Perfect Mate (6 page)

To say it freaked out the medical staff was an understatement, and Antonia was probably the only person ever to have been barred from the camp mess hall.
 

Ops had only wanted her to sign off on reports. Paperwork never quit, even when you were “dead” to all intents and purposes.
 
Still fully clothed, she lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The room was small but private. At first she’d thought it a luxury; now she realized it was little more than another prison. Sure, the lock on the door had been deactivated now, but it hadn’t always been. In the early days, just after her “accident”, they’d locked her in here from sundown to sunup on the thinking that she and the rest of the Bloods were less dangerous during the day.
 

A snort of amusement escaped her. Yeah right, the day any Blood was harmless was the day Barney became President.

She went back to counting paint blots above her. She’d been up all day, but sleep was proving to be elusive. Counting paint blots was marginally better than counting sheep. Counting sheep became counting bags of blood running around on little woolly legs. Which made her hungry, made her fangs drop and burn, and soured her temper even more than normal.
 

She tilted her head…had that been two or three blots? She counted it as two and moved on. Interestingly, since her accident, she hadn’t had PMS or even a period. One of the upsides of being a vampire, because even
she
wouldn’t want to see a vamp with PMS.
 

The room lights were off, but she didn’t need light to see. Another benefit of her new existence. At least it would be if normal light didn’t give her a blinding headache. The sort of headache that felt like a spitfire was trying to take off inside her head, and no amount of over the counter medicine could deal with it.

At three hundred blots, a door opened down the hall and footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Stopping her count, she listened as they approached. Lifting her chin, she scented the air. Human, male and scared out of his wits. The scent of fear clogged the air, like thick incense.
 

Three doors away. Two doors.
 

How had they gotten a human to come down here at this time of night? It was bad enough trying to get them to come in here in the daylight, when they were all safe and secure in the knowledge that vampires were “docile” in the day. Yeah right… She gargled holy water and shit garlic.
 

One door, and the footsteps carried on. Antonia held her breath and waited for the sharp rap on her door.

“Major Fielding? You’re needed in the Operations office.”

Without conscious thought, she was off the bed and headed for the door. The guy the other side, a corporal, yelped and jumped as she yanked it open less than a second after he’d spoken.
 

“For? I do sleep, you know.”
 

She glared at him, the look in her eyes deliberately glacial. Even though she hadn’t been asleep and his arrival was a welcome distraction from her contemplation of the ceiling’s paint job, she was still offshift. A familiar resentment filled her. She was fed up with the Project snapping its fingers and expecting her to jump.

“Uhmm…they didn’t say. J-just that you’re needed.” The corporal paled, appearing to realize that he stood in the middle of vampire country, facing down the queen bitch herself. The pissed-off queen bitch.
 

A bead of sweat ran from his hairline and rolled down his brow. His gaze shifted sideways to the door.
 

“You’d never make it in time,” she informed him softly, amused that any human thought he could outrun her. He paled even further, his lip quivering. Antonia shook her head and decided to give him a break. He was so scared that baiting him seemed cruel.
Like kicking a puppy.
 

”Operations? We may as well go.”
 

Stepping out through it, she pulled the door shut behind her and started to walk up the corridor. It was a long walk to the outer door, the expanse of wall broken at regular intervals by doors. Each had a lock. Most were active.
 

A low moaning sob emanated from the last one as they passed it. A sound of misery and hopelessness that evolved into rage and frustration, then back again. Antonia’s jaw tightened. She recognized the sound of a newly turned Blood suffering their first thirst. Remembered the endless night she woke feeling like her body, her very blood, was boiling. The pain was excruciating, something she wouldn’t wish on her worse enemy.
 

She’d drunk gallons of water, only to throw it back up. Soda tasted worse—fizzy acid. White wine? Paint stripper. There were only two things even slightly palatable: port and, of course, blood.

Chapter Five

It didn’t take long to reach Operations. In point of fact, it didn’t take long to walk across the entire camp. The part that was habitable, anyway. Built way back when, it had been abandoned for years before the Project had come along. Most of the buildings were still uninhabitable, apart from a main core around the central hub.
 

Well, inhabitable was a relative term, she thought as she passed the Lycan kennels. They’d thrown up some silver-banded steel fencing and let the dogs loose in what amounted to little more than huge dog pens. Her lip curled again as she passed, the stench wafting toward her on the night breeze. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had to send someone in every day to muck them out.
 

“Freaking animals,” she muttered, unable to keep her prejudice to herself. Before she’d become changed, she hadn’t had any feelings one way or the other about Bloods or Lycans, other than the fact both freaked her out. They were all the same to her. People who’d been willing test subjects or those unfortunate enough to be infected. She hadn’t counted on the fact that when the Project ran out of willing test subjects, it created its own.
 

And she certainly hadn’t counted on the rush of complete and utter hatred the first time she’d seen a Lycan after her infection. Anger had welled up from her very core, as though her soul itself rejected the idea of the creature in front of her. Her fangs had dropped, despite the sedative they had her on, and it had taken all her self-control not to rip its throat out right there.

“Sorry?” The corporal leaned forward trying to catch her whispered words, a look of puzzlement on his face.
 

She shook her head and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It doesn’t matter.”

