Gravity (Mageri Series: Book 4)

by Dark, Dannika

  Justus was too upset to find it amusing that Slater was able to take her down in her own apartment. “Raise your left arm straight up and bring it down over my arms. Twist your body and neck to the right as you do it.” She followed his orders and Justus lost his grip. “Now you can strike me in the face or kick me with your knee, but you must attack.”

  “Why can’t I run?”

  “Because I’ll chase you. Throw me down and injure me and you buy time.”

  Page was hesitant at first, but he reminded her that he was a Mage and no injuries she inflicted upon him would matter. That hesitation kept her from delivering the move properly.

  “Do it, Page!” he said angrily.

  “I am!”

  “Like you mean it. Pretend I’m coming after you.”

  She sighed audibly. “You’re bossy, you know that?”

  “You’re weak,” he dared, saying it under his breath as he reached for her neck.

  The transformation in her expression was brutal. Page completed the moves and had Justus on the floor in three seconds. When he bent forward, she drove her knee into his chest and sent him to the mat.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she said, kneeling by his side. She rested her hands on his shoulders and then a cunning smile tugged the corners of her mouth when she realized he wasn’t upset.

  Justus was grinning, and he couldn’t have been more proud than he was watching her rise to the challenge.

  “You’re something else, you know that?” Page caressed his cheek and he flinched.

  “You don’t like to be touched, do you? I’m sorry; I’ve overstepped my bounds.” She sat back on her ankles and frowned.

  It took most a while to notice his little nuances, but Page was a perceptive woman, always analyzing the situation.

  He sat up, feeling vulnerable on his back.

  It was a strange moment to think about Eleanor, the woman he’d loved from afar who was murdered years ago. He’d kept his distance so she wouldn’t succumb to his charm. Only recently had he found out she was a Blocker—a Mage with a rare ability to block the gifts of others. Page had her own blocking mechanism that kept her from reacting to his energy the way other women did.

  Since the night Merc revealed the truth about Eleanor, Justus realized he had wasted an opportunity he could never get back.

  Walking into Page’s empty apartment had reawakened a nightmare he couldn’t live through again. But this time the feeling was stronger, and it made him question if what he had felt for Eleanor was truly love or just the idea of something he’d never known for himself.

  Justus leaned forward and kissed the tiny scar on her forehead.

  “You really came for me,” she said. “I’d hoped someone would find me, but I can’t believe you came for me.”

  “I would have crossed a battlefield for you.”

  “Will you…”

  He was so close that his nose touched her cheek. “Anything. Speak your mind.”

  “Will you kiss me?”

  Justus dragged his lips slowly to meet hers and whispered across her mouth. “My lips are yours.”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  That single word—not only the meaning itself, but the way she whispered it—seized him unexpectedly with desire.

  Their lips touched warmly, tenderly. When he broke away, Page looked disappointed.

  “Apologies,” he said.

  “No need. Now I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I wanted to see if I felt passion in your kiss.”

  “I feel passion every time I look at you, Page.”

  Without warning, he cupped her face and kissed her as a man who burned for a woman and wanted to discover her with his mouth. He could feel her hesitation at first. Justus didn’t kiss women very often; sex had merely become an outlet. But a fire licked at him just as fervently as her tongue against his. The kiss was so deep their tongues made love.

  He could have kissed her for lifetimes.

  A tangle of emotions weaved through him: fear, lust, and something else wholly unfamiliar. It expanded within his chest with every passing second.

  Sexual energy pulsed throughout his body, energy he’d always kept tethered with his sexual liaisons. A Mage could only touch another Mage during intercourse because if they released their energy into another Breed, it would injure their partner. He’d found ways around this by keeping his hands out of reach. However, accidents had happened, and Justus was enraged that he could hurt a woman who trusted him in the most intimate way. So for decades, he’d restrained all those desires. A woman could satisfy him, but it was a passionless affair.

  But with Page, he couldn’t control the energy and it spiraled out of control. God, her wet lips and the way she moved her tongue. The way she tasted, smelled, and how he wanted to know every curve of her body with his mouth.

  “Wait,” he said, breaking the kiss. They both were breathing heavily. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I kicked you in the chest and threw you down on a mat, and you think kissing is going to hurt me?” She chuckled and her laugh sounded like little wind chimes.

  “Do I seem cold to you?” he finally asked.

  She wiped a few wet hairs away from her eyes. “Why would you ask that? Brash, yes. But when you danced with me that night, you were anything but cold.”

  “A Thermal has that—”

  “No,” she said, lifting her hand to silence him. “That’s not what I meant. A cold man would have left me out there on that floor to make a fool of myself. Or maybe he would have driven me home and taken advantage of my being drunk, only to leave me in the morning. You’re anything but cold, Justus. I might say that you should consider toning down how you speak to people, but then I’d be a hypocrite if I did.”

  Justus rose to his feet and held his hand out. “Let me take you to bed.”

  “I’m not sleepy,” she protested.

  “Neither am I.”

