Chapter Fourteen
Devon walked into her bedroom with a much brighter energy to her step, her body moving with its usual automatic seductiveness, heavily enhanced by her anticipation of Liam’s arrival behind her.
The very thought of him made her smile, made everything seem so much brighter and lighter.
Funny, that. He wasn’t what she could call a man full of optimism and faith in his fellow man, but he provided the validation she needed for the work she had done, for the path she had chosen, even when she was wavering and not necessarily so sure of it herself.
That had not been her intention when hiring him, of course.
Nor had it been her intention when she had taken him to her vaults just now.
The intention had been to arm him and protect him to the best of her ability.
She would not have him thrust into the middle of a brewing war inadequately prepared for it.
But she let thoughts of war and weapons fall away as she moved into her bathroom and touched the tap control panel inside the door, immediately setting water to fill the tub in a wonderful, heated rush of sound.
She reached up to the back of her neck where her dress was tied but her hand froze short of the mark.
Thinking her mind was playing tricks on her, she very cautiously turned back toward her bedroom, still standing half in it and half in the bathroom as she did so, and took a slow, searching breath in through her nose.
The Morphate peeled away from the wall, her body perfectly blended into it and not visible to the untrained eye until she moved.
But when she did move it was with speed and a furious strength that drove into Devon in a crash of flesh and bone.
Devon’s head smashed into the doorframe, sending stars across her vision.
Her breath left her body as she was yanked off the frame and driven down so hard onto the bathroom’s marble flooring that she would have grunted in startled pain had she the breath for it.
Her attacker was resolving, still looking partly like the bedroom wall and partly like a lithe, less-than-pretty woman with the bright, joyous eyes of a creature reveling in its element.
Reveling in the kill.
“Just to be clear,” the assassin said with a wicked grin.
“Some of us don’t take kindly to you playing God, Dr. Candler.
We think you need to remember how it feels to have someone else toying with your life.
” She moved in closer, her face hovering nose to nose with Devon’s, a fine set of fangs on display.
Devon could hear claws ripping and popping through the fabric of her dress where the Morphate gripped her.
“Because apparently the first few messages weren’t clear enough. ”
“They were clear enough,” Devon huffed as she grabbed the other woman by her shoulders in return. “They made it all the clearer how much in need some Morphates are of being put down! Just like the rabid dogs they are!”
The assassin growled, her naked body strangely warm and deceptively vulnerable as it pressed viciously down on her.
Devona realized that in order to blend with her surroundings, the woman had divested herself of her clothes.
No normal Morphate could do what this assassin could do.
No Morphate from the original lots of Paulson’s guinea pigs.
This was Morphate offspring. Devon was face to face with the second most dangerous secret among the Morphate clans.
That their first generation of children was developing the strangest of abilities as mutated genetic codes began to mix.
However, that was nothing compared to the second generation of children, whose volatile mental states were sometimes deadly: The touch of crazy dancing in the assassin’s eyes attested to that.
“Time to play!” she announced.
She hauled back and punched Devon in her face, the pain of it exploding through Devon’s head in an excruciating blossom of hurt.
Liam wanted to hurry up after Devon, but as tempting as she was, she couldn’t break him of the habitual need to check doors and see that everything was locked soundly for the night on his side of the house.
The others were responsible for their sections, but the final check on the west wing side was his chore.
He would not rest easy without seeing to it, and when he finally caught up with Devon, he planned on taking a great deal of time with her and wanted no distractions.
Keeping her safe was his job and his promise to her, and he would not fail her because he didn’t take the time to check a simple window lock.
Devon flailed blindly with one hand, her vision blurred by the dizzying impact of incredibly powerful fists.
As a Morphate, she could take a fairly good beating and shake it off relatively quickly, but there was a strength in this slim creature that went well beyond the norm even for a Morphate.
It began to make sense to her now why the assassin had thought she could walk naked into this house and kill her.
Or maybe she wasn’t going to kill her.
It didn’t matter. The attacker’s end game wasn’t Devon’s concern. And as Devon finally got hold of a fistful of her hair, she smiled through swollen lips and yanked the bitch off of herself, cracking her head into the bathroom’s marble floor just as the creature had done to her.
“Enjoy that!” she spat, wrestling the slippery bitch under herself and smashing her head into the floor once again. “And that! You come in here calling me a traitor, but what you are is proof and validation that my work is sorely needed!”
The girl regrouped before Devon could smash her down a third time, back-fisting Devon across the face so hard and with such force that she flew off of her and crashed into the doorframe.
Devon coughed, blood spewing out of her mouth.
The assassin’s initial attack had broken one of her ribs.
This hit had sent the rib through her lung.
She had not felt anything so agonizing in her life.
She could barely draw breath. Just because she was physically capable of healing herself from beyond the brink of mortality did not mean it wasn’t the most excruciating process known to man or Morphate.
This was nothing like a shot to the leg.
Breathing affected everything, all of her capabilities.
The room was spinning as her opponent got to her feet and loomed over her, her wide face looking strangely reptilian as her cold black eyes, the pupils indiscernible from the irises, regarded her from the left to the right and back again.
The movement was slow and graceful, almost rhythmic, but it was so reptilian that it was menacing.
“The thing about our healing abilities? It takes time,” she noted, a feral grin on her lips.
“And in that time, I’m going to fuck you up some more.
Then, when you’re good and tenderized, I’m going to drag your ass back to Ambrose and he’s going to see to it you’re tried for your sins against your people. ”
Ambrose. So that was who was at the bottom of this!
At last she knew who to focus on, who was gunning for her so relentlessly.
Of course, he had been high on her short list of suspects, if she were going to boil down the entire Morphate race to a brief list of people who had the most motivation for her destruction.
She had been meeting with high placed members of all the clans, one after another, these past weeks, trying to get a hint.
A clue. If she hadn’t been in a fight for her life, she would have taken a moment to cry out in victory.
It would make her victory doubly sweet when she kicked this Ambrose Clan whore’s ass.
The Ambrose assassin couldn’t possibly have known the magnitude of the mistake she had made.
Devon lurched up from the floor in one powerful, extreme movement, her body like a battering ram, plowing down the startled assassin.
Rhiannon had thought her opponent beaten and crippled.
But how ironic that the creature from reptilian Ambrose Clan would forget that having both hands around a deadly snake is no guarantee it won’t whip back around and bite you dozens of times in retaliation. Even if injured.
But Rhiannon fast learned her mistake. Devon was spitting a savage spray of blood across Rhiannon’s face as her hands closed around the other woman’s face and with a rapid-fire extension of claws viciously raked them down over it, slicing through both eyebrows and transecting her eyelids.
Only the right eye itself was damaged as Devon’s claw-tip sliced through her cornea the way paper might slice through the tip of a finger.
Swiftly. Painlessly. And with an effect that wouldn’t be noticed for several heartbeats.
But all it took was a further stressor on the wound to make the damage come screaming to the forefront of attention, and that was what happened when Devon elbowed her hard in her eye socket.
“I’ve had fifty years to learn self-defense, whelp,” Devon rasped between blows and the screams of her stunned victim. “Genetics don’t make you a badass. You have to work at it. That’s what your generation will never understand.”
They had become Morphate the easy way. They were born into it. They had never known anything else.