5. Fucked Up Blood
FIVE
FUCKED UP BLOOD
Seven
T welve was no longer pregnant.
Twelve and Nineteen had created a new life … together. And with one bullet, fired by a stupid, frightened agent, that life had been snuffed out.
The knowledge rattled around in my aching brain. My arms and legs, my neck, were all secured to a sturdy chair. Cold, metal clasps bit into my skin. A drip in my arm kept a steady dose of drugs pumping into me.
“Explain it again,” Baxter asked, leaning back against his desk. The coffee he’d had for breakfast was stale on his breath, even from this distance. The drug no longer dulled my senses the way it always had in the past.
There were other smells in this room. Nineteen’s sweat. They’d dragged him out as Dawson escorted me down the corridor. His body looked broken, although there wasn’t a mark on him. His head had lolled. Unconscious.
Did they beat him? Did they pummel his grieving body until he lost consciousness? Did Baxter do it personally? Or did he have his minions do the dirty work for him?
“Seven. Again.” Baxter’s voice was a low warning. I licked my lips with a dry, scratchy tongue. A side-effect of the high doses of drugs, Dawson had told me.
“For your own safety,” she’d explained, her eyes darting.
Such a liar.
“I was waiting for him to … perform. Same as every day. He wouldn’t. He refused. The agent in charge of supervising tried to force him. I … I told them I didn’t want to do it, either. And then, when his wings … when he began to shift, it was like my body just … couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”
Baxter was silent for a long moment. I tried wetting my lips again. They cracked. My blood hit my tongue. I inhaled sharply at the taste. Another scent invaded my senses. Fresh water in a glass on Baxter’s desk made me whimper. I bit it back. I didn’t want him to have something else to hold over me.
I sniffed again, chasing another elusive scent. Like the smell of damp earth in that clearing, mingled with something slightly salty. The scent tickled at my nostrils. It flitted through parts of my brain I was trying to ignore.
Mine. MineMineMine.
HE’S been in here.
“Tell me again what Nineteen said,” Baxter commanded. I sighed. I’d told him three times already. I just wanted him to let me go so I could return to my room and curl up in a ball. Sob silently for Nineteen, for Twelve. For the little embryo that had bled out of her when a bullet wound matching Nineteen’s had opened up in her stomach.
Baxter didn’t know that I knew this. But gossip between agents was rife, and they always seemed to forget how much better our hearing was than theirs.
One way they underestimated us.
One day, they would underestimate us in the wrong way. And the white, sterile walls would run red.
“He kept asking to be taken to Twelve.”
Baxter sucked air through his teeth. The sound set my nerves jangling.
“And, when the agent left,” Baxter continued. “When the alarm was raised about Twelve, tell me what happened.”
“Nineteen crawled for the door. He didn’t … he had no idea why he needed her, but he …” I trailed off, remembering vividly the word he’d used. The word that still reverberated in my own tender skull.
Mine.
“He felt compelled to go to her,” Baxter finished for me, and I held myself so still, hoping he wouldn’t realize that I was leaving information out of my story.
“And then they drugged me, and … I don’t remember anything else after that,” I said, my voice gravelly from talking through the dryness of my throat. I was tempted to worry at the scab on my lip, break it open again, and suck the blood from my own body. Something, anything, to quench the thirst in me.
Mine. MineMineMineMineMineMine.
He would quench every thirst our body has.
I shuddered. Baxter’s eyes flashed to me.
“Is something the matter?” he asked, eyes cold, calculating.
I hate you.
“I’m just …” I let my voice slur, let my eyelids droop. “So … tired.”
My head lolled against the neck brace holding me in place.
“Fuck. Is the dose too high? Why do they keep passing out on me?” Baxter grunted. I kept my body limp.
“You’ve had her in the chair for two hours, sir,” Dawson replied tentatively. “That’s a long time for a continuous dose, especially after what we gave her yesterday. If you want them to stay lucid, you need to let the drugs wear off a bit.”
Baxter snorted. “I’m not taking any chances with this, not after yesterday.” His voice was laced with disgust. And something else.
The tang of fear filled my sinuses.
I want you to die bloody.
“It seems she doesn’t have anything more for me, anyway,” he continued, his footsteps pacing around the desk. “So … what to do with the little information we have …”
“Sir …” Dawson interjected. “I wonder if maybe conception creates a sort of … of bond, between the biological parents? It seems that Twelve was aware very early on that she had conceived. And she kept asking for Nineteen, too. Maybe there’s a … a need to be together, to protect their young.”