  Chapter 32

  We tied the men to the tables using the restraints. Simon had a little too much fun scaring the big one with his knife. He did a trick where he could twirl the blade between his fingers, back and forth.

  “How many other labs are there?” Christian asked Slater. There was no telling which of them knew more or less, but each man was going to have his turn with Christian.

  “One that I know of,” Slater replied in a monotone voice, completely entranced.

  “Where?”

  “The address is in the files,” he said, nodding his head at a drawer.

  I pulled it open, thumbing through the files until I nodded at Christian, removing a red folder marked “locations.” Slater confirmed they had absorbed one of the other labs and acquired their paperwork.

  “Simon, I think we’re going to have to go through all the files,” I grumbled. “We’ll need Novis to help us move it out; there are way too many drawers here and it’s not going to fit on Christian’s bike.”

  A bike ride I dreaded. Justus had taken the car and Simon declared he was going to head over to a swanky bar up the road for a couple of drinks to take the edge off, leaving Christian to take me home.

  Something with Simon was off, and I knew it had to do with Knox. That’s why he was so anxious to get back on board, because Nero was involved. Simon may have given Knox a hard time, but deep down he liked the big guy. The vacant stare on his face mirrored my own as I occasionally lost focus, thinking about what hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

  Simon continued playing his game with the Mage, repeatedly stabbing the dagger into the table next to his head. The older Mage, who looked like a science teacher, remained quiet, hoping we would forget he was there.

  The questioning went on for hours. The big Mage could only tell us about the women who were brought in. His responsibility had been maintaining the files, doing runs for the serums, and other odd jobs. His involvement was incriminating, but by no means was he the brains in this show. Whoever was in charge had the right i
dea in keeping the talent separated. Perhaps they were easier to control if only one person knew what was going on within each lab.

  The older Mage tapped his finger against his leg, watching us with wide eyes. Simon guarded the biggest threat, but ever the strategist, the real person he was tormenting with his knife tricks wasn’t the gopher, but the older man who was forced to watch.

  Slater had been a recent addition to the gang. He didn’t seem to possess the depth of knowledge one would expect in someone working on genetics. He had written a few papers that received some attention, and someone anonymously offered him a large sum of money to put his knowledge to use.

  What Christian got from the big guy was that all the pregnancies yielded human children. The mothers were disposed of, and once they realized the children were not Breed, they would dump them off for someone to find. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to murder a child.

  It was a horrifying revelation, a fate that my mother was lucky to have escaped. They were looking for the next genetic leap and needed something special. They’d figured out how to manipulate sperm and eggs by altering the DNA. Half of what they were saying was over my head, but it sounded like they were trying all kinds of combinations based on the results of the other labs.

  Slater confessed he had found my vial of blood in Page’s possession and sampled my DNA to see if I might be a potential candidate for their experiments. To his surprise, he found that my blood was very similar to the infants born in their lab.

  It took dedicated research to discover I was patient zero—the first baby born of these experiments. Now that I was a Mage, it excited him tremendously. Once he made the connection, he tried to locate my file, but the complete records didn’t date back that far.

  Some were missing.

  Only one of their files had minimal information on my conception. It stated that Grady was an Infuser who was able to seal energy onto core light that would otherwise escape with time. I was told that not many Infusers come out because they’re highly sought after. A Mage has no desire to become a commodity, so many keep their gifts a secret. Simon mentioned some of the Learners who discovered their gifts early and made them public were kidnapped and sold on the black market.

  The egg had been fertilized and inseminated into the patient. Grady had concentrated a small amount of energy into the womb and then used his abilities as an Infuser. The idea was to strengthen the uterus and the egg so that the woman would be able to carry a Breed child. We had theorized it to death, but that explained the unusual buildup of static I always carried when I was human. Grady performed this same act several other times, and those were the only children who ended up on Samil’s list. He wasn’t interested in all the test-tube babies, only the ones whose lives began with an infusion of Mage energy.

  “Why did they want my mother?” I asked the older Mage.

  He kept his gaze on Christian while speaking in a monotone voice. “She was the human child of a Chitah.”

  I gasped and Simon spit out a curse.

  “That can’t be!” My hands trembled. I couldn’t believe it! I would have never imagined that my own mother’s life had begun in this world—that she was the child of a Chitah.

  “They are usually impossible to locate, but yours had a Chitah mother who tried to claim her when she was an infant, so her identity was known. There’s something in their DNA that increases the odds of carrying a Breed child to full term, so we discovered. We had no luck in the beginning with Breed females carrying; their body would reject any fertilized egg of another Breed.”

  “My mother is a Chitah?”

  “Human. Just born of a Chitah. But she shares their blood, even if she is not a Chitah. They live ordinary mortal lives and will never share the same characteristic traits of a Chitah, but there is a magic in them nevertheless.”

  I sat down on a metal stool with my mouth agape. My mother was a human child of a Chitah. Grady was torn about following through with it, but had finally buckled under the influence of money. He agreed to help as an Infuser on the condition that he’d no longer have to retrieve any of the women.

  “And what of the spermtabulous cocktail?” Christian pressed.

