Scorpio Sons 1: Colton (3 page)

Chase addressed them all. “Brothers, I’d like to introduce you to the newest Scorpio Son, Cameron.”

Colt remembered what it was like to stare out at so many faces that looked just like his own. It was like being in a hall of mirrors. Everywhere he turned there was another him. Not fat or thin, tall or short versions of him, but him with different hair, clothes, accents, and body language. It had been creepy as much as it had been comforting. For the first time in his life he’d felt as if he belonged. As if he fitted.

“Cameron, I won’t try to introduce everyone. Even our great memories would falter at the deluge, especially as we all have names that start with C. But I'll introduce you to your Unit. As you know, we’re called Scorpio Sons because we were all removed from our incubation tubes on November 1 1988, our official birthday. That makes us all Scorpios. I got the idea from a girlfriend who was into astrology. And it suits us. We're as deadly and secretive as scorpions.

“For efficiency, we’re divided into Units of five or six men. Part of this is just to differentiate us. We currently have two Christophers, two Christians, and three Callums... I think you get the point. So we assigned each Chris to a different Unit. Chris A, Chris B etc. But there’s more to the allocation than that.”

Chase led the new guy over to him and his Unit. This posh dude looked gay, with his perfectly styled shock of dyed white-blonde hair, tidied eyebrows, and trendy clothes
. Metrosexual.
Was that the term they used for guys like this? Colt wasn’t homophobic, but it did surprise him to find one of the Sons batting for the other team. Their DNA was so damn male it just didn’t figure. Maybe he was Bi. That fitted better. Their beasts would likely fuck anything, given half the chance.

“Cameron, this is Unit D. You’ll be working with them. There are five of us in this Unit. You’ll make the sixth. Me, I’m leader and in charge of logistics. Colt.” He pointed to him and Colt raised his beer in greeting. “He heads up recon, with Connor as wingman.” Chase pointed to Connor who was sprawled like a cat across the thick carpet reading a
Sports Illustrated.

“That’s Caleb our IT guy, although all of us seem to have a way with tech. I assume you do too?” He pointed to their Unit’s rebel who lounged at Colt’s side on the sofa. Caleb wore a modified Mohawk and intricate tribal markings cut into the buzz-cut sides. The patterns matched his tattoos, which covered his upper arms and shoulders. He’d been getting rid of his copious piercings, one by one, over the last few years.

“Nearly got thrown out of Eton for hacking into the system and changing some of the boy’s addresses to local brothels. So yes, I can find my way around most tech.” The clipped, upper-class British accent and supercilious tone already had Colt’s back up, and he could almost hear Connor’s teeth grinding. Eton, no less? Was Colt supposed to bow, curtsey or something?

“Then there’s Coop, Cooper. The one in the wheelchair over there playing cards,” Chase used his head to indicate Coop, as the wheelchair made him easy enough to identify. “He’s one of our medics. He concentrates on the research side of things, and leads one of our research teams upstairs. As far as those above ground are concerned, I'm one of identical twins separated at birth. I’ve found Cooper and my third brother, who looks remarkably like us, in the last few years. That brother has a penchant for changing his appearance. That covers any sightings of the rest of the Sons in and around the building.”

“And if someone in the Guild notices our uncanny resemblance? I can’t be a long-lost brother,” Cameron said, lifting one imperious brow.

“Why would the Guild notice you?” Colt demanded, annoyed more and more by how unfazed this guy was by all that was being presented to him.

“Cameron’s going to take over the diplomatic element of our work and infiltrate the Guild.”

“The Guild? Are you nuts?” Colt cried, almost dropping his beer. Only his catlike reflexes kept the bottle from falling to the floor.

“Have you never heard the saying, ‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer,’?” asked Cameron in his bored, snobbish voice.

“I assume you're quoting Machiavelli’s
The Prince
? I suppose it was bedside reading for Etonian boys.”

Colt heard the growl deep in the other man’s throat. The insult had hit home. His own cat edged forwards enthusiastically. He’d been primed for a fight since he’d taken on Connor over 'Lyss. This new guy needed to know straight up where he belonged in the pecking order. And it wasn’t the top, no matter what his life so far had taught him.

“Enough,” Chase snapped. “Leave the pissing contest for another time. Colt, Cameron is one of us. And he’s perfectly placed to infiltrate the Guild. It’s the best news we’ve had in a long time.”

“Convenient, I'd call it. If he’s so pally with the Guild, who’s to say he isn’t a plant?” Colt shot back, sitting up, ready to leap at the first indication the new guy wanted to fight.

“Because he can't be. He's been raised by the Résistance. And if the Guild were to discover he was one of us he’d be dead,” Chase answered patiently.

“Then how will he infiltrate?”