“That theory has merit,” Baxter replied. “After all, their young are as weak and vulnerable as human young. It makes sense that there would be some primitive, evolutionary urge to stay close, to provide more protection to a feeble infant.”
I kept my body limp only through sheer force of will. The way he spoke about us horrified me. As if we were nothing more than a slightly disgusting science experiment to him.
Twelve lost her baby. It might not have been more than a cluster of cells, but it was hers. Hers and Nineteen’s.
And it was gone.
But … what would have happened to it if it had survived to be born? Perhaps this was a mercy for all involved.
No parent would wish this life on their child.
“What I want to know, though, is how Seven managed to throw off the drugs and shift,” Baxter continued as if I wasn’t in the room. As if I’d ceased to be worth his notice the second I no longer had an immediate purpose.
Which suited me just fine. Knowledge was power. And he knew things that I didn’t. Things about me … about my kind.
“It stands to reason that Nineteen could do it as a result of this conception bond—if we accept your theory as fact, Dawson. But how is Seven involved in this? How did she shift? Did Nineteen emit some sort of pheromone that overrode the drugs?”
“I … I don’t have answers for you, sir,” Dawson stammered. “I know they’re running tests on him now.”
“Yes … send Seven to the lab for blood work and scans, too. Maybe something … anomalous will pop up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The black world behind my eyelids spun. Dawson was turning my chair, wheeling it towards the door.
“Oh, and Dawson?” Baxter called as the creak of opening hinges hit my ears. Movement stopped.
“Yes, sir?”
“Have Dean escort Jack Turner to the lab also. He had that … unprompted partial shift in the mess hall yesterday. It seems too coincidental for him to shift through the drugs and then two of our lab hybrids to do the same only hours later.”
“What shall we tell him, if he asks?”
Baxter snorted. “Fucking coddled little shit he is. Just tell him we’re doing a full medical on him before his departure for Denmark. That should keep him compliant. He desperately wants back to Blaire, so he’ll cooperate if he thinks it’ll get him closer to his goal.”
“Do you know where she is, sir?” Dawson asked.
“Not yet. But give it time. She’ll crawl out of the woodwork eventually.”
The darkness in his words sent ice shooting through every inch of my skin as Dawson wheeled me out of the room.
I was no stranger to the medical facility. When I was in G Block, undertaking combat training, I’d spent many hours here. We hadn’t been quite immortal, back when they started us in that program. We healed fast and didn’t really need treatment, but they liked to watch the healing happen. They liked to take blood and do scans, trying to find some answer as to how our accelerated healing worked.
I’d broken my arm once, but it had healed before they could rush me into a CT scan. They forcibly broke it again while I was strapped to the machine, just to recreate the moment under ‘controlled circumstances’.
I could still hear my scream echoing in my mind from time to time. Could still feel the agonizing crack of the bone.
Those memories were drowned out by the whirring of the scan machine. One set of restraints had been replaced with another. Strapped to a metal table, a drip feeding something icy into my veins, the machine spun around me, emitting clicks, beeps, and buzzes.
I closed my eyes, willing back the nausea from whatever they were injecting me with. Weariness—real bone-deep weariness this time, not just my feigned tiredness from Baxter’s office—stole over me …
“Wake up, half-breed!”
My eyes snapped open, and I gasped, trying to sit up. I choked myself on the neck restraint and fell back, coughing violently.
A nasty female laugh echoed through the space. I clenched my teeth. Agent Mercer. She’d done tests on me before. She hated us almost as much as she was fascinated by us.
She reminded me a lot of Baxter.
“Stupid fucking freak,” Mercer muttered to herself, but I could hear her just fine. “I’m not interested in your sleeping brain activity,” she said louder for my benefit, and slowly, as if I were an imbecile. “I want to see whether that feeble mind of yours is doing anything different to the last time we scanned you. Something must be going on in there for you to shift through the medication.”
The noises started up again, and a fresh batch of icy liquid was pushed through the IV into my bloodstream.
“I just can’t … there’s nothing anomalous on this scan,” Mercer snarled. “That can’t be right. Something must have changed.”
Silence.
Then, “Greta! Are the blood results in?”
“Just checking the slides now!” a younger voice called, fainter, from further away. “It looks … I can’t work it out. There’s … something unusual in there. But it’s …”
“Let me look!” Mercer snapped. “Holy … what the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know. But that’s not how… that isn’t how human cells act.” The younger one sounded befuddled. My limbs started trembling.
“Well, they aren’t fucking human, are they? Nothing like this has ever shown up on blood slides before. What about the others? Twelve and Nineteen? What do their bloods look like?”
