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“So does the history give you any idea of your origins? Were you always here, were you once human and …mutated somehow or did you come from somewhere else?”
“Like outer space?” Adrian asked, an amused smirk on his face.
“Whatever. How the hell am I supposed to know? Yesterday I was a human who didn’t even know your species existed except in horror movies and in books. Fiction, fantasy, not this bizarre reality you’re forcing me to accept at face value, so cut me some slack.” She lifted her chin, supremely satisfied that she’d pulled off a big lie like that without stumbling.
“There are a lot of species on this planet that even we don’t know about,” Duncan said. “It’s only humans who are arrogant enough to think they are the master race here.”
“Other species? Like what?” Nothing the government knew of, or at least none that her security clearance made her privy to.
“We don’t know. We’ve read things in the history books that lead us to believe they exist. Maybe they’ve chosen to keep their identities a secret. Maybe we’re the first guinea pigs with the humans,” Adrian added.
“Guinea pigs?”
“Humans are the dominant population. Though we have superior speed, strength and skills, they still outnumber us. Plus, they’ve captured and used our own people to figure out how to weaken and eliminate us.”
And Harlee had played an integral role in that process. Guilt washed over her. But why? She did the job she was trained to do, based on what her government told her about the lycans and vampires. She held onto her training like a lifeline, forcing the doubts away.
“Together, we are stronger than separate,” Duncan said. “Lycans and vampires have forged an uneasy peace. We cannot fight the humans as well separately as we can united.”
“Then why haven’t the lycans and vampires allowed cross mating?” she wondered.
Adrian stood and leaned against one of the bookshelves. “Centuries ago, our people were lax about interaction between humans and their kind. The vampires and lycans created from blood interaction with humans developed a madness, the blood lust, which couldn’t be contained. They became uncontrollable killers, preying on other humans. Of course this was attributed to the pure lycans and vampires, so we realized it would have to stop. But by then the blame had been cast in our direction. We became the enemy. We had to round up and kill the humans who had been turned and our people forbade blood contact with humans. That’s where we still get the occasional rogues. Though we tried to get to all of them, we knew some had managed to slip through our nets. They’re still out there.”
Duncan nodded. “And vampires and lycans had always been at war for supremacy and control, but once the government began tracking us down and destroying us, we knew we had to join forces. Because of the nightmare the transfer of blood into humans had caused, our people theorized that cross breeding vampires and lycans would produce a similar result, or possibly one even worse. So it was outlawed.”
“So no vampires and lycans had ever mated?” she asked.
“Not that we’re aware of. If they had, we think we’d have known,” Adrian said. “Until Stefan and Amelia, of course. And we still haven’t determined the result of that union. You hold the key to those results, Harlee. So far, you seem okay.”
Or so they thought. And if her luck held out, they’d keep on thinking that, because she couldn’t give them the opportunity to discover who she was. Or rather, who she wasn’t.
“We had just started working on what strategies to use to go about the experimental cross breeding,” Adrian explained. “It’s all tech/medical stuff so it’s over our heads, but the bottom line is, the plans are on hold because of Stefan’s death. Tensions are high and so is suspicion. But now that we have you, what we can learn from you might provide our tech people with information on how to go about it.”
“Didn’t Stefan and Amelia mate the…uh, natural way?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Duncan said. “But we still don’t know how it affects a child of that kind of union. Like Adrian said, you’re the key.”
“We’ve recently decided it’s imperative for us to determine whether lycans and vampires can breed successfully. Increasing our numbers and possibly our powers can only help us if our fight with humans goes to all-out war. Their technology is growing, at least in some areas,” Adrian said, disgust evident on his frowning face. “They have no idea how much we could benefit them. Instead, they concentrate on using our own people to develop weaponry to use against us.”
“How can you benefit them?” Harlee asked, pushing aside that constant niggle of guilt at what they’d done to the vampires and lycans they’d captured.
“We’ve done a bit of our own testing here in the labs,” Adrian explained. “Genetic testing, researching ways to assist humans in becoming more resistant to the diseases plaguing them. Our original goal was to come out of the darkness, to make peace with the humans by offering our assistance. We sent negotiators to discuss this. Only our negotiators didn’t return.”
“No, they were used,” Duncan chimed in. “And now the negotiations have stopped but the humans are relentless in their quest to hunt us down and exterminate us. We have to hide who and what we are, maintain a cloak of secrecy that neither of our species want, because humans are too afraid of us to negotiate, to even let us demonstrate how we can help. Their paranoia is groundless, so we may yet have to go to war with them, if only to save ourselves.”
The trickle of doubt within Harlee began to grow, and no matter how she tried to discount what Duncan and Adrian said to her, she could no longer ignore what they said. With the doubt, fear surfaced, and a sick feeling that they might just be right and humans had been wrong all along.
Dead wrong.
Duncan watched the mix of emotions cross Harlee’s face. Confusion, fear, disbelief and finally resignation. He’d love to crawl into her mind and figure out what was going on in there. Trying to imagine what she was going through was impossible. He admired her strength in dealing with everything she’d learned in such a short period of time.
And her sass…he loved that about her. There was nothing more attractive than a woman who gave as good as she got, who showed no fear.
“What’s up, everyone?”
He turned at the sound of a sexy voice, not at all surprised to find that voice attached to Annmarie. Speaking of sass, she was really something, all wrapped up in a petite, bombshell package that never failed to fire his imagination. His mind was always full of ideas of what they could do together. Too bad she was vampire and forbidden to him. Then again, when had “forbidden” ever stopped him?
“What are you doing here?” Adrian asked.
