More Than Life (Arcane Crossbreeds) (21 page)

“I’m fine. Give me two more minutes.”

There was a weighted silence.
“You now have one minute and forty-five seconds.”

She focused on the emotions and thoughts swirling around her. Disgust. Indifference. Grief.

She zeroed in on the grief to discover fear crouching beneath. A whole hell of a lot of it. Closing her eyes, she focused on the trembling strains of the soft female voice. It sounded distant, maybe from another room, but the woman’s thoughts were stark and easy to read. She was afraid for her life. Afraid that they would come back because the books were all still there.

The books?

“You’ve got thirty seconds.”

Katya surged to her feet, and the room tilted beneath her. A cop caught her by the elbow.

“Easy there, sweetheart. This your first murder?”

Blinking to clear her blurring vision, she nodded, keeping her face lowered. The last thing she needed was to have a description of her face make the rounds when the owner of the jacket she was wearing noticed it was missing.

“I need some air,” she mumbled and pushed past him to move out the door.

“Time’s up.”

Quickly discarding the jacket and replacing the gear, she cast a glance at the flirty investigator with a shake of her head. These people should definitely be more diligent. Ducking around the side of the van, she shimmered back to Raife.

Before she got her bearings, Raife was pulling her up by the arms, and the harsh angles of his face swam before her eyes. She blinked as he gave her a shake.

“Don’t ever pull that kind of shit again.”

Katya straightened her shirt and cleared her throat. The smell of Raife shot straight through her, clearing out any lingering scent of Defoe’s blood and the Guardian musk. Hunger cartwheeled crazily through her, taking her breath. Her gums throbbed, and she barely managed to keep her fangs from bursting into her mouth. The crowd wasn’t paying them any attention, which was good because she suspected her eyes might have gone red, and the last thing they needed was a vampire-sighting hysteria.

“Guardians,” Katya said.

Raife’s pupils flashed, and he sent a searching glare through the crowd. “Where?”

For a brief moment, her gaze fixated on the pulse in his firm, bronzed neck as he turned to look around them. Forcing herself to look away, she inhaled through her mouth and swore she could taste him on her lips. It was getting worse and worse. She thought she might be going into bloodlust, but the overwhelming scent of blood in the house had only turned her stomach. No, she craved him. Just him.

“Katya?”
His mind moved smoothly through hers, and she pulled the hunger back defensively, hiding it in the shadows of her mind.
“Are you okay?”

“It was…” She swallowed and nodded. “I was shocked to see his body. It unsettled me a bit, but it was definitely Guardians who killed him.”

Raife’s eyes narrowed on her, and his lips thinned. The feel of his concern and suspicions stroking through her mind only made her retreat further. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yeah. There’s no mistaking that smell.” It had been seared into her memory.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” He pulled her against him as they retreated farther into the shadows. It took every ounce of her remaining strength to get them back to Incog.

Chapter Fifteen

Katya signed on to her terminal in the Tech Lab and cast a glance over the top of her screen to where Raife was pacing. He was speaking to Forestor. She’d wanted to recheck the decryption process on the Triumvirate files, and he was hesitant to let her out of his sight. She thought he might be afraid she’d shimmer back to Defoe’s house alone.

He kept glancing back at her as though to make sure she was still there, and Katya rolled her eyes.

Like she’d be that stupid. Guardians had torn half that guy’s chest out. She could still see the gruesome sight in her mind, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to chance a meeting with the bastards without some major power behind her. But Raife couldn’t go back without her. Well, he
could,
but it would take too long and be too conspicuous, especially when she could easily shimmer them in later tonight with no one being the wiser.

That could be what had him so agitated, what had him hissing and growling into his cell while casting her those menacing looks. He was frustrated. He couldn’t tuck her safely in at Incog like he wanted to, and he knew it. Poor baby.

She glanced down at her screen again. Most of the Triumvirate files were easily decrypted. They didn’t look like anything important. Transmissions about supplies. Orders for personnel. She ran the decrypted files through a special filter, searching for any key phrases or words that might pertain to them.

