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The horrific experiments that had been done on the couples still had the power to give Ely nightmares. She forced herself to go through them again, praying she could find in time the answers Navarro and Mica needed.
Everyone thought she had grown cold and hard inside. That she no longer cared.
She cared too much, but she was so much more aware of her limitations now than she had been before.
The low though nonetheless strident buzzer from within Phillip Brandenmore’s cell pinged again.
Ely turned and stared at the activated partition, the glass that had been darkened to keep Phillip from seeing out or anyone else from seeing in. It had been activated all day while she tested Mica and ran the tests for answers.
Answers she had yet to find.
The strident summons came again.
What would it hurt?
The man was crazed, she knew. A psychopath slowly dying while the senses of the animal were being born inside him. Seeing the progression from a scientist’s standpoint was incredible. Watching the tortured destruction of the man would give her nightmares for years to come.
The sound echoed through the labs once more as Ely gave an exhausted sigh and moved to the control panel.
The glass cleared, revealing Brandenmore as he sat huddled in the foam chair, his knees drawn to his chest, his face staring back at her through saddened, pain-filled eyes.
The old, diseased man was slowly regaining his prime. A thick head of hair had been brushed casually to the side. He was muscular and fit beneath the loose scrubs he was given to wear.
So handsome, and so corrupt. Even before he had injected himself with the devil’s brew he’d concocted to return his body to its former condition and his mind to its once crystal clarity.
Before he’d injected a baby with it, and forced the Breeds to halt the freedom he had so very little time left to enjoy.
“I hear whispers,” he told her as she activated the two-way communication between the rooms. “I hear a Breed has mated a human, and has now unmated her.”
It didn’t surprise Ely that he knew, despite the fact that he shouldn’t have. The guards knew now, and sometimes the small slots were left open in the door of the cell to facilitate the guards’ ability to hear his screams if the pain returned. It also allowed him to hear what they gossiped about. She had no doubt the gossip was flowing now. Talk of the Breed that had reversed mating.
“You shouldn’t listen to whispers, Phillip,” she reminded him as she returned to the holo-comp. “You know how deceptive they can be.”
Sometimes, the whispers he heard were in his own head.
“The whispers keep me company,” he said and sighed.
It seemed the day was one of his calmer ones. They were becoming few and far between.
“Have you figured out how to save me yet, Ely?” he asked conversationally, as though they were talking about anything other than his death.
“I haven’t yet, Phillip.” She shook her head. “I told you, I need your help.”
She had to have the recipe he’d used for the formula he’d injected himself with. The recipe he’d injected Amber with. He refused to tell them, certain that if he held that information back, then they would have to figure out how to save him, to save the child.
That theory wasn’t working very well. They couldn’t figure it out. The drug seemed to have mutated inside him, whereas they could no longer find traces of it inside Amber.
In a matter of no more than eight weeks, the changes that had been wrought in Phillip Brandenmore were horrifying. But other than a few anomalies, Amber seemed to be thriving as any other infant would be.
“What if I wasn’t certain?” he mused when she said nothing more. “What if the recipe was one I found, the notes indicating success?”
Ely froze.
She stared at the files she’d pulled up on the holo-comp’s grid and prayed he’d continue with his musings. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t.
“Are you listening to me, Ely?” he asked.
“I’m listening, Phillip,” she assured him with apparent absentmindedness as she continued as though she were concentrating on the files on the grid.
