Mark looked up from the reports he was sorting as Jeffrey entered the room. "We've got a nibble."
"Excellent. What happened?"
Jeffrey sighed and dropped into one of the richly upholstered visitors' chairs that faced Mark's desk. "Robert's company was asked to send in a technician to calibrate their new invention on a prisoner."
"I don't suppose he was given the location?"
"Of course not. They're sapiens, not stupid. We have our collaborator in place at their main office, which is where Robert's been told to report. Hopefully they'll test him there, where we can alter the results, and then send him on to the prisoner's location."
"And now we wait. We don't even know if the prisoner they want the device tested on is Tom." Mark ran a careless hand through the neat stacks of papers. "Unexpected ally notwithstanding, if it is, do we have the manpower available to get him out?"
"Hard to say. Everyone scattered after the ambush. Former friends don't know us anymore. We may have enough by the time we get confirmation on the location and the set up. If it were today, I'd have to say forget it."
"That's what I feared." Mark clenched his fists, tried desperately to retain his calm façade and failed. "Damn it, Jeffrey, we need him! The best and brightest of the chameleons, one of the Chosen, embracing coexistence. We would no longer need to count our numbers so carefully; hundreds of thousands would follow his example. Think of it, Lewis' hand-picked successor, advocating coexistence!" He slumped back in his seat and took a deep breath. "We need him, Jeffrey," he said calmly.
"Forgive me, Mark, but do we? Wouldn't Lewis himself be a much better symbol? After all, he is the inspiration for those that believe the sapiens must be crushed. The accounts of what he lost at their hands after giving them his trust…they inflame our young and empower our more radical leaders."
"One problem. He has not chosen coexistence."
"He has taken a sapiens as his bonded mate!"
"Has he? You've seen the same reports I have. Is Keridwen Ashton really sapiens?"
Jeffrey sighed. "No one seems to know what she is. The hair sample I collected for analysis gave anomalous DNA readings. Her PSI adaptation does not exactly match ours, but it is similar. The characteristics appear to be dominant rather than recessive, so far as we can tell without breeding her experimentally…so, it is possible that she is not homo sapiens-sapiens."
"But is she one of our half-adapted with an evolutionary advance, or is she something else entirely? Wouldn't that be a kick in our collective ass, Jeffrey? While we are working to replace the sapiens, yet another even more advanced species is developing to replace us?"
"You don't believe that?"
Mark picked up the DNA analysis report. It was almost a year old, but still valid. "I'm not sure what I believe, but their bond is legitimate. That argues for her PSI gifts being an advance on ours. Lewis is one of our more gifted talents. Perhaps his subconscious recognized that she is indeed an advance and initiated the bond in order to secure her for the gene pool. I just wish I knew what the advance consists of and whether or not it could be useful to our plans."
"Does what she is truly matter? Mark, she thinks she is sapiens…Lewis thinks she is sapiens. Can he truly continue to pursue a vendetta against his mate's people?"
"After what happened to his family, how can he not?"
... ...
Keri woke up wrapped in Lewis' arms. She snuggled in to enjoy the warmth and security of his embrace, then gasped and pulled away as she noticed his state of arousal. He stared at her; his eyes heavy lidded with sleep and desire. "Where are you going?" he grumbled. "You belong here."
"Not right now I don't," she watched as he frowned and began to move towards her. "Lewis, remember; we can't do this now…you can barely keep me safe as it is, if I get pregnant that will make it impossible."
"Hmm. Not impossible, but considerably more difficult." He groaned; his eyes drifting closed. "Don't bother saving me any hot water…I'm not going to need it."
Keri chuckled as she headed for the bathroom. "Believe it or not, I am sorry, you know." She heard Lewis snort in disbelief as she closed the door.
... ...
Lewis gritted his teeth as he watched Keridwen dress. He didn't trust himself to leave the bed while she was present. The imperative was not as strong as it should be, but it was back. He did not understand why she didn't seem to be affected, but he was not going to question their good fortune. She hummed as she fussed with something at the sides of her head. When she turned, he saw that they had brought her some simple jewelry as well as clothing.
"Thought my earring holes were going to close up," she commented.
He watched intently as she fastened a simple gold chain around her neck.
"Nice of them to think of jewelry, don't you think? It's funny what you miss when you don't have it anymore, but I think I missed the jewelry more than anything else…well, except a good shampoo."
"Are you finished?" he asked quietly.
"Uh, yes. Why?"
"Pick up the phone and have someone escort you downstairs so that I can shower."
"Huh?" She looked up to meet his eyes and flinched. "Oh. Sorry."