There was one grouping of files that proved more difficult. She suspected anything of importance would be there. She isolated those files and ran another program.

She looked up over the top of her monitor while she waited for the program to run, and her gaze met Raife’s across the expanse of the room. She understood his frustration. If anything happened to her, he would die with her. A year ago, she would have been content to allow him to control how this went but not now. More than her genetics had changed these last several months.
She
was a different person. Regardless of how uneasy her existence was right now, this was her life. Her future.

Incog.

Raife.

But she wasn’t going to allow Raife to dominate her. She needed to be an active participant in her future, in learning why she’d been put in that place.

Starting with returning to Defoe’s house tonight. His wife had definitely been afraid Guardians were going to come back for something. Whatever that something was, it might be a clue to finding out who was responsible for what was going on in that damn facility.

Raife moved close enough to her that she felt the heat of him radiating, drawing her in. She was so exhausted it took real effort to put one foot in front of the other, and—God—she just wanted to lean into him so badly, to feel the strong beat of his heart beneath her cheek. The urge was intense enough that she ached with it. Hell, the need to lean on him, to borrow his strength, was hollowing her out, but she couldn’t trust him to just offer support. He would take control and try to tuck her back into the cocoon she’d lived in most her life. She couldn’t live like that anymore. She just couldn’t be that woman anymore.

“We’ve been ordered back in.” His words were terse, as though they’d been painfully ripped from him.

Turning in her seat to look up into his eyes, Katya steeled herself for the fight she knew was coming. An argument she was too worn out for, but one that was too important to let go.

That hard gaze searched her face for a long moment, then he sighed, and she could practically feel his frustration melting into concern. His fingers swept over her cheek and burrowed into the confines of her hair. “Rest and eat.” His brows drew together as he rubbed at the knotted muscles at the back of her neck. “Then I’ll follow you into hell if that’s where you want to go. Without a single complaint and only one request.”

Katya looked up at him with a cocked brow and a smirk. “What, only one?” Her voice dripped with skepticism.

His eyes narrowed, and he snapped, “You may not value your life, but I do.”

Katya sighed and felt a dark shadow shift through her as she met his gaze. “I value my life, Raife. If I didn’t, I would never have survived my first month in that place. But I’ve come to value my freedom too.” She shook her head, eyes pleading. She wanted him to understand. To accept her as she was. “I don’t want one without the other anymore.”

His fist tightened in her hair, loosening her clip, and she could feel the battle to understand raging in him. Raife wasn’t an unreasonable man. She knew that. But he was protective, always had been in regard to her. Now that they’d mated, forging a connection even she couldn’t deny, his need to shelter her and preserve her life was suffocating. His jaw tightened and his lips thinned as he searched her face. His sigh hissed between them, and she could nearly feel the vibration of his heartbeat in her own chest.

She waited, hoping. But in the end, she knew he’d lost that battle. For one brief moment, his pupils stretched and elongated, a flash of light bursting in those depths. He blew a gust of air out and shook his head with a growl, barely gaining control over that part of him that was savage in its need to protect her. He’d talked of it, his dragon, as though it were a separate entity, something that he housed in his own spirit. But she knew it wasn’t. She felt it when she merged her mind to his, when they made love. It suffused him. It
was
him and it—
he—
could not accept the risk her need for freedom represented.

Yet she couldn’t accept anything less.

“And I would sacrifice everything, my life, your freedom, just to keep you alive.”

“I didn’t ask for that, Raife, and I don’t want it.” Katya dropped her forehead to his chest. Her entire body felt made of lead. She was exhausted and just unbelievably used up. The room around her pulled in tight, growing small. She blinked as the hunger expanded until it barely left room for her to breathe. The sound of his heart and the scent of his blood rushing beneath his warm flesh filled her senses.

Clenching her eyes shut, she struggled to get in a gasp of air that wasn’t saturated with his.

