Chapter Seven
“By Christ, Devon … are you a Morphate?”
Devon instantly lurched up off the bed, dismay at her unchecked confession written all over her.
She staggered away from him, but Liam launched himself out of the bed and caught her by both arms. Unfortunately, the venom had taken its toll on his strength and his balance, and they toppled back onto the bed when both gave out on him.
Liam’s IV catheter popped out of his arm under the duress of his movement, sending a fresh river of blood out from the puncture site.
He ignored that, along with everything else, and rolled Devon facedown beneath the significant weight of his body on the bed, trapping a wrist in each hand and pressing them in close to her shoulders.
He might not have much in the way of strength and balance going for him, but he still had his brain, and she’d have a fine time trying to buck off a man of his size.
She wasn’t going anywhere until he was damn well ready to let her go. And that wasn’t going to happen unless she began answering the flood of furious questions running through his mind.
“Answer me right now, Devon! Are you a Morphate?”
“Get off of me!”
“Devon!”
“What if I am?” she shouted furiously, her head turning so he could see the angry flush of her cheek through a cloud of mussed hair.
He felt her flex under him, her round bottom lifting up into his groin as she tried to find leverage with her knees.
The contact sent a flurry of explosive input throughout his entire body that split up in two responses.
One was an intense cramping of just about every muscle he had, and the other was a rush of male awareness that left his skin humming and his senses drawing all the more sharply to attention.
“What if I am a Morphate,” she demanded between gasps for breath. “Will you pull that gun on the nightstand and shoot me into vapor?”
Liam closed his eyes and gripped his teeth tightly together, his forehead touching her shoulder for a brief moment as he tried to push down his outrage. He was breathing so hard, his body shaking with such a fury of spasms and emotion, it was a wonder he didn’t fly apart.
Instead he lifted his head and pressed a hot whisper against her ear.
“I am no murderer. And I told you before, killing is against the law. That includes the death of a Morphate … whether the law recognizes the possibility of it or not. The only reason I have not, and will not report the death of your assassin tonight is that I have sworn to my country that I won’t be the one who reveals the nature of the relationship between mercury and Morphates to the public.
Explaining the assassin’s death and lack of body to the local cops would kinda go contrary to that promise.
When you give me a way to incapacitate Morphates without killing them, Devon, you can bet your sweet ass that I will be using that instead of deadly force when given the choice.
But since you were in such a goddamn rush to stick your neck out in public tonight without giving us the opportunity to prepare ourselves better, we had no choice in the matter.
“And if you’re implying that I’d up and blow away any Morphate that crosses my path, Ms. Candler, just because I am one of the few who know how to do so, I’m going to be forced to remind myself really, really strongly that you don’t know me well enough to realize that an implication like that would dangerously piss me off.
And Devon, the last thing you want to do right now is piss me off.
Are you getting that, or do I need to make the point clearer for you? ”
He felt her shudder hard beneath him and he closed his eyes again briefly.
He’d fantasized about feeling her shudder beneath his weight more often than he’d care to admit the past couple of days, but never had he wanted it to be in fear or anger or whatever the hell it was that she was feeling right then.
He wasn’t expecting the emotional rasp of breath she drew in, so rough that it was close to a sob.
“Morphates used to be humans,” she coughed out.
“Eric Paulson created the Phoenix Project in an attempt to unlock the secrets of pushing back the aging process. He never intended on the immortality I have heard some refer to as an ‘undesirable side-effect.’ His intention had been to destroy the thousands of living results of his Phoenix Project. Discarding them just like he might have euthanized a lab full of rats that were part of a failed protocol. Only we refused to die. His undesirable side effect was immortality, and we refused to die even though he did everything from poisoning us to shooting us in the head.”
She laughed with a breathy sound of bitterness that sounded tragically painful coming from her. Liam could tell she was visiting something or someone she had been in the past. Someone far more jaded and wounded than the woman he had been coming to know.
