So why did it look as if it could see her? Hadley fanned at her shirt—she was drenched with sweat and not sure how she had gotten soaked or so hot in the first place.
Why are you so upset? What do you think will happen?
Hadley jumped backward, nearly stumbling over her own feet before catching herself, and peered around. No one, not another soul, was anywhere in the vicinity. Who had just said that?
I did. The squid waved its left front tentacle at her.
Hadley gasped. Dear heaven, the sea creature was speaking to her. It was impossible—it shouldn’t even be able to see her through the one-way glass and yet it had addressed her, twice.
Are you under the impression you’re awake?
She blinked rapidly. Hadley couldn’t stop the giggle that formed in her throat. Of course. It made perfect sense. She was having another incredibly vivid dream. None of this was real. No one had ever managed to capture a giant squid and have it live. The Mote had a dead white one on display, the one the Japanese scientists hadn’t been able to keep alive, but not a live red one.
Besides, when had she ever been to the Sarasota Aquarium and seen it this empty?
Someone would be walking around, children would be screaming and grandparents would be looking at their watches.
“Phew.”
She waited a beat and looked around again. Usually this was when she woke up. Knowing she was dreaming always made the dream itself go away. Except nothing seemed to happen this time.
I thought you would be comfortable here, as opposed to visiting with me at the bottom of the ocean. I assure you, I find nothing about these surroundings particularly comfortable.
She shook her head. “I could see how this sort of arrangement might be a problem for you. I never thought you should be caged. There’s always been something so remote, so otherworldly about your kind. We don’t see you very often—most of the time we can’t get a shot of you on our very high-tech cameras and when we do catch a giant squid on a deep fishing line or net, you’re dead by the time we pull you up.”
Even though she was now perfectly cognizant of the fact that she was not really conversing with a creature of the sea, it seemed a natural thing to do under the circumstances.
I know you feel that way, which is why I am speaking with you now.
Hadley nodded as if she discussed these matters with a giant red squid all the time.
So I will ask you again, why are you upset? What do you think will happen?
“I don’t know, truly. I can’t seem to make sense of anything right now. First I’m kidnapped by an incredibly handsome man who says I’ll live but I’ll experience pain, and the next thing I know he’s engulfed in flames and regenerating before my eyes. I’m not sure how any of this is happening.”
Hadrian is a complicated creature. His nature is always in conflict with itself, but we do not believe he will actually hurt you.
Hadley stumbled to the brown bench behind her and sat down. “Who are we?” The squids.
“Of course, the squids, obviously. Is it all the squids or just the giant ones?” Are you trying to be obtuse?
“I never try to be obtuse. It just seems that my mind doesn’t work like everyone else’s.”
There’s a good reason for that, but I am not going to get into it right now.
Hadley huffed. It was bad when you couldn’t even get your own dreams to cooperate with you. “Then what would you like to talk about?” He’s coming, Hadley. We’ll talk again.
Hadley’s eyes flew open and she stared unseeing for a moment into the darkness of the cabin. It wasn’t the same room she’d slept in earlier. The bed felt significantly more comfortable, due in a large part, she quickly decided, to the fact that the mattress had fewer lumps. Her neck felt less stiff, which she quickly credited to the comfortable pillow beneath her head.
But her physical comfort did nothing to relieve the fear building in her mind.
The last thing she remembered was fainting on the deck. Where the hell was she now?
“I moved you to my cabin…well, the cabin I’ve been using, since you were technically in mine.”
Hadley squealed and pushed herself back against the headboard.
Recognizing that it was Hadrian’s voice did not make her feel better. She’d watched the man regenerate from nothing more than dust on the ship’s deck.
“Please don’t screech. My head hurts enough as it.”
Hadrian stepped forward out of the back of the cabin toward the window, which provided a little light. He looked exactly as he’d looked when she’d first met him, not at all like the charred marshmallow he’d become on the deck. As frightened as she was, she had to admit he was the sexiest man she’d ever encountered.
If that was what he was—a man.
She swallowed. “What are you?”
He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I had hoped not to have to explain it to you until after it was over.”
“Look, I know I’m a prisoner here and you have plans that involve causing me pain, but I think I have a right to know. Whatever else you might deny me, don’t you at least have the decency to allow me that?”
Hadrian whirled around so his back was to her and stormed to the wall. He pressed his fist against it as if he wished he could pound on it. “You have no idea, no concept of what has been done to me. I have taken care of your family for eons and now I have been left with no choice but to do something that will cause you pain.”
The muscles on his back bulged with tension and she knew they must be causing him discomfort. She shook her head. They were discussing him causing her pain and she was thinking about his back? What the hell was wrong with her?
She cleared her throat. “Hadrian, if you expect me to care about something you’ve been doing for, quote, eons, unquote, for my family, think again. If you don’t want to cause me pain, don’t cause it. Seems simple to me.”
“Does it, now?” When he turned around his green eyes blazed with red fire. She sucked in her breath, but he either didn’t care about her fear or he liked it, as he advanced toward her bed. “Nothing is simple, Hadley Pettigrew. If you only understood just how complicated life actually was, you wouldn’t sleep at night.”
