Blood Moons (5 page)

by Alianne Donnelly

than he should have had. "I'll shut up about your pretty little thing in exchange for a free ride every once in a while."

"Not a chance. I don't share."

"Better sharing with me than sharing with everyone else, don't you think?"

Tristan speared him with a sharp glare, holding the man in place with a small compulsion. He only hesitated for a moment before he projected some sense into the guard's mind. Subtle was the way. He lowered his head a little, leaned forward; added real perceptions of a threat to the projected ones and amplified all of them to suit his needs.

Just enough to make him back down. Just enough to scare the fucking shit out of him for a few seconds before he eased up.

Blanc's smile fell away and he shifted nervously, unable to look away. He broadcast his fear like a scent Tristan could see. Blanc already thought Tristan was an animal. Nothing but muscle and brute force. But Tristan let him see something even more dangerous in his eyes. It was something even the guards refused to fuck with. He was not such an easy prey.

He amplified the doubt in the guard's mind. Maybe Blanc shouldn't have brought this up just yet.

And a seemingly stray thought,
Maybe not ever.
It brought Blanc's shoulders back and his chin up. Tristan's control of him slipped and the son of a bitch found his backbone again.
I
am the fucking law around here!
he thought. "Think about it,"

Blanc said out loud, barely keeping his voice from betraying how uneasy he was. Before he walked away, he decided to 41

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

give Hunt a final warning. "Word can spread mighty quick around here. I'll stop by tonight."

I knew she'd be trouble.
Tristan swore and dropped the towel into the pool. It was instantly vaporized. He should have thrown the damned guard in there. No fuss, no messes.

Before he could entertain the thought a little longer, one of the doctors approached him. Adjusting her spectacles, she watched Blanc leave, her sharp gaze missing nothing. Out of all the white coats, Dr. Chase was the nicest and the sharpest. She always spoke to him as if they were equals in every respect. Unlike the others, each time she performed an experiment or procedure on him, she told him what she was doing, while she was doing it, and even went so far as to predict possible side effects. She'd used to ask if he was okay with what she was about to do. But she'd stopped after a while when he always answered the same—that he didn't give a fuck either way.

"Are you making trouble for him again?" she asked.

"Not yet," Tristan told her and she grinned up at him.

"Try not to break any bones, will you?" she told him gamely. "I'm always the one who ends up having to set them."

Tristan schooled himself not to smile back. "What's on the menu today, Doc?"

She looked away. "I saw yesterday's population charts.

Herb assigned a woman to your cell." The observation was made in a cool, neutral manner, but Tristan knew she was on the lookout for any kind of reaction.

"I don't think he wants to be friends with me anymore."

42

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

"You'd do well to be careful, Tristan. I can only help so much."

"Do you know anything about her?"

"Let's talk in my lab, shall we?" She didn't look behind her to check if he was following as she left the gym.

Tristan shook out his wet hair and went after her.

A few words to the guards and an elevator ride later, they entered the laboratory that was reserved for her exclusively.

As one of the top physicians and researchers, Dr. Amelia Marguerite Chase merited it. She waved him into the exam chair that stood in the center while she reviewed his file. A computer screen took up nearly half of one wall and displayed his entire body, inside and out in precise detail.

"You were about to tell me about my new roommate,"

Tristan reminded her.

Dr. Chase read through the last part of the file, then set it aside and met his gaze. "You should know that the guild is debating a new series of experiments."

"Do I want to know?"

"No, I don't think you do. But I'll tell you anyway." But she didn't. Instead, she pulled on her gloves and pushed a button to summon a hovering table. She opened a kit and neatly spread the contents on the table before sending it to Tristan's side.

"You're hedging," Tristan frowned. "That's not like you.

What's going on?"

Dr. Chase looked at him for a moment, then nudged the hovering table aside to reach the keypad on the back of Tristan's chair. It beeped softly with each button she pushed 43

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

and then the surveillance cameras turned off. "Ten minutes, that's all we have. Then the system reboots and security is notified."

He nodded.

"I was recently given the results of a statistical analysis done on Earth. The sample size was big enough that I'm inclined to believe it. It shows an increasing trend of chemically ... different people. They don't fit any of the original DNA profiles and are proving to be resistant to the chem treatments."

"Like me."

She nodded. "Like you."

"Are you sure they were even treated?"

Dr. Chase gave him a look. "Tristan, the treatments are mandatory. People can protest all they want, but whether they like it or not, their children will receive it with or without their knowledge. There are no loopholes. The guild and the government—since they're chief advisors to the president—

thinks it's because these traits are being naturally selected for."

"I don't think I like where you're going with this."

It was easy to keep up with the political currents when he was being swept up in them. And Tristan had been paying close attention.

Since the last fallout, the government had taken a stronger hand in the ruling of its people. They dictated where people should live, what they should eat; they even controlled fashion trends, although why anyone would want to get involved with that was beyond him. Chem treating people 44

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

right after birth to prevent any problems was just another way to stay efficient.

If that was starting to fail, people were shit out of luck.

Because the next step would be engineering people according to the government's specifications.

"Believe me, I don't like it, either. But the grants have been received, supposedly with no strings attached—"

"And yet in a few months' time, officials will be knocking on your door for results on the studies
they
want done," he finished for her.

"Yes," Dr. Chase agreed unhappily, then hesitated before blurting out, "They're reproductive studies, Tristan."

It took his brain a moment to process what she'd just said.

The rest she related quickly, as if she didn't want to pollute her mind even long enough to put the thought into words.

"The preliminary design is to pair inmates according to three processes—chemical traits, natural selection, and randomization."