“Falsified blood test results,” Cameron said in that oh-so-bored tone that was anything but. "Having their alien blood type will identify me as one of them."

“Look Colt, this is an orientation, not an interrogation. Cameron’s engaged to the daughter of one of the principal members of the Guild. That’s how he gets in. His adoptive mother was from Guild stock but was so desperate for a child, and ashamed she couldn’t produce one, that she was willing to keep quiet about the black-market baby her loving husband acquired for her, and claim it as her own. She died not long after the adoption and the secret of Cameron’s birth died with her.”

That had Colt’s attention, as well as that of everybody within hearing distance, which was pretty much the whole room. “You’re for real? Was he strategically placed like you?”

Chase jerked a nod. “It would seem so. Of course it wasn’t in the records I was given on my eighteenth birthday, but the Résistance has been in operation for centuries. It makes sense that they’d undertake such a strategic move. But for protection, the individual cells of the Résistance don’t know about each other. We didn’t know about Cameron and he didn’t know about us.”

“I was told as soon as my cat was activated what I was,” Cameron drawled. “I was put upon by several boys at Eton. I came close to killing them. And that’s when I found out I had guardians. They moved in immediately, took charge of clean up, and took me home so my father could explain what I was.”

“How old were you? And how did they cover up the boy’s knowledge of your cat?”

“Twelve. The boys were found dead in a stolen, wrecked car, with blood alcohol levels through the roof. They sneaked out of school and went joyriding, so the police determined. It was all hushed up, of course. The tabloids would have had a field day.”

“Are these the boys you gave brothel addresses?” Connor asked, obviously warming to their newest member.

“Yes. They had been thorns in my side from the moment I enrolled. They were Guild children and I wasn’t quite acceptable, having a purely human father.”

“They obviously saw what you were when you activated?”

“Yes. I didn’t know what my guardians were going to do. I didn’t know they'd kill them to keep them quiet. But they were Guild, after all. They deserved to die. I’m not sure whether my guardians would have retired human children, just to cover up what I am.”

Chase growled and nodded. “Oh, yes, they would have. The Résistance is very cavalier about collateral damage.”

“So, let me get this straight,” Connor said slowly, his lilting accent no longer obvious. “You were activated when school-boy bullies tried to beat you up. Your father then told you that you were a clone, one of a hundred experimental warrior babies that were supposedly terminated when the US government got wind of the illegal clone research the Guild was undertaking.”

“I was told I was one of a kind. A prototype for the Guild’s new army, thrown away at birth as defective. I was told that the Guild and its bloodline were not human. No more human than I was, although their bloodline was non-terrestrial, where mine was man-made using animal DNA. I was told that these aliens had been manipulating the world for their own gain for millennia. They were a cancer that had snuck in unseen and were slowly eating away the body... the Earth. When they finished with it they would move on to fresh fields.” There was no mistaking Cameron’s loathing for the Guild now.

“A cancer. Yes, I like that analogy. And we’re the T cells sent to eradicate them. Now we’ll remove the cancer from this world before they succeed in destroying it completely.” Chase’s pupils had become elongated as he spoke, a sign that he was passionate about what he said.

A growl of approval rose up from the throats of the Sons and rumbled around the room. Colt felt the hairs on his arms rise in answer.

This was his purpose, his destiny. And he shared it with his other selves: The Scorpio Sons

CHAPTER TWO

Chase directed D Unit into the small conference room off his office. Once they were all seated, he had Caleb turn on the table screen so they could all see the data in front of them.

“One useful piece of information Cameron brought with him was the identity of one of the newest recruits to the Inner Sanctum of the Guild,” Chase said as he indicated the photo and data in front of them.

“This is Alzhir Akaman, the head of the multi-national media conglomerate,
Feronic
. We were unaware of him and his bloodlines until now. He can thank his PR machine for that, as it works very hard saturating the media with superficial misinformation about him so he can hide in plain-sight.”

Connor let out an impressed whistle. “The perfect disguise. So he isn’t the partying playboy he’s made out to be?”

“He is, up to a point. But he has a double who stands in for him when he needs to be involved in more covert activities. That’s how Cameron spotted him. He'd seen a blog post showing him at a celeb party in Los Angeles at the same time that he was entering the study of Cameron’s fiancé’s home in Sussex with known members of the Guild. Once the smoke and mirrors were removed, it was easy enough to start building a case against the man.”

Colt felt a chill run up his spine at the name
Feronic.
Hadn’t that been the name of the record company Alyssa had signed up with? It was stupid to worry about her. A man like Akaman was at the very top of the pyramid and Lyss was at the bottom. The chances of her coming in contact with his enemy were remote.

As the next photo and accompanying data appeared in front of him, Colt felt his heart stutter. Twice in one day he was seeing the girl who’d haunted his memories and dreams for four years.

