Atlantis Redeemed (27 page)

It wasn’t paranoid if there was a good chance it might be true.

“How did you make it past that metal detector?” she murmured, scratching her nose to cover her mouth in case they were on video surveillance. Although maybe that was a bit over the top. What was the likelihood that they had lip readers on staff?

“The only—”

She cut him off by pulling his head down and kissing him, then pretending to nuzzle his ear. “The room might be bugged. Maybe whisper in my ear?”

He put his arms around her and pulled her very close to his hard body. “Finally, a mission I approve of one thousand percent,” he said. He returned her kiss, taking full advantage of the situation to thoroughly claim her mouth. She was dizzy by the time he stopped.

“The only weapons that can survive transforming into mist with us are those made of a native Atlantean ore, orichalcum. It has the added benefit of not triggering metal detection, even masking other metals that are combined with it,” he murmured near her ear. She was pleased that his voice was ragged; this insane attraction between them was definitely two-sided.

“Even the silver?”

“Silver?” His eyebrows drew together. “What silver?”

“You told those vampires your blades were tipped with silver.”

His face relaxed into a lazy grin. “Ah, Truth Teller, it surprises me that you ask me this.”

She blinked. “You lied?”

“Call it more of a bluff.”

It was her turn to laugh. She had been so worried about more important things, like
not dying
, that it had never occurred to her to listen for bluffs.

“You’re devious, Brennan.”

“You’re beautiful, Tiernan,” he whispered, and then he kissed her again, but only briefly, and she heard the voices heading down the hall toward them right after he raised his head.

“Here we go,” she said. “Showtime.”

Brennan let Tiernan turn to face the door but kept his arm wrapped around her waist, telling himself it was because she needed the comfort of his touch. She would have called him on that lie immediately. His fear for her safety was spiking adrenaline and pure, primal aggression through his body so powerfully that he had to work hard to control himself. It wouldn’t be good for either Tiernan or their mission if he were the one to commit the first overt act of hostility.

Litton burst through the door, reminding Brennan again of nothing as much as a hairless rodent, leading to an odd and utterly random curiosity about whether or not were-rodents existed. Seemed unlikely.

Several men and women in lab coats followed Litton through the room. Litton gestured toward the large conference table and everyone took a seat, except for one man who hurried over to the equipment on a desk near the front.

“Welcome to the place where the magic happens,” Litton said, sweeping his arms out.

“Bit grandiose, isn’t he?” Tiernan said under her breath.

Brennan’s rage calmed down several notches at the amusement in her voice. His mate was not afraid; that fact went a long way to dampen the fury threatening to swamp him.

“Please take a seat,” the man at the equipment said.

Brennan and Tiernan took the two open seats at the end of the conference table. They were farthest from the door. Brennan forced himself to draw in slow, deep breaths to fight the animal instinct of being cornered.

The predator in him didn’t like it one bit, no matter that none of the humans between Tiernan and the door seemed likely to put up a fight. Lab coats could conceal a great many things, weapons among them.

Even Brennan could not always outrace a bullet.

Litton nodded, and one of the scientists, a female, distributed dark blue folders to each person at the table. She hesitated when she got to Tiernan, biting her lip, and she shot Litton a look, but he just nodded again and she put the final blue folder in front of Tiernan and then rushed back to her own seat.

“You will find in front of you documents that detail a great many of our more important findings in the area of neurophysiological control,” Litton said.

As Brennan and Tiernan opened their folders, an image flashed on the screen at the front of the room. A group of large, obviously strong men were working on a skyscraper. They were all happy and smiling for the camera.

None of them was human.

“Those are all shifters,” Tiernan said. “You can tell from the way they’re hanging off the side of that building, or those two who are carrying huge steel beams with one hand. Only shifters would have that kind of strength and agility. But why—”

“Correct, Ms. Baum,” Litton said, as if rewarding a prize pupil. “They are all shifters. But not just any shifters. These are all men who, just one month before this picture was taken, were hopeless derelicts. Leeches upon society. They’d taken the worst of the shifter existence—violence, dominance, bloodlust—and warped it even further, until they were roaming as a gang in Chicago. Brutalizing innocents and terrifying even the police force.”

He stopped and grasped the lapels of his lab coat, looked around the room, and smiled his smug, self-satisfied smile. “We made them productive members of society in
just three days
.”

“I thought you said one month?” Brennan said.

Litton was clearly prepared for the question. “Well, it took them three-and-a-half weeks to learn construction.”

Everyone in the room, but for Brennan and Tiernan, laughed, but it had the tired sound of being well rehearsed. Brennan looked down at the papers in front of him and scanned the people in the room out of the corner of his eye. Most of them had telltale signs of exhaustion and anxiety. Pale and deeply drawn faces, nervous quirks such as tapping the arms of their chairs or the table, fidgeting, lip-biting. It didn’t take a shifter to read this body language. A select few, however, were leaning forward, all eagerness. They were the zealots, then.

Something was very, very wrong here.

“I made a fascinating discovery about the brain,” Litton continued, clearly in his element being the center of attention. “The activity in the caudate nucleus can not only predict people’s preferences, but it can and does reinforce decisions already made.”

“The caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, isn’t it?” Tiernan asked, clearly surprising Litton.

“So lovely to see you’re not just a pretty face,” he said, beaming.

Brennan noticed the female scientists in the room—and some of the men—wince at the comment. Potential allies? But they all looked too defeated to strike out against Litton, and certainly they wouldn’t be able to stand up to vampires.

