The Phoenix Project, Page 4

  She squeezed past him and tapped the water temp panel for the shower. The cube was quite small, but she reached for him regardless and drew him under the spray with her. Amara figured there was no need to be shy anymore, and she wasn’t quite ready to be left alone just yet. She hoped he didn’t balk, and she smiled when he obeyed the silent request to join her. She felt the sting of the hot water in the many pricks and cuts on her body, and when he winced ever so slightly she could imagine it was quite a lot worse for him since she’d tracked up his back pretty fiercely.

  “Let’s avoid soap,” she advised as she ran her hands down over his chest and helped the water run red with his blood. “Are you dizzy or anything? You lost a lot of…” Amara frowned. Nick reached up quickly to cradle her cheek against his palm, his thumb rubbing away the lines of distress between her brows.

  “No. Not at all. I feel fine. Strangely, better than fine. Don’t worry. I did my share of damage, too.”

  “There are no towels,” she noted.

  “We’ll have to settle for the heat dryer. I hate the damn things, but there isn’t much of a choice.”

  Nick gently rubbed his free hand down over her chest, rinsing away places where blood had dried on her skin. A mixture of his and of hers. Suddenly, Amara wanted more of his gentility. There was something very compelling about his animalistic mastery, and she wouldn’t kid herself about how it had felt despite how it had come about, but she also craved this human kindness from him. It was almost as if she yearned for the balance of it.

  He turned off the water and hit the drying switch. Bright heat lights flared on over them and warm air blasted against their bodies. Nick turned her, lifting her hair, her breasts, and skimming down her body again and again until she was mostly dry. He even made her step her feet wide apart to dry her between her legs, his fingers stroking through tight pubic curls and beyond. He turned her and very familiarly cupped her backside, parting her cheeks and very intimately made certain she was dry there as well. Amara flushed as his touch ran over her. There had been a time when she would never have allowed such familiarity. Now, she had no more secret or sanctified places on her body after three months at the whim of medics, doctors, and others who couldn’t care less about her modesty. But at least with Nick it felt welcome. Like a choice. Odd, since it was clear choice had been manipulated in both of them. But at this moment, it was voluntary.

  They stepped out of the shower and the instant she was away from the warmth of his body and the dryer, she began to shiver, wrapping herself up in her own arms.

  Nick reacted immediately, drawing her against his own warmth and leading her out of the chilled bathroom to find the blanket she’d abandoned earlier. He wrapped them up together and, after flipping over the bloody mattress, drew her down onto the bed. “Seems cuddling is the least I can do after all else I’ve done to you,” he joked a bit grimly. Amara appreciated the humor, black as it was.

  “I wonder what will happen now. I’m afraid of what will happen next. I know they are watching us. They know we’re done doing what they wanted us to do.” She had no more caution, no more reason to be shy or withdrawn, so it allowed her a new freedom. She exercised it as she touched him over his chest, rubbing a thumb over a Land Corps tattoo on his biceps. He had served in the military. He was a cop. Everything about him evidenced that he was a man who wanted to do good, but he had to do it in rough and tough ways. The beast he had become under the duress of the experimenters’ drugs had probably already existed in part inside of him. She had easily seen his aggressive tendencies the moment she’d first seen him in the common room. She imagined he would have been a dominant lover even under normal circumstances. But she also sensed he would have been far more attentive, and much more caring of his partner’s needs. His actions in the shower had made that clear to her.

  For herself, after having grown up destitute and living half her life on streets far too dangerous for a child, she knew there was an animal inside of her as well. She had repressed it and every other emotional reaction she’d ever had as she had turned herself into a labor machine. Work, eat, sleep. Work, eat, sleep. There had been comfort in that. It kept her isolated and insulated. She didn’t have to fight for food, for her body, or for her life. Until this very moment, she had continued to react numbly to what had happened to her, perhaps having given up even before she had gotten there. But in the end, she had been herself, numb or not. What they had done these past three months had altered all of that. Taken her all away.

  Made her into what they had wanted her to be.

  Now, Amara felt as though she had just wakened from a long, paralyzing coma. Perhaps it was seeing what had happened to Nick while looking into sea-green eyes turned savage and outrageously wild. Or she was more inclined to believe it had been that moment of reckoning striking with guilt and horror across his face when he’d seen the blood on their bodies. It surprised her to realize that what happened to someone else really did matter to her. She had spent a very long time convincing herself otherwise, figuring it was just easier that way.

  But it was different suddenly. She felt energized and revitalized and…

  Powerful.

  Whole. That was it. She suddenly felt like missing parts of herself had been retrieved and connected to her soul where they belonged. It was such an elemental sensation and so very raw at heart. And she knew, somehow, that it was because fate had thrown her into Nick’s path.

  “I don’t want them to take me away,” she blurted out suddenly.

  “They can’t take you away,” he said, his voice suddenly low and rough. There was such a deep-seated level of threat and, seeing how his eyes flashed virulent green wildfire, she believed him. He dragged her up closer, rubbing his face against her hair and locking a leg around both of hers as if that would keep them from taking her when the time came. But the truth was they weren’t the ones with the ultimate power in the end.