The photo was a professional one, probably taken from the
Star Quality
website. She looked older than he remembered her, but no less innocent, for all the makeover they’d given her. That halo of golden tendrils was now a waterfall of curling locks artfully flowing over one shoulder as she tipped her head to the side and gave the camera a shy smile. Her eyes, which had seemed so dark the night of the attack, were now an impossibly bright granny-smith-apple-green. They had to be artificially enhanced by contacts or clever photoshopping.

“One of Akaman’s newest starlets has been seen with him on several occasions. The PR machine labels them a couple. On the night Akaman was in England his double was with this starlet. So she is clearly close enough to him to know some of his secrets. We’re going to get near this girl and see just how far down the rabbit-hole she can lead us. We need enough evidence to present to the Judiciary so we can bring this bastard to justice. It’s not enough that he’s part of the Guild. We need concrete proof of death-sentence-worthy criminal activities.”

Colt swallowed the huge lump that had formed in his throat. He glanced briefly at Connor to see what he thought of this information. But his brother was playing his cards close to his chest. His face gave nothing away.

“It’s likely she’s an airhead who hasn’t even realised the man who’s shepherding her around the top night spots isn't Akaman. If she’s only part of the smoke and mirrors then...”

“She’s not an airhead.” Colt had spoken the words before he even realised the thought.

Chase frowned at the interruption but waited for him to go on. Colt shifted in his seat and looked to Connor for help. He didn’t want to talk about her with his teammates as if she was an anonymous target.

Connor jumped into the uncomfortable silence to rescue him. “Colt saved her four years ago. It was a pack-rape on a college campus.”

Chase’s light-brown eyes gleamed golden as his pupil’s elongated into cat-eyed slits. His nostrils flared. A predator had caught wind of its prey, and Colt felt his protective instinct rise up in defence of that prey.

“Interesting. So she already knows you. You’ve saved her once. That might work for us. If her current bodyguards were to drop the ball and a hero was to step in to save her. A hero who's saved her once before, Akaman might jump at the chance of hiring you to protect his precious, little starlet,” Chase said slowly, thinking his plan through aloud.

“He might be suspicious if she tells him what she saw that night of the attack. My cat was out, big time.” Colt tried to keep his voice steady and his words cautiously logical.

“Unlikely. It’s probably more likely that after the event she was too shocked to remember the details. Did you follow up at the time?”

“Not in the way you mean. I just got the hell out of there. I’d been sleeping rough on campus and I knew the cops would be like ants at a picnic after the attack. I just hung around long enough to tie off a loose end.”

“Loose end?” This was Cameron, speaking up as if he had every right to ask intrusive questions.

Colt growled in response and refused to answer.

“Colt, I know it’s your private life and we protect those where we can, but this is information crucial to our target.” Chase’s eyes remained cat and didn’t blink as Colt met their gaze for a full minute of tense silence.

In the end it was Colt who backed down. He knew he was being irrational where Alyssa was concerned. She was nothing to him, and never had been. Even had she been a girlfriend, he would never have put her needs before the good of the many. That’s what duty meant.

“The bastard who had orchestrated the rape was an ex who wouldn’t take
no
for an answer. I knew if I left him alive he’d find some other way to get to her. He’d been escalating his ‘messages’ over a period of time. So I did what the guardians did for Toffee Nose over there. I kidnapped him in his own car, poured alcohol down his throat and then ran his car into a tree.” He knew his tone was cold and his eyes had gone cat waiting for the wholesale condemnation.

It wasn’t the way they fought. Staging accidents was too cold-blooded for them. When their cat came out to play it was violently and in the moment, even if they’d stalked their prey first. None of them would approve of his actions. Even Cameron hadn’t approved of his guardian’s actions. His tone had given that away.

“What happened to your bloody code?” Connor asked in amazement when the silence had gone on too long.

“It was justice. He deserved what he got. My conscience is clear.”

Chase’s eyes had lost their golden gleam and gone back to brown. His expression was speculative. “This girl means something to you. How can that be?”

Colt shrugged and looked at the tabletop. But there his gaze settled on Alyssa again. The pretty, sweet songbird who was set to destroy his life.

“She was adopted as a newborn,” Chase commented randomly.

Colt looked up and frowned at their leader in confusion. What did that matter? They were all adopted, either legally or illegally. What did it matter if Lyss was too?

Chase sighed as if making up his mind on a difficult subject. “Okay, this is something that might or might not be relevant. But your reaction to this girl leads me to believe there's more here than mere lust over a pretty girl. We haven't discovered any before, but that doesn’t mean we won’t.”

“What the fuck?” Colt exclaimed in frustration. “What are you on about, man?”