Tristan stared at her, astonished. "Please tell me you didn't just say what I think you just said." They wouldn't dare.

"It gets worse," she said. "Interaction is necessary. They don't want to see in vitro fertilization in their results because it creates bias. As far as chemical traits and random selection go, a computer can find candidates fairly easily, but the rest of it, especially the natural selection part, is nothing more than..."

"Rape." Tristan's stomach did a nasty dive. Those bastards. "How will it be conducted? What's the scope?"

"You don't want to know."

45

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

"Yes, I do, damn it!" he growled. "How?"

Dr. Chase took a steadying breath. "Anarchy," she said succinctly. "They plan to designate an entire level to it. Men and women will be led inside in near-equal proportion and then the guards will leave and the doors will close."

"What's the scope?"

"Total. No exceptions."

The next thing Tristan growled was not in English. Dr.

Chase stared at him, her mouth agape. "Was that Greek?"

she asked in amazement.

Gaelic, actually. But he spoke Greek and Latin too. Wasn't worth it to read
The Odyssey
or
The Aeneid
in the English translation. Like paying the price of a 3-D interactive admission to watch the movie on TV. But he couldn't say that; he could barely make a sound.

Tristan was struggling to keep from lashing out. The previous studies done on him had changed him significantly, altered his mental and physical abilities. His muscles have been enhanced—a side effect of one of the serums Dr. Chase always pumped into him. They caused him to have outbursts of incredible strength that he couldn't control, because they were triggered by stress or anger—times when he didn't
want
to be in control. He was literally a primed bomb ready to go off at any moment.

Even as he gripped the armrests of the chair he was sitting in, the material indented, right down to the alloy center.

There would be marks left on it.

"Tristan, listen to me. You have to breathe through this. I don't want to have to sedate you."

46

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

"Of course not," he managed to say through gritted teeth.

"That would mean no more experiments today."

Dr. Chase stepped away. "You know that's not true," she said and Tristan could hear the hurt in her voice. She wasn't one of them, he tried to remind himself. If she hadn't told him, that reproductive study would have come as a nasty surprise.

He breathed in, instinctively reaching out to the only person like him within ten light years. He
felt
Dara start and drop her book. Cursing himself, he pulled back instantly, throwing up all his shields. He told himself that the next breath came easier, and his vision settled to normal. He pretended that the details faded until he couldn't see the miniscule writing on the computer screen twelve feet away from him anymore.

Dr. Chase was next to him again, her fingers pressed to the inside of his wrist, but she wasn't looking at her watch to measure his heart rate. Tristan looked at her and she blinked.

"Your eyes have changed. The pupils contracted vertically just now, like a cat's." There was something in her voice, some kind of emotion he couldn't pinpoint in his current state.

His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles ached. "Amelia,"

he said, fighting to regain his senses. "I need to ask you a favor."

"What is it?"

"Keep her out of it."

She frowned. "The woman? I'm not sure if I can. I told you the scope—"

47

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

Christ, his teeth were about to start cracking. "You can try.

There are ways. There are always options."

"Tristan, I can't make her disappear. She's on the list.

She's coming in tomorrow for—"

"No," he told her fiercely, meeting her gaze. His hand turned up to capture hers for emphasis, though it took everything he had to control his muscles and not crush her bones. The more he fought himself, the more it enraged him, eroding his control further. Tristan focused on his breath and nothing more. In and out. He closed his eyes. In and out.

The security cameras beeped as they turned back on. A deep male voice called Amelia's name from the intercom by the door.

"Please," Tristan said and opened his eyes. If it was all he could ever do for the woman, he had to keep her away from this mess. Dara exuded innocence like an aura he could practically see around her. She'd be broken by this.

Irreparably. Tristan had seen rape victims in the memories of some of the men here. Those women had lost everything that had ever defined them, leaving nothing but a shell of a human being. And if there was one thing he never wanted to see, it was Dara's eyes completely empty like that.

Dr. Chase pulled her hand free and answered the intercom.

"All clear here, Sergeant. I must have punched in the wrong combination. Won't happen again."

"Need backup?"

"No, thank you. Everything's fine." She waved at the camera for good measure.

48

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

"All right, then. Security out." But they weren't and both she and Tristan knew it.

Amelia picked up the file that lay next to Tristan's and came to him so she wouldn't have to speak loudly. "Dara Frost," she read. "She was sentenced to life for a series of bloody murders. Seems she called the police with some information that led them to one of the victims. He was already dead, and there were no clues to point to the killer.

Except her call." She closed the file. "The chief of police testified against her, then pleaded for the jury to spare her life. No one really believed she did it, but the people were screaming for blood. And hers was the most readily available."

Tristan felt ice settle in the marrow of his bones. She'd seen it. She'd looked into a serial killer's mind because she couldn't keep it from happening. And now she was far too close to far too many of them, with no mental guards to keep out their sick thoughts. How did she survive without going mad?

She doesn't belong here.

He hadn't realized he'd spoken out loud until Dr. Chase tilted her head, studying him curiously. "No, I suppose she doesn't. But there are a lot of us here who could make that claim. What should be doesn't change what is." Her tone didn't tell him whether she was talking about him, or herself.

"I hope you're not planning to make a crusade out of this. It's not worth it to stick your own neck out for someone you don't even know."

49

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

Tristan was nobody's puppet. What the doctors did to him, they did only because he allowed it. Dr. Chase, for all her sage advice, had her own agenda when it came to him. Her research was dependent on his full cooperation, and until now, he'd given it without qualm. That she would stoop to this kind of manipulation was as low as it was unexpected.