  They were. The experimenters.

  Except now, their experiments had suddenly developed very interesting new strengths.

  “Do you think what they have done is permanent?” she whispered.

  “Feels like,” he said just as softly, not knowing if it helped them speak privately or not. “Drugs don’t grow body parts. I think they fucked with our genetics.”

  “Maybe we’re the end result of all the trial and error they’ve been doing. They culled out all the weakest of us. You are the first new person we’ve seen in ages, and like you said, you were chosen deliberately because you were snooping around where they didn’t want you.”

  “From what I learned,” Nick replied, his frown hidden in her hair, “the Phoenix Project is supposed to be some kind of anti-aging protocol.”

  “Great, so they make vampires out of us?” Amara couldn’t believe she’d had the temerity to say it aloud. It seemed so ridiculous, but at the same time it was the best description. “I wonder what else it does to us. Did. Did to us. Are we immortal? Will we go ‘poof’ in sunlight?”

  “I’m sure they are testing those theories on some poor assholes as we speak. But they must have known about the animalistic need to mate and feed, otherwise why pair us up so fast?”

  “You think we can eat regular food still?”

  “We can drink water. You proved that.”

  “Oh, hey. I did, didn’t I?” She sighed. “I have to admit, I am scared to find out the answers to all of this. Worse, it scares me to think of this savagery being let loose inside of some of the nasty weirdos we have around here. They brought in a really large group with us, and we probably weren’t the only ones. Raul, the medic on my floor, said it was a ‘big day today.’ Maybe they culminated this part of the project? Maybe everyone was changed?”

  “We won’t know until and if they let us back into the general populace. But here’s the part that freezes my soul, Amara. My investigation, the one that led me here? It was in pursuit of a rash of kidnappings.”

  “I know. That’s how they get us.”
/>   “No, honey. I mean kidnappings. As in kids. They’ve got children here, too.”

  Chapter 5

  Nick dozed off in spite of himself. Considering all he’d been through that day (though he doubted it was the same day), it was to be expected. There was also the factor of the warm, very sweetly curved woman who had turned her back to his chest and was spooned up against him, her bottom snuggled tightly into the lee of his hips and her ankles clinging around his.

  It had been a long time since he had lain like this with a woman. He’d been so damned busy lately; he had hardly had time to catch the quick, occasional screw with Lydia in the apartment three doors down from his. She was fun, casual, and had nice tits, and didn’t expect anything more than a good orgasm from him. That had suited him just fine. Overtime and undercover work had made everything else unfeasible. Far be it from him to start something he couldn’t invest the proper time to. It wouldn’t have been fair to a woman if he had.

  But everything was so different now. Not just being torn out of his life so harshly, either. As far as he was concerned, this was just a temporary glitch. He’d had undercover work go deadly wrong before and was alive to tell the tales, and while this was obviously much, much worse than the worst-case scenario, he still believed there had to be a way out.

  He was beginning to think his captors had handed it to him on a silver platter. What if he could figure out how to call up all this new natural weaponry on command? What else was involved in this anyway? Strength? Was he stronger than before? He certainly felt physically more powerful. However, he also felt he had traded it for some mental stability. Every so often a surge of primal instinct would overrun him. He was finding it was usually somehow connected to thoughts associated with the female lying asleep beside him.

  Whatever logic or reasonable social norms his brain was used to, he knew it had all been thrust aside and there was now a single irrefutable fact. Amara was his mate. For now, forever. Instinct drove the knowledge into him. It didn’t care that he knew next to nothing about her. It didn’t feel fazed in the least by her status as a stranger. There could be a thousand things wrong with her to make her incompatible with the man Nick was.

  But she was the perfect mate for the beast he had become. She smelled like divinity to him, the aroma of her a constant depth of allure. Now it was deeply imbedded with his, and that pleased his new beast to no end. He smelled their sex on them, as well as the blood they had both shed, but more crucial than that was the understanding that they had both changed on some kind of chemical pheromone level. This essential alteration was what marked her as his, just as it marked him as hers. Somehow, he realized, the rest would have to follow this forcefully laid path.

  He expected to feel a bit panicked by the noose this created around him, and by the implications that made him suddenly responsible for someone other than himself for the first time in a long time. However, it just wouldn’t come. In fact, he was feeling quite the opposite. He felt eager to keep her close and protected, even relishing the idea of fending off others who might try to take her from him. He would prove himself worthy of his choice. He had no doubt about that.

  Nick felt a streak of possessive need rushing dizzily through him, and before he realized it, he was stroking a proprietary hand along the length of her body until he was clutching her full breast in the seat of his palm and leaving bruising fingerprints in his wake. It wasn’t until he smelled fresh blood that he realized his talons had extended back out, pricking her delicate flesh.

