His Dark Bond (22 page)

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Authors: Anne Marsh

BOOK: His Dark Bond
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“No, I did not.” Those large hands of his examined a tray of glass tubes. “I did not expect you to examine my bloodline.”
She shrugged. “It’s what I do. Get me more samples, so I can confirm. I need samples from all of you.”
“We are not guinea pigs, but I will see what I can do.” This was an outcome he sure as hell hadn’t foreseen.
“You can identify the soul mates.”
“No. Maybe.” She hunched her shoulders beneath the white lab coat. “It’s not that simple. I can give you the gene pool. I can tell you if someone is a likely match or not. Somehow,” she argued, “your DNA got spread around down here. Hypothesize,” she ordered. “How could that have happened?”
He wanted to give her a fairy tale. Make it sound romantic. But it wasn’t. “Dominions occasionally came down to Earth.” For fucking and fighting. Yeah. There wasn’t a whole lot of romance going on there. More like shore leave for a bunch of heavenly berserkers.
From the look on her face, she’d drawn the appropriate conclusions. “Reproductive activity.” She made it sound like a disease, but, hey, she’d just found out she was the love child of a Dominion slumming with a human woman. He could understand her distaste. “Was that expected?”
“No. Most times, there was no offspring.”
Tapping a finger against her teeth, she nodded slowly. “Infertile unions. Typically. But not always. That’s just lovely, Zer.” She paused, thinking. “But there had to have been more than a few isolated incidents. This kind of genetic change—you find it in a community. People who lived together, in close proximity, for centuries. Long enough for their DNA to reflect that proximity.”
He grimaced. “Clearly, not impossible.” The ethics of those couplings were strangely disturbing. How could the salvation of his brothers’ souls be tied up with the shore leave R & R of their forebears?
 
“You can tell who the soul mates are by looking at their DNA,” Zer repeated.
“I could. I think.” She paused, then threw down the gauntlet. “But I won’t. I won’t give you my research, Zer.”
“Why not?” His voice was hard and implacable, all leader now. “I need that information, Nessa. When I gave you the lab, I thought you would work for me. Now, you want to hold out on me?”
“I can’t do it.” Her voice got real quiet, real fast.
“You won’t.” He wondered what was going through her head. He supposed he could have pushed his way in, found out for himself. It was what he should do. Instead, he slapped a hand down on the table beside her, rattling all the damn glassware with a shimmy-and-shake of epic proportions. He didn’t want to threaten her.
But he would.
This was too damn important. He couldn’t afford emotions.
“All right. I won’t.” She lifted her head and glared at him. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do with this information, Zer, but I can hazard a pretty good guess. Tell me you’re not going to go haring off after these women. Tell me you’re not intending to drag them back here and pair them off with your brothers.”
“You don’t know these women,” he pointed out. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“No,” she agreed. “I don’t. But I still think they should have a choice. You may be a barbarian, Zer, but I’d like to think I have a few manners. And some ethics.”
“It’s not a question of choosing.” Hell. He ran a hand over his head. “At least, not yet. Those women aren’t safe, Nessa. Don’t you think they deserve a chance to live? Because, I can assure you, Cuthah isn’t going to play nice. He knew you were looking for this information. If he doesn’t get it from you, he’ll find someone else to put two and two together.”
“Good luck to him,” she said confidently. “I’m the best. He can try, but I can assure you, it will be a cold day in hell before he finds himself another researcher who can do this for him.”
“Can you guarantee that there were no leaks in your lab?” He drove his point home ruthlessly. “That no one planted a bug in your software? Never looked over your shoulder while you were working? Hell, you had an office full of notes on the thirteenth tribe before I met you. You were that close, Nessa, and he’s going to know that, sooner or later. Why the hell do you think he came after you?”
“I know why he came after me,” she snapped. “The real question is: Why did you?”
 
