by Lara Adrian
She glanced away, stung and not a little afraid of what that silence might truly mean. “I have to get out of here. I want to go home.”
When she started to swing her legs over the edge of the bed to get up, it wasn’t Lucan or Brock or any of the other huge men who stopped her, but Alex. Jenna’s best friend moved to block her, the sober look on her face more effective than any of the brute strength standing ready elsewhere in the room.
“Jen, you have to listen to me now. To all of us. There are things you need to understand … about what happened back in Alaska, and about the things we still need to figure out. Things only you may be able to answer.”
Jenna shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only thing I know is that I was held captive and attacked—bitten and bled, for God’s sake—by something worse than a nightmare. It could be out there still, back in Harmony. I can’t sit here knowing that the monster that terrorized me might be doing the same hideous things to my brother or to anyone else back home.”
“That won’t happen,” Alex said. “The creature who attacked you—the Ancient—is dead. No one in Harmony is in danger from him now. Kade and the others made sure of that.”
Jenna felt only a ping of relief, because despite the good news that her attacker was dead, there was still something cold gnawing at her heart. “And Zach? Where is my brother?”
Alex glanced toward Kade and Brock, both of whom had moved closer to the side of the bed. Alex gave the faintest shake of her head, her brown eyes sad beneath the layered waves of her dark blond hair. “Oh, Jenna … I’m so sorry.”
She absorbed her friend’s words, reluctant to let the understanding sink in. Her brother—the last remaining family she had—was dead?
“No.” She gulped the denial, sorrow rising up the back of her throat as Alex wrapped a comforting arm around her.
On the wave of her grief, memories roared to the surface, too: Alex’s voice, calling to her from outside the cabin where the creature lurked over Jenna in the darkness. Zach’s angry shouts, a current of deadly menace in every clipped syllable—but menace directed at whom? She hadn’t been sure then. Now she wasn’t sure it mattered at all.
There had been a gun blast outside the cabin, not even an instant before the creature leapt up and hurled itself through the weather-beaten wood panels of the front door and out to the snowy, forested yard. She remembered the sharp howl of her brother’s screams. The pure terror that preceded a horrific silence.
Then … nothing.
Nothing but a deep, unnatural sleep and endless darkness.
She pulled out of Alex’s embrace, sucking back her grief. She would not lose it like this, not in front of these grim-faced men who were all looking at her with a mix of pity and cautious, questioning interest.
“I’ll be leaving now,” she said, digging deep to find the don’t-fuck-with-me cop tone that used to serve her so well as a trooper. She stood up, feeling only the slightest shakiness in her legs. When she listed faintly to the side, Brock reached out as if to steady her, but she righted her balance before he could offer the uninvited assist. She didn’t need anyone coddling her, making her feel weak. “Alex can show me the way out.”
Lucan pointedly cleared his throat.
“Ah, I’m afraid not,” Gideon put in, politely British, yet unwavering. “Now that you’re finally awake and lucid, we’re going to need your help.”
“My help?” She frowned. “My help with what?”
“We need to understand precisely what went on between you and the Ancient in the time he was with you. Specifically, if there were things he told you or information he somehow entrusted to you.”
She scoffed. “Sorry. I already lived through the ordeal once. I have no interest in reliving it in all its horrible detail for all of you. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d just as soon put it out of my mind completely.”
“There is something you need to see, Jenna.” This time, it was Brock who spoke. His voice was low, more concerned than demanding. “Please, hear us out.”
She paused, uncertain, and Gideon filled the silence of her indecision.
“We’ve been observing you since you arrived at the compound,” he told her as he walked over to a control panel mounted on the wall. He typed something on the keyboard and a flat-screen monitor dropped down from the ceiling. The video image that blinked to life on the screen was an apparent recording of her, lying asleep in this very room. Nothing earth-shattering, just her, motionless on the bed. “Things start to get interesting around the forty-three-hour mark.”
He typed a command that made the clip advance to the spot he mentioned. Jenna watched herself on-screen, feeling a sense of wariness as her video self began to shift and writhe, then thrash violently on the bed. She was murmuring something in her sleep, a string of sounds—words and sentences, she felt certain, even though she had no basis to understand them.
“I don’t get it. What’s going on?”
“We’re hoping that you can tell us,” Lucan said. “Do you recognize the language you’re speaking there?”
“Language? It sounds like a bunch of jibberish to me.”
“You’re sure about that?” He didn’t seem convinced. “Gideon, play the next video.”
Another clip filled the monitor, images fast-forwarding to a further episode, this one even more unnerving than the first. Jenna watched, transfixed, as her body on-screen kicked and writhed, accompanied by the surreal soundtrack of her own voice speaking something that made absolutely no sense to her.
It took a lot to scare her, but this psych ward video footage was just about the last thing she needed to see on top of everything else she was dealing with.
“Turn it off,” she murmured. “Please. I don’t want to see any more right now.”
“We have hours of footage like this,” Lucan said as Gideon powered down the video. “We’ve had you on twenty-four-hour observation the whole time.”
“The whole time,” Jenna echoed. “Just how long have I been here?”