He gritted his teeth again as she called for someone to meet her. Finally there was a knock on the door and Keridwen exited. Lewis left the bed, got into the shower and resolutely turned on the cold water full force.
... ...
"Good morning, Keri. Please, have a seat; your breakfast will be ready momentarily."
Keri smiled at Mark and took the seat he had indicated. "Is it still morning?" she asked.
He looked up, she could feel a tinge of amusement in his aura, but his face was passive and controlled. "Yes, you made morning by a good thirty minutes."
She laughed. "Well, just so long as I didn't sleep past noon. Don't want to perpetuate the rumors about the idle rich."
"Not that you qualify," Jeff said as he set a plate of steaming food in front of her. "You were always either at class, seeing a client, or doing a consult for the DA's psych team."
"Oh, not always," she chuckled, examining her breakfast with delight. They had somehow come up with her favorite menu. The ham and Swiss cheese omelet, hash browns, wheat toast with strawberry jam…and here was Alexa with her orange juice!
"True, in your spare time you were doing all that work for your history group."
"Well, that was for fun," she mumbled around a bite of omelet. "Mm, this is wonderful. How did you know I'd like this, do you have a file with my food preferences?"
Mark shook his head. "No, even our records are not that detailed. Lewis ordered it for you." His head tilted at her surprised reaction. "Will he be joining us soon?"
Keri sighed. "I'm not sure. It seems I was only partially right. I think he can sense there's no chance of my conceiving without further…ah, input. He was having a little difficulty this morning, but at least I'm not looping it back to him and making it worse."
"That is regrettable. I don't know of anything we can do to help him."
"I do not need your help," Lewis growled.
... ...
Keridwen looked up at him, her gray eyes widening at his tone. He reached inside to tighten his control. "My apologies." He sat down across from his mate and watched her return to her meal. She ate daintily but with good appetite, and judging by the feeling of enjoyment he was getting from her, he had accurately remembered and interpreted the smells of the breakfast she had been served outside his cell.
"Thank you for remembering," she said quietly, reaching to touch his hand. Lewis braced himself for the contact but found he could tolerate it easily.
"Your favorite?" he asked. Keridwen nodded happily then dabbed a bit of orange pulp from her lips with a napkin. "I thought it might be. As I recall, your cousin needed to be conciliatory at the time."
"Damn straight," she chuckled.
"Any news?" Lewis asked as his own breakfast was delivered. He tucked into the French toast and sausage without waiting for a response.
"We have an operative bringing a report to us. He should arrive within the hour," Mark said. "From what I understand, the results of his mission were mixed. Unfortunately the line was not secure so what he meant by that remains to be seen."
Keridwen had finished her breakfast and was sitting at the table leaning with her elbows on it, her n resting on her folded hands. Her contentment flowed to him through the bond, and he was able to use it to strengthen his control.
Jeff returned from the kitchen with a coffeepot. "Seconds, anyone?" Lewis held up his empty cup for a refill. He smiled as his mate wrinkled her nose.
"Hot bitter dishwater," she muttered. The others turned to look at her in surprise. "Well, sure, it smells great, but do you really taste that stuff?" she asked.
"The caffeine is useful," Lewis told her. "In moderation, of course."
"That," she said firmly, "is what chocolate and coca cola are for."
Lewis chuckled. "I see that I will be making my own coffee, hmm?"
She shrugged. "I don't mind making it. Just don't expect me to remember to buy it." Keridwen looked up at him suddenly, her eyes wet. "Assuming we ever have a normal enough life that it matters."
He set down his cup and reached across the table for her hands. "I will find a way to give you the life you want. I promise." Lewis squeezed her fingers gently as she nodded.
"Given the current state of affairs, you may have to take on two governments to keep that promise," Mark commented.
Lewis snapped his head around to stare the man down. "Then I will do so." Much to his annoyance, the man refused to be cowed. His guess at Mark's occupation among their people was no doubt correct.
"Then perhaps it is time you took a stand one way or the other."
"You know where I stand. I am the head of the chameleon program, our people's best weapon against the sapiens and our best chance at survival."
"Not any more," Alexa spoke up. She swallowed at his glare but held her ground. "One of the council's pets now runs the program. We are no longer an elite force to infiltrate and gather intelligence, killing only to prevent them from identifying us. We are now assassins, nothing more."
Jeff snorted. "Not that the original mission matters now. The sapiens can identify us almost at will…at least at any point where they can legitimately run a fluid test. They have identified the markers that make it unnecessary to run a full DNA work up to know what we are."
"It matters," Lewis said. "What has it come to that even you have betrayed me?"
