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“It feels like hell has descended to your guts,” Gideon told him with relish. “The agony begins with the first cut, and you believe it can get no worse.” He leaned close, reaching out with the scalpel to draw the tip along the graying curls that covered his victim’s chest. “But it can get worse, Scott. So much worse. And when the cold air meets the warmth of your insides, then you’ll swear a hundred scalpels are biting into your organs, tearing them apart with jagged steel and ripping your mind out along with it.”
“Please, Gideon!” Scott screamed hoarsely, the tears beginning to fall, the fear rising inside him with an acrid scent Gideon inhaled with heady satisfaction.
That scent was becoming addictive. Like a drug he couldn’t resist. Now he knew, he knew why Coyotes thirsted for blood. For its coppery sweet scent and the feel of it gliding like wet silk over the hands.
“Please,” Gideon repeated the plea. “Please, Scott. Scream for me in mindless pain. Please feel what I felt. Please beg as I begged. God, please, let me watch you die as you watched me each time you stopped my heart.”
Then Gideon chuckled and glanced down at the stream of wetness flowing from the man’s flaccid cock.
Scott was pissing himself.
The poor little coward.
It was something Gideon hadn’t done during the experiments until the chill of the air actually hit his guts. Until the pain had been worse than hell on earth, and his body had fought to die amid it.
And there was nothing he wanted more than to slice into the monster at that moment and allow him to feel that same agony. To watch his blood seep from his flesh as it parted. To see it run in bloodred streams along his chest and abdomen to pool into the creamy carpet beneath him.
But first, first, he needed information. He needed information more than he needed to smell his victim’s death.
At least, for the moment.
He could wait to kill him. He could wait until Scott gave the truths Gideon knew he held. The truths the man had so far hidden from his friends, coworkers and priest. The truth of the location of the one person Scott had shown any gentleness to in those labs. But he wouldn’t be able to wait for long.
“Unlike you and your scientist masters, I can be merciful. I don’t want to be, but I can be. If you cooperate.”
Scott’s lips quivered as he sobbed, snot dripping from his nose and running along the side of his cheek.
“Anything, Gideon,” he begged desperately. “Anything you want. I swear it.”
Gideon looked to the safe he had found earlier. Tucked into the wall across the room, and hidden, not very imaginatively, behind a framed print of Scott, his wife and two sons.
His sons didn’t look as pathetic and weak as Scott. Surprisingly, they more resembled their mother with her strong Nordic features and direct blue eyes.
How had Scott Connelly managed to find a wife of such strength when he was such a weak, pitiful excuse of a male? How had he bred sons whose scent was mixed with the sweat of hard work and whose palms were calloused with it? Men whose reputations for honesty and a hard day’s work were so well known in their small community that parents often held those sons up as examples to their own children?
Perhaps they weren’t his sons, Gideon mused before turning his attention back to Scott. Unfortunately, Gideon couldn’t be certain. Familial lines weren’t scents to which he was particularly sensitive. His primal strengths ran to other areas.
“The combination to the safe,” Gideon demanded, keeping his voice low. “I want it.”
The combination spilled from Scott’s lips as his teeth chattered in a cold Gideon had been created to ignore.
When he finished, Gideon nodded then smiled again. He knew the image he presented.
With the slash of the Bengal’s strip across his face, the sharp strength of his incisors and the icy mercilessness of his cold pale green eyes he appeared every bit the animal he had been created to be. That image and the chill of ice in his eyes assured the researcher that Gideon had every intention of causing him to suffer however possible.
Strangely, the primal stripe across his face was new to him. It hadn’t appeared until the first vivisection and transfusion of viral blood two years before. It had only grown darker with each horrific experiment he was forced to endure. With each transfusion of the only blood they had found that his system would accept after the feral fever had overtaken him twelve years before.
Her blood.
Only her blood was compatible. Only her blood could save his life and with each transfusion the insanity seemed to take a tighter grip on him.
Rising to his feet, Gideon moved to the safe, followed the directions and hummed in satisfaction as the steel door swung open.
Cash, jewels, bonds and several false identifications filled the interior, along with a laser-powered side arm.
It was the typical items anyone who worked with the Genetics Council kept on hand since the revelation of the Breeds and the horrific experimentations the Genetics Council had practiced.
No one who worked with the monsters responsible for the creation of the Breeds wanted anyone to learn they were aligned with them. At the moment, sentiment was with the Breeds, not with the Council.