“Five days,” Gideon answered. “At first we thought it was a coma brought on by trauma, but your vitals have been normal all this time. Your blood work is normal, too. From a medical diagnostic standpoint, you’ve merely been …” He seemed to search for the right word. “Asleep.”
“For five days,” she said, needing to be sure she understood. “Nobody just falls asleep for five days straight. There must be something else going on with me. Jesus, after all that’s happened, I should see a doctor, go to a real hospital.”
Lucan gave a grave shake of his head. “Gideon is more expert than anyone else you can see topside. This thing cannot be handled by your kind of doctors.”
“My kind? What the hell does that mean?”
“Jenna,” Alex said, taking her hand. “I know you must be confused and scared. I’ve been there myself very recently, although I can’t imagine anyone going through what you have. But you need to be strong now. You need to trust us—trust me—that you are in the best hands possible. We’re going to help you. We’ll figure this out for you, I promise.”
“Figure what out? Tell me. Damn it, I need to know what’s really going on!”
“Let her see the X rays,” Lucan murmured to Gideon, who typed a quick series of keys and brought the images up on the monitor.
“This first one was taken within minutes of your arrival at the compound,” he explained, as a skull and upper spinal column lit up overhead. At the topmost point of her vertebrae, something small glowed fiercely bright, as tiny as a grain of rice.
Her voice, when she finally found it, held the barest tremor. “What is it?”
“We’re not sure,” Gideon replied gently. He brought up another X ray. “This one was taken twenty-four hours later. You can just make out the threadlike tendrils that have begun to spread outward from the object.”
As Jenna looked, she felt Alex’s fingers tighten around her own. Another image came up on-screen, and in this one,
the tendrils extending from the brightly glowing object appeared to lace into her spinal column.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, reaching up with her free hand to feel the skin at her nape. She pressed hard and almost gagged to register the faint ridge of whatever it was embedded inside her. “He did this to me?”
Life … or death?
The choice is yours, Jenna Tucker-Darrow.
The creature’s words came back to her now, along with the recollection of his self-inflicted wound, the nearly indiscernible object he’d plucked from within his own flesh.
Life, or death?
Choose.
“He put something inside me,” she murmured.
The slight unsteadiness she’d felt a few moments ago came back with a vengeance. Her knees buckled, but before she ended up on the floor, Brock and Alex each had an arm, lending her their support. As terrible as it was, Jenna could not tear her eyes away from the X ray that filled the screen overhead.
“Oh, my God,” she moaned. “What the hell did that monster do to me?”
Lucan stared at her. “That’s what we intend to find out.”
CHAPTER
Two
Standing in the corridor outside the infirmary room a couple of minutes later, Brock and the other warriors watched as Alex sat down on the edge of the bed and quietly comforted her friend. Jenna didn’t break down or crumble. She let Alex wrap her in a tender embrace, but Jenna’s hazel eyes remained dry, staring straight ahead, her expression unreadable, glazed with the stillness of shock.
Gideon cleared his throat, breaking the silence as he glanced away from the infirmary door’s small window. “That went well. Considering.”
Brock grunted. “Considering she just came out of a five-day Rip van Winkle to learn that her brother is dead, she’s been leeched by the granddaddy of all bloodsuckers, brought here against her will—and oh, by the way, we’ve found something embedded in your spinal cord that probably didn’t originate on this planet, so congratulations, on top of all that, there’s a good chance you’re part Borg now.” He exhaled a dry curse. “Jesus, this is messed up.”
“Yeah, it is,” Lucan said. “But it would be a hell of a lot worse if we didn’t have the situation contained. Right now, all we need to do is keep the female calm and under close observation until we gain a better understanding of the implant itself and what, if anything, it could mean to us. Not to mention the fact that the Ancient must have had a reason for placing the material inside her in the first place. That’s a question that begs an answer. Sooner than later.”
Brock nodded in agreement with the rest of his brethren. It was only a slight movement, yet the flexing of his neck muscles set off a fresh round of pain in his skull. He pressed his fingers into his temples, waiting for the knifelike agony to pass.
Beside him, Kade frowned, jet-black brows furrowing over his wolfy, silver eyes. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” Brock muttered, irritated by the public show of concern, even though it was coming from the one warrior who was as tight as a brother to him. And even though the hard stab of Jenna’s trauma was shredding him from the inside out, Brock merely shrugged. “No big thing, just par for the course.”
“You’ve been eating that female’s pain for almost a week straight,” Lucan reminded him. “If you need a break—”
Brock hissed a low curse. “Nothing wrong with me that a few hours back out on patrols tonight won’t cure.”
His gaze strayed to the small panel of clear glass that looked in on the infirmary room. Like all of the Breed, Brock was gifted with an ability unique to himself. His talent for absorbing human pain and suffering had helped keep Jenna comfortable since her ordeal in Alaska, but his skills were just a Band-Aid at best.
Now that she was conscious and able to provide the Order with whatever information they needed about her time with the Ancient and the alien material embedded inside her, Jenna Darrow’s problems were her own.