Still, she shot a glance over her shoulder at the dark and silent Lycan pens as she walked through the door into the office. As far as she was concerned, every one of them should be put down. Taken out to the edges of the camp where they buried all the failed test subjects and shot point-blank in the back of the head with a silver bullet.
 

Hell, she’d offer to do it herself.

“Ah, Major. So good of you to join us.”
 

Colonel Nathan Fitzgerald looked up with a smirk as Antonia entered the control room. Amusement glinted in his deep-set eyes, as though he knew she’d been pulled from her bed, and the power he had over her filled him with petty glee.
 

Deliberately, she blanked her expression and gave him a poker face to look at. She didn’t like Fitzgerald, and she was sure the feeling was mutual. He was the sort of inbred, jumped-up son of a senator who never had to fight for anything in his life. A person for whom life opened doors by dint of association, who his parents were, rather than for anything he’d done or achieved himself. For a kid from the rough side of town who’d dragged herself up and fought for every chance she’d gotten, it was sickening.
He
made her sick.
 

He was also a bully. Rather than using his rank and position in the Project for good, for the technological and scientific advance that could be the
only
reason the government would do what they did to their own people, he used it to reinforce a whole new set of prejudices and racism based on his own opinion.

“As always, I live to serve.”
 

Her voice, calm and collected, revealed nothing of her bitterness as she quoted the Project’s motto back at him.
Live to serve.
In other words,
Your ass is ours. If we can bring you back as something else, we will, and you’d better be fucking grateful.

He wasn’t intelligent enough to read between the lines and figure out the sarcasm. Yet another worrying lack in a full-bird colonel.

“Good. Just make sure you remember that.”
 

He pushed away from the planning table and looked her straight in the eye. Everything in Antonia went still. She recognized that look. The “you’ve fucked up” look.
 

“Of course, sir.”

He had a pen in his hand, fiddling with it.
Click-click.
His thumb hit the end in a rapid-fire motion.
Click-click.
The pen nib appeared and disappeared.
Click-click
. The sound reverberated through her skull like the double-tap from a rifle. The tension in the room rose several notches as the other staff with them faded out of view. No one wanted to get between the colonel and his victim.
 

Antonia stood her ground and gave him a rattlesnake look. Her best. It made people…human people, that is…uncomfortable as hell. Something in their brains clicked on when she looked at them like that, and ramped their survival instincts up to maximum. Full-Bird Fiztgerald was just too fucking dumb to realize the danger signs when he poked at the tiger with a stick.

“I have always run this camp with fairness and equality in mind, no matter what ethnic or species origin our staff are…”

Great, she was getting the equality and diversity speech. Someone, please shoot her now.
 

“But we do have to have some rules. Do you know what the most important of those rules are, Major?”

Time to play dumb grunt.
She fixed her gaze to the wall behind Fitzgerald’s shouldered and answered with an ambiguous, “Sir!”

It was a rhetorical question. He smiled, a particularly oily and smug expression she wanted to wipe off his face, preferably by knocking his teeth down his throat. Which she’d enjoy also ripping out.

“Our most important rule, given the different
species
on site, is to preserve the integrity of the human gene pool.”
 

His irritating voice matched his smile. Patronizing and smug as he used big words as if she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant.

Her fixed look didn’t waver. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“You’ve not been a good girl and obeyed the rules, though. Have you, Major?”
 

That shocked her out of her rigid contemplation of the plaster behind him.
 

“Sir? I’m not sure what you mean.”
 

A frown furrowed her brow as she looked him directly in the eye. A mistake. Those dark orbs set in heavy flesh that would turn into unhealthy-looking jowls within a few years glittered with a level of malevolence that took her aback. Malevolence aimed solely at her, yet not personal at all. Not only was she a woman in uniform, which was bad enough according to the camp’s grapevine, but she was no longer human. And he hated anything not human.
 

“Oh, I think you know exactly what I mean.”
 

The pen clicked again, four times. She wanted to ram it down his throat. Sideways.

“You’ve been fraternizing with some of the camp staff. The
human
staff. We have witnesses.”

She couldn’t help it. At his words, she barked out a laugh, a short, sharp sound of bitter amusement and surprise. She didn’t
fraternize.
Hell, most of the time she didn’t even smile. She’d rather tear most people’s throats out than initiate conversation.
 

“Witnesses? To what?” She demanded, forgetting momentarily that he disliked being challenged. “Who are they?”

Fitzgerald waved his hand dismissively. “That doesn’t matter. This infraction will go on your permanent record. If any more occur, action will have to be taken.”

The screams died into whimpers of pain, which became chokes. Lillian stood where she’d been ordered behind the cabinet, flattened back against the wall. At first she’d been about to argue at his high-handed order, but then the gun had gone off.
 

All she could see was the furrow in the opposite wall. The bullet had taken the plaster out before burying itself in the wall at the end of the corridor. She’d helped deal with suicidal and violent patients, ones who struggled with the world in general and their place in it.
 

Being shot at was completely out of her realm of experience.
 

Men who weren’t men, who sprouted claws the size of bread knives that could shear a man’s hand off at the wrist, were completely out of her realm of experience as well.
 

Right now she’d like her realm of experience to include being at home, tucked up in bed with a nice, safe chick flick in the DVD player. Which told exactly how out of her element she felt since she hated chick flicks with a passion. She favored action movies or the occasional horror. Watching horror, however, and taking a starring role were two completely different things.