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He stared back at her, her brown irises shadowed, filled with agony as the tears she tried to hold back slipped free.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered.
“What have you done, Uncle Phillip?”
His expression twisted. “The fountain of youth, Kita.” He looked around as though searching desperately for something. “I found it. The Breeds. They hold the fountain of youth.” His gaze swung back to her, his fingers clenching at his side, his body tense now, ramrod straight, strong and young again. “You hold the fountain of youth,” he whispered, his gaze, his expression shadowed with grief. “Why, Kita? Why did you let him touch you? You can’t live without your liver, Kita. It creates . . .” He stopped.
His expression became frozen, his gaze laser sharp. “You’ll have to die, just as he will.”
“For the fountain of youth.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “You stole my uncle for his youth.” This wasn’t her uncle Phillip any longer.
Beside her, she felt Creed tense, his fingers rubbing against her wrist to get her attention. He wanted something.
Again. He was scratching out the word on her arm.
Again. She followed each curve his nail made.
“Mother loved you. Do you remember?” Having grasped Creed’s meaning, Kita said the one thing she now knew would distract her uncle. “She cried for you when she died.”
The monster who had stolen her uncle’s form swung his head away. His shoulders heaved, and then the world around her went to hell.
The lights in the garage suddenly burst, throwing them all i
nto darkness as pieces of the fluorescent bulbs rained down on them.
Creed swung her around, pushed her beneath an old worktable she had never cleared out of the area, and suddenly, he was gone.
Laser fire and gunfire began ricocheting around her, blasting into walls as screams filled her senses. She knew that, if she survived, they would echo in her nightmares.
She couldn’t see anything through the flashes of light. She had no idea where anyone was, who they were, or if Creed was even still alive.
“You bitch!”
Kita screamed as the table toppled over and a flash of light exploded through the room, revealing her uncle, his expression demonic, his eyes burning red, a second before everything went dark again.
TEN
Her father had saved her life. He just may have killed his brother-in-law.
Kita sat in the corner of the garage as Breed enforcers swarmed around the area, each consulting with Jonas Wyatt. Next to him stood the woman who had betrayed her uncle. Diane Broen. A mercenary her uncle had hired, but who, Kita learned, had already given her loyalty and the loyalty of her team to Jonas Wyatt.
Horace Engalls sat on an upended wooden box, his face in his hands, mourning the man who had betrayed them all.
When her uncle had disappeared, despite rumors of his death, Horace and Kita had assumed the Breeds had captured him. They had been right. He had been imprisoned in Virginia as the Breed scientists attempted to learn how he created the serum that began turning back his age. A serum he had injected into an infant child.
Kita was still in shock. Her uncle, her loving, doting uncle had done something that could potentially destroy an infant? He had let a baby go hungry. He had let her lie in her own waste without changing her diaper. He had attempted to kill her when he’d seen he couldn’t escape with her.
For what?
For the fountain of youth. Because he believed Amber’s reaction to the drug would answer the question of why the drug was killing him. Unfortunately, if it was going to answer anything, it wasn’t doing so yet. Amber’s body was only showing minute anomalies. Anomalies Kita hadn’t yet been given details on.
“Kita.” Behind her, Creed still held her.
He had caught her as her uncle fell, his blood spattering from a single gunshot wound to the shoulder, low, perhaps too close to his chest, inflicted by her father.
Her father had also been the reason the lights had blown.
As her uncle confronted Kita and Creed, Horace Engalls had done what he had always done best: he tinkered. This time, with the electric generator that fed the fluorescent lights in the garage.
