CONCEPTION (The Others) (6 page)

“Men are always right.”

“Says the male wanting to get his way.” She scooted to the
right.

Deuce rested his hands on her hips, keeping her there,
blending their shadows into one. “Says the male who
will
get his way. In
the matter of your healing, I will suffer no argument.”

Another shadow flowed into theirs. Bohdan. “Your fears are
unfounded.”

Eden straightened to the last fraction of her height, her
shoulders squaring as she challenged his brother. “You don’t know what I’m
afraid of.”

“You fear the ones you ran from. You fear for the baby. And
you fear us.”

This close, Deuce could not miss her start.

“You’re reading my mind!”

“It is not necessary to read your mind when logic makes it
so simple,” Bohdan murmured, coming closer, healing energy radiating from him
in soothing waves.

“But you do read my mind.”

“We can, yes.”

She turned to Deuce. “Promise me you’ll stay out of my
head.”

“I cannot block the thoughts you project when upset.”

Her blues eyes widened. She wrapped her fingers in the shirt
and twisted. She had not known she projected. Adrenaline raced through her
system again. “Fair enough, but I want your promise you’ll stay out of my
head.”

Her fear was greater than his arguments. He stemmed the flow
of adrenaline. It would not hurt to give her this promise now. Soon enough
nature would make it obsolete anyway. “This promise is given.”

She looked at him askance, whether because of the formal
Chosen wording or because she was still worried about the ramifications of her
projecting, he did not know. Deuce tugged the shirt free of her fingers,
smoothing the material across her hips. He could at least address one of her
fears. He sent his own soothing energy into the waves with which Bohdan had
surrounded her. “I can and will protect you, Edie.”

With
the hard bulge of Deuce’s biceps under her hand and the force of his
personality around her, it was hard for Eden to believe anything could defeat
him or his brother. But her grandfather had. She’d seen it with her own eyes.
And he’d used her to do it. She couldn’t go through that again. Be responsible
for that again. Risk failure again. Not with the stakes as high as they were.
She couldn’t take that chance with the baby’s life. “What makes you think
you’re strong enough?”

The smile Deuce gave her was gentle, but the energy that
radiated from him shifted, deepened, took on a darker resonance, twisting her
resolution into a mixed message she couldn’t untangle. “I am Chosen. You are my
mate. I will not lose.”

Oh God, could anything get more complicated? She didn’t need
him staking a claim on her. “I don’t want to be your mate.”

“A mate is determined by birth, not choice.”

The certainty
with which he said that made argument futile. She couldn’t do anything about
his delusion that she was his mate, but she could focus on what was important.
His ability to protect her child. Was he strong enough?

She looked to Bohdan. The same lethal aura that surrounded
Deuce surrounded him. His eyes, as dark as Deuce’s, never wavered from hers.
“It is true.”

She glanced at her daughter, still asleep on the bed. So
little and defenseless. So reliant upon her to do the right thing. What if she
was wrong? If they were wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time someone had
overestimated their abilities. “I can’t chance it.”

“There isn’t any chance.”

Something hard pressed against the top of her head. Deuce’s
chin? The sensation of being surrounded intensified, giving birth again to that
false sense of security. She squashed it immediately. The scarf slid across her
forehead as she twisted until she could see Dusan’s face. “They got you
before.”

The flicker of his eyelashes told her he didn’t like to be
reminded of that. “The circumstances were unique.”

Pain lanced up from her abdomen, grinding through her chest,
making it difficult to breathe, let alone speak. “Circumstances are always
unique.”

The pain was too much to hold the position. She turned back
around to find Bohdan shaking his head, his brows lowered in a frown. He was a
damn scary man when he frowned. She instinctively leaned back into Deuce. His
hand opened over her midriff, pulling her into his chest. The unquestioning way
he offered her his support made her want to cry in relief and run in terror.
She had no defense against him. Never had, and apparently the last year hadn’t
changed that. She sat as still as she could, taking breaths to not only control
her pain but her instincts. She had to stop thinking of Deuce as her personal
miracle and start thinking of him as a man she was about to put in a horrible
position.