  The older man stared blankly at him. “Our boss made sure that each of us only knew part of the puzzle. We did our job and kept confidentiality, even amongst ourselves.”

  “Who the hell is my father?” I screamed.

  Christian leaned in and punched out his fangs.

  The Mage continued staring into his eyes. “The egg belonged to a female Chitah. We think that’s why it bonded so well in the early experiments, but we ran out of human-Chitah surrogates. Locating one of them who also happened to be of childbearing age became as easy as locating a goldfish in the Atlantic Ocean. They’re given up anonymously, and we haven’t had any success in recent years of tracking them down, so we moved on and tried different things. I don’t know where the sperm came from.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand. “I’m a Chitah,” I breathed. “Both my biological and surrogate mothers were Chitahs.”

  “Where is the man who knows about the sperm?” Christian asked in a cool and dangerous voice.

  “Dead. Some knowledge died over the years, which is why we’ve had to try new things. Like vaccinations.”

  “Where is Silver’s file?”

  “Below the desk… by the door in the back.”

  Christian nodded for me to go look and I dug around until I found an old brown file with a coffee stain on it. I saw my mother’s picture, her name, information about my birth and conception.

  “It’s here, Christian. I got it!” I said excitedly. I tucked the file beneath my shirt, inside my pants. “Are you two okay here? I need to go.”

  “Hell no, you’re not going!” Christian snapped in almost unintelligible Irish accent. “You forget I’m your guard?”

  So I waited it out for a grueling ten hours.

  Christian and Simon extracted every slice of information they could get out of the men, including all their knowledge, how much of it was documented on paper, where those papers were, and if they knew anything that had not been documented. Christian got names of three other men involved, but no one knew the ringleader; he was a shadow. The criminals with money and intelligence operated like the Great and Powerful Oz, having other people do their dirty work and staying out of arm’s reach. It reminded me of how Nero conducted business.

  ***

  Justus led Page into his bedroom and closed the door. She leaned against it, and they stared at each other.

  Even before he realized the Relic was immune to his charms, he had been drawn to her. She wasn’t anything like the women he had been with before. She carried a subtle beauty and never flaunted it with provocative clothing or heavy makeup. He found himself attracted to her admirable qualities: intelligence, leadership skills, and how she handled difficult situations with great fortitude. He understood her personality in a way that few men would, and it’s why he challenged her every step of the way.

  When Page would visit with Silver, Justus stood quietly by the wall, noticing little details about her. Like how she sometimes tapped her nose while thinking, or whenever she was working something out in her head, she would twirl her finger in the air and look around. There was a brilliant light shining in her eyes that captivated him.

  In his youth, Justus had been an artist. Life had excited him in much the same way as it did her, except his medium had been painting and hers was books. She absorbed knowledge the way a canvas absorbs paint. She reminded him of the man he once was. The man he never thought he could be again.

  The air stilled between them and he dropped to his knees before her. Page smoothed her soft hands across his bristly head in a very slow manner. She was the first person he had allowed to touch him so intimately in a private setting. Not the heavy petting that went on in the clubs, but a touch that meant something as her eyes gazed directly into his.

  He ran his hands up her naked thigh
s and slowly dragged his fingers beneath her long shirt. The smooth hush of skin filled the silence of the room and her head fell against the door as her eyes closed. It was the most erotic visual Justus had ever seen, and he suddenly had an urge to paint it. His rough hands journeyed higher up her smooth thighs until he reached the feminine curve of her hips. Justus had never experienced such a lack of control with his energy. He immediately let go and placed his hands on his lap.

  “I’ll hurt you,” he warned.

  “Then don’t touch me.”

  His cobalt eyes sharply looked up at her. “That would be an impossibility.”

  She stepped around him to the bed. “Then maybe it isn’t meant to be. Maybe what they say about dating outside your Breed is right.”

  Something caught his eye and Justus stood up. He lifted the object from the dresser and latched it around his neck with a click.

  “Oh, that’s darling,” she said with a flurry of giggles.

  Silver’s necklace that suppressed energy hung around his neck, and Justus smiled at her like a cat that was about to eat the canary.

  When her cheeks pinkened, he frowned. “Have I offended you?”

  “Can I see you without your shirt on?” The palms of her hands turned red and she wrung them together as if trying to hide the fact that she blushed all over her body.

  His heart unexpectedly beat faster. Page was about to appraise him, and while Justus was proud of his physique, he suddenly became nervous as hell. She was not under a Charmer’s spell.

  Page could reject him.

  “Never mind,” she said dismissively, clasping her delicate fingers together.

  Without hesitation, he peeled off his shirt and dropped it on the floor. Over the course of the past month, the physical conditioning in his training room had strengthened his muscles. His abs were a force to be reckoned with.

  He could almost feel the heat from her eyes sliding up his abs, broad torso, and then along the muscles in his arms. She wasn’t looking at him with Relic eyes, but the eyes of a woman. Her blush slowly faded and he stepped forward within reach.

  “Turn around?” she asked.