Though Bailey Duncan had been created to complete the B series, her escape left Edwin shorthanded. But the Level 4 group seemed promising.
He watched as Kennedy roused then stilled, sensing danger. She slowly stood but made no aggressive moves. She also didn’t look either man in the eye. Intelligent.
“She’s changed,” Yates announced.
“Yes. Smells damn fine.” Myers smiled.
Kennedy didn’t react except to make herself seem smaller.
Edwin made notes.Yes, smart and able to adapt. Good, good.If only she’d stop chastising him every time she opened her mouth.
******
Kennedy stared in horror at the men who felt…bad. She couldn’t explain it, but Myers and Yates were different now. When she’d first started working at U-Ground Services four months ago, she’d thought she’d volunteered for a secret government experiment.
Most people laughed at the idea of ESP. But Kennedy had been able to read minds and send thoughts her entire life. Puberty had made her gifts even stronger. Then her parents had died, and she’d gone to live with a distant cousin.
Charlie. The poor woman had been in isolation since they’d evacuated the U-Ground building. A massive fire and the chaos of escaped mutants in the basement levels had reached an explosive conclusion.
Kennedy had prayed they might escape, but Dr. Lang and his sadistic assistant, Duane Smith, had made sure she and her psychic companions left alongside his trustworthy men.
Men who weren’t exactly men.
Kennedy could read minds, and she’d been reading odd things for a long time while in Dr. Lang’s company. She could tell the humans from the nonhumans, as she liked to think of them. They thought in two parts, a shared sentience that at times separated. The beast-like part of the men talked to her, told her of their hungers, their hurts. She felt sorry for them, knowing the poor creatures to be as much a victim of Lang as she and her friends were.
She had a bad feeling she’d just become a nonhuman as well, because she felt another part of her self separate, a raw creature guided by instinct and the need for self-preservation. No, no. She had to be imagining things, reading from the others, perhaps.
She stared at the ground, not wanting to aggravate Myers and Yates.
Sadly, of all the Circs—as Lang referred to them—she’d met, these two were the least dangerous. And that wasn’t saying much. Myers had deep pain, one his beast both liked and hated. Yates retained some semblance of humanity, but he had done and continued to do very bad things to women.
As he’d done bad things to her friend, Katie.
Kennedy mourned the woman, knowing how much she must have suffered. She’d barely managed to warn Kennedy to get out of the program before her voice had been snuffed, never to be heard from again.
“Come on, Kennedy. Show us what you’ve got,” Myers taunted. “And flash some tittie while you’re at it. It’s been a while.”
Yates frowned at him. Of the two, he’d been more of a gentleman since coming to the new place. At least, he hadn’t tried to rape her or the others. Yet. Myers had assaulted two of the psychics who’d been part of the program. They’d since left and hadn’t returned.
“I don’t know what you want,” she said softly. To the beasts inside them both, she sent,Please help me. I will obey. You’re clearly in charge. Don’t hurt me.
Myers blinked in confusion, off balance.
Yates narrowed his gaze at her. She felt a subtle acceptance from the creature inside him—nothing softening from the man. “Show us your beast, Kennedy. Let’s see the claws, the fangs. Look at me,” he ordered.
She didn’t want to, because that would mean that the crap Lang had been injecting her with wasn’t some harmless serum designed to just increase her telepathic ability. That she really was becoming something more. She’d wanted so badly to believe the lies, even as she’d sensed herself changing.
And now she knew. She was one ofthem.Oh God.
“Show me,” Yates said again, this time looking at her with that other intelligence inside him, his icy blue eyes shading to a darker brown as an animal stared back at her.
She searched deep inside herself and felt it there. A need to take inventory of the room, of the males with her. Of the danger outside the room, centered in the beings behind the tempered glass.
Poor mates. Ugly, sick. Evil.
Kennedy agreed, and had to force herself not to cry at the thought of losing herself to the sentience inside her.
Not separate. One,it said, trying to calm her. Then it showed her how easily she could rip Myers’s throat out and disembowel Yates.
