Cooper (7 page)

"Will it go away? I can't go home like this. My father will throw a fit."

Coop broke into a loud, raucous laugh, falling back on the bed and grabbing his belly.

Despite everything that had happened, Amy smiled at his child-like pleasure, even though she didn't know what she said that was so funny. Had she been stupid again?

When he'd recovered, Cooper held out his hand to her. Yet again she took it. Whatever had changed her eyes and teeth, whatever was taking control of her mind and body, trusted this man and wanted to do his bidding. And although it was frightening, this other part of her was somehow familiar. It was also strong and confident, where Amy wasn’t. And she had learned the hard way in her life to allow the strong to have their way. This felt no different.

Gently, Cooper pulled her down to him and placed her head on his shoulder, wrapping an arm around her protectively. Amy listened to his heart beating. It sounded so loud, and yet it calmed her ragged nerves.

"My Amy. My mate. Who'd have thought," he mused in awe.

"Your
what
?" Amy tried to sit up to look him in the eye, but he held her gently, almost possessively, in place.

"There's so much I have to tell you. But it's good. Really good, I promise you. Will you just lie here and listen while I tell you?" he asked, running his fingers through her hair that was streamed out across his chest.

Amy didn't trust her voice so she just nodded. Too exhausted from all the options she’d had to consider in the last few hours, it was easier just to keep still and let whatever was unfolding before her, have its way.

"Do you know what the Guild is, Amy?"

He'd used the too-familiar term twice before, she realised, and it hadn't hit her that he shouldn't know that word. Non-Guild didn't know about the Guild. They were a secret society of superior beings. Ordinary humans couldn't handle knowing they existed amongst them.

She nodded more cautiously this time.

"Well, they're the round pegs and you are lucky enough to not really be one of them. The Guild are an abomination. A bit theatrical, but true. They're an alien breed who came to earth thousands of years ago and tried to take over the planet, subjugating the humans who lived here. But it wasn't as easy as they thought, and after a while they found they could get further with their plans for domination by going underground, becoming the puppet-masters pulling the strings.

"They're a race of sociopaths who have no empathy, care for nothing or no one but themselves and their own best interests. Not even the good of their own people counts for much. It's all about themselves and their own personal greed, which is insatiable."

Amy wanted to interrupt and condemn him for his harsh description of the Guild. They were her people, after all. Even if she didn't fit in, she was still one of them. What he said about them, he said about her. And it just wasn't true. She wasn't like that at all.

Was she?

But she kept quiet, just as she'd agreed to do. At least she could hear him out before she left. Not that she knew where she'd go with cat eyes and sharp teeth. Not home, that's for sure. But away from this man who spoke so scathingly about her race.

The story she knew was different from his. Her people had left their doomed world millennia ago and found refuge on earth. But the savage primitives who called this planet home were not open to their advanced technology. It frightened them, and because those savages had superior numbers they succeeded in almost wiping her people out. Only a small group of males remained after the fighting was over, and to continue their species they took human women as their wives.

For a long time they stayed hidden, cautious of the primitive, violent creatures who were too stupid to see the advances her people could offer them. Over the millennia her people multiplied and then began to spread out, in secret, assimilating with the different tribes around the world, instructing them where they could, so they could become civilized and assist her people to properly make use of all the resources available on the planet.

But the Guild always knew that someday they’d have to move on and colonise new worlds, so they left all their technology hidden away in caves for that future time.

The humans were impossible to totally control, because their brains were so inferior and beast-like. At first, all they could handle was primitive farming skills, and then more complex tasks such as mathematics and writing followed slowly. Eventually, they were ready to be given the greater knowledge of her people, and with it they developed the technology that was akin to what the Guild had known in their long-ago past. The Guild could finally start rebuilding their space-crafts in readiness for departure to more favourable worlds.

Now her people waited patiently for the time of evacuation. It would come in her lifetime, so her father taught her, but she knew no details. Women, especially stupid ones like her, couldn’t be trusted with such knowledge.

Giving her head a little shake, Amy brought her focus back to Cooper and his story, which was from the human perspective.

"Some of the humans saw what the Guild were doing and set up their own resistance group thousands of years ago, unknown to the Guild. That group still operates around the world today, just as the Guild continues to control the economics and politics of the world, to our detriment.

"In the 1980s the Guild decided they wanted an army of their own; an army that would do anything it was told to do; an army of genetically engineered super-soldiers. They used an embryo that was the result of cross-species DNA experimentation and gestated a hundred cloned babies in test tubes from it. In that super-cocktail of ingredients they included panther DNA.

"What they didn't know was that the Résistance had infiltrated the research facility and controlled many of the experiments. When the babies had grown to full term, the Résistance blew the whistle on the whole project. The Guild sent out a Termination Order and thought that it had been carried out. Instead, the babies were secreted out of the labs and distributed to couples around the world who were loyal to the Résistance. To safeguard them, no record was kept of where the babies went." Cooper paused to draw breath.

Amy's head was spinning. Was he saying she was one of those babies? But she didn't have a warrior mentality, and her parents were her
real
parents and certainly weren't Résistance. They were very much Guild. But she kept quiet and let him finish, knowing he'd give her all the answers she needed by the end.

