Renegade Passion by Lisa Renée Jones Page A

morality and restoring the honor of the army and his country. Kel, well, he didn’t have a lot of faith in that happening, not after their special forces unit had been told they were getting immunizations, when they were really given experimental DNA. But hell, as long as he didn’t have to don any red, white, and blue leotard, he was willing to play superhero, and see where it landed them. Kel glanced at his watch. “You’re a full ten seconds behind on the landing. Getting slow in your old age. Oh, right. We don’t age anymore, so you’re just slow.”  
     
    “I wasn’t aware it was a race,” Damion commented dryly.  
     
    “Confucius say ‘Life’s always a race,” Kel said, ”then you die’.” They started walking toward an elevator.  
     
    Damion flipped him an incredulous look. “Confucius did not say that.”
     
    “No,” Kel agreed, “but my fortune cookie last night did.”  
     
    They stepped into the elevator that would lead them to a tunnel beneath the building next door, a huge entertainment complex that drew many a Vegas tourist. They were dressed to blend with the crowd, both in jeans, t-shirt and boots, his with an   Aerosmith logo, Damion’s a basic black. Kel pulled off the civilian routine pretty darn well with his long brown hair, and his arms and a good portion of his body well inked with tats. Damion, not so much. He was army through and through, from his short military cut to the stern expression that might as well be tattooed on his face. But they weren’t there for   fun and cotton candy. Roasted peanuts might be on the menu later, after they finished up one of those superhero missions they called their life these days.  
     
    “Any idea what this is about?” Kel asked as they stepped off the car and entered the underground tunnel.
     
    “Only that Sterling needed you involved,” Damion said. “So I assume they need someone’s memory wiped.”
     
    A handful of the GTECHs involved in the Area 51 experiments had developed unique abilities. Kel’s was one that he carried with some weight on his shoulders. The decision to wipe away someone’s memory wasn’t something to be taken lightly, but there were times when it saved lives.  
     
    It didn’t take long before they were inside the facility, standing in a small room with rows of monitors across the front wall. Sterling Jeter, the head of the Renegade’s inner-city operation, was facing a master panel when they walked in. His spiky blonde hair was in disarray, as if he’d been running his hands through it in frustration.  
     
    Sterling rolled his chair around to face them, his eyes, black as coal like all the GTECHs, fixed on Kel and Kel alone. Tension rolled off the other GTECH and Kel didn’t miss the fact that Sterling’s normal wise-cracking sense of humor was no more present than his lifebond and wife, Becca – who had some pretty amazing powers of her own -– and who was usually by his side. “I have something you need to see,” Sterling said.  
     
    A   ridiculous sense of foreboding had every muscle in Kel’s body tensing with a   feeling that someone close to him was in danger. There was no one close to him. His father had been killed during a terrorist attack overseas while on active duty, when Kel was still a small child. His mother had died five years before that from cancer. His friends were these men, his fellow GTECHs. But there was someone else, someone he tried not to think about because it hurt too much.  
     
    Kel leaned against the wall, trying to calm himself when he’d never had that problem in the past. Never. “I’m all eyes and ears,” he said with a remarkably steady voice.  
     
    “It seems that the Zodius are bound and determined to find a way around the GTECHs inability to reproduce without an exact perfect female match, now rather than later,” Sterling continued. “They seem to be stepping up their fertility testing on human women. Five women disappeared this