“For five days,” she said, needing to be sure she understood. “Nobody just falls asleep for five days straight. There must be something else going on with me. Jesus, after all that’s happened, I should see a doctor, go to a real hospital.”

Lucan gave a grave shake of his head. “Gideon is more expert than anyone else you can see topside. This thing cannot be handled by your kind of doctors.”

“My kind? What the hell does that mean?”

“Jenna,” Alex said, taking her hand. “I know you must be confused and scared. I’ve been there myself very recently, although I can’t imagine anyone going through what you have. But you need to be strong now. You need to trust us—trust me—that you are in the best hands possible. We’re going to help you. We’ll figure this out for you, I promise.”

“Figure what out? Tell me. Damn it, I need to know what’s really going on!”

“Let her see the X rays,” Lucan murmured to Gideon, who typed a quick series of keys and brought the images up on the monitor.

“This first one was taken within minutes of your arrival at the compound,” he explained, as a skull and upper spinal column lit up overhead. At the topmost point of her vertebrae, something small glowed fiercely bright, as tiny as a grain of rice.

Her voice, when she finally found it, held the barest tremor. “What is it?”

“We’re not sure,” Gideon replied gently. He brought up another X ray. “This one was taken twenty-four hours later. You can just make out the threadlike tendrils that have begun to spread outward from the object.”

As Jenna looked, she felt Alex’s fingers tighten around her own. Another image came up on-screen, and in this one, the tendrils extending from the brightly glowing object appeared to lace into her spinal column.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, reaching up with her free hand to feel the skin at her nape. She pressed hard and almost gagged to register the faint ridge of whatever it was embedded inside her. “He did this to me?”

Life … or death?

The choice is yours, Jenna Tucker-Darrow.

The creature’s words came back to her now, along with the recollection of his self-inflicted wound, the nearly indiscernible object he’d plucked from within his own flesh.

Life, or death?

Choose.

“He put something inside me,” she murmured.

The slight unsteadiness she’d felt a few moments ago came back with a vengeance. Her knees buckled, but before she ended up on the floor, Brock and Alex each had an arm, lending her their support. As terrible as it was, Jenna could not tear her eyes away from the X ray that filled the screen overhead.

“Oh, my God,” she moaned. “What the hell did that monster do to me?”

Lucan stared at her. “That’s what we intend to find out.”

CHAPTER

Two

Standing in the corridor outside the infirmary room a couple of minutes later, Brock and the other warriors watched as Alex sat down on the edge of the bed and quietly comforted her friend. Jenna didn’t break down or crumble. She let Alex wrap her in a tender embrace, but Jenna’s hazel eyes remained dry, staring straight ahead, her expression unreadable, glazed with the stillness of shock.

Gideon cleared his throat, breaking the silence as he glanced away from the infirmary door’s small window. “That went well. Considering.”

Brock grunted. “Considering she just came out of a five-day Rip van Winkle to learn that her brother is dead, she’s been leeched by the granddaddy of all bloodsuckers, brought here against her will—and oh, by the way, we’ve found something embedded in your spinal cord that probably didn’t originate on this planet, so congratulations, on top of all that, there’s a good chance you’re part Borg now.” He exhaled a dry curse. “Jesus, this is messed up.”

“Yeah, it is,” Lucan said. “But it would be a hell of a lot worse if we didn’t have the situation contained. Right now, all we need to do is keep the female calm and under close observation until we gain a better understanding of the implant itself and what, if anything, it could mean to us. Not to mention the fact that the Ancient must have had a reason for placing the material inside her in the first place. That’s a question that begs an answer. Sooner than later.”

Brock nodded in agreement with the rest of his brethren. It was only a slight movement, yet the flexing of his neck muscles set off a fresh round of pain in his skull. He pressed his fingers into his temples, waiting for the knifelike agony to pass.

Beside him, Kade frowned, jet-black brows furrowing over his wolfy, silver eyes. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” Brock muttered, irritated by the public show of concern, even though it was coming from the one warrior who was as tight as a brother to him. And even though the hard stab of Jenna’s trauma was shredding him from the inside out, Brock merely shrugged. “No big thing, just par for the course.”

“You’ve been eating that female’s pain for almost a week straight,” Lucan reminded him. “If you need a break—”

Brock hissed a low curse. “Nothing wrong with me that a few hours back out on patrols tonight won’t cure.”

His gaze strayed to the small panel of clear glass that looked in on the infirmary room. Like all of the Breed, Brock was gifted with an ability unique to himself. His talent for absorbing human pain and suffering had helped keep Jenna comfortable since her ordeal in Alaska, but his skills were just a Band-Aid at best.

Now that she was conscious and able to provide the Order with whatever information they needed about her time with the Ancient and the alien material embedded inside her, Jenna Darrow’s problems were her own.

“There’s something more you all need to know about the female,” Brock said as he watched her carefully swing her bare legs over the edge of the bed and stand up. He tried not to notice how the white hospital gown rode halfway up her thighs in the instant before her feet touched the floor. Instead he focused on how readily she found her balance. After five days of lying flat on her back in an unnatural sleep, her muscles absorbed her weight with only the smallest tremor of instability. “She’s stronger than she should be. She can walk without help, and a few minutes ago, when it was just Alex and me in the room with her, Jenna was getting agitated about wanting to see her brother. I went to touch her and calm her down, and she deflected my hand. Tossed me off like no big thing.”

Kade’s brows rose. “Forgetting the fact that you’re Breed and have the reflexes to go along with it, you’ve also got about a hundred pounds on that female.”

“My point exactly.” Brock glanced back at Lucan and the others. “I don’t think she realized the significance of what she’d done, but there’s no mistaking the power she threw at me without really trying.”

“Jesus,” Lucan whispered tightly, his jaw rigid.

“Her pain is stronger now than it has been before, too,” Brock added. “I don’t know what’s going on, but everything about her seems to be intensifying now that she’s awake.”

Lucan’s scowl deepened as he glanced at Gideon. “We’re certain she’s human, and not a Breedmate?”

“Just your basic Homo sapiens stock,” the Order’s resident genius confirmed. “I asked Alexandra to conduct a visual scan of her friend’s skin right after they arrived from Alaska. There was no teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark anywhere on Jenna’s body. As for blood work and DNA, all of the samples I took came back clear, as well. In fact, I’ve been running tests every twenty-four hours, and there’s been nothing notable. Everything about the woman to this point—aside from the presence of the implant—has been perfectly mundane.”