Danny Garza would have punched her for those words.
Martin-with-no-last-name only smiled, sad and wistful. “Scared? No.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Never.” He reached out and brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “All right. A few days.”
Heat scalded her face. “Okay, then.”
Tommy chortled.
All day long, she thought about it. Thought about him. It was a goddamned long day. After the lunch rush, she went over to Inez’s and asked if she’d take Tommy for the night.
Inez raised her eyebrows. “You met someone?”
“Yeah. Kinda.” Carmen’s unruly blood rose.
“Shit, girl!” Inez laughed. “I’d about given up on you. What’s he like?”
Good question. “I don’t know.” Carmen shrugged. “Kinda quiet. Nice,” she added, not sure if it was a lie or not.
“Huh.” Inez regarded her. “Well, good for you.”
She worked the rest of her shift. Tommy wasn’t happy about the arrangement, but he went anyway. He was a good kid, never prone to whining. She promised him he’d see Martin tomorrow. And then she went back to her room above the diner, where she found Martin waiting and the table laid with barbecue pork tortas and cool, sweating bottles of beer he’d gotten from a corner vendor.
“Aw, shit.” Tears stung her eyes. “Aw, shit, Martin!”
He blinked once, slowly. “I thought you might be hungry.”
“Yeah. No.” She wiped her eyes. “I gotta shower, okay?”
“Okay.”
When Carmen got out of the shower, he was standing before the window, gazing at the street below. His head turned slightly toward her, lowering sunlight gleaming on one cheekbone. She crossed the room on bare feet, wearing only her threadbare robe, and slid her arms around his waist from behind, laying her cheek against his back. “Make love to me,” she whispered. “Please.”
He turned in her arms. “You’re sure?”
She began unbuttoning his freshly laundered shirt. “Yes.”
It was and it wasn’t like it had been with other men. The act was the same, but he was different, so different. She traced the column of his neck with her open mouth, tasting him. His skin tasted like any man’s, but the flesh beneath it was too dense, too solid. When he kissed her, his lips were soft, but his tongue was alive with muscle. It excited her beyond reason.
“Jesus!” Carmen clutched him.
Martin’s brows furrowed. “You like it?”
“Yes!” She yanked at his shirt. “Yes!”
He was gentle; with any other man, she would have said too gentle. But there was nothing gentle about his body, the stark physical reality of it, sliding over hers as sleek and deadly as a shark in dark waters. She wrapped herself around him, clung to him as he moved in and out of her, and ripples of pleasure kept surging, surging. His cool skin grew hot. His cock felt like a living thing throbbing inside her. She came and came, stifling her cries against his shoulder, until finally he shuddered and went still. For a moment, his body went slack and she felt the full, impossible weight of him on her; then he sighed and rolled over.
Carmen lay breathing hard. “Martin?”
“Yes?”
“What the fuck are you?” she asked. He didn’t answer. “I’m serious.” She propped herself on one elbow and stared at him. “Who are you? What are you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” She blew out her breath in frustration. “Okay. Shit. We just fucked. I just fucked you without a condom. Shit. I let you come inside me. And I don’t even know your last name.”
“Ah.” He smiled wryly. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
“From what?”
He ran his thumb over her lower lip. She resisted the inexplicable urge to grab his dark, sinewy hand and suck his thumb into her mouth. “Me.”
“You’re clean?” Carmen asked. “Yeah, well, good. Me, too. But that’s not the only risk. I can’t afford another kid.” She shook her head, tears welling. “It’s not even that, you know? It’s just… who the fuck are you? Why am I doing this? Jesus! Tell me something; tell me anything. Make me feel better about it. Where do you come from and where are you going? Where were you even born? ’Cause I know it’s not America. I can hear it in your voice, man. I’ve heard a hundred thousand different soldiers’ accents, and yours isn’t one of them.”
“Hush.” Martin gathered her into his arms and let her cry. “I’m sorry.”
She cried harder. “No, you’re not!”
“I am,” he said. “You don’t know.”
She lifted her head and glared through her tears. “Don’t know what?”
“You don’t know what a gift you are,” he said softly. “Don’t know how beautiful you are. Don’t know what a gift your desire is.”