Liam had learned all of what she had told him and much more than he’d ever wanted to know during his service.
He’d had to learn about the Morphates in minute detail because he was charged with protecting humans from them.
Really, it had come down to how hard and how fast a human could wound a Morphate.
Wound them bad enough that they lost consciousness as their ravaged bodies regrouped.
Up until his accidental encounter with a Morphate in which that creature had ended up dead.
Truly, finally dead.
He’d been treated like a hero. A messiah.
All because he had solved a deadly mystery.
He’d been attacked in a lab during a visit by the President of the Federated States he was protecting.
He had been there, one on one, his weapon thrown across the room and nothing but bare fists and ingenuity to protect him from the rampage of a Morphate male bent on killing him and his principal.
He had been grabbing blindly for something, anything to use and all he had come up with was a vial of unidentifiable fluid.
He hadn’t even cared what it was, he’d only wanted the glass vial.
He’d shoved it into the Morphate’s eye, ramming it home as deep as he could, the vial shattering under the pressure.
He scrambled free of his attacker, intent on using the distraction to get away and find his gun or more backup.
He didn’t know. He didn’t know. It was a fluke.
Only a goddamn fluke. By the time he’d gotten to his weapon, the Morphate had been screaming and then …
poof. Like a magic trick. Now you see him, now you don’t.
It had sickened him at the time, both the death itself and the way he had been revered afterward. All for a stupid fucking accident. It had strongly motivated him in his decision to resign to the private sector.
But that wasn’t what was at issue.
“Five thousand, two hundred and thirteen men, women, and children,” he murmured gently against her temple.
Liam dug a knee into the mattress and lifted his weight.
He turned her over beneath himself so he could see her flushed features.
He pushed a mess of hair away from her face and took in the dampness around her eyes and the way her hands balled up into fists near her shoulders.
She’d let them fall there even though he no longer held her, the position submissive and yet unwelcoming in its defensive and hostile tension.
He couldn’t blame her. He had been the one to unlock the key to finishing the genocide that had been so impossible the first time humans had tried it.
“And you were there,” he realized quietly.
“You are one of the original Morphates.” Not one of the new generations, those strange children that were hidden away from the public in the Dark Cities.
“A lot of things have gone right and wrong since then, too. People are unpredictable, and nine out of ten are really damn stupid, but that’s true for all the races on this planet, Morphates most definitely included.
But they don’t mean shit to me right now, Devon.
All that matters is what you and I are going to get straight between us. ”
Liam reached to palm her cheek, wanting so badly to touch her. But since he was bearing weight on his good arm, he reached with the bad.
“Shit.”
They cursed in tandem when he caught himself just in-time to keep from dripping blood all over her face and hair.
Liam flung himself back away from her and she scrambled for her kit the instant she was free of the cage of his body.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed and she turned to stand between his knees as she put pressure on the wound left by the IV.
Once she had taped that up, she leaned in to check his shoulder, pulling away the saturated bandages.
The instant that sweet smelling hair brushed past to torture him, he reached out and secured his hand to the curve of her waist. He felt her hesitate.
She went extremely still, under the guise of studying his wound, but he felt the tension in her every muscle.
“You need stitches,” she said after a moment. She stepped back a bit, clearly testing the determination of his hold on her. She cocked her head to the side and looked so purely puzzled, Liam had to resist a strangely powerful urge to scoop her up close and kiss the expression right off her face.
“Can you do it?” he asked instead, his gaze falling briefly on the complex and professional kit she’d been using so skillfully.
“Yes, but …”
“Then, you stitch and we’ll finish talking while you do.” He couldn’t help his next impulse. “Is it better for you from the front or the back?”
He’d asked the question with just enough innuendo to get himself slapped. But this was Devon, and she wasn’t exactly the shy and retiring type who got easily affronted. Her eyes widened a bit as she absorbed the intent of the remark, and he could swear he saw her mouth twitch at the corners.