Chapter 11
“Nicky, you’ll get yourself killed if you keep up this cowboy bullshit of yours,” Jamie Mulloy said with a resigned sigh. “Then I’ll have to lie my way through a eulogy at your funeral so people will think you weren’t an asshole.”
“Anyone who comes to my funeral will know perfectly well I was an asshole. Don‘t lie on my account,” Nick chuckled.
“Your brother will hunt me into the tomb beside you if I let anything happen to you. I’m begging you. Kincaid Gregory scares the piss out of me. You know that.”
Nick smiled slow and wide. His big brother was a bit intimidating at that. “Kin won’t kill you. He’ll just bat you around a little. Then he’ll dig my ass up and kick the shit out of it for getting myself dead.”
“Nick! You wake up right now, or so help me I am going to kick your ass!”
Nick opened his eyes and drew a breath, not realizing it was his first in nearly two hours. Previous to that, his lungs had contained too many holes to hold air. His chest hurt like hell, and he had the weirdest sensation that his heart wasn’t beating quite right.
Or at all.
“Am I dead, or what?”
“Or what.”
Nick sat up sharply, ignoring the savage backlash of pain it caused as he turned to stare into copper eyes that were filled with tears.
They spilled over onto her cheeks and it was the most amazing thing Nick had seen in all of his convoluted life.
Tears. Crystal-clear drips of emotion so normal, so common, and so alive.
Tears falling from beautiful, blinking eyes completely unmarred by an off-center bullet wound.
Yet … her hair was stained red and crusted with the heavy remnants of her own blood. Possibly even his as well as he had bled out on top of her body.
“Amara?” he said dumbly, reaching out to touch her and see if she was real. His wrist snagged on the zipper teeth of the plastic surrounding him. That was when he looked down at himself and realized he was stripped naked.
Again.
And he was in a damn body bag.
“Holy hell!”
Nick jolted so clumsily to get out of the creepy plastic covering that he fell off of the autopsy table and onto white, sanitized floor tile. Amara, just as naked as he was, bent to put her hands on her knees, and peered at him with a sniffle.
“I did the exact same thing,” she noted with a shrug as she held out a hand to him. Nick took it automatically and she helped him coordinate getting to his feet. When he was up, he immediately saw the second metal table and the empty body bag. God. She had woken up alone zipped up in that thing!
“Honey, are you okay?” he demanded, using their clasped hands to drag her up against himself.
She was warm. She was pliant and soft, her heart beating against his chest beneath her breast. He couldn’t bring himself to make a visual check, so he cautiously reached up to slide his fingertips into the hair at the back of her head.
It crackled with dried blood and she tried to shy away.
“Nick, I’m icky and crusted … and I have weird goo in my hair,” she complained, trying to draw back.
“That goo is probably half of your damned brain, Amara! What in hell were you thinking! You got yourself killed!”
“Only for a little while!”
They stared at each other when they realized the absurdity of the argument.
“My God, I think we’re zombies,” she said with a shudder.
“Mara,” he chided her, finally chuckling with the peculiarity of it all, “we aren’t zombies.
Just … remarkable healers. Man, even your hair is growing back,” he marveled as he stroked his fingers over the very solid bone of her skull under her scalp.
Finally he turned her around and looked for himself.
No hole. No gore—discounting what was stuck in her hair.
He looked around the autopsy room and saw an empty table with the handheld spray nozzle they used to wash cadavers before beginning the postmortem. “Come here.”
Nick drew her to the welled metal table and gave it a pat.
“Nick, we don’t have time for this,” she said, eyeing the table skeptically.
“If there was a reflective surface in here, you’d disagree with that. Get up.”
Sighing, she did as he asked. He arranged her so she was leaned back on her elbows with her head closest to the drain. He didn’t think she needed to see what he was about to clean off of her.
“Close your eyes. Let me take care of you,” he said softly.
He grabbed the nozzle and squeezed. It took him a minute to figure out how to adjust the temperature so he wouldn’t freeze or scald her.
He started at her feet and with the pressure of the spray and the thorough stroke of his free hand, he cleaned her of all the evidence of her violent “death.” He didn’t stop until her hair ran crystal clean and both sides of her body had been tended to.
The room was very cold, and she was shivering even before he turned the nozzle loose and stopped the water.
He spied piles of fresh towels and crossed to grab some.
Better still, he saw freshly packaged scrubs, each set conveniently marked for size.
He held up both in triumph and she smiled as she eagerly reached for the towels.
He helped her to dry off, buffing her skin to a warm, rosy glow.
It wasn’t the time or the place for it, but Nick couldn’t help the way his whole body seemed to grow tight with need for her as he dried her under her breasts, across her chill-hardened nipples, and up the elegant curve of her throat.
Her pulse beat sluggishly there, making him realize that despite her recuperation, she had lost a great deal of blood and probably needed to replenish her energy and regenerative resources with a supply of blood.
Blood he could not provide because he was just as starved for it as she was. His heart had yet to find a regular beat, though he had felt it fit and stutter, especially when he had become stimulated by touching her.
He left her to the act of dressing and hopped up onto the table himself.
As he washed away his blood he examined his healing body.
