Chapter 4 #2
Sick. She was going to be sick. Amara was sure of it. Covering her mouth, she raced to the bathroom sink. Her body heaved, wanting to throw up what her human mind needed to reject as an act of horror, but nothing came. Nick, who had followed her in, was looking gray and distraught beside her.
“What have they done to us?” She echoed his earlier query, her voice strained as her body hunched over the sink and tried again to reject the meal she’d made of him.
But even as this happened, another part of her brain warred with her over it, arguing that the warmth and spicy flavor of him had been the best meal of her entire life.
She’d never known such satisfaction or such pleasure.
“Amara, I’m so sorry. God, look at what I did to you,” he choked out, reaching to touch her bloodied, wounded hips where he’d clawed into her.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said quite honestly. “Just stings a little.” She splashed water over her face and drank the coolness from her fingers. She wiped her face against her arm and stood up straight to examine him. “Turn around.”
Nick hesitated, the avoidance of his usually direct eyes confirming what she already knew.
She reached for him and, after a look of admonition, turned him gently between her hands.
She saw the raw slices of her nails down his back, and even deep into his buttocks, which she didn’t as easily recall doing as she did the other.
“Does it hurt?” she had to ask, her fingertips ghosting over the wounds.
Then she reached up to touch his neck, where she could see the savage bite of her very own teeth turn into his flesh.
But she could also see he was already healing from the damage.
She had ripped him up unthinkingly, but despite the ugly look of the melded wound, it was clearly sewing itself together again. “You’re healing,” she marveled.
Nick turned and reached for the breast he had bitten, gentle fingers cupping her warmly even as he stroked his thumb over the deep punctures and surrounding bruises.
“So are you,” he noted. “Amara, I never wanted …” He swallowed loudly, remorse and distress resonating deep into his intense green gaze.
“Neither did I. You aren’t to blame any more than I am. I knew the minute they threw me in here we were in trouble no matter what we did. I’ve seen too many things here.”
She squeezed past him and tapped the water temp panel for the shower.
The cube was quite small, but she reached for him regardless and drew him under the spray with her.
Amara figured there was no need to be shy anymore, and she wasn’t quite ready to be left alone just yet.
She hoped he didn’t balk, and she smiled when he obeyed the silent request to join her.
She felt the sting of the hot water in the many pricks and cuts on her body, and when he winced ever so slightly she could imagine it was quite a lot worse for him since she’d tracked up his back pretty fiercely.
“Let’s avoid soap,” she advised as she ran her hands down over his chest and helped the water run red with his blood.
“Are you dizzy or anything? You lost a lot of …” Amara frowned.
Nick reached up quickly to cradle her cheek against his palm, his thumb rubbing away the lines of distress between her brows.
“No. Not at all. I feel fine. Strangely, better than fine. Don’t worry. I did my share of damage, too.”
“There are no towels,” she noted.
“We’ll have to settle for the heat dryer. I hate the damn things, but there isn’t much of a choice.”
Nick gently rubbed his free hand down over her chest, rinsing away places where blood had dried on her skin.
A mixture of his and of hers. Suddenly, Amara wanted more of his gentility.
There was something very compelling about his animalistic mastery, and she wouldn’t kid herself about how it had felt despite how it had come about, but she also craved this human kindness from him.
It was almost as if she yearned for the balance of it.
He turned off the water and hit the drying switch.
Bright heat lights flared on over them and warm air blasted against their bodies.
Nick turned her, lifting her hair, her breasts, and skimming down her body again and again until she was mostly dry.
He even made her step her feet wide apart to dry her between her legs, his fingers stroking through tight pubic curls and beyond.
He turned her and very familiarly cupped her backside, parting her cheeks and very intimately made certain she was dry there as well.
Amara flushed as his touch ran over her.
There had been a time when she would never have allowed such familiarity.
Now, she had no more secret or sanctified places on her body after three months at the whim of medics, doctors, and others who couldn’t care less about her modesty.
But at least with Nick it felt welcome. Like a choice.
Odd, since it was clear choice had been manipulated in both of them. But at this moment, it was voluntary.
They stepped out of the shower and the instant she was away from the warmth of his body and the dryer, she began to shiver, wrapping herself up in her own arms.
Nick reacted immediately, drawing her against his own warmth and leading her out of the chilled bathroom to find the blanket she’d abandoned earlier.
He wrapped them up together and, after flipping over the bloody mattress, drew her down onto the bed.
