CONCEPTION (The Others) (13 page)

“Release her.” The words slurred through the baring of his
fangs. Whether he was baring them at his brother, or the loss he could feel
looming, Deuce was not sure. He only knew that Eden could not bear to be
touched by another, so there would be no touching.

Bohdan eyed him warily as he withdrew his hands and pulled
away. “I cannot help her if I cannot touch her.”

Deuce
clenched his teeth, fighting back the need to strike out. He nodded. Bohdan
slipped his hands beneath the comforter. Eden’s resistance was immediate.

The shake of her head was an extension of her next shudder.

“Do
not defy me in this!” He thought she muttered “Bastard”. It was hard to tell
through the chattering of her teeth. She collapsed at the end of the next
shudder, her head rolling with exhaustion. He nodded to Bohdan. “Do it.”

Bohdan’s
face took on the surreal composure it always did when he entered another. Deuce
measured the minutes the probe took in the shudders that racked Edie’s small
frame.

Bohdan pulled back, his hands lingering on Edie’s bare back.
“She needs blood.”

“You said blood would kill her.”

“It will, but she does not have enough now to sustain the
change that is commencing.”

“She will not die!”

The look Bohdan turned on him was sad. More than any other
of the Chosen, Bohdan knew the pain that came from losing a mate. He only lived
because the union had not been completed. He existed each day knowing his one
chance had come and gone. He now faced forever alone. “If we cannot balance her
blood, there will be no saving her.”

“Then we will balance her blood.” There was no other choice.
Deuce raked his nail across his chest. Blood flowed freely. Horror rounded
Edie’s eyes at her body’s immediate reaction to the sight and smell. He
registered her disgust. She saw her need as something evil. Not understanding
the beauty of their union because he had not had time to ease her into it. The
hot liquid spilled down over his abdomen, pooling in the hair at the base of
his hungry cock before seeping to his thighs. A desperate hunger overrode the
horror on Edie’s face. Everything in him commanded that he satisfy it. He
reached for her as she lunged forward.

Bohdan
grabbed her upper arms and pulled her back out of his reach. Edie fought his
hold. Her pain and desperation flooded Deuce in a crushing wave. Energy
gathered in and around him, seething with the rage coiling within. The growl
sprang from his gut. “Let her go!”

Bohdan
shook his head, his demeanor calm as always, unswayed by Deuce’s rage. “It
cannot be that way.” He nodded toward Deuce’s chest. “Close the wound.”

Deuce did not want to close the wound. He wanted to bring
his mate to him, strengthen her in the way the Chosen had been making their
mates strong for ages. By giving her his blood.

Edie lunged again. Bohdan held her by simply crossing his
arms over her chest from above. As he pulled her back against him, his hair
fell over her chest, cocooning her in an intimacy that had everything in Deuce
tensing in outrage. “Let her go.”

Bohdan shook his head, his hair brushed across Edie’s
breasts in an intimate caress she should know from no one but him.

Deuce
bared his fangs. He curved his nails into his palms against the rolling
blackness of all-consuming rage. “I cannot promise not to kill you, if you do
not.”

Bohdan’s response was a sweep of calm.
Close the wound,
brother.

The order echoed in his mind, the force of compulsion behind
it. From between Bohdan’s arms, Edie watched him, her expression frantic, her
face ghostly pale against the black of Bohdan’s hair. Her breath came in
rasping pants, not as deep as they should be. Too fast, too hard. She was
dying. She needed help. He had to do what was right for her.

Bohdan’s order came again, finding and weaving along a
shimmer of logic,
Close your wound or she dies.

Deuce tamped down the animalistic rage, struggled for, and
then found reason. He closed the wound. His instincts howled a protest. Edie
moaned in despair.

Bohdan cautiously straightened. “You are yourself?”

“Yes.” Barely.

He felt the touch of Bohdan’s mind as he ascertained the
truth of the statement before he lifted his arms. “Then take her.”

Edie leapt for him. Deuce caught her, some of the turmoil
inside abating as his flesh made contact with hers. He turned her so her back
was to his chest, closing his ears to her despairing moans. They could not both
be acting on instinct at the same time. Carefully, he reduced her heart rate
and once again the adrenaline pumping into her system as he folded her back
against him. Her skin slid across his as she tried to turn. Despite the gravity
of the moment, his body sang with the erotic pleasure.