He found the entrance wound from memory and saw it was almost invisible already.
The exit wound low in his gut was a little more noticeable, but it wouldn’t be for very long, he was certain.
Growing impatient with details, Nick finished washing up and dried himself in quick passes before getting dressed in the scrubs.
He quickly moved to examine the exits as discreetly as he could.
Nothing was locked. Why would it be? Everyone was supposed to be dead.
But if this morgue was anything like the morgues he had seen, it had a door leading directly outside for easier body disposal.
To freedom.
He saw it instantly, the view of green vegetation through the small window visible even from where he was. He walked over to it almost as if in a daze.
“Amara,” he said softly as he pressed a palm to the door and looked outside in wonder.
It had been an entire month since he’d been beyond the cold walls of this place.
A month since he’d been outside. When he saw a parking lot and a roadway, his heart finally began to beat in hard, steady thumps.
He saw cars. Cars he knew how to break into and start.
He held out a hand to her without taking his eyes off of the outdoors, trying to judge which car would be best for them and provide the least risk of getting caught.
“Nick.”
He could hear the protest in her use of his name and it drew his full attention. “What’s wrong, honey?” he asked a little impatiently. “We need to get going before someone comes in here.”
“Nick, we can’t leave them. They’ll kill them. The children, too. If they find we’ve escaped, they’ll burn this place to the ground and they’ll run. Turned or unturned, human or Morphate, they will find a way to permanently destroy them all.”
Nick felt his heart sink with the realization that she was right. He desperately looked back toward freedom. “I can get us help in a matter of hours. All I need is a phone.”
“And you don’t think they won’t have planned for a cleanup in less than a couple of hours? Nick, we’re probably sitting on a radical bomb as we speak. Something that will blow our atoms into such tiny bits they will never be able to heal.”
“And what’s to say they aren’t already planning to do just that?
” he snapped at her, running an agitated hand through his damp hair.
“You saw what a cluster-fuck that was for them! We don’t know what happened, Amara.
They could all be gone, this place already written off!
If we don’t go, there’s no hope for any of us. We have to get help.”
“We can’t abandon our pack!”
“They aren’t a fucking pack!” he exploded, even though everything inside him hissed in contention. “They are people who need help!”
Amara’s hands balled into fists at her sides, her bronze eyes flashing with fury. “You are a liar! If they aren’t a pack then I am not your mate!”
“Mara,” he warned icily.
“You can’t pick and choose what you are going to believe and what instincts you are going to follow!
Don’t stand there and tell me your whole psyche isn’t screeching to go back and lead them to safety.
” She stuffed a clenched fist against her belly.
“It’s writhing in my guts like a virus I can’t choose to ignore, Nick.
We did things that made us responsible for leading those people.
If we leave without them and Paulson destroys them, we’ll have hundreds of deaths on our hands. ”
“Thousands,” he corrected her softly. “Look.”
He nodded out of the little window. She bit her lip but obeyed him and came up to look.
What he saw froze his soul, and he knew she felt the same.
Identical buildings. Six others besides their own.
One, he knew, housed all of the children.
The others, he imagined, held any number of experiments just like theirs.
“Even if we go back to our pack, baby,” he said gently against her ear, “nothing we do from inside here will ever free them from inside their prisons.”
“But—”
Nick held a finger to her lips suddenly and ducked away from the glass as two employees entered the lot, chose their vehicles, and left down the long roadway.
“God … I think I just had a very cold-blooded idea,” he said grimly. “All we need is a few hours, right? A few hours where they won’t know we’re gone?”
“Long enough to get a phone and for you to do your … cop things.” She waved a hand at him in summary, making him laugh softly.
“Okay. What if we fill those body bags with bodies? All we have to do is hope the autopsy isn’t until tomorrow. It’s late. Shift is changing, looks like.”
“We’re going to kill two people?” she asked, shivering.
“Not my first plan, no,” he said with a head shake. “But you need blood and so do I. We drink deep enough and they’ll be out a good long time. If they die in the interim … well, two lives for thousands—I can live with that if it’s two pricks from the workforce here.”
“That doesn’t sound very coplike, Agent Gregory,” she scolded quietly. But she was looking out of the window and judging distances and shadows for herself. “The black Honda Envy?”
“I was thinking the gray Mitsubishi Heron. Gray has a way of being unnoticeable. Besides, it’s out of sight lines from almost everywhere but the south.” Nick reached for the door but she grabbed his arm.
“Wait.”
She hurried away and he impatiently watched a few others go to their cars. He didn’t want it to get too busy out there. They’d get caught.
Amara returned and he realized she had a knife in her hand. A scalpel actually. He was wondering why she felt she had to arm herself when she suddenly stabbed herself in the arm with the thing.
“Shit! What the hell are you doing?!”
She was bending over a sink, her blood pooling thick and slow, the precious drops doing everything they could to remain in her body. She stuck a finger inside of herself and there was a clang in the bottom of the sink.
The implants.
“They don’t work on us anymore,” he reminded her fiercely.
“Maybe. There’s a perimeter device. One of these four implants triggers it. It’s incendiary. Raul said anyone who tries to escape gets ashed. I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to test my new genes that far.”
“Right. Give me that thing.”