“Seems cuddling is the least I can do after all else I’ve done to you,” he joked a bit grimly.
Amara appreciated the humor, black as it was.
“I wonder what will happen now. I’m afraid of what will happen next.
I know they are watching us. They know we’re done doing what they wanted us to do.
” She had no more caution, no more reason to be shy or withdrawn, so it allowed her a new freedom.
She exercised it as she touched him over his chest, rubbing a thumb over a Land Corps tattoo on his biceps.
He had served in the military. He was a cop.
Everything about him evidenced that he was a man who wanted to do good, but he had to do it in rough and tough ways.
The beast he had become under the duress of the experimenters’ drugs had probably already existed in part inside of him.
She had easily seen his aggressive tendencies the moment she’d first seen him in the common room.
She imagined he would have been a dominant lover even under normal circumstances.
But she also sensed he would have been far more attentive, and much more caring of his partner’s needs.
His actions in the shower had made that clear to her.
For herself, after having grown up destitute and living half her life on streets far too dangerous for a child, she knew there was an animal inside of her as well.
She had repressed it and every other emotional reaction she’d ever had as she had turned herself into a labor machine.
Work, eat, sleep. Work, eat, sleep. There had been comfort in that.
It kept her isolated and insulated. She didn’t have to fight for food, for her body, or for her life.
Until this very moment, she had continued to react numbly to what had happened to her, perhaps having given up even before she had gotten there.
But in the end, she had been herself, numb or not.
What they had done these past three months had altered all of that. Taken her all away.
Made her into what they had wanted her to be.
Now, Amara felt as though she had just wakened from a long, paralyzing coma.
Perhaps it was seeing what had happened to Nick while looking into sea-green eyes turned savage and outrageously wild.
Or she was more inclined to believe it had been that moment of reckoning striking with guilt and horror across his face when he’d seen the blood on their bodies.
It surprised her to realize that what happened to someone else really did matter to her.
She had spent a very long time convincing herself otherwise, figuring it was just easier that way.
But it was different suddenly. She felt energized and revitalized and …
Powerful.
Whole. That was it. She suddenly felt like missing parts of herself had been retrieved and connected to her soul where they belonged. It was such an elemental sensation and so very raw at heart. And she knew, somehow, that it was because fate had thrown her into Nick’s path.
“I don’t want them to take me away,” she blurted out suddenly.
“They can’t take you away,” he said, his voice suddenly low and rough.
There was such a deep-seated level of threat and, seeing how his eyes flashed virulent green wildfire, she believed him.
He dragged her up closer, rubbing his face against her hair and locking a leg around both of hers as if that would keep them from taking her when the time came.
But the truth was they weren’t the ones with the ultimate power in the end.
They were. The experimenters.
Except now, their experiments had suddenly developed very interesting new strengths.
“Do you think what they have done is permanent?” she whispered.
“Feels like,” he said just as softly, not knowing if it helped them speak privately or not. “Drugs don’t grow body parts. I think they fucked with our genetics.”
“Maybe we’re the end result of all the trial and error they’ve been doing. They culled out all the weakest of us. You are the first new person we’ve seen in ages, and like you said, you were chosen deliberately because you were snooping around where they didn’t want you.”
“From what I learned,” Nick replied, his frown hidden in her hair, “the Phoenix Project is supposed to be some kind of anti-aging protocol.”
“Great, so they make vampires out of us?” Amara couldn’t believe she’d had the temerity to say it aloud. It seemed so ridiculous, but at the same time it was the best description. “I wonder what else it does to us. Did. Did to us. Are we immortal? Will we go ‘poof’ in sunlight?”
“I’m sure they are testing those theories on some poor assholes as we speak. But they must have known about the animalistic need to mate and feed, otherwise why pair us up so fast?”
“You think we can eat regular food still?”
“We can drink water. You proved that.”
“Oh, hey. I did, didn’t I?” She sighed. “I have to admit, I am scared to find out the answers to all of this. Worse, it scares me to think of this savagery being let loose inside of some of the nasty weirdos we have around here. They brought in a really large group with us, and we probably weren’t the only ones.
Raul, the medic on my floor, said it was a ‘big day today.’ Maybe they culminated this part of the project? Maybe everyone was changed?”
“We won’t know until and if they let us back into the general populace. But here’s the part that freezes my soul, Amara. My investigation, the one that led me here? It was in pursuit of a rash of kidnappings.”
“I know. That’s how they get us.”
“No, honey. I mean kidnappings. As in kids. They’ve got children here, too.”