“You hurt.” Bohdan’s frown deepened with the observation.

She did not need them making a big thing of her injuries.
Even though her grandfather’s latest experiments had failed to restore the
incredible healing properties he’d initially created, she was still strong
enough to do what she had to. She had to be. She didn’t have any choice. “I’ll
be fine.”

As if her assessment was a gnat he could wave away, Bohdan
motioned to her abdomen with his hand. “We need to tend to your wounds.”

She looked at him, and then at Deuce. She couldn’t allow
that. If they succeeded they would know too much and never let her leave. If
they failed, their attempts could make her too weak to do what needed to be
done. “I’ll live.”

The determination in those two words flicked Deuce on the
raw. Willpower may have gotten Edie this far, but she was worn out, her energy
weak and fading. She needed to be healed. As her mate, it was his duty to see
that she was. He stroked his hand over her shoulder, his finger catching on the
fold of her shirt. He pressed in, freeing his finger and the trapped air from
within the light fabric. The strong odor of blood welled around him, giving
birth to a foreign panic. She would not die. “You will allow Bohdan to examine
you.”

She went stiff in his arms. “No.”

“I will force this, mate, if I have to.”

“You won’t. “

She was badly mistaken in her belief. He would do whatever
he had to ensure her survival. He shifted his hands to her abdomen. The
waistband of her jeans was wet with blood. They would not slide off easily. He
would rather scare her than hurt her. With a thought, he made them vanish.

She grabbed at air as if she could recover what was gone,
her shriek echoing in his ears as he stared at the blood-soaked bandage
covering her entire lower abdomen. Blood smears spread down her thigh. There
was a crudely gouged hole in her upper thigh. The flesh surrounding the seeping
wound was red and swollen, obviously infected.

Bohdan took a step forward. A whisper of power and then the
bandages were gone. Eden cried out, Deuce swore and Bohdan’s breath hissed out
between his teeth. He stepped closer. Eden lashed out with her foot. Deuce
struggled to mentally contain her panic as it crashed through him. Following
the emotion back to its source with the intent to quell it, he ran up against a
barrier that should not have been there. He probed it carefully. It was strong.
He could not penetrate it.

More
emotion poured out of Eden, demanding his attention, blending into the chaos of
his own, catching on the primitive edges, dragging them higher, forcing him to
turn his mental efforts to controlling his own response rather than hers as he
absorbed the reality of what he was seeing.

She had experienced surgery. Recently. Her abdomen was laid
open, stitches popped. Blood flowed in a sluggish seep. She was a mess. He did
not know how she still lived, yet she’d climbed the mountain with his daughter,
struggling with the snow and cold, and injuries—that will of hers carrying her
when others would have surrendered to defeat.

“Be easy, mate,” he whispered in her ear, keeping his horror
to himself, giving her calm. “You are safe now.”

His words had no effect. Her panic spilled over into his
anger, feeding it. Driving it higher. His fangs pushed through his gums. Red
hazed the edges of his vision. His control slipped a notch. And then another.

In the next instant, he felt Bohdan’s touch in his mind,
controlling the spill of energy, siphoning off the excess so he was free to
isolate Edie’s emotions and his reaction to them, to bind her anger with his,
to pull it back into himself to be sorted through another time. She twisted
against him, hands curled into claws, her mind for a brief second unguarded. He
pushed into the small opening, and with a thought sent her to sleep. She
slumped against him, all that desperation blessedly smothered under a forced
veil of unconsciousness.

Chapter Five

“I cannot heal her.” Pale and drawn, Bohdan sat back on his
heels, and slowly withdrew his hands from Eden’s stomach. Of all the things
Deuce had expected his brother to say, that was not it. Bohdan had perfected
his skills over centuries of existence for precisely a moment like this. He
could not fail now. Not with Eden. He above all others, knew how important Edie
was to him, to their people. But one look into his brother’s eyes confirmed the
words he would not accept.

“I do not understand.” The wound on her stomach was closed and
the wound on her thigh likewise, but they were not gone like they would be had
the healing been complete.

