Penumbra (Spook Squad 3)

Gabriel frowned. “I thought you had to undergo the change to gain the extra chromosomes.”

“So did I.” O’Hearn’s voice was dry.

“Normally, yes,” Finley said. “But in recent government tests, vamp chromosomes have been successfully introduced into both pig and rat embryos.”

Sam’s face echoed the horror Gabriel felt. Government meddling with the very beginnings of life could never be a good thing.

“What the hell is the government doing that for?”

Finley shrugged. “Vampires have what humanity has long searched for—life everlasting.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah, but at what cost?”

“To some, the cost doesn’t matter.” Finley hesitated, frowning slightly. “Anyway, while we were trying to decode the unknown strands, I remembered my father once saying he worked with a man who could melt into shadows. Handy, when you were a member of covert operations. At the time, I thought my father meant a vampire, but since AD Stern here questioned me about the existence of shadow walkers, I began to wonder.”

“So you questioned him?” Gabriel interrupted tersely. Finley had a tendency to ramble if left unchecked.

The young doctor nodded. “He confirmed the man was a walker. One of six the Australian military had on the payroll.”

If they were on the payroll, why was there no record of them now? “What happened to them?”

Finley shrugged. “Dad wasn’t sure. It seemed they disappeared after the Race Wars.”

Sent to Hopeworth, perhaps? It was certainly a possibility—especially if Sam proved to have walker blood in her.

“Could he point you to anyone who might know more?”

“He did—to two men, actually. Robin Deleware and Frank Lloyd. Deleware died some three years ago, and Lloyd—”

“—is a general stationed at Hopeworth,” Sam muttered. Her gaze met Gabriel’s. “That man keeps reappearing.”

And the reason behind Lloyd’s interest in Sam was becoming clearer. “Lloyd’s not likely to help us.”

“No,” Finley agreed, “but Deleware still might. It appears he was Karl’s uncle.”

“On my mother’s side,” Karl explained with a grin. “I inherited all his books when he died, you see. Among them were his journals.”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “I thought personal journals were banned in covert operations?”

Karl’s grin widened. “Rules are made to be broken, as you should know.”

Ignoring the jibe, Gabriel asked, “So what did the books reveal?”

“The answers, at least to some extent. It appears that both Lloyd and my uncle were involved in the research side of operations. Walkers are mentioned extensively in three of his journals, and then they disappear abruptly.”

Because the walkers themselves disappeared? Or was there a more sinister reason?

Sam shifted slightly on her chair, and her tension was a darkness that crawled through his mind. Her thoughts flashed like fire behind that darkness. He only had to reach out and he could be there, sharing them. But he didn’t reach out. He didn’t dare. He had a feeling that if he breached them one more time—as he had when he’d used their bond to find her at the condemned hospital—he would never again be able to raise the barriers that had protected him for so long against the psychic bond of his twin, and the more recent one he’d developed with Sam. “What did the journals say?”

“For a start, they noted that the walkers had an extra chromosome, one that resembled an S. While it had no pair, it seemed able to fuse itself onto the X and Y pairings. To what purpose, we have no idea, but it’s exactly what we’ve seen in Samantha.”

“All of which means squat to me.” She hesitated, drinking the remainder of her scotch in one quick gulp. “Nor does it really tell us what the hell walkers were.”

Karl smiled. “I suppose it’s hard to get excited if you’re not a scientist. From what the journals say, walkers were not, in fact, human—not even in the sense that changers and shifters are human. They are, in fact, an entirely new species rather than a human offshoot.”

Other than a slight leeching of color from her face, there was no immediate reaction from Sam. But her shock clubbed at Gabriel’s mind, almost numbing in its intensity.

“Not human in what way?” she said, her voice soft and tightly controlled.