Chase rubbed at his forehead abstractly. “In the file left to me by our creator, Markus Regis, a member of the Résistance working for the Guild, there was information on other experiments, along with the details of our birth. We weren't the first batch of warrior babies. And we weren’t the only embryos genetically modified.

“You may not be aware that, because of our genetic makeup, we can’t breed with regular humans. That wouldn’t be a problem if the project had continued, because they could have manufactured as many of us as they required. But Regis was far-sighted enough to know that a time might come when we would need to be self-generating. This war we fight might last longer than a generation. So he genetically engineered female embryos, gave them the panther DNA like ours, but didn’t clone them. Every embryo was manufactured from a different DNA core strand. These embryos were frozen and distributed secretly at the same time we were removed from our tubes and carried into safety.”

“Are you saying there were females being grown in gestation tubes like we were?” Cooper demanded in horror. Colt knew how he felt. It was one thing to know you were created like Frankenstein’s monster; it was another to think of females being treated that same way.

“No, those embryos were to be implanted into childless women over as many years as it took. They were nurtured in wombs.” Chase assured them, obviously as uncomfortable with the idea that females would never have known the connection with a mother in the same way the Sons hadn't.

“So what are you suggesting here? This Alyssa Aimes is one of those embryos? She’s meant to be a brood mare for one of us?” Cooper demanded again. Of all of them, he was the gentlest and kindest. He was known to feed stray cats in the alley behind Scanlon Industries. He donated his allowance to charity. Sometimes he was just too damned saintly for his own good.

“Possibly. And if she is, I’m not sure how it works. Is she available to one or all of us? Until more of us have come in contact with her, we won’t be able to tell if Colt’s reaction is a common response. I would assume it is. We are, genetically speaking, the same person and should be stimulated by the same factors. And she shouldn’t have a preference, physiologically.”

“Fuck that. You’re not treating her like a cat in season ready to be serviced by any or all of us. That’s just shit!” Colt exploded, standing up so abruptly that his chair flew out from under him. His cat was out and ready to tear shreds off anyone who challenged him.

“I’m with Colt on this,” Cooper said forcefully. “She’s a woman and has to be treated like one. She's not a baby-making machine. I, for one, don’t plan on letting this war go on for another generation. And I sure don’t intend to let my sons fight it, or my daughters bear the next generation of warriors. That's just shit.”

Colt felt his cat calm slightly at this unexpected support. He looked to the others. Their eyes had all gone cat after his explosion, but none seemed interested in taking him on. They were all focused on Chase.

“I’m not suggesting this girl, or any other who turns out to be bred for us, be treated that way. Physiology only goes so far. We’re all different. We all have our own personalities. We might all be able to breed with her, but that doesn’t mean she’ll love or even like all of us equally. She’ll have her preferences. And we’ll give her that. And it won’t be first in first served, Colt. You may want her. You may feel as if she’s your mate, but we may all feel exactly the same way when we meet her. There'll be no fighting amongst us, no claiming.

“
If
, and I do keep repeating that word. If she is one of ours, then I won’t have her dividing us. Nothing is more important than our mission. Our procreative drive comes second. And I will enforce that dictate as firmly as it needs to be enforced.”

Colt made much of reclaiming his fallen chair and sitting down again. By the time he had, his cat was under control once more. He couldn’t remember ever being this edgy. Three times in almost as many hours he’d been ready to take one of his brothers down. And the idea that he might have to compete with them all to claim Alyssa only made him wilder.

The image of Connor between her legs while she cried his name hadn’t fully left his imagination since Colt's teammate had made the throw-away comment earlier in the evening.

And if she got to choose, there were a dozen better men than him for her. Someone like Coop would be gentle enough for such a fragile girl. Someone like Chase had his rough edges well and truly sanded down. He’d know how to treat a lady.

Colt? The only women he’d had anything to do with were the easy ones he’d picked up in bars and nightclubs for a quick fuck in an alley. What did he know about nice girls? Virgins. Though of course it was unlikely that she’d still be a virgin. She had to be twenty-two. A pretty eighteen-year-old virgin was a rarity; a pretty twenty-two-year-old virgin was probably gay. Or damaged by almost being pack-raped, he realised suddenly.

“So here’s the plan in outline. We’ll fill in the deets when we get her schedule. You're willing to play bodyguard, aren’t you Colt? I can assign someone else if you’re too volatile. She won’t be able to tell the difference between say you and Connor, so he could pass as her teenage hero if necessary.”

“His accent’s wrong. She knows I’m Canadian. But no, I’m right. I can keep my cat corralled.”

Chase stared at him for a moment longer before nodding. “Right then, we have a plan. Cameron, will return to the UK and keep tabs on our man from that end, while he works his way into the Guild. The rest of you are on Alyssa Aimes. We’ll deal with the possibility she’s ours once this is over. Dismissed and goodnight gentlemen. Thanks for your time and input.”