“Like I did with you?” Nancy asked.
Luc flipped her off. “Nancy knows that if she harms one hair on any of our bodies, even looks at us in a way that I find annoying . . .”
The casual indifference that he always rocked slipped off his face like a mask falling away. He leaned forward, his eyes glowing like purple diamonds, as Nancy turned to him.
In that moment, I was seeing the Luc who caused grown men to piss themselves, the Luc I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and that Luc was downright disturbing-looking as his features sharpened.
“She knows I will have every single one of them killed in seconds,” he said, his voice low. “And if my people don’t hear from me, even if I can’t make it to a phone in time, they are all going to die. And then Nancy has nothing.”
Good God.
Kat stared at the kid like she’d never seen him before.
There was no doubt in my mind that Luc was capable of doing something like that. As messy and wrong as it was, he’d do it, but I also didn’t believe that he’d ever let those kids fall back into Nancy’s hands.
And I wondered if she really believed that. Then again, what choice did she have? “Why didn’t you just kill her?” I asked.
“We kind of need her,” Archer explained. “At least, we need the government, someplace safe until . . . well, hopefully there’s an ‘until’ and not a forever. We also needed to get you all out and we—”
“As freaking awesome as we are,” Luc threw out, slipping back into the not-so-disturbing Origin mafioso.
Archer sent him a bland look. “Going up against that many Luxen would prove difficult. Right now, she’s a necessary evil.”
“And boy, do we mean evil.” Luc grinned.
Sitting back, I thrust my hand through my hair. Looked like Luc had Nancy on a leash. There was so much running through my head.
“What now?” Kat asked, drawing my stare. “We need to get Dee away from them.”
That made me want to get her name tattooed on my freaking forehead.
“And we need to find a way to stop what is happening, what—”
And that made me want to lock her in a closet or something.
“What you need is rest and probably something to eat,” Archer jumped in, glancing at me. “Both of you. That is the priority.”
“There are things that are going down. Stuff I’m sure Nancy will be happy to share with you, but that’s for a different day.” Luc reached over, patting Nancy’s hand like she was a small child. “But there’s something else she does need to tell you.”
Nancy’s jaw jutted out.
I smirked. “I doubt there’s anything she can tell me I’ll give a crap about.”
“Actually.” Luc drew out the word. “I think you and Katy will care about this.”
Kat tensed. “What now?”
“Tell them,” he goaded, and when Nancy didn’t speak, he said in a hard voice, “Tell them the truth.”
Oh shit. My stomach took a drop off the deep end. “The truth about what?”
Nancy’s lips pursed.
Archer stood, folding his arms like he was about to be the muscle in the room, and I really didn’t like where any of this was heading. “What the hell? Just spit it out.” My patience was reed thin.
Nancy took a deep breath and then squared her shoulders. “As you know, Daedalus worked on many serums before we had any amount of success, and in some cases . . .” She paused, looking pointedly at Luc, who smiled brightly. “The successes proved to be failures in the end. There was the Daedalus serum, which was given to Beth and Blake and so on.”
Kat drew in a sharp breath at the name of the bastard I hoped was rotting in a special corner of hell. I hated the mere mention of him in her presence. Kat had taken him out, in defense, but I knew that what she’d had to do still got to her.
“Then, of course, there was the Prometheus serum,” she said, her eyes lighting up like a kid catching the Easter Bunny hiding eggs. “The serum that was given to the men you mutated.”
“You mean the men you forced to be mutated?” I challenged.
“The volunteers you mutated were given the Prometheus serum, just like the hybrids that the most recent batch of Origins were created from,” she explained, surprising me.
“Wait,” Kat chimed in. “You were just testing out that serum when we were there.”
Luc shook his head. “What she means is that humans who were accidentally mutated on and off throughout the years were given the Prometheus serum in test batches. Not ones like Daemon mutated, but people like you and Beth and anyone else out there who was healed by a Luxen.”
Confusion poured into me. “So you were testing the Prometheus serum for the first time on forced mutations?”
“Like I said, they volunteered,” she corrected.
I was about to volunteer my foot upside someone’s head. “Okay. This is great info, but basically useless to me.”
A smirk graced Nancy’s lips for the first time since our lovely reunion. “The Prometheus serum is different from the Daedalus serum. It ensures that the mutated human, that the hybrid, is not connected to the Luxen.”
My head cocked to the side. “Okay?”
“When you healed Kat, and Dr. Michaels alerted us when she fell ill, we didn’t use the Daedalus serum.”
Kat stiffened. “What? He said—”
“Do you think he really knew what we were handing him?” Her dark gaze fixed on Kat. “He believed what we told him and that was it. He was given the Prometheus serum, which is what was given to you.” Her attention flicked back to me. “It was the same thing given to those you also mutated, Daemon.”
“No.” I leaned forward. “That doesn’t make any sense. When Kat was shot—”
“You got sick. Thought you were dying? Oh, save us from the dramatics.” Her eyes rolled. “It’s because you truly bonded with her on an emotional level. You love her.” She spat out the L word like it was an STD. “Yeah, we’ve figured that out. The whole true want and need crap.”
“Well, yay for you, but I was dying.”
She shook her head. “You were weakened and you were ill, but if she had died, you would’ve survived. You would’ve gotten better. Life would’ve gone on. You just didn’t get to that point because obviously someone else healed her.”
Kat gasped.
I stood. The floor under my feet seemed to shift. I locked my knees together. I was rocked through and through, almost unable to believe her.
Nancy took a deep breath. “Your lives aren’t joined like you think they are. If one of you dies, the other will feel it—feel everything, down to the last breath, the last heartbeat—but the other one will take another breath and their heart will beat again.”