“Hold on, I haven’t checked their slides yet.”
There were a lot of tiny, clinking noises and then a long silence.
“There’s … something in there, too,” the younger one said, her voice tentative. “But these cells look … I don’t know … like they’ve merged, maybe?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Greta, get out of the way.”
There were sounds of people shuffling about, of desk chair wheels rolling on a hard floor.
“Well, this is interesting , isn’t it?” The smug glee in Mercer’s voice was colder in my veins than the stuff they’d pumped me full of for the scan.
“Get the new recruit’s sample. That hulking blond beast Baxter just sent over. Have they taken his blood yet?”
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” Greta replied.
“Fucking hell, this place may as well be run by trained monkeys. Go and get him from the holding area. I’ll get Seven out of the machine. The scan is a fucking waste of time. These bloods, though.” She whistled, chuckled darkly, and as Greta scuttled past, Mercer’s cold face appeared above me.
“You’ve got some fucked up blood, half-breed,” she said conversationally, ripping the cannula from my arm violently. Blood erupted from the wound. I watched it spurt from my open vein onto the floor, like it belonged to someone else.
“I’ll never get over watching how fast your veins seal themselves up,” Mercer continued, unbuckling me from the restraints. I glanced down at my arm, coated in drying blood, but wound-free.
“Yes, it’s fascinating, isn’t it, freak?” she hissed in my ear, stepping back as I sat up. “How you just bounce back. I’d give anything to reverse engineer all your little quirks, figure out what makes you tick. If I could just synthesize the healing … the lack of aging … maybe we wouldn’t need to be wasting all this time and energy trying to br …”
My mind flitted away from her rambling. The smell of fresh earth, of salt and moisture, invaded my senses. My blood thrummed.
Mine.
MineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMine.
I inhaled deeply, sucking breaths through my mouth, but I could taste the damned scents. Saliva flooded my mouth, my jaw ached. My gums pulsed … no!
No, I couldn’t partially shift. Not here, not with Mercer’s greedy eyes on me. Not with whatever mystery she had found in my blood playing on her mind. She’d think there was some sort of correlation.
Was there?
What is this? What is happening to me?
“Jesus fuck, why is the floor covered in blood?”
My eyes flashed up and I was on my feet in an instant.
It was him. The big blond they’d been talking about.
It’s HIM.
His eyes locked on mine, amber and flecked with gold. They widened. His nostrils flared.
“You,” he breathed.
My mouth dropped open.
“Oh, have you two met? I didn’t think Baxter was letting his precious ‘homeschooler’ mingle with the facility plebs,” Mercer said with a smirk.
What is she talking about?
My brain felt too scrambled to comprehend her meaning. I took a breath, and my lungs filled with that scent. His scent. I clenched my fists by my sides. I ached to touch him. To run my hands through that golden hair. To scratch the stubble on his chiseled jaw, let my fingers trail down that strong neck, over the …
The blond’s eyes flashed, his jaw clenched.
“No. She’s … nothing—no one.” His voice was dismissive, but it was also deep, rumbly. It vibrated through parts of me that I didn’t want to acknowledge. Parts of me that no longer felt like they belonged to me.
I pressed my thighs together to try and stop that ache from intensifying. It did nothing except make it worse. He took a deep inhale, and those eyes turned to molten gold for a split second before he turned his head, shoving his hands into the pockets of his Operation issue jumpsuit.
He could smell the things I didn’t want to be feeling.
Heat surged into my cheeks.
“Oh, I disagree wholeheartedly,” Mercer said with a little girlish giggle that had my teeth sharpening with the desire to rip her throat out.
“Put those away, Seven,” she said, flicking a hand at my mouth, her lips twisting in distaste. “Let’s not be rude in front of our special guest.”
I longed to snap my teeth at her, to see her skitter away, her pupils dilating in fear. But I knew from past experiences with the sadistic bitch that she kept loaded syringes on her at all times. And they weren’t just loaded with the usual suppression drugs. She had far nastier concoctions she liked to test out on hybrids who got too big for their boots.
I closed my mouth around my elongated teeth, hiding them as best I could.
Mercer took a step back from the male, who scowled at her. “I must say, raising them in the human world seems to have some … perks.”
I froze. Raised in the human world? Was he … were there others like us, outside? I’d always thought that the entirety of our population was here in this facility. Had I been wrong? And if there were others in the outside world, why was he here now?
I looked at the male again with new eyes.