Zer was no poet. No, he was large and bold, all warrior and very, very male. Maybe, just maybe, he could see her for both the researcher and the woman. Clearly, he wasn’t threatened by either. He didn’t need to prove he was as smart as she. And he sure as hell didn’t have anything to prove in bed. He prowled toward her with hungry eyes.
“Let’s examine this question of yours.” His large, hot hands wrapped around her waist, lifting her effortlessly onto the lab table. “Why did I come after you?” He grinned wolfishly. “Your name was on that list, of course, but the minute I saw you ... all prim and proper and buttoned-up. You were obviously brilliant, but so much more, too.”
Distantly, she realized she was melting into him, her fingers curling into the heavy leather of his coat. His mouth covered hers, one hand sliding up to cup her neck, tracing an erotic pattern on the sensitive skin of her throat. His other hand deliberately flicked open the buttons of the lab coat and pushed down her top.
“This pleases me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Very much.”
“Good,” she moaned, leaning deeper into his touch.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to give me what I want,” he growled. “Don’t underestimate me, Nessie.”
Lowering his head, he resumed his hot, heady exploration of her neck. Talented fingers stroking delicately down the exposed curves of her breasts. The soft kiss of his knuckles gliding across her sensitive skin teased her with wicked promise.
When he tongued her nipples, pleasure exploded through her.
Her hands clutched his shoulders. To hell with keeping still. He’d promised to deliver on all her fantasies, so, closing her eyes, she let her hands explore. Slid them down that powerful back, ignoring the obvious bulge of weaponry. His ass was a work of art.
“You’re beautiful,” he growled as he pushed down her lounge pants. “I like you better in a skirt. You were wearing one when I found you. You challenged me,” he growled. “Then, when you picked me at the club, you really threw down the gauntlet, baby. You know what happens when you push a predator?”
She was too busy sliding her hands around to the front of him, sliding open the buttons on his leather pants and wrapping her hands around the thick, hot length of him. “Right. Predators. It’s just simple anthropology, isn’t it?”
God, it was hard to think with the delicious haze of lust rolling over her. Screw thinking. She could do that later. Much later. Instead, she slid a hand down him. Smooth. Hard. His husky groan was music to her ears.
Challenge a predator, and he needed to dominate. His teeth closing gently over her earlobe sent a bright thrill of sensation shooting through her, so, wrapping her arms around him, she urged him down onto the table.
C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN
S
napping on the latex gloves, Nessa pulled material for a dish card. The glassware was still hot from the sterilizer, so she was good to go.
For the past week, she’d worked her ass off in the lab. And when she hadn’t been working, she’d settled for staring out the wall of plate glass looking down onto a small courtyard. Right now, the pink glow of the early morning came through the glass, lighting up the rows of tables and workstations. Computer fans beat out a steady hum as the processors did their thing.
Two weeks ago, she’d have named the place paradise. Now? Well, she’d acquired a partner, a heartache, and the equivalent of a biological time bomb. Since she really couldn’t stare out the window all day, she settled for rolling her chair over to a lab table loaded with glass beakers.
Zer hadn’t stinted on the equipment. Somewhere, somehow, he’d ordered an entire lab picked up and delivered right to her doorstep. She had enough glassware to equip a small country and high-tech equipment that was so cutting-edge, there were probably entire governments who’d never heard of it. And would likely kill to obtain it.
And all the effort had paid off, hadn’t it? She could identify the genetic marker in her DNA that identified the soul mates. Yeah. Confetti and champagne all ’round. Of course, she hadn’t shared that little tidbit with Zer yet.
Right on cue, the door to her state-of-the-art laboratory opened quietly, and damned if it wasn’t her nemesis. Zer had brought coffee and some sort of Danish to sweeten her up. She’d known he was smart. She took the paper cup he offered because she was smart, too, and there was no point in turning down good coffee.
“You got built-in radar?” she asked. Right now, she’d believe anything was possible.
“You find something for me today?” He set his cup down on the table and looked her over. Yeah. This wasn’t an accidental visit. None of them were.
“Maybe,” she admitted, because she could tell him that much. He needed to know that much. He just didn’t have to have the deets. “I’ve been going through the microbial DNA sequences.” Again. Because she couldn’t afford to be wrong about this. There was way too much at stake. “I can identify the start and end of the gene sequence. Alpha and omega.” She shrugged and waited for him to make the connection.
“The software routines.” He ran a hand over his head, and damned if he didn’t look interested. “Your computer analysis of our DNA strands.”
“Code,” she agreed, and she sighed. “I’ve spent this week processing millions of records and sequences, searching for a particular pattern.” A pattern she’d predicted. If there were anomalies in the gene model, she’d intended to find them. One by one, she’d coaxed the fragile DNA strands onto glass slides, scanned them with a microscope, and uploaded the results into a database. The freezers lining the lab wall came with a backup power gen and bank-worthy alarm systems. Locked inside those stainless-steel doors was raw material for decades of research. Genetic gold. So, she’d had no illusions. She’d known he’d be watching.
