Kissing Sin (Riley Jenson Guardian 2)

Misha nodded. "The chance of having a son, with no strings attached, is something few male wolves would pass up."

"So why should I settle for you?"

He slipped into the opposite end of the spa, and stretched his arms across the edge. The heat of the water lent warmth to his pale skin, but it did little to erase the calculating chill from his gaze. "Because you also want answers."

"You haven't yet proven you can give them to me."

"No, but I will."

"And what do you get out of the deal?"

He raised an eyebrow. "A son or a daughter to carry my name."

The slight edge in his voice made me frown. "Why is that suddenly so important?"

"Because I'm dying."

I blinked, not sure I had heard him right. "What?"

"I'm dying." He shrugged, as if it was something he'd long ago accepted. "And I want to leave this world knowing something of me is left behind."

There was only truth in his words, not lies. At least in this one instance.

"You're dying because you're a clone?"

He smiled. "You know more than I thought."

"We've had Talon for a few months now."

"Ah, yes." He considered me, icy eyes slightly narrowed, nostrils flaring. Another wolf on the hunt, and I wasn't entirely sure for what. "Talon was produced in the same batch as I. There were three others produced alongside us. Talon and I are the only ones left alive."

"Why?"

"Because the very chemicals used to help give us life is now snatching it away." He grimaced. "I've begun to age at twice the normal rate. It isn't yet showing, but it soon will. If the pattern of my disintegration follows that of my lab brothers, I will be dead inside five years."

"And Talon?"

"Will undoubtedly soon suffer the same fate."

I wondered if Jack or the lab boys knew. "So how long ago did the three created with you die?"

"Two didn't make it to their teens. One died at sixteen."

I sipped my beer, then asked, "Why?"

He hesitated. "What do you know about cloning?"

"The DNA from a donor egg is sucked out, and the cell of a donor used to replace it. Then it's fried into activity and away it grows."

He grimaced. "Crudely put, but reasonably accurate. The process is far from perfect, even now. There are always problems, and those of us who do make it into adulthood without problems then have to contend with a self-destruct button that somehow is related back to the method used to fuse cell and egg and switch on the DNA sequencing." He took a drink, then added, "Two of the three who died were victims of large offspring syndrome, and one was born with an immune system than was, at best, poor."

From what I'd read about cloning, having two out of five survive into adulthood was a pretty damn good success rate. "Yet despite these difficulties, they obviously survived quite well At least for the first few years."

He nodded. "Medically, we're far enough advanced to keep them alive where once we could not. However, no one has yet uncovered the sequence that becomes the self-destruct button once the clone reaches a certain age. Nor do we know why some clones can reach their forties, like me, and others don't even live to see their tenth birthday."

"I'm amazed Talon never tried to research that - after ail, he had a vested interest in uncovering the answers."

"Talon is a lot less circumspect than his creator, as evident in his approach to cloning He also believes that he will not face what the rest of us have faced, that he is destined for greatness."