Chapter 1 #2
Morphates could not be killed. The tag that had led Paulson’s genetic modifiers into her cells had made those cells indestructible, unaging, and had given them the most incredible regenerative ability known on Earth.
A Morphate could be shot right through the head and could still heal and eventually fully recover with perfect integrity.
It was also a surprisingly fast process.
So as she shook Dr. Chandler’s hand, she was overwhelmed with a combination of utter guilt and absolute fascination.
Oh, she knew she had had nothing to do with the creation of the actual genetic modifiers that had caused this woman to mutate, she had only created the delivery system, but still …
it would be as ignorant to say she hadn’t created the bomb, she’d only discovered how to split the atom.
“I …” What could she say? That she was sorry? That she hadn’t meant any harm? Hadn’t meant to be a part of making her inhuman? If she said the wrong thing, the woman was now strong enough to rip her head off in a single punch. And she’d have every right to do so.
“Eric Paulson asked me to be a part of his work,” Devona Chandler said in her soft, refined accent.
“I was honored and thrilled. I accepted before he even offered me my salary. After all, it was Eric Paulson. He was a genius and the most powerful researcher I knew of. It wasn’t until I realized his zoologicals were actually humans that I comprehended what I had signed on for.
I quit on the spot. Tried to walk away. But he was having none of that.
He gave me a choice: work with him or for him.
What he meant was he knew I would speak against him if he let me go.
I would either take care of his test group as I’d been hired to do …
or I would become one of them. I chose the latter.
I like to think that had you been aware of the nature of what your work was being applied to, you would have made the same choice. ”
Jenesis nodded mutely, but she could not affirm that with any honesty, so she didn’t try. It was easy to say she would have made the right choice in a crucible of morality, but the fact was, no one could honestly answer a problem like that unless they were actually in the situation.
“I would like to think that as well,” Jenesis agreed grimly. “But only you have the real answer.”
Dr. Chandler gave her a slow nod and a half smile.
“Come. Let me give you a more in-depth tour of the lab,” she said, pulling Jenesis into position at her side.
Kincaid Gregory stood with his feet braced hard apart and his arms folded tightly over the expanse of his chest as he stared fixedly at the monitors on the wall.
Behind each mirrored run along the lab ceilings was a multitude of cameras, one for each workstation at minimum and dozens of others besides that were less hidden.
The security cameras in the corners of the labs were par for the course and to be expected, but these others were for his purposes, although it benefitted everyone that there was always a second witness to the techniques, actions, and culpability of all events in the laboratory.
He had gone from being one of those anonymous little rats in Paulson’s cages to being Paulson himself.
The parallel was not lost on him, and it didn’t fail to make him just a little bit sick to his stomach.
But unlike the demented Eric Paulson, Kin Gregory was not trying to recklessly mutate innocent humans, although it had become quite apparent early on that the mighty Dr. Paulson had never intended for his creations to become indestructible.
Quite the contrary. That outcome had not suited his methods of illegal and inhumane research at all.
After all, how could he possibly get away with what he was doing if he couldn’t destroy the evidence?
Kincaid narrowed his focus onto the smooth little blond doctor he’d hired to run his lab.
She had been one of Paulson’s weapons in a vast arsenal of scientists.
A key weapon, as it turned out. Without her, without that damnable tag of hers that had ferreted out the perfect cells necessary for transforming Paulson’s human rats into the inhuman Morphates, he might never have succeeded.
Without her, Kincaid might still have the human life of a Federated police agent he had once been so proud of. His brother, Nick, would also be the human cop he deserved to be. Now, instead, they were …
Alphas. Beastly leaders of a beastly species, condemned to live this parody of freedom as the leaders of two out of the six Dark Cities.
Seven years ago, no one in their right mind would want to purposely set foot in one of the Dark Cities.
They had been overrun with the scum of the earth.
Gangs. Rapists. Pedophiles. Thieves. They had claimed Dark New York, Dark Philadelphia, and four other cities for their own, making certain no decent person would want to go anywhere near them.