"Those babies grew up. At eighteen, one of them was given all the files on himself and his brothers and set the task of bringing them all together again. He called those brothers the Scorpio Sons because we were all born on the first of November 1988, which makes us Scorpios." She could hear the chuckle rumble in his chest.

"A girlfriend of Chase's had once told him he was a Scorpio and described his traits. Chase thought they fitted not only him but the organisation he was setting up, so the name was born. But it took a hell of a long time to track down the Sons. I was one of the first to be found because my blood samples were on record in Oz and Chase could access them. The others haven't all been that easy. The Résistance did too good a job keeping them hidden. Seven years later, we’ve still only found about half of the Sons, a handful of those dead already. But those who have been found alive wage a war against their creators. We gather information on their crimes and then bring them to justice.

"A few months ago we were told that, along with the baby warriors who were all male, Regis, the Résistance scientist on the project, had fertilised and genetically altered female embryos. His theory was that if the war continued on into another generation more Sons would be needed. The only way that could happen was if there were females of this new hybrid-human species created to give birth to them."

Amy tensed up. For the first time, this story was starting to make sense. Female embryos? Was he telling her that she was one of those? But how?

"The first of what we now call the
Mates
was discovered last December, although Colt had met her four years earlier, very briefly. Alyssa Aimes, you might have heard of her?"

Heard of her? She was her biggest fan. She'd called in hundreds of times to register her vote so that she could win
Star Quality.
It had been devastating when Alyssa lost.
But Amy had bought her album and sat for hours listening to it, particularly
Dark Fantasies
, which was a song that touched something deep inside her. Some longing she only half understood.

Now Cooper was telling her that Alyssa Aimes was a cat-girl, too? This was way too bizarre to be true.

"At first we thought that a mate was for any of us. After all, we've got identical DNA; for all intents and purposes, we're the same physical person. But that wasn't the case with Alyssa. There was only ever Colt for her. And when Alice turned up in London, a PI working for the Guild, we discovered that she, too, was only interested in Connor, who had activated her cat. Whether the act of activation, which involves that biting thing, is what decides the mate, or whether the mate bond comes first and then the biting, it's all inconclusive as yet. Certainly Colt and Alyssa felt the bond four years before he met her again and bit her. But one sample is not conclusive." He stopped again to let her take in the enormity of what he was telling her.

When she didn't say anything, Cooper went on. "All the other Sons had their cats activated when they were children or adolescents. We think it's something about heightening emotions around puberty, coupled with a dangerous situation. Whatever it is, the cat comes out and all hell breaks loose. But my cat never activated, most likely because I never faced a dangerous situation. After my accident when I was ten my parents were over-protective. Nothing was going to be allowed to hurt their son again.

"I'd started to think I'd never be activated. I thought there was something wrong with me. Then I looked over at you tonight and something sparked inside me. At the time, I didn't recognise what was happening, but as we sat over coffee my emotions were roiling. The intensity of them terrified me. That's why I had to get away from you, fast.

"I went back to my brothers and told them what was happening. Caleb found you and your family and discovered you were Guild. I was devastated. I was supposed to be hot-wired to loath Guild on sight. Instead, I looked at you and saw the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen."

The awe and reverence, as he said those last words, not only embarrassed her but ignited something deep inside. Not her cat, because obviously the bite had done that. But something else. Now it made sense why everyone else thought she was ugly and he saw her as beautiful. She was part of his sub-species; he was programmed to find her attractive. That was both a relieving and depressing thought, so she dismissed it.

"So we threw around some ideas about what was going on with me, and in the end they decided I needed to stay away from you. And you can see how well that worked out." He gave a little self-deprecating grunt of amusement.

For a long time, they lay in each other's arms contemplating the enormity of what had happened. For Amy, her world had just turned upside down. She couldn’t reconcile her view of the world to the one he presented to her. It
felt
right, though, in a way her father’s version never had. Yet her ability to choose was flawed, she knew, so how could she be certain Cooper was telling her was the truth?

Everything she'd been taught to believe in now appeared to be false, if Cooper was to be believed. She wasn't part of a super-race; an insignificant female member of that race, who hadn't shaped up. She was… Wait, actually, she
was
part of a super-race. It was just a
different
super-race, which included panther DNA. That part she couldn’t deny. The evidence was plain to see. And that was still a big problem because she couldn't go home if her eyes stayed the way they were.

Did she even want to go home, now she'd found out her parents weren’t really her parents? It was almost a relief to know that there was a reason why they didn't love her and why she didn't really love them. This innate loathing might explain her previously inexplicable sense of wrongness when she was around them. Unfortunately, her whole life had been filled with Guild, so she'd come to think that the wrongness was inside her, not in them.

What if
she
wasn’t wrong? What if
they
were?

"So Amy, I know this is a lot to take in. And it sounds
stranger than fiction,
as they say, but it's all true, I promise you."

"I know it is,” she said slowly, feeling her way to what she was coming to accept as the truth. “It feels right.
I
feel right for the first time in my life. But how do you feel about having me foisted on you as your mate, so our race can go on? I know you're programmed to find me attractive. It probably explains why you got an erection. But
being
attracted, and
wanting
to be attracted, are two different things."

"I guess it's going to take a while to deprogram you, Amy Hays. So let me just say that I couldn't be happier that you turned out to be my mate. I'm drawn to everything about you, inside and out.” He kissed the top of her head and sighed.