Carmen sniffled, inhaling snot and tears. “Well, I can’t fucking help it!”
“Carmen.” Martin cupped her face in his strong hands, gazed at her with his calm, fearless eyes. “Okay. You did this because you wanted to, and that’s a gift I’ve never been granted before. I hope I accepted it with grace. Because that’s what it was, a gift of grace. I can’t answer a lot of your questions because I don’t know the answers. Okay?”
“I guess,” she murmured.
“I’ll tell you what I do know.” He caressed her face, his touch at once soothing and arousing. “You’re okay. We could fuck all day long, and I couldn’t get you pregnant. I’m sterile. A mule. So that’s all right. And I know where I was born.”
“Yeah?” Carmen swiped at her dripping nose.
“Yeah.” Martin smiled. “It was an island. A barren island. Seems fitting, eh?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “What island?”
“La Gonâve,” he said.
“Where’s that?”
He shrugged. “It’s part of Haiti.”
“Oh, holy shit!” Carmen sat bolt upright, wide-eyed, clutching the damp sheets to her breast. “You’re one of the fucking Lost Boys!”
FOUR
She got the yellowing stack of tabloids from the closet and showed him the article while they ate cool tortas and drank warm beer. Martin laughed at the photo of the feral-looking wolf-man with the pointed ears and snarling face, but he didn’t laugh while he was reading.
“Where did you get this?” he asked when he was done.
“Ben,” Carmen said. “He was this soldier-guy I dated a long time ago. Before I met Tom’s father.” She shrugged. “His mother had a thing about those papers. I guess she was a little crazy. They’re not supposed to have newspapers from the outside world on the base, but she used to smuggle them to him somehow. She said they printed lots of bullshit, but that secret rebels in the government used them to leak true stories. Like it was some kind of code.” She paused. “Maybe she wasn’t so crazy, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Martin murmured.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” she asked. “About the Lost Boys.”
“There was a facility on La Gonâve,” he said slowly. “Funded by the Chinese. Yes. Haiti is a very, very poor country. For enough money, they were willing to permit things that would have been unthinkable even in China.”
“Like making…” Carmen skimmed the article, looking for the term and pronouncing it with care. “Human genetic hybrids.”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Artificial werewolves spawned in secret laboratories,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘An army of ravening wolf-men poised at America’s back door.’ She frowned. “What does ‘ravening’ mean?”
“Hungry,” Martin murmured.
Carmen eyed the empty plate before him. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I’m not a goddamn werewolf,” Martin said mildly.
She eyed him. “Yeah, right.”
He returned her gaze steadily. “They did a lot of experiments, tried a lot of things. When the Americans found out about the facility and raided it, the scientists burned all their records. I don’t know exactly what I am. None of us ever did.”
“Us.” She cleared her throat. “The Lost Boys.”
Martin nodded. “There were twenty of us. We were all around eight years old when the Americans took us.” He smiled briefly. “Some ravening army.”
“What’d they do with you?” Carmen asked.
“Studied us.” He shrugged. “Or at least they started to. Then the first big wave of flu hit and everything went to hell. All the important scientists were put to work looking for a cure or a vaccine.” Martin fell silent for a moment. “We grew up in laboratories,” he said at length. “They didn’t do any more genetic testing and no one ever told us what they learned from the first ones, but they’d have less important guys running less important tests. Strength, endurance, speed, metabolism. How much food we need,” he added, seeing the question on her face. “How long we could go without it. How long we could go without sleep. Sometimes they’d talk in front of us. That’s how I know we’re sterile. That’s how we learned about fear.”
Carmen blinked at him. “What’s to learn?”
“We don’t feel it,” he said.
“So you’re all like super-brave, huh?” she asked. “Big heroes?”
“No,” he said patiently. “We don’t feel fear. You can’t be brave if you can’t be scared. Henri figured it out. He was the oldest; he was sort of our leader. Fear’s a survival mechanism. You’re supposed to be scared of danger. Henri figured out that we were missing something. And he figured out that it meant we had to be extra careful. To learn to think about what we couldn’t feel.”