Bohdan reached for the bag he’d brought into the room.

Deuce bent to whisper in Edie’s ear. “Be easy, my mate.”

Edie showed no sign of quieting. Bohdan pulled a syringe
from the bag.

“What are you going to do with that?” Deuce asked.

“We’re going to give her blood.”

Deuce eyed the needle as Bohdan approached. “Why cannot I
feed her as is custom?”

“Because we cannot control the amount she will take, plus
this is how they did it, so it is what her body is used to.” He jerked his chin
at his arm. “I need to get at the inside of your elbow.”

Deuce turned his arm. Bohdan wasted no time sliding the ugly
needle in. Deuce watched his blood fill the syringe. “The stabbing with needles
is barbaric.”

Bohdan looked up. “Not to humans.”

“So you say, but my mate is looking less favorably on the
needle than am I.”

Which was true. A new emotion welled beneath the hunger and
desperation. It did not take deep delving to define it. Panic.

“Edie?”

She was staring at the syringe with horror. “Oh God, no!”

Bohdan pulled it from Deuce’s arm and took her wrist gently
in his hand, turning her inner arm up.

Edie tilted her head and glanced at him, the terror in her
eyes beyond reason for the small procedure. “Please, don’t let him do this.”

“It is already done,” he whispered, merging his mind to the
edges of hers.

Nothing prepared him for the agonizing burn that shot
through her body as Bohdan depressed the syringe. The pain swelled in a knot
and then spread like acid along her veins. Her agonized scream ricocheted
around the room.

The door hit the wall and Harley and Dak broke into the
room, guns down and ready to fire. Deuce shook his head and threw up an
illusionary wall between them as Edie reared back and screamed again.

Harley’s “Son of a bitch!” was as hot as Dak’s “What the
hell are you doing to her?” was cold. Deuce felt the bite of the anger both
projected. The ugly suspicion.

He gritted his teeth against the agony he pulled from Edie
to himself. The pain engulfed her, leaving her no strength for defense,
facilitating his entry.

“Do not interfere,” he warned the approaching Others.

“Unless you speak up fast,” Harley countered, raising the
muzzle of the machine gun, “I’ll do a hell of a lot more than interfere.”

Dak, with the calm patience of his Pride ancestry, pushed
the muzzle down. “Explanations before threats.”

Bohdan retreated from Edie’s mind, his expression mirroring
the fury Deuce could feel rolling off him in waves.

“What did we do wrong?” Deuce asked, wrestling with the
pain, and Edie’s efforts to detect his presence. He had to drop the wall
between himself and the Others.

Bohdan’s expression went carefully blank. He capped the
empty syringe. “Nothing.”

“She’s in agony.”

“Yes.”

“You said this was how they did it.”

“I did not press deep enough for emotional memory for fear
of instigating another bleed.”

Deuce put it together at the same time that everyone else
did. Their curses cut through the last echo of Edie’s scream, overriding the
whimpered notes as he found the path to block the last of the pain from her
consciousness. He closed his eyes as the agony spread to Edie’s chest and
seized her lungs, taking it into himself. He did not have time for swearing as
he fought to keep her heart from stopping at the shock sweeping through her. He
felt the touch of Bohdan’s presence and then Edie’s heart beat again. Once,
twice and then steadily.

“I’m calling a hunt,” Harley said when he stopped swearing.

Deuce locked Edie’s life functions to his, leaving the
healing to Bohdan, raising his heart rate to match a normal human one. He
opened his eyes. Both men were in battle stance, frustration and rage
shimmering around them in a red haze of contained energy.

“The Pride will join you,” Dak said with a calm that was
belied by the sharp claws extending around the stock of the machine gun. Others
only lost control of the change when under extreme emotion.

Deuce lifted Edie’s lax body into his arms, balling his rage
into a cold, hard knot to be drawn upon later. “The Chosen will exact the
revenge on behalf of my mate.”