Law-abiding citizens had then walled those cities off, isolating the bad things where they could keep an eye on them.
Then they had stuck their heads in the sand, pretending that the scum of the earth would be quite content with their lot and never want to expand their territory.
The walls had kept people out of the Dark Cities, but not in.
The pestilence of poverty and violence had been creeping over the walls slowly, bleeding into the New Cities as well as the workhouses, industrial parks, and the low-income housing along the Dark City walls that no one else wanted to be near.
And then the Morphates had come.
Much in the way Native Americans had been given reservations, the Federated government had given the Morphates the dubious benefit, at Nick Gregory’s suggestion, of taking over the Dark Cities.
Normal people had been given the illusory comfort of putting the scary Morphates they hardly understood behind high walls with all the other things they didn’t understand or were afraid of, and the Morphates found themselves in charge of huge amounts of real estate that, up until then, had been controlled by the baddest asses of the moment.
Well, there was nothing more badass than a Morphate.
It hadn’t taken long for the criminal element behind the Dark City walls to realize there was a new sheriff in town, and that sheriff couldn’t be dealt with the way they had dealt with previous mortal competitors.
Each Alpha in each City ran things his own way, and those Alphas took part in the Alpha Council, which was loosely responsible for keeping each group of Morphates under a modicum of control and helping the Morphates maintain representation in the government.
After all, what the government had given, the government could just as easily decide to try and take away.
If they were stupid, that is. But no one had ever accused the government of being overtly smart.
Over the past seven years, Dark New York and Dark Philadelphia, the cities run by the Gregory brothers, had undergone massive restructuring.
The cleanup was moving along in both cities and, for the most part, the criminal element had been cleaned up along with it.
Kincaid smiled, a feral showing of his teeth.
Not that they’d had many other options, he thought.
Kin watched the monitor as Devona made nice with the new doctor, his eyes narrowing on the delicateness of Jenesis DeBreuhl’s wrist. The monitors were sharp, the cameras high-definition color, to the point that he could see the beat of her pulse through the tiny veins there.
The sight of it was a little like dangling chocolate in front of a PMSing woman.
There was an instant reaction of craving inside his body as a whole, quickly followed by the push/pull effect of wanting something on a visceral reactive level and yet knowing it wasn’t good for him in any way except to provide a brief moment of pleasure, but with no real long-lasting satisfaction.
Kin frowned. He didn’t usually drop and get hard at the idea of the warm blood in a woman’s body, even though there was always a craving for it.
But ever since his transformation, he had directed his craving solely at Morphate women.
The only women, in his opinion, who were capable of holding up under the savage need a Morphate male felt when sexually aroused.
In fact, it was something of an unwritten law among Morphates that they should only breed and feed amongst themselves.
Both feeding and breeding could get so out of control sometimes that fragile mortal lives could easily be lost. They had learned that in Paulson’s Phoenix Project, when he had “fed” unchanged humans to the Morphates.
Just for shits and giggles. Just to see what would happen.
The results had not been pretty. True, the Morphates had just been turned and had had very little idea of what they were and even less control over what they had become, but quite a few of them had been scarred by their own savagery and behavior.
Kincaid shrugged a shoulder harshly, pushing the heat-inspiring reaction to the doctor away.
He put it down to a lifetime weakness for blondes, especially the pale pretty ones.
And this blonde in particular looked like she hadn’t been touched by sunlight once in her life.
It wasn’t an unattractive paleness. It was a cool, fragile one.
If he looked at her pulse points, like along her long neck or her cleavage, which was presently being displayed in the simple white blouse she was wearing, he could see the spidery blue ghosts of her veins painted delicately beneath her skin.
That had once been a mild turn-on for him in a strange secondary way, but now there was nothing mild about it.
It was hard and brisk. Right in his face.
Strange. While she was measurably pretty, she wasn’t as drop-dead hot and viscerally sexual as the Morphate women who had been gracing his bed since …
Still, he found her physically compelling.
But only enough to acknowledge it and push past it.
He had uses for Jenesis DeBruehl, and they absolutely did not include bedding or blooding her.