Free Cooper by Nhys Glover Page A

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