She stood, her stance rigid. As far as she was concerned, the intimidation stopped now. “You talk in riddles, all clues and insinuations but nothing concrete. Then I come on deck and find you burning to death… Only you don’t die. You regenerate and no one seems to be the least bit concerned about it, which makes me think that probably your entire crew can do the same thing. So what is it?” She stepped forward and poked a finger into his shoulder. “Huh? Are you some sort of genetically modified people who can’t die?”
“I’ve been changed but it wasn’t through science.” He turned his back on her again and she threw the pillow from the bed right at him. It wasn’t okay for him to just turn his back every time he didn’t want to discuss something.
Hadrian spun around, an eyebrow raised and an amused look gleaming from his eyes.
At least she knew he wasn’t going to overreact to things like soft pillows hitting him from behind.
“That will teach me, I suppose, to turn my back on a Pettigrew.”
“Why do you say my last name like that? What could my father have done to you?”
He nodded. “All right, Hadley. I’ll tell you the story and if you don’t believe me I suppose it’s your own doom.”
“Start with why you can’t die.”
He crossed the room and sat down on a large chair. She could barely make out his face in the darkness, which she supposed had been the point of his placing distance between them. “I can die, just not here.”
Standing with her hands on her hips didn’t seem very natural when she wasn’t in the middle of a confrontation with him. She sat on the bed, feeling insecure now that he wasn’t near her. “Just not here on this boat?”
Looking around, Hadley didn’t see anything different about the vessel. M
aybe the whole thing was enclosed in some kind of electromagnetic casing that altered the makeup of everyone on it. She gulped. What would that mean for her?
“In this dimension—this plane of existence, if you like.”
Hadley’s ears rang. “I was really hoping, like you can’t believe, there was a scientific answer to this.”
“I know that, Dr. Pettigrew. I’m sorry to disappoint.” His amusement at her distress pricked her temper again, causing her head stop spinning and her anger to flare instead.
“Okay, for now I’m going to buy this dimension stuff. It’s not my field of expertise. I study fish and marine life. So who am I to say that there aren’t hundreds of other dimensions out there with people living in them?”
“Thousands that we can visit. More than that if you count the ones the people from my dimension still aren’t sure how to get to. It’s all about multiples of twelve. Twelve dimensions with twelve dimensions within each of them and twelve within each of them and so on and so forth.”
She nodded. “Fine, thousands of dimensions and you’re now in this one, unable to die, with a vengeful plot against my father.”
“When you say it like that, it almost sounds simple.”
“I find that most things are when you get right down to the core of them.”
Rising, he moved toward the bed where she sat and placed himself next to her. She wasn’t sure what had prompted his move but the sudden warmth of his body next to hers made her want to gasp. From a different dimension or not, Hadrian’s presence did strange things to her libido.
He reached out to caress her hair and she felt sweat form on her neck. “It’s the details that make things interesting and they’re never simple. Like your hair, for example.”
Heat rose in her cheeks. Why did he have to bring up her hair? She’d always hated everything about her hair. “What about it?”
“It would be simple to say your hair is red. It is. If I wanted to simplify and describe it in one sentence I would say ‘Hadley Pettigrew has red hair’. That is a true statement. But it doesn’t do it justice. More accurate would be for me to say something like ‘Hadley Pettigrew has the softest reddish-gold hair ever to grace the planet Earth in this dimension or any other’. I could describe the way it curls at the ends, giving it the impression that it is always coiffed for a party or social event, even when she’s been abducted from her family.”
As he spoke, Hadley stared deeply into his eyes. Gone was the fire she’d seen earlier. Instead she swam in their green depths and allowed herself to pretend for one moment that he really meant it when he saw her hair as red and gold and not actually as the color equivalent of spaghetti sauce. She made believe that he wasn’t saying exactly what she wanted to hear because he was manipulating her for reasons she had yet to understand. For exactly ten seconds, she decided, it was okay to imagine she was the kind of woman for whom he could really mean the things he said.
Hadley pressed her lips to his. He tasted of mint, not of the flames he’d endured outside. She sighed against him, loving the way his whiskers cut at her skin. For seven seconds she let them stay like that, her lips barely touching his, knowing this would be nothing more than a brief moment before reality intruded. Finally she pulled back.
Her brief, fantastical interlude behind her, she blinked twice and tried to remember what the point of their conversation had been, even though he smelled like fresh air and bay leaves. “So your point is that I summarized your situation too succinctly and ignored the details?”
She should get a medal for remembering their discussion amidst the heat pooling between her thighs. Hell, they’d barely touched.
He nodded but didn’t stand up to move from his spot. Hadrian lifted his hand as if he would touch her hair, which made her wonder if he was about to stroke her head again. She tried not to notice how exciting the thought was. He dropped his hand to his side.
“What are the details, then?” She hoped her cheeks were not as red as she feared they were.
