know algebra? How did you learn these things?”