“You can drop us off at the edge of town when you’re heading back.” Beaumont leaned back in his seat. There was no point in wandering through town if they didn’t have to.
~/~/~/~
“What were you keeping from the brothers?” Beaumont waited until the boys had run their errands and Kylo had dropped them off halfway between town and the Putney home after eating lunch and acting like tourists for whoever was watching them. Duron advised his eagle didn’t sense anyone watching them now they were hidden from the road. Beaumont was wondering whether it would be a good idea to shift, but he had to know what Duron had sensed first.
“There is something off about the girl,” Duron said slowly, and Beaumont noticed he was leading them in a set direction rather than just wandering. As Beaumont didn’t have a clue where to even try looking first, he was happy to follow.
“Off how? Because she has magic, or is it her not being able to speak?”
“No.” Duron lowered her voice. “It’s difficult to tell, just looking at the paper, but I sensed something in the wards we came through this morning. As if she’d left a part of herself in them.”
“And…” Beaumont hadn’t noticed anything, but then that could’ve had a lot to do with the tension between the brothers. The knowledge they were being watched, and that same edginess that his alligator felt, had returned as soon as he’d woken up that morning. Good sleep and amazing orgasms aside, something was really setting off his alligator.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think she’s like Teilo and Nico.”
“Hang on a minute.” Beaumont caught Duron’s arm, encouraging him to stop. “Selina’s an assassin?” In all the information Beaumont had read about the training program and the horrific experiments conducted on the poor kids involved, not once had there been any mention of a female child. Not once.
But Duron was shaking his head. “Not an assassin. A hybrid—possibly a created, or a made one, I’m not sure.”
Created or made. Interesting distinction. One Beaumont had to clarify. “By created, you mean Ben’s mates and by made, you’re talking about you and your friends?”
The nod was short and definitive.
“And you think Selina is another child caught up in the experiments? Mate, that doesn’t make sense. All the stuff I’ve read… all the scientists’ notes indicate the whole point of these damn experiments was to make strong killing machines, and in every case, those children were males.” Duron’s eyes were steady as they met his, causing Beaumont to swallow hard. “Did you see… when you were in that place…” Gods, Beaumont didn’t even like to think about it, but he pushed on. “Did you ever see any females?”
“No. Which makes me think they created this Selina.”
“Deliberately, or…” Beaumont’s mind raced ahead. “Hang on. Hang on. Genetically, some of these experiments have been going on for decades, and the scientists wouldn’t have known about DNA, nor had the lab equipment to dissect and manipulate it. This means they were going purely on genes… and likely naturally paired chromosomes… meaning some of those children would have been born female. Females we’ve seen absolutely no evidence of.”
“They would’ve been killed. But Selina wasn’t.” Duron came past Beaumont’s shoulder. “Which means we have to find her.”
Accepting Duron knew where he was going was easy, but swallowing the thought of females being in the experimental programs—subject to the whims and pure sadistic nature of scientists created a thump of despair in Beaumont’s chest.
Birds sang, insects chirped, and bush gave way to Duron’s sturdy boots, but Beaumont didn’t register any of it.
All he could think of was how the people who’d taken his family had killed his daughter—only his sons had been deemed to be of any use. Likewise, he remembered from Cassius’s story; they had killed his wife, who had been a lioness shifter, without mercy, and it was Riley who they’d captured. There were literally hundreds of cases, from what Beaumont had seen in documentation so far, and they all involved boys—mostly abducted, although Teilo and Nico were exceptions, in that they had been made in a lab.
So caught up in his thoughts of what might’ve happened if… it took a moment for Beaumont to realize Duron had stopped. “I have her scent,” Duron whispered. “Sniff. She has the smell of the three men we saw in town.”
“The same scent again?” Beaumont opened his mouth and inhaled, relying on his alligator to filter the scents of the dirt beneath his feet, the vegetation and wildlife, and those scents associated with their mystery female.
It took him a moment. Duron’s senses were clearly more developed than his, but as he inhaled a second time, he caught it—not a definite scent as such, but more a combination of unique elements that weren’t natural to their environment.
Definitely female. Beaumont couldn’t say how he knew, but his alligator did. Human, not shifter, but as Beaumont’s senses processed what he was sniffing, he smelled the essence of something he hadn’t come across in…more than a hundred years!Tears prickled his eyes, and his agitation grew as Beaumont inhaled again, and again—we have to be wrong, we have to be wrong, damn it!But his alligator knew, and Beaumont couldn’t ignore it.
“No, not James, damn it. Not my James!” Beaumont’s knees threatened to buckle, but he was determined to get to the source of that scent—the person walking around with his son’s genetics. Duron grabbed him and when Beaumont shrugged him off, heading further into the dense bush, his mate grabbed him around the waist and neck, and pulled him into that rock hard body Beaumont had enjoyed the night before.
“You need to calm down.”
“They have James.” Beaumont was broken, his mind awash with the history of his past. “Let me go. I must get to her. She can tell me where he is. They have James. They’ve got my boy.”
“No, they don’t.” Duron’s voice was like a slap across Beaumont’s face. “Think, mate. Think for a damned minute. Sniff again. It’s not your son you can smell. It’s only part of him.”
“Part of…” His heart broke all over again. Beaumont knew his mate was right. The woman, likely Selina, didn’t smell entirely of James—his son’s scent was just part of who she was. Just as Duron was a man of many parts, so too was the woman he’d scented. And besides, as he’d told Duron just the night before, James wasn’t even a full shifter, and had likely died a long time ago.
That didn’t make it right. Someone had used his genetics. “I’m sorry,” Beaumont said tersely, realizing it wasn’t a good time to break down. He could process everything later. “You can let go now. It was a shock, not something I was expecting, but I’m all right now. We need to get to that woman, though. I will have answers.”
“Just remember,” Duron said as his solid grip relaxed. “She carries the same scent as the three men in town.”