What had surprised her, though, was tracking the shift in the genome from the purely human to the paranormal.
You wanted to build a human body, the instructions were out there on the Internet. She was piggybacking on generations of scientists who’d picked apart the human genome and cataloged its idiosyncrasies.
Human genomes made humans who they were.
Twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, with the last pair dictating boy or a girl; the others had always fascinated her more. Some things were more fundamental—more
unique
—than gender could ever be. The genomes were a living record of everything her species had done and accomplished in the evolutionary picture of things. Genes that had been there since the first human breathed and stood upright. Genes that reflected all the turns humans had taken on the evolutionary path.
If she was right, one of those turns had happened three thousand years ago, when the Dominions had Fallen from the Heavens. Some of her kind had acquired a new gene. A gene marking them as potential mates for the Fallen.
“What did you find?” His dark eyes examined her face, but he stayed out of her head, which she appreciated.
“We’ve tracked the migration of the human race from one continent to another. We can tell you how different races of people evolved, by examining their genes. I can trace the soul mates the same way.”
There was a long pause, and then he swore colorfully. “You’re sure of this?”
“Yes.” She took a sip of her coffee, not surprised that it was perfect. He knew precisely what she liked. “I’ve been looking at mitochondrial DNA as it passes from mother to daughter. I can trace a maternal lineage from one woman to the next. What might have been a harmless genetic mutation once upon a time”—if they were talking fairy tales—“is now a neon soul-mate-here sign. A daughter inherits the genetic marker from her mother and then passes it along to her own daughters.”
“Does that make your mother a soul mate?”
He was quick. “It makes her a likely candidate. If I’d had a sister, she would have been another likely candidate. It’s not a guarantee, though. Just like not all brown-haired mothers have brown-haired daughters, not all women with the soul-mate marker pass that gene down to their own daughters.”
Except the mutation seemed to be regional. The change would have originated with a small group of women—her thirteenth tribe. The lost tribe of Israel.
“So, what’s the connection?” He raked a hand through his hair. “You and Mischka are not closely related, if at all.”
“We can both trace our ancestry to the lost tribe. As the tribe dispersed and the women moved, the genetic marker moved with them, disappearing into the general population. Have that particular marker in your DNA, that X-chromosome mutation, and you’re related to the women who were originally born near the Jordan River and lived there in the same community. Mischka and I share a common ancestor; people who lived in the same geographic region often share certain genetic patterns. Not all of them will have the same genetic patterns, but enough will. We can trace the outward migration of that group, look for that common allele.”
From the look on Zer’s face, he was connecting the dots fast. “So your research on the thirteenth tribe of Israel wasn’t a crock of shit after all.”
“No.” She shot him a bitter look. “It isn’t. It’s the academic breakthrough of the century. There’s not a journal in the world that wouldn’t rush to publish the paper I could write.”
“Can you find the other women?” No missing the fierce interest in his voice. Yeah, he’d want to know that, wouldn’t he?
“Not all of the women may have had the allele, but enough of them did. They likely lived in that area for several generations and then migrated from there. They share the same genetic variant. Test a woman, and I can tell you whether or not she’s got the marker Mischka and I share.”
“You weren’t a ringer, after all,” he said, savage satisfaction filling his voice.
“No.” She couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “No, I wasn’t.” He’d been right. She was a match. Just not for him, it seemed.
“Tell me how I find them.”
She understood now that she needed to help Zer find the women. Keeping their identities to herself would not keep the potential soul mates safe.
“You can give me the list and bring me biological samples from each woman on that list. If I type their DNA, I’ll know whether or not they’re the ones you’re looking for. Or—”
“Or?”
“Or, you can approach this from another angle. Go through a larger sample set, typing for hits.” When he didn’t answer, she continued. “Blood banks, Zer. Hospital records.” God, she was suggesting felonies as if they were flavors of ice cream. “Anywhere you can get me the biological matter I need. Hell, you can go scraping the Metro if that’s what you want. I can’t tell you where those women will be, but I can tell you if they’re carrying the mutation you’re looking for.”
“I don’t want you involved in all this anymore. Just tell me how to identify the DNA, and we’ll set up a team of scientists to do the actual work.”
“Don’t ask me to do that, Zer.”
What would happen if the whole world knew exactly what the genetic marker was? Her mind supplied a mental picture far too easily of the media feeding frenzy that would result. Worse, what if it turned out that her kit, her little pee-on-a-stick genetic test-in-a-box could identify potential soul mates? She’d upend all their lives. And paint a great big fat red bull’s-eye on their foreheads. She hadn’t made anyone’s life better. No, what she’d done was plunge them all straight into a living hell. Worse, the kit was already out there. It identified those traits—it just didn’t say one line for nice, normal human life and two lines for a destiny as the eternal soul mate of a soul-sucking Goblin.
“I’m not asking,” he growled. “I’m telling.”

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