More Than Life (Arcane Crossbreeds) Read Online Free Page A

at her. It was a risk she could no longer tolerate, one that threatened her very soul and forced her to a startling realization.
    She was one hell of a fighter, and she wasn’t going to fade away if she could help it. She was strong. These bastards wanted her for some reason, and whatever that reason was, it was important enough for them to work real hard at it, and she made sure they did indeed have to. It was the least she could do. She’d even found the chip they’d imbedded at the base of her skull, which was silver, no less. Since her species couldn’t move through silver, the chip prevented her from shimmering from one location to another.
    She’d dug that bad boy out with the sharp edge of a coil from her metal cot. At the time, she’d been too weak from their experiments to shimmer out of the complex once she got the damn thing out, but she had managed to cause some havoc and send the guards scrambling. Then it was good-bye cot, hello silver-lined cell.
    A feral smile curled her lips. At least they’d had to pay a ton to keep her in one place. There was some satisfaction to be had in that.
    Now she was under constant surveillance. There were probably night-vision cameras monitoring her at this very moment. Analyzing the success of their tampering.
    Well, the joke was on them. While they were constantly removing blood and infusing her with who knew what, she was changing in ways they’d never know. Not if she could help it. She was in control in that regard, not them. She could feel their frustration, their desperation, as test after test failed to yield what they wanted. Whatever their goal, they’d made her one messed-up piece of work in the process. A veritable freak of nature. She intended to turn all of it back on them.
    It wasn’t like she had a life outside this place anymore. Even if she could escape, she would never be accepted by the Alliance, or her own House for that matter. There would be no place for her in her old world. Even her uncle, her only family, would be forced to turn her away.
    Beneath her hands, her belly tensed, and the steady beat of her heart quickened in her ears. The nerve endings in her fingertips tingled.
    Slow down. Focus. One misstep, one single wrong move, and she would lose all control, betraying the secrets she kept, and even though she wasn’t sure what they were looking for, she refused to volunteer anything.
    Katya rubbed two fingers absently over the crisp material of her hospital gown. Hospital. Right. This place was hell and gone from a hospital. More like some research facility.
    Pain and desolation saturated its walls; the screams and moans that normally penetrated into her cell were a testament to the horror of what was going on in here.
    What she wanted to know, what drove her now, was finding out why. She wasn’t a scientist or anything, but she knew they weren’t just randomly experimenting on the people trapped in this place. They had a purpose. She’d heard them refer to the others here as subjects in specific trial groups, none of which made any sense to her. The one thing that did translate was that they had a particular outcome in mind.
    For some reason, she was the key to achieving it. That doctor had taunted her with it.
    “You’re more than I ever hoped to find.” That cold, latex-covered hand patted her bare thigh, lingering with its corpselike weight against her skin. “Yes, little one, you’re the link to unlocking the whole puzzle.”
    Revulsion. Fear. Fury. It twisted and spiraled inside her until she thought she might lose her control, blow her big secret. Then she’d look in those beady dark eyes and promise herself she would rip him apart. Soon. The promise always soothed her.
    But first she needed to know. She played the past twenty years of her life endlessly through her mind in the darkness, analyzing every word, every look, trying to determine if there had been a sign things were heading in this direction. Why her? What was so