He was larger than most of the males in here. His skin was bronzed in a way that seemed impossible, offsetting the golden glints in his hair. Did the outside world make these … tempting attributes possible? Was that why I was having these … feelings?
Was that scent of damp earth and salty air that I smelled every time he was near … the scent that called to me … was that the smell of the outside on him? That elusive scent of freedom that I’d gotten a taste of that night they took us to that clearing.
Mine.
MineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMine.
Mercer pinched her bottom lip, eyeing him appraisingly, and I found my gaze wandering, following the trail her eyes were taking. How they paused for too long at his crotch.
I swallowed down a growl.
We’ll pluck those covetous eyes from Mercer’s head and shove them down her throat for staring at him like that , the whisper announced viciously.
I couldn’t stifle the growl this time.
Mercer and the male both flicked their eyes to me. Hers annoyed. His … there was something primal in that look. Something that sent hot and cold coursing through my bloodstream.
“I need blood from you, Jack,” Mercer said with a sniff. “Greta, clean up this mess.” She gestured to the splatter of my blood, crimson on the monochrome floor. The girl hurriedly grabbed a paper towel and cleaning spray, crouching and rubbing at the stain as Mercer bustled off into her office.
The male—Jack—watched my blood disappearing under Greta’s frantic scrubbing, his nostrils flaring again, his brow furrowing. His throat bobbed once, twice, and then his eyes darted back to me.
“Seven’s a weird fucking name,” he murmured.
My mouth twisted bitterly. I wanted to growl that as the seventh born in this place, that was the only name I’d ever known. And that maybe ‘Jack’ was a stupid name, too.
But his jaw tensed, he shook his head once, and when he turned those eyes on me, they were burning gold.
“You smell of spring, of growing things,” he muttered, his voice suddenly deeper, rougher … growlier.
My lips parted.
“I think I’ll call you Blossom.”
Time slowed. My skin burned with a flash of heat so intense it made me gasp. His molten eyes were unwavering on mine, his lips curling into a feral, wicked grin.
Mercer bustled back into the room, eyed Jack with a mixture of lust and intense disgust, and gestured for him to take a seat.
I blinked, and when I glanced at him again, his eyes were back to that warm hazel color that they’d been before, although looking everywhere but at me. He plonked into the chair almost dazedly, his mouth tight, all hint of that smile gone.
“Greta, escort Seven back to her cell once you’re done with that mess,” Mercer commanded, tugging on a fresh pair of latex gloves and prepping her sharps and containers.
She was inching closer to the top of my revenge list every time she opened her mouth.
Mercer tightened a tourniquet around Jack’s bicep as he squeezed his fist. As the veins and muscles bulged in his forearm.
Saliva flooded my mouth. Other liquids flooded lower.
His gaze snapped to mine, his lips parted around growing teeth. His eyes glowed gold again.
MINE!
Nausea roiled in my gut, and I shoved past him and Mercer. My shoulder bumped into his bicep, and he hissed. Heat shot down my arm, but I pressed my lips tightly together and burst out of the door and into the corridor.
“Get back here, Seven!” Mercer shouted. I ignored her, striding down the hallway, dragging in air. He must have been brought in this way, because every breath pulled more of that smell, that taste into me.
His smell. His taste.
Those bulging veins, filled with his blood
“Shit! Greta, get her! Take her straight to her cell. Tell Dawson to lock her in there. She’s not to be serviced today. I might need her back for further examination.” Mercer’s voice chased me down the blank, lifeless corridor, Greta’s hurried footsteps following soon after.
“I know my way back,” I snarled, shaking out my tingling fingers.
“I know you do, Seven, but you know you can’t just wander around this level unaccompanied.” Greta’s voice was soft, almost apologetic. I slowed but didn’t stop.
“Please, don’t make me electrocute you,” she pleaded. “You’ve been through enough today.”
I sighed, stopping and turning to her.
“Don’t you get off on zapping us?” I hissed, wrapping my arms around my stomach, pressing against the swirling feeling there, the pulsing heat … lower down.
No. I didn’t want to feel things there. Oh … please don’t let me feel things down there. Hundreds of days of work, to pretend that part of me … those needs … no longer existed, all gone in an instant. In a breath, that tasted of night-time earth and salty air. In one fleeting brush of heated contact.
Why was this happening to me?
“Not all of us are like Mercer, you know,” Greta said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She stepped up to me, gave my arm a quick pat, then began walking once more, beckoning me onwards.
I stared down at the spot she’d just touched. It looked the same as it ever had. And yet I could still feel her small, warm hand as if it had branded me.
It was the first time I’d ever been touched with kindness.