Navarro's Promise - Lora Leigh [48]
He remained still and silent, forcing himself to relax, to accept the electrodes on his chest, at his temples and his back. To hold out his arm for the pressure cuff, and his finger for the heart rate monitor.
“What happened to the simple stuff? Blood, saliva and semen?” He stared down at the cuff, resigned to the fact that to get the answers he wanted, he would have to deal with it. He didn’t have to like it. He didn’t have to like the memories the tests evoked, but he’d been trained to endure them.
Ely gave a muttered little snort, a sound filled with both frustration as well as resignation. “Evidently you haven’t been paying attention to your friends in the past few years, Navarro.”
Oh, he had, he just hadn’t wanted to admit what he was seeing.
His brow arched as though he was still unaware of that was going on. As though he was going to convince her he’d been living under a rock? It wasn’t going to happen.
Her head lifted, her brown eyes so confidently knowing he almost grinned. She knew he knew, but he wanted confirmation.
All amused knowledge and irritation aside, he knew what they’d learned in the Andes, knew what he’d read in the files that had been stolen from the labs during the rescues. And he knew that the signs of mating heat from then to now were far different.
“Mating heat is changing,” Ely finally revealed, her lips thinning as a hint of fear flashed in her dark brown eyes. “It’s becoming very unreliable in its symptoms and progression, as well as its reactions from couple to couple. I don’t know what we’re looking at anymore, Navarro.”
He could hear the hint of weariness, a fear for the future, and a sense of failure in her words.
“Have you managed to decode any of the files we sent from Haven?” In those files were years of research the Council scientists had done on mating heat at the Omega lab. The Omega Research Project had been a fully funded, closely watched project researching the mating heat phenomena that the scientists had been unable to grasp.
The aging delay, the higher human immunity and the strengthening of both body and senses of the human mate had fascinated the scientists, and pushed them to greater heights of depravity and pain than Navarro had seen before, or since. But what had especially fascinated them had been the rare times that they’d seen diseases disappear after a mating. The most notable, and the one that had infuriated the Council the most, had been the young scientist that had escaped with her Coyote mate. The scientist had been diagnosed with terminal cancer just weeks before. The members of the Genetics Council had been desperate to find them and to learn what drove the mating heat, as well as the anomalies that went with it.
“Bits and pieces. We’ve decoded nothing significant from them, but the files Storme Montague gave us are also giving us nightmares.” Ely recorded the readings on blood pressure, heart rate and whatever the hell the electrodes were on his flesh for.
She was trying to avoid the memory of whatever those files had revealed. He’d seen it in Styx Mackenzie several weeks before, when Navarro had come to Sanctuary before heading to New York, just as he’d seen it in both Jonas’s and Callan’s gazes.
There was something in those files that had left a portal of dark fury raging in each of them, and Navarro knew exactly what it was: Breed mating heat research and the mated couples who had been tortured so severely, so horrendously, that even though they couldn’t hear them, every Breed in those labs had sensed them, and raged inside for them.
Navarro stared across the room, ignoring Ely and the quiet assistant working with her as he once again pushed back those memories. He’d been a part of those labs. He’d sensed more than just their rage, their pain. He’d sensed that soul-deep darkness of an inner insanity that came with being unable to stop the destruction of their mate.
“Jenny, could you put a rush on those tests for me?” Ely asked, her tone more reserved as she spoke to the assistant. Suspicious. Ely would