  He would remember that. These possessive thoughts seemed to trigger their appearance. Meanwhile, he felt badly for scratching her again, so he turned her gently onto her back and bent to lick a tender tongue over the wounds. The flavor of her blood was intensely narcotic, not to mention how it felt to nuzzle himself all around her breast. He began to grow hard again, but he warned himself that this time nothing would come of it. She was exhausted, her pale skin showing dark circles beneath her eyes. He wanted to lick her there as well, all of a sudden, so he did. The instinct was quite strong, as if he believed he could heal her with the action of his stroking tongue. The truth was, the wounds at his neck and on her breast had healed far more rapidly than the shallower ones elsewhere on their bodies. He suspected their saliva might now carry some kind of healing salve that helped to close the wounds they created. Perhaps all wounds. This, he realized, could be extremely useful to know.

  Nick would never have admitted it to Amara, but these drastic changes terrified him. It was clear the scientists of the Phoenix Project had no sense of ethics or moral rectitude, their practices shoddy and even bordering on demented. That people like that were behind what was happening to their bodies made him fear for the stability of it all. It was already very obvious they had unleashed something within both of them that had probably been bred out of their species through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, lending a hand to becoming a so-called civilized species.

  Were they really purposely trying to make vampires? If so, to what end? Immortality? And it was also clear that these savages inside of them could be put aside. Could be hidden away. Perhaps even controlled. Maybe the intensity and violence of need they’d experienced was because they were “new” or because of the trauma of the changes in their bodies….

  They would never know enough, he supposed. He hadn’t said anything to Amara, but he realized that if they weren’t exactly what these people were looking for, the odds were frighteningly in favor of them being discarded and destroyed in favor of the next batch of guinea pigs. He hoped to God they were at least close to what they were looking for. It could buy him the time he needed to get them out of this place. At the very least, he had to try. In the final analysis, all roads led to a bad end for them.

  And it wasn’t just Amara he was worried about. He had seen the children’s center. When he’d first been captured, he’d been given a mocking, gloating tour by some maniac in a white coat named Dr. Paulson who’d shown him the building housing what had to easily be five hundred children.

  “Orphanages. Gangs. You’d be surprised how often our society discards its young like trash,” Paulson said, tsking his tongue and shaking his head. “We are hoping to improve these types of human flaws by bringing out the best in our instincts.”

  “Mrs. Rockwell’s third-grade class wasn’t full of orphans,” Nick spat at the other man. Paulson was tall, elegant, and pretty much everything a handsome, brilliant middle-age doctor should appear to be, but Nick could see the feverish existence of a damaged, fanatical mind behind those deceptive blue eyes.

  “Well, they are now. Their parents gave up looking for them.”

  “Because their bus was found at the bottom of the fastest running river in the States! With only ten miles to the ocean outlet, they knew there was no hope of recovering their bodies!”

  “But you didn’t give up, now did you, Agent Gregory? Seems you cared more about them than those who spawned them. I think that will make you an excellent volunteer for our Project.”

  Nick closed his eyes and found himself squeezing hold of the warm female. She made a responsive sound and it was almost enough to make him put aside worrying about how much trouble they were really in. When she wriggled a bit against his awakening cock, he squeezed his eyes shut tighter and tried to think of something other than how tight and how eagerly hot she had felt as she had surrounded him earlier. He was amazed he remembered any of the details. At the time, he had just been about the possession, the thrust, and the climax. Just the same, it had also all been about the woman. The smell of her, the glorious flavor of her…both with and without the depth of her blood.

  God, he still craved that depth, he realized. Not with the reviling hunger that had forced him to take from her, just as it had forced her to take from him, but there was no denying the desire and appeal of it that still lived within him. However, it was no more powerful than the desire he had just then to know the flavor of her pussy. Now, in the stillness of his hum
an self, he realized just how much he desired to know her in normal physical ways. Was it even possible? Would that savage inside overtake him once he became heavily aroused by her?

  He was going to find out soon enough, he realized grimly. The more he thought of having her, the more his body demanded follow-through. Letting her sleep was no longer an option, though he cursed himself for the inconsiderate selfishness this beating need forced on him, and would now force on her.

  Oh yes, the beast was rousing, he understood. The question was, would Nick be able to exert any control? At the moment, despite the demand pounding insistently through him, he didn’t feel blinded or overrun in any way. He was pulsing fully hard along her hip, his erection rubbing against her already in absent request, but he was determined to maintain his civilization this time.

  There had to be a “this time.” He should have asked. He shouldn’t just take. However, this was the one thing he knew he couldn’t gainsay at the moment.

  Pounding, relentless need for her.

  Nick decided to stop wasting time trying to fight what was inevitable. Just in case he completely lost his mind, he wanted to at least have made a preliminary show of being attentive to her needs. Rising up on an elbow, he dipped his head and caught her lips in a gentle, wakening kiss. His free hand was still at her breast, still sporting curved claws, but he scraped them gently across her nipple without breaking her skin.

  Amara sighed into his mouth, her lips parting as her eyelashes fluttered in place. She squirmed when he stimulated her, making a sound of protest as she was drawn from sleep, and one of pleasure when she found her mouth full of his probing kiss. She moaned softly, then louder as he tugged on her nipple sharply. Her hand curled into his hair at the back of his head, holding him to her return kisses.

  It was several minutes before she pulled back and asked, “Aren’t you afraid of how we’ll be with each other?”