Free Dark Embers by Tessa Adams Page B

sure it hadn’t somehow been contaminated. Then she decided to start over again with a new slide. She checked everything carefully, from the dropper, to the slide, to the microscope, to the blood itself. When she was satisfied that all was as it should be, she slid it back under the microscope. And swore in frustration as she got the same results.
    Although she might be looking at red and white blood cells, they were different from the ones she had in her own body, different from any she had ever seen in her subjects. If she didn’t know better, she would say that they were vaguely reptilian in nature—long and thin and flat, they were a strange yellow-orange color that made her doubt both her eyes and the microscope.
    “Not what you were expecting?” Dylan murmured as he came up behind her.
    “Not at all.” Turning, she pinned him with a glare that had made lesser men stammer like twelve-year-olds at their first dance, but he merely winked at her, a slow, sexy lowering of his left eye that almost succeeded in distracting her. Almost.
    “Where, exactly, in New Mexico are you from?” she asked, her mind scanning through the possibilities. Maybe they were testing at White Plains again, or maybe the testing from years before had leaked into the water system or the ground and had slowly poisoned Dylan’s clan.
    She looked back at the microscope. But nuclear radiation wasn’t enough to do this kind of damage, to cause this kind of mutation in a person’s bloodstream. She wasn’t a hematologist, but she’d looked at enough blood cells in her life to know that something was very, very wrong with the blood in Dylan’s body. If all of his clan members had blood like this, it was no wonder they were sick. Maybe she could get a friend to look at—
    “I can practically see the wheels turning in that gigantic brain of yours, Phoebe. Let me stop you before you get too far. I’m not sick.”
    “No offense, but you’re not the doctor here. You can’t know what I saw—”
    “Of course I can. You saw cells very different from what you are used to. Dark where they should be light, and vice versa. Orange where they should be red, flat where they should be raised.” He quirked a brow. “How am I doing so far?”
    Her mouth fell open as she stared at him, aghast. “So you knew you’d contracted the disease before you came here, even after you swore to me that you weren’t sick?”
    “Once again, I’m not sick. I know what you saw because that’s what anyone who looks at our blood sees. If you looked at the blood of my clan members who actually did get sick, you would see something completely different.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Yes, you do. You just don’t want to accept it.”
    “That’s not true—”
    “Of course it is, Phoebe.” He pushed against her, crowding her until her back was against the solid marble of the lab table and the front of her body was pressed against his rock-hard muscles from chest to thigh. “You wanted proof that what I said was true. You’re holding that proof, and still you don’t want to believe it. Still you won’t believe it.”
    She shoved against him, refusing to be distracted by the heat between them. Making yet another slide, she peered through the microscope a third time. “There has to be some explanation.”
    “There is.” He leaned back against the table next to her, his long legs stretched in front of him with his ankles crossed. “Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m just telling the truth.”
    “How is that possible? Looking at this, I would say the blood came from a totally different species—someone who isn’t even human.” She ran her eyes over him from head to toe, trying not to linger on his heavily muscled chest or flat stomach. “And that’s obviously not the case.”
    “Phoebe—” he started, but she cut him off with a raised hand.
    “Three million dollars,” she said, her voice firm but her eyes wild. “Before we leave this lab