“Two hundred and forty years ago, I was brought here as the leader of a large brigade of warriors whose sovereign duty it was to protect the Princess Zamara while she was on her lifetime’s trip. As was the case with all protectors before me, I was selected because of my ability to travel through dimensions with relative ease and few noticeable problems. But things went terribly wrong with Zamara. Now we are stuck here while she breeds for your father, over and over again. In the last one hundred years, your father has had thirty-eight of my men boxed.”
Hadley grabbed his arm. All thoughts of sex with this highly inappropriate man fled the scene. What the hell did that mean? “Say that again. Breeds for my father?
What does that mean? Boxing?”
Her heart pounded. All this sounded too strange to be real, but she’d never known her mother. Some of what he said would make sense based on things she already knew to be odd about her family.
“It means that for the last two and one-half centuries, your father has kept my princess, the woman who I am all but physically unable to abandon, in a drug-induced delirium whereby every thirty or so years she feels compelled to mate with your father and produce heirs.”
“That’s impossible.” Hadley stood and started to pace. “My father builds boats, for god’s sake… Okay, okay, that’s a lie. He builds weapons, I know that, but he’s a human being—he can’t have lived for two hundred and forty years.”
“He can, darling, he can. As long as he is feeding off her energy, living in nearby vicinity to her, he can live endlessly. Just as you, as her daughter, denied of her presence, will die at the age of thirty.”
Chapter Four
Why had he told her she’d be dead at thirty? Hadrian shook his head. What good had he thought it would do? She’d kissed him and scrambled his brains. If he could go back in time and undo something, that moment would be the one he would choose.
Yet there was more to say and now that he’d started he couldn’t leave the story untold. “You will be dead because of what your father did to you when you were born. He injects his offspring with a slow-acting toxin that festers and eventually kills you around your thirtieth birthday. If you stayed in your mother’s presence her energy would counter it, keep you alive, but it’s too late for that, unfortunately.” She’d gone so pale he feared she’d faint again.
He really needed to shut up. There was no point in telling Hadley these terrible truths. But to lie to her, not to inform her of everything she should know, felt wrong to him. Hadley was clearly special. She didn’t behave like any Pettigrew he’d ever known, and including her father he had now known nine. Never having met Hailey, he wouldn’t count her, but everything he’d read in her surveillance report said she was more typical of a Pettigrew than Hadley.
Hadley’s hands fisted at her sides. “You’re lying. He loves me. He would never do anything to harm anyone he loved.”
Hadrian nodded. “He does love you. Indeed I would fathom that he loves you very deeply and that is why he is hoping you will live through the toxin. His deepest wish is that one of his children will take after their mother and adapt—alter at the genetic level and become more like one of us than like a human of this dimension. That’s why he takes you from her at birth. Then he thinks he’d have the ultimate weapon—a near godlike creature that can’t be killed and can be used for his own interests.”
He sighed. “We’re not controllable enough, you see. His legion only listens because they still feel loyal to the princess—they could change at any time. You, one of his kin… You would be a whole different matter.”
He’d watched Zacharias do this to his children for eight generations, but never had it bothered him more than it did now to think of Hadley, dead as the others were. She stood before him so vibrant, so present—but in less than a year her candle would be snuffed out and it would be time for Zamara to breed again. Only this time, Hadrian wouldn’t let her. It had been his job for over two hundred years to protect his princess—it w
as time he found a better way to do it.
Hadley sat down in the chair he’d vacated and held her head in her hands. “Why am I believing any of this?”
“Because you watched me regenerate from dust yesterday and you’re too brilliant not to recognize the truth when you have it laid out in front of you.”
She lifted her head and one lone tear slipped from her left eye. A burning fury spread from Hadrian’s stomach to his entire body. She was crying and it was all his fault. He was the bastard who hadn’t left her alone. She’d been out in the middle of the ocean doing what she loved, completely unaware that in six months she’d be gone, replaced by an infant to try again at a quest for genetic perfection, and he had ripped her from that world into his sick, twisted version of reality. He didn’t know whether he was angrier that she was crying or that she’d soon be dead. He shook his head. There was no time for such thoughts.
He was the worst kind of monster.
Pounding his hand on the bedpost, he gave in to his urge to scream. “Stop crying.”
Anger worked better. He had no outlet for his grief and he’d be damned if he’d back out of what he’d started now. “All of this was done to you when you were too young to do a damn thing about it, so stop sniveling about eventualities you cannot control.”
Hadley’s eyes were wide as she looked up at him. Unlike her sisters, who were long dead and who had the Pettigrew brown eyes, her blue depths reminded him of home.
Refusing to give in to the desire to flinch, he cocked his head to the side and stared her down.
Fuck it.
Hadrian pulled him against her and ravished her mouth, pushing her up against the bed frame. His hands roamed the front of her body. This woman had a body made for sex. She was his prisoner and he’d promised her she would leave him unmolested. Shit. He tweaked her nipple through her shirt and she gasped. He opened his eyes. Passion shone back at him, not fear.