Tiernan, however, ignored the remark entirely, focusing intently on Litton.

“Yes, the caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, which is involved in generating movement.” Litton made a motion, and the image on the screen changed to a diagram of the brain. The caudate nucleus looked rather like an Atlantean sugar bean and was situated on the right side of the image.

Tiernan whistled. “That’s a pretty major discovery. Can you activate the caudate nucleus?”

Litton smiled. It was a singularly unpleasant smile. “Not only can we activate it, Ms. Baum, but we can control it and, by so doing, control the desires and resultant actions of the person whose brain has been activated.”

Tiernan slumped back in her seat, shaking her head. She turned to Brennan. “That’s not only major, that’s control-the-world major,” she said in an undertone. “And if he’s telling us this, he has no intention of letting us out of here, ever. He would not only be shut down so fast by the scientific community that your head would spin, but this is criminal prosecution time.”

“Anything you’d like to share with the group?” Litton said, sneering at them.

“Very impressive,” Brennan said, clenching his hands into fists on his thighs but presenting a calm face to the room. “Looks like you’re putting my money to very good use, Doctor. How long does this control last?”

Litton’s smug smile faltered, and he broke eye contact. “As long as we want it to last, of course.”

Brennan didn’t need to see Tiernan’s tiny head shake to know that Litton had just lied, but the confirmation convinced him that he needed to get Tiernan out of there, and fast.

“Is your head still aching?” he asked Tiernan, who glanced up, surprised.

He took her hand in his. “We should get you some medicine and have you lie down for a while before we continue this.”

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” she said firmly, pulling her hand from his, the light of battle in her eyes. “This is fascinating, Dr. Litton, please continue.”

“We have a bit of video you’ll be very interested in, Mr. Brennan. This will show you what we’ve done so far, what we’re planning to do next, and where we hope to ultimately arrive with our research and practical trials.”

From the first image of video footage, Brennan knew it was going to be bad, but even he, hardened by millennia of battle, had not anticipated the sheer depth of evil—all committed in the name of scientific research.

Litton’s voice, sounding somewhat tinny, narrated the footage, describing the testing and failures that led to eventual success in the human trials. The video focused on two subjects, one male and one female, and the results were fairly innocuous at first. The subjects were shown submitting to a procedure whereby they were fastened into a chair and various electrodes were attached to their body. A metal helmet bristling with knobs and antennae, looking like something out of the science fiction movies Ven and Riley enjoyed so much, was fastened over their heads, and the scientists administered what looked like a series of electric shocks.

Tiernan, beside him, was clutching the arms of her chair so tightly that her knuckles were as white as her face. “Is that—is that the procedure to activate?”

Litton nodded, his attention fixed avidly on the screen. “Yes. Depending on the level of natural resistance, which varies from subject to subject, we may have to repeat the procedure multiple times.”

The test subject on-screen, the female, screamed and arched her body and then fell back against the chair. Brennan saw the tears trickling down from the corners of her eyes, and he wanted to smash something.

Smash someone.

And his prime candidate had the nerve to chuckle.

“Sometimes they feel a little discomfort,” Litton said, still chuckling. “But they forget it when we’re through.”

“You can affect memory, too?” Brennan said, instantly imagining the worst.

“Not exactly. Something about the procedure does cause a bit of an amnesia effect, but that only seems to relate to events around the actual procedure itself. It’s the trauma of the procedure, we believe.”

“Gee, you think?” Tiernan snapped.

Litton frowned. “All great scientific achievement and progress must come with some sacrifice, Ms. Baum.”

“What did you sacrifice, Dr. Litton?” she shot back.

“I gave up a high-ranking faculty position at a very well-respected university to found this institute,” he snapped. Then he gathered his dignity. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brennan. Usually it’s hard for laypeople to understand the hard work and dedication that goes into this sort of scientific endeavor. Since you’ve been so heavily involved in research before, I’m sure
you
understand.”

“Of course,” Brennan replied. He took Tiernan’s hand in his own, under the table, and squeezed it in warning. So far they didn’t have any real proof of what was going on. Her rapid breathing rate was signaling Brennan that they didn’t have much time before she exploded, though.

“Please continue,” he told Litton.

The video continued to mild scenes of the humans accomplishing simple tasks and performing feats with physical dexterity that they hadn’t had before the procedures. They watched the subjects juggle, walk on a thin balance beam, and climb a rock wall.

“We activated the woman to believe she was a concert violinist,” Litton said, as the images on-screen switched to show her in a room, playing the violin with an expression of dreamy bliss on her face.

“It’s beautiful, but . . . wrong,” Tiernan whispered.

It was true. The woman’s music was technically proficient but oddly soulless, much like the look in her eyes when the camera zoomed in for a close-up.

“Think of how much this talent enhanced her life. Absolutely beautiful. That’s Bach, I believe,” Litton said. “Imagine the music we could bring to the world.”

“Where is she now?” Tiernan asked. “Playing the concert circuit?”

For the first time, Litton looked uncomfortable. “No. She, ah, she had certain difficulties.”

“What does that mean, exactly—difficulties?” Brennan asked.

At first, he thought Litton wouldn’t answer. The scientist clamped his lips together and glared at them. But then he gave a little shrug. “She became obsessed. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, or even stop to drink water. Never put down the violin, not even for a minute, and became extremely violent when we tried to take it away from her.”