"I didn't betray you, or the program, Lewis," Alexa told him. "I didn't enter the program to be a killer. I did it to ensure our people's survival. The old ways aren't working; we need to find new ones. This is the new one I found."
Lewis stood abruptly and left the room.
... ...
"I think he took that rather well," Alexa said, breaking the silence.
"Why is he so hot about you betraying him? I know he's pissed with Tom, but Tom's his cousin," Keri asked.
Alexa's left eyebrow rose in a naggingly familiar arch. "Do you know our naming practices, Keri?" she asked in return.
"Uh, no."
"Until and unless one must live among the sapiens full time, one uses the name given them by their birth mother, and as a surname uses the given name of their sire. This makes it easier to avoid developing an interest in a half-sibling. If someone is using the same surname as you are, you make sure you know their father's surname."
"Okay. So Jeff's father's name was Garrett?"
"Exactly. Now sometimes the father's given name doesn't really work as a surname, so it is altered. Paul Barnes, our faction's murdered leader, was the son of a man named Barney. That would have sounded odd to sapiens record keepers, so the last letter was changed."
"Got it."
"Those that will be spending extended amounts of time living as sapiens in one place are given a new name. We had a researcher watching for up and coming stars in the genetics field who was renamed Ian Copeland, and lived for twenty years working in various university systems as such. His original name was Ian Scott."
"Okay."
"My name is Alexa Lewis."
"Oh my god." Keri stared at the doorway that Lewis had stridden through. "No wonder he feels betrayed. Wait a minute; I thought all his children were killed."
"His children with his bonded mate, Marjorie, were murdered," Mark told them. "Alexa was from a required pairing when Lewis was much younger."
"I wasn't part of the gathering, hadn't even met him at that point, so I didn't know he had taken a mate," Alexa interjected. "Children don't often have contact with their sires from required pairings. Generally only the children of bonded mates grow up with both parents."
"That is so sad. No wonder you all seem so lost."
... ...
Keridwen found him staring out the window of a second floor balcony. She walked up behind him, wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek against his back. "Everything's changing so quickly," she whispered.
Lewis sighed. "Yes." He drew her around to his left side, and tucked her against him. "There are four choices and I find I don't care for any of them." His mate rubbed her head on his shoulder and looked up at him expectantly. "Shall we make new choices, my own?"
She smiled, almost wickedly. "Absolutely. What did you have in mind?"
He chuckled. "Well, for one, we'll assist in recovering my cousin. The council will not do so, and I do not believe this coexistence faction is capable of doing it. Certainly, not since they've lost their leader. I imagine that they are in a great deal of disarray."
"I'm up for that," Keridwen said, playing with the gold chain. "More Dani baiting, sounds like fun."
Lewis frowned. "What happened to that amethyst crystal thing you were wearing in the facility?"
"I'm not sure." She shrugged. "I guess I lost it while we were getting out. I didn't notice it was missing until I was at the ATM, and I didn't find it in the car." An odd light entered her eyes. "Hmm, that thing was really attuned to me. Remember what you said about Dani's hunches not happening infrequently enough?"
"Yes."
"Well, I don't know if she can do it on purpose, she hasn't got all of the gifts that I do, but maybe she's got my crystals and is using them to tune in on me."
Lewis considered the matter. "How are you and Danielle related?"
"We're cousins; you know that…oh, got it. Our mothers are sisters, twins, actually."
"A pair of twins married a pair of brothers?"
Keridwen stared at him. "No, our fathers weren't related."
His brows rose reflexively. "Then why are you both Ashtons?"
"Oh," she chuckled. "I guess that is confusing. Grandfather adopted us both; he decided it would make inheritance and such easier." She suddenly sobered. "Well, that and he was worried about us being next."
"Next for what?"
"He believed that our fathers were targeted as part of a conspiracy, industrial espionage, professional rivalry, he never really was clear on just what the conspiracy was. You see, when Dani and I were ten our parents took a holiday together and drove one of grandfather's cars to the Catskills. The brakes failed and they went off a bridge into a ravine. They never had a chance." She blinked rapidly a few times, and then looked back up at him. "Officially, the police said the cause was faulty maintenance, that the brake fluid was too low. The thing was, grandfather has an in-house mechanic. That man was fanatical about the condition of the cars; always had been. There is no way the brake fluid could have dropped that much since his last inspection of it without someone purposely draining it."
"What did your father do?" Lewis asked, a suspicion forming at the back of his mind.
"Both dad and Uncle Stan were doctors; researchers, not practicing physicians. Grandfather wanted his daughters to have husbands who actually got some sleep occasionally. They were on one of the teams working on mapping DNA."
