Ignoring the jibe, he asked, "So what did the books reveal?"
"The answers, at least to some extent. It appears 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 abruptly disappear."
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.
He didn't reach out. Didn't dare. He had a feeling that once breached, 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 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 diddly-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 his mind, almost numbing in its intensity.
"Not human in what way?" she said, her voice soft and tightly controlled.
"They were elementals—the essence of nature itself. There were apparently four types—sun, earth, wind, and water."
"Then a sun elemental could, say, control a fire, even appear to swallow it?" Gabriel said, remembering the story he'd read in the archives. And a water elemental could control a storm, using the lightning as a weapon, as Sam had done.
Karl nodded. "Each walker was the master of his element.
Their ability to disappear into shadows came from the fact they were more energy beings rather than flesh. Vampires disappear into shadows by exerting psychic pressure on the human sense of sight, making it appear the shadows wrap around them. A walker merely lost his human shape, reverting to energy form."
Sam scrubbed a hand across her eyes. "So basically, what you're saying here is that I'm not human? That I never was?"
She hesitated, swallowing heavily. "How is that even conceivable? I'm flesh and blood. I'm not made of energy, for Christ's sake."
"Sam, you have human elements in your coding, the same as a changer, a shifter, or even were." O'Hearn's voice was gentle, almost soothing. "But the dominant sector in your DNA seems to be what we presume is walker coding."
"If the walkers were all powerful, why even bother patching in changer or were coding? It's not as if I can shift or change."
She scrubbed a hand through her hair, eyes a little wild.
She didn't want to be anything more than human, Gabriel realized. She might want to discover her past, but in many respects, she feared it. Or, rather, feared discovering just what she might be—and what she could do.
While that fear was totally understandable, if what O'Hearn was suggesting was true—and he had no doubt that it was— then it was more important than ever that they press forward on the quest to discover who had made her, and why.
Because not only was the military now interested in her, but someone far worse also held an interest. Sethanon.
"But you can channel the power of the storms," O'Hearn continued softly. "Which suggests, perhaps, that the walker strands are dominant in you."
"Meaning I'm likely to dissolve into darkness at any given minute?"
The silence seemed filled with sudden tension, and Gabriel wondered why.
Finley cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, you have already begun to fade."
"What the hell are you on, Finley?" Gabriel snapped. Sam was sitting there, as plain as day, despite the darkness that had gathered in the office. He could see the fear in her blue-grey eyes, the whiteness of her knuckles as she clasped her hands in her lap.
O'Hearn and Karl shared a look. Karl waved a hand in Sam's direction. "You can see her?"
Stupid question—wasn't it? "Yeah." He frowned. "You honestly can't?"