Bohdan frowned. With an elegant gesture he indicated Edie’s
wound. “Whatever was done to her was done without regard to harmony.”

“And?”

There was infinite sadness in Bohdan’s eyes. “It is killing
her, and I cannot stop it.”

Deuce rejected the comforting brush of his mind with a hard
shove. He lifted Edie up against his chest so her breath brushed his skin in a
rhythmic proof of life. He kept his emotions as contained as his tone. “That is
unacceptable.”

“I know.” Bohdan leaned back and shook his head. “I have
never seen anything like it. Her chemistry is unbalanced. Her organs mutated
into something I do not recognize and are badly damaged. Attempting to fix
anything only causes greater problems elsewhere. “

A sick, unfamiliar knot gathered low in Deuce’s stomach.
“She cannot die.”

Bohdan cut him a glance. “I know her importance.”

“Then she will live.” He could accept nothing less.

“She cannot live as she is.”

Deuce scooped Edie fully into his arms draping her across
his knee, baring her throat to his bite. “Then I will bind her.”

Bohdan’s hand on his arm stopped him with his teeth a
hairsbreadth from her jugular. “Binding will kill her.”

Logic battled with instinct. “I will not lose her.” The knot
grew, spreading its cold through his stomach and chest. Whatever it took, she
would live.

“I bought us time.” Bohdan ran his hand through his hair,
letting it drop to his hip as he looked at the sleeping baby and then at Eden.
“For now, I have slowed the breakdown of her organs, but how long that will
last, I do not know. “

“How much time?”

Bohdan did not answer, just folded his arms across his chest
and shook his head.

“How long, brother?”

“Do not force me to say what you will not hear.”

“Then do not tell me you have done all you can.”

Bohdan stood slowly. “I have done all I know how to do with
the information I have.”

Against Deuce’s chest, Edie rested, her breathing too
shallow for comfort. In front of him, Bohdan stood, his face expressionless.
The knot in Deuce’s stomach exploded outward in an emotion so unfamiliar it
took him a minute to recognize it. He tightened his grip on Eden and looked at
his daughter lying so helpless on the bed.

Fear. He feared for his family. He did not know such a depth
of feeling was possible, but with everything logical and elemental in him, he
feared. He brushed his lips over Eden’s forehead. He was Chosen. She was his
mate. He had not found her again just to let her go. “Then I will get more
information.”

* * * * *

Eden came awake slowly, hovering above realty and pain on a
soft cloud of comfort. The awful burning agony in her body drifted just below
her beneath an invisible shield, unable to reach her. She savored the moment of
peace. She’d almost forgotten how it felt to wake without biting back a scream.

“It is time to wake up now, Edie mine.” Deuce’s voice
floated over her sweet dream, strong and confident, with those varied timbres
that resonated in the core of her being. She snuggled deeper into the dream,
into the memory.

“Come, my Eden. Awake.”

She groaned and rolled to her side. Even in her dreams, the
man was bossy. She tucked her hand under her cheek. Fingertips met hers.
Knuckle bumped against knuckle before locking together. The scent of wilderness
and man surrounded her. The fingers entwined with hers squeezed. There was
comfort and demand in the gesture. This wasn’t a dream.

Eden remembered the argument, the command from the “Voice”
to fight. Her hysteria. The pain. And then nothing. For sure, Deuce had touched
her while she was unconscious, which meant there was no going back. They were
all living on borrowed time. She cautiously opened her eyes. Deuce leaned over
her, his expression neutral, his gaze meeting hers without guilt.

“The baby?”

“Our daughter is fed, happy and sleeping in the next room.”
His hand stroked lightly over her head, snagging in the hair at her nape.

Her hair?

She put her hand over his as he worked his finger free of a
snarl. Thick silky strands twisted against her fingertips. This time shock had
her blinking. “You made my hair grow back?”

Something dangerous flared in his eyes before disappearing
behind a wall of neutrality. “I would not leave you so shamed.”

“I wasn’t ashamed.”

His thumb stroked over her cheekbone as light as a feather,
as tender as a kiss, sliding under her defenses. He always could say more with
a touch than most people could with an hour of speech. “No. You would not be.”