Lewis' eyes closed. Keridwen felt him stiffen and she pulled away from him, backing towards the center of the room.
"Oh god," she said, evidently coming to the same conclusion that he had. "Lewis, please tell me that you didn't kill my parents."
He spun to face her. "No! I did not. Nor did I order it." He sighed and reached out for her hands. "Keridwen, I was eighteen and in Vietnam when the…accident happened. I was not involved in any such activities at that time, I swear to you."
She let him pull her closer. "But you think that your people may have…"
"Yes. It's possible, even likely." He pulled her close and stroked her hair as she cried.
"That could explain a great deal," Mark said as he entered the room."Keri, does your grandfather share any of your gifts?"
"Um, sort of. He gets hunches, like Danielle…only stronger and far more frequently. Oh and sometimes a full on precognitive episode. And he can tell when someone believes him or not." She chuckled through her tears. "Kind of explains why he's never lost an election, doesn't it?"
"Yes, and more." Mark looked at the bond mates. "Our doctor has arrived. I think it is time to talk about that memory block."
ELSEWHERE
Grant Ashton wiped tears from his face with a shaking hand. He angrily grabbed the remote and turned off the VCR that had been playing a tape of Keri's graduation from Columbia. He hadn't been able to tell her then how proud he was of her accomplishment. His anger, or rather his fear of her choice of a field of study had separated them.
He had wanted the girls to study law, not to follow him into politics though that would have pleased him, but because it was as far removed from anything that would threaten the hidden ones, the ones who killed their parents, as any field he could think of.
But his sweet Keri, with all her innocence, had refused to take her finals at Harvard, and had instead begun again, studying a combination of subjects almost guaranteed to make her the hidden ones' target. Her doctoral thesis, on paranormal talents and how they were inherited, would have made waves in the fields of both her major, Parapsychology and her other degree, Genetics, had he not donated enough money to the university to ensure that they would 'neglect' to officially publish it.
And now she was in their hands…in his hands. He picked up the set of file photographs. The older shot was of a young man with wavy golden blonde hair, sporting a trim goatee. The intense blue eyes were echoed in the new photo of a man with wavy silver hair, who he knew had been forcibly clean-shaven. The young man had a sensual confident smile. The elder's lips were sent in an arrogant, condescending smirk.
Had Lewis taken his Keri on purpose? Had he known she was the child of his favorite daughter? Grant knew that his decisions had deprived the man of his wife, sons and daughters. Was this Lewis' revenge?
Twenty-three years ago…it seemed like a lifetime. His children had been dead six years and his private investigations had uncovered hints of something that no one would believe. A new breed of man, living among them, doing anything they could to protect themselves from discovery. His sons-in-law were the heart of a research team studying DNA. They were full of ideas that would advance the research in leaps and bounds. And then they were gone.
His surprise when another powerful senator approached him with news of this new breed was complete. He had been asked to join a group that would meet representatives of these people who wished to come forward and announce their existence to the world under the auspices and protection of the US Government. The world was changing, he was told, and here was his chance to be part of it.
Grant remembered meeting with the group. Several men in their early thirties to early fifties had introduced themselves as their people's council, who had the authority to make decisions for the whole. Also present were several families, obviously intended to show the various senators, congressmen and military officers that they were just like any other Americans.
They were not like any other Americans. One of the families had stood out in Grant's eyes. The father was tall, blonde and blue eyed. His strength and grace called to mind an Olympic-caliber athlete. The mother was red-haired with hazel eyes. Her serene smile and the way she moved almost in synch with her husband were intimidating.
When they were introduced to him, the woman's smile had widened. "Senator Ashton, it is a pleasure," she had said. "These are my daughters Cassandra and Melissa. I understand you are raising granddaughters, and had daughters of your own." The two girls, one with curly dark red hair and the other with soft waves of honey blonde, reminded him of Keri and Dani…flawless, inhuman versions of Keri and Dani.
She hadn't introduced her two sons. That she had left for her husband, who had favored her with an indulgent look at her omission. All four children were beautiful, intelligent, and well behaved. They were veritable poster children for the new breed. Grant had felt a shiver of unexplained dread run down his spine…then realized they all gave off a kind of power hum. Something like the feeling Keri gave him, but stronger…more overt.
Later, he had closeted himself with several of the group that had met with the new breed. He shared his fears and suspicions. The new breed had gathered its people in Oaxaca, Mexico to facilitate announcing their existence. It was decided that their existence would end there.
Grant looked again at the two photographs. One was of a young man full of hope and dreams. The other was of the same man, whose only dreams were likely of revenge. "Damn you, Lewis," he ground out. "Why didn't you die with the others?"