Edie’s head lolled to the side as he stood. Her slender neck
appeared too fragile to bear what she had. Her pulse shimmered under her skin
in a bare thread of life. He would kill them all. His revenge would be long,
bloody, and the men who had harmed Edie would suffer well into their death
throes. That the Coalition had subjected her to that agony over and over while
she lay helpless was inconceivable. He crossed to the bed. How she had survived
it, he did not know.

He laid her on the red sheets, away from the bloodstains. He
turned the comforter and covered her with a clean section, keeping her
unconscious. He would not allow her to wake until the pain was gone. He brushed
a curl out of her face, rubbing his fingers over the silken strand as it
wrapped around his finger, binding him to her.

“You cannot kill them.” As always, Bohdan was the voice of
reason.

Deuce spared him a glance as he stepped up beside him. “You
cannot stop me.”

“You cannot kill them,” Bohdan repeated with that same
irrefutable calm that demanded attention. Deuce dragged his gaze away from
Edie, quelling the panic that said to do so sentenced her to death, that she
only lived because he held her here.

What
he saw shocked him. Bohdan was at the edge of his strength. Healers were the
strongest of the Chosen. They had to be for the effort it took to restore
heath. But from the pallor of Bohdan’s skin, keeping Eden alive had drained
him. As the sun was upon them, he would not be able to replenish until
nightfall. Deuce touched Edie’s cheek, the agony whipping through her body
tearing at him. The situation was bad. Very bad.

“Give me one goddamn reason why we can’t gut the whole lousy
bunch,” Harley snarled, fangs flashing.

Bohdan’s gaze met Deuce’s, his calm soothing over the
violence of the Pack leader’s question. “She bore a child of the Chosen. They
made it happen. They cannot die until we know how.”

It was a very good reason.

Chapter Nine

Eden
awoke in darkness. Complete and utter darkness. Restrained to the bed, for one
horrifying moment she thought she was back in the lab. Except for the darkness.
The lab was never dark. It was always lit in sterile white unrelenting light.
She tested her restraints. They seemed to be limited to her torso and thighs.
Unevenly so. A quick exploration revealed a heavily muscled arm and thigh
draped across her. Very heavy appendages that lay unnaturally still.

“Deuce?” She couldn’t think of anyone other than Deuce who
would dare crawl into bed with her as if it were his right. He probably
justified it with his claim of being her mate. He didn’t answer. Didn’t move.
She lifted his arm—definitely dead weight. Eden elbowed him in the side. No
grunt marked the impact. Now that she listened, she couldn’t hear anything at
all. Not even a breath.

She slid from the bed, wrestling free of the covers, her
skin crawling with an awful suspicion. His arm hit the bed with a thump just
before her feet hit the floor. Was he dead? Was this another of her
grandfather’s sick games?

Eden backed up a step, disoriented in the dark, and bumped
into something sharp. Wood clattered against wood and the corner of something
gouged her hip. A table. The unmistakable sound of a lamp teetering had her
spinning around. She caught it, fumbling up the curve of the base until she
found the switch. With a prayer it would work, she turned it. Soft yellow light
filled the room, illuminating the massive sleigh bed that dominated the
large space and the lethal looking swords displayed on all the walls. No doubt
about it. This was definitely a man’s bedroom.

And no doubt about it, it was definitely a naked man
sprawled on his stomach on the gleaming burgundy comforter, his cheek resting
on his forearm, the long, thick length of his hair obscuring his face. Nothing
could disguise who it was, however. There was only one man she knew who had
that perfect build setting off the thick ropes of muscle that started at
impossibly broad shoulders and flowed inward to the base of his spine in deep,
shadowed channels that narrowed until one by one they blended into a single
point just above the tight, hard rise of his buttocks. Eden followed the
channel below with her eyes as it curved with the angle of his bent leg,
dipping into an inviting shadow beneath, finding the darker hue of his heavy
balls. Round and slightly compressed, they lay against his thigh and the bed in
a tempting display. Her fingers twitched and saliva flooded her mouth. Deuce.

He must have changed the bedding while she slept. The golden
cast to his skin glowed against the deep maroon, while the stark white sheets
accentuated the power in the arm stretched across them, as if reaching for her.
Except he wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving? Between her getting out of bed
and the sudden influx of light, he should be waking up. Eden leaned forward and
tapped the back of his hand.