“There’s something more you all need to know about the female,” Brock said as he watched her carefully swing her bare legs over the edge of the bed and stand up. He tried not to notice how the white hospital gown rode halfway up her thighs in the instant before her feet touched the floor. Instead he focused on how readily she found her balance. After five days of lying flat on her back in an unnatural sleep, her muscles absorbed her weight with only the smallest tremor of instability. “She’s stronger than she should be. She can walk without help, and a few minutes ago, when it was just Alex and me in the room with her, Jenna was getting agitated about wanting to see her brother. I went to touch her and calm her down, and she deflected my hand. Tossed me off like no big thing.”
Kade’s brows rose. “Forgetting the fact that you’re Breed and have the reflexes to go along with it, you’ve also got about a hundred pounds on that female.”
“My point exactly.” Brock glanced back at Lucan and the others. “I don’t think she realized the significance of what she’d done, but there’s no mistaking the power she threw at me without really trying.”
“Jesus,” Lucan whispered tightly, his jaw rigid.
“Her pain is stronger now than it has been before, too,” Brock added. “I don’t know what’s going on, but everything about her seems to be intensifying now that she’s awake.”
Lucan’s scowl deepened as he glanced at Gideon. “We’re certain she’s human, and not a Breedmate?”
“Just your basic Homo sapiens stock,” the Order’s resident genius confirmed. “I asked Alexandra to conduct a visual scan of her friend’s skin right after they arrived from Alaska. There was no teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark anywhere on Jenna’s body. As for blood work and DNA, all of the samples I took came back clear, as well. In fact, I’ve been running tests every twenty-four hours, and there’s been nothing notable. Everything about the woman to this point—aside from the presence of the implant—has been perfectly mundane.”
Mundane? Brock barely refrained from scoffing at the inadequate word. Of course, neither Gideon nor any of the other warriors had been present for the head-to-toe body search performed on Jenna upon her arrival at the compound. She’d been racked with pain, drifting in and out of consciousness from the time Brock, Kade, Alex, and the rest of the team who’d joined them in Alaska had made the trip back home to Boston.
Given that he was the only one who could level her out, Brock had been drafted to stay at Jenna’s side and keep the situation under control as best as it could be. His role was supposed to have been purely professional, clinical and detached. A specialized tool kept close at hand in case of an emergency.
Yet he’d had a startlingly unprofessional response to the sight of Jenna’s unclothed body. It had been five days ago, but he remembered every exposed inch of her ivory skin as though he were looking at it again now, and his pulse kicked at the memory.
He recalled every smooth curve and sloping valley, every little mole, every scar—from the ghost of a c-section incision on her abdomen, to the smattering of healed puncture wounds and lacerations that peppered her torso and forearms, telling him she’d already come through hell and back at least once before.
And he’d been anything but clinical and detached when Jenna lapsed into a sudden convulsion of agony in the moments after Alex had finished searching in vain for a birthmark signifying that her friend was a Breedmate like the other women who lived at the Order’s compound. He’d placed his hands on both sides of her neck and drawn the pain away from her, all too aware of how soft and delicate her skin was beneath his fingertips. He fisted his hands at the thought as it rose up on him now.
He didn’t need to be thinking about the woman, naked or otherwise. Except now that he’d gone there, he could think of damned little else. And when she glanced up and caught his gaze through the glass of the little window in the door, an unbidden heat went through him like a flaming arrow.
Desire was bad enough, but it was the odd sense of protectiveness serving as a chaser that really thr
ew him off kilter. The feeling had begun in Alaska, when he and the other warriors first found her. It hadn’t faded in the days she’d been at the compound. If anything, the feeling had only gotten stronger, watching her fight and struggle through the strange sleep that had kept her unconscious since she’d come out of her ordeal with the Ancient in Alaska.
Her frank gaze still held his from across the infirmary: cautious, almost suspicious. There was no weakness in her eyes, nor in the slight tilt of her chin. Jenna Darrow was clearly a strong female, despite all she’d been through, and he found himself wishing she’d been a mess of tears and hysteria instead of the cool, in-control woman whose unflinching stare refused to let him go.
She was calm and stoic, as brave as she was beautiful, and it sure as hell wasn’t making her less intriguing to him.
“When was the last time you ran blood work and DNA?” Lucan asked, the grave, low-voiced question giving Brock something else to focus on.
Gideon pushed back his shirtsleeve to check his watch. “I drew the last sample about seven hours ago.”
Lucan grunted as he pivoted away from the infirmary door. “Run everything again now. If the readings have changed so much as an iota from the last sample, I want to hear about it.”
Gideon’s blond head bobbed. “Given what Brock has told us, I’d also like to take some strength and endurance measurements. Any information we can gather from studying Jenna could be crucial to figuring out what exactly we’re dealing with here.”
“Whatever you need,” Lucan said grimly. “Just get it done, and fast. This situation is important, but we also can’t afford to lose momentum on our other missions.”
Brock inclined his head along with the other warriors, knowing as well as any of them that a human in the compound was a complication the Order didn’t need when they still had an enemy on the loose—namely Dragos, a corrupt Breed elder whom the Order had been pursuing for the better part of a year.