The tinny
ping
of her program notifying her it had completed its process broke the tense silence, and Raife reluctantly let her push away from him. She swiveled in her chair back toward the computer screen; her hands trembled as she opened the cleaned files.

At first her mind was dull from the intensity of her hunger for him, but it quickly cleared as she realized what she was looking at. Excitement winged recklessly through her, and she distantly heard him shift closer behind her.

“What is it?”

“Those hidden files I just decrypted were research files.” Some of them were dated nearly twenty years ago. She scanned through them, feeling her heart thump heavily with every word. Medical research files. A lot of it was beyond her scope of understanding, but there were some things she was able to pick out. “What is the Arcane Genome Project?”

“The Arcane Genome Project was started by Drachon geneticists,” Raife murmured. “They mapped the genes of all four species of the Arcane…and well before the humans mapped theirs, I might add.”

She turned to see Raife reading over her shoulder, and she rolled her eyes. Drachon were considered the most intelligent of all the species, especially by themselves. “These are research notes about the findings of a Triumvirate scientist. She noted some differences in chromosome two.”

“Chromosome two?” She looked up to see Tag strolling into the room. He shrugged. “I picked up on your excitement from inside the static room and thought I’d see what you found with your super-hacker powers.”

Katya snorted. “I just cleaned up some old medical research files on the Triumvirate server. From what we can tell, they are lab notes on genetic research pertaining to chromosome two. Old ones.”

“Well I know chromosome two holds a crapload of genes and is thought to hold a lot of our ancestral info. What’s it say about it?” He walked up to lean down next to Raife.

She stared at him until he looked back at her.

“What? I come from a shit ton of scientists. It was hard not be slightly infected by it.”

With a shake of her head, she turned back to the screen. They scrolled through the files, Tag explaining some of the technical information.

“So, wait.” Raife rocked back on his heels. “It looks like this guy was doing a comparison between the genes of all the Arcane?”

Tag nodded, a deep frown furrowing between his brows. “Not only that, but he found something. This is insane. Scroll down some more.” He tapped a finger on the screen. “Hell, he managed to isolate a specific sequence of genes that were different between Rebel and Alliance Arcane.”

Katya felt her heart jump as she scrolled down farther. “He says that they’re genetic markers for the blood-magic pact.” She closed out a file and opened another and browsed through it. This was getting crazier. Whoever the hell this Triumvirate scientist was, he was developing a plan to implant the Alliance genetic sequence into the Rebels.

They stared at the screen in silence for a long moment before they finally exchanged glances. She suddenly felt so cold. She didn’t open the last remaining files, but she could clearly see, although created nearly twenty years ago, they were last accessed only months ago. Someone was still referencing these files, which could only mean someone was still performing the research.

“Shit.” Raife hissed, pushing a hand through his hair as he silently exchanged a look with Tag. “We need to get these files to Forestor and get Brim up to speed on this crap so he can notify the Drakes.”

Katya looked from one frowning man to the other. “What’s going on?”

“If the Triumvirate has found a way to infect other species with the blood magic against their will, the Drachon will be the first targets.” Raife glanced down at her with a frown. “Drachon females only ovulate every fifty years or so. If our people are targeted and our lifespan shortened, it could mean our reproductive rate would decrease big-time. Fewer babies means fewer females. We’re already on the verge of extinction.”

“Shit.” Tag shook his head, his lips thin. “Not to mention the power the Triumvirate would get from infecting more bloodlines with their funk. I’ll call Forestor. Send those files to him.”

Katya nodded, her fingers flying over the keys even as her mind was still processing. The majority of the files had been accessed this past year. What if this was what they were doing at the research facility? What they were doing to her?

She’d heard Dr. Rupple say she was the key to his research on more than one occasion. She glanced at Raife through the shield of her lashes even as she continued to type. What if her blood, her DNA, had the information they needed to infect Raife’s people? To infect everyone.