Ghostly Game, page 23
“I tried the night she walked out on Gideon. The thing is, he did betray her. He told her she was safe with him. Everything she told him was in confidence. If a woman said those things to me and then turned around and told all her friends everything I said to her, I wouldn’t forgive her. In fact, I’d probably slit her throat.”
“That isn’t good,” Ethan said.
“No, it’s not,” Javier said. “And he couldn’t tell her anything about himself or what we do. To make matters worse, she realized he told us for our sakes and not for hers. He was looking out for us, not her. It wasn’t like he was trying to save her from Whitney. He was trying to save us. So that betrayal went even deeper.”
Ethan swore under his breath. “How do we make this right?”
Javier glanced at Rhianna. She shook her head. “That kind of betrayal had to devastate her. If she found it hard to trust in the first place . . .” She trailed off.
“We all know what having trust issues is like,” Ethan said.
They stopped in front of the three-story warehouse that Jaimie, Mack’s wife, had found first and begun to renovate into a home for herself. When the others found her, Mack had moved in and never moved back out. Now the place was completely finished, with Kane Cannon; his wife, Rose; and their son, Sebastian, residing on the first floor. The second floor was where the GhostWalker team met and planned their missions. Jaimie and Javier had computers set up on another part of the same floor. The entire top floor was home to Mack and Jaimie.
The three made their way to the second floor, where the rest of their GhostWalker family was waiting for them.
“It’s bad,” Javier announced without preamble. “We’re going to lose him if we don’t do something. He’ll take matters into his own hands; in fact, he’s planning to do just that.”
Mack sighed. “I’ll talk to her.”
“What can you tell her that Gideon couldn’t? We’re classified. Until we know she isn’t a threat, you can’t tell her anything. You can’t say he told us to protect her, because she’s intelligent and she already figured out he told us because he was worried Whitney may have sent her after Sebastian. Or to harm us in some way.”
He knew he sounded belligerent when Rhianna put a hand on his arm. Her touch was very light, but it was a reminder of who he was talking to. He knew none of this mess was Mack’s fault. It just was—a mess. And this was Gideon.
“She doesn’t know most of us,” Kane said. “Paul’s idea can still work. We go to the bar. One or two at a time, not sitting at her station, not paying attention to her. Paul can sit at the bar with Mack and get close enough to her to examine her. Is that feasible, Paul?”
“That could be difficult. If she’s moving around and there are quite a few people close by, it wouldn’t be easy,” Paul said. “I’m not a miracle worker.”
“We could go during her slowest time,” Mack said. “I could engage her in conversation. Talk about my wife.”
“If you made one misstep with her, she would know. She’s looking for us now,” Javier pointed out.
“We’re GhostWalkers,” Mack said. “If we don’t want to be seen, no one sees us. We hide in plain sight.”
“But not from each other,” Jaimie reminded him. “Don’t be so arrogant. She’s a GhostWalker too. She may not remember, but she has all the instincts, doesn’t she?”
“I didn’t think so,” Javier said. “At least not at first. I followed her home from the bar a couple of times she was followed. I took care of it because she didn’t seem to notice. Now, I don’t know. Her lungs are shit. That’s for real. She couldn’t outrun anyone if she tried to. I don’t know how she is at self-defense, because I’ve never seen her in action.”
“She seems like a decent person,” Ethan said.
“You know I don’t like being around many people outside of”—Javier circled the group with his finger—“but Rory can be included in those I’m fond of now. She’s genuinely a good person. I spent a couple of weeks watching her before Gideon ever approached her. I didn’t want her hurting Gideon. I like her, and that’s saying something.”
“I knew Rory as Laurel when we were children growing up,” Rose volunteered. “Whitney despised her because she had trouble breathing. She had an amazing memory, and she was good with languages. She had skills when it came to weapons and hand-to-hand combat. That didn’t matter, because she didn’t have what Whitney called ‘staying power.’ He wanted her to run for hours. She couldn’t run. And she couldn’t hit the times he demanded of her. He made them impossible. The more she failed, the worse her punishments were.”
“What does that mean?” Ethan asked.
“He would make it so she really couldn’t breathe. He’d force her to wear a mask over her mouth and nose, and then send her out to run in the heat. He’d have two of his soldiers chase her. They weren’t kidding around either.”
“Meaning?” Marc Lands asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“They would kill her if they could.”
The team members looked at one another with horror on their faces. “How old was she?”
Rose shrugged. “He started that kind of thing with a few of the girls when they were very young. Around seven or eight. The ones he didn’t like and thought were expendable. He believed she was useless and wanted to teach us all a lesson. None of us knew what that lesson was supposed to be.”
“But she survived,” Mack said.
Rose nodded. “She always came back. The soldiers didn’t. It was always hours later.”
“Did you ever ask her how she did it?” Kane asked. His hand slid up to Rose’s neck. He cradled his son’s little bottom in the crook of his other arm. Sebastian was listening intently, as if he understood every word being said.
Rose shook her head. “We were careful not to ask those kinds of questions of each other. We didn’t want Whitney to know any of our psychic abilities. By the time we were five, we understood he would use anything against us. We even tried to pretend we weren’t close, because he would use friendships against us. He tricked us all the time. We were young and wanted to believe him.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“He rotated girls in and out of the facilities.” She rested her head against Kane’s arm. “I was about ten when Whitney gave us all puppies to take care of. Each of us got one. We were so happy. We had the responsibility of looking after them and training them ourselves. Laurel and a couple of the other girls were younger, but they still took care of their puppies. When the dogs were a year old, he took us all to the arena. He had fighting dogs brought in, and one by one, he put our puppies in with them. In front of us they were killed. He blamed us and told us we didn’t prepare them. We didn’t teach them survival skills.”
Rose pressed trembling fingers to her mouth. “You can’t imagine how horrible it was. Laurel couldn’t breathe. I remember she tried to get into the ring with those terrible animals to stop them, but one of the guards stopped her. I think Whitney would have let her. I think he hoped the dogs would turn on her. She fell to the floor and went into convulsions. There was a doctor there and he went to her. She was carried out. Whitney called her a disgrace. He said she wasn’t strong enough to be a soldier and never would be. He always talked about her like that.”
“If you were ten,” Mack said, “and she’s younger than you, she had to have been seven or eight.”
Rose nodded. “After that, he sent her on mission after mission. She was forced to sleep in an attic. It was horribly stuffy and dirty. We tried to go up there to clean it, but he had guards to keep her from getting out or us from getting in. After every assignment, he would force her to go into that place.”
“When did he give you the tattoos?” Rhianna asked.
“It was just a couple of weeks after he killed our puppies. None of us would cooperate with him. I think he thought he needed to do something that would turn everything around, and it did. We were all young enough to want to have a parent. He was all we had. Each one of us had artwork that was beautiful and specially designed just for us. We were very excited. Laurel loved her tattoo, but she wasn’t like a couple of the girls. She didn’t trust him. I don’t know if he had expected she would fall for his gift and fawn all over him, but when she didn’t, he went back to sending her out on as many assignments as possible. Then one day, she just wasn’t with us anymore. He never said where she went. Whether she was alive or dead.”
“Did Whitney act upset, as if she had escaped him? Or did you think he sent her away to another facility?” Mack asked.
Rose sat up straighter, obviously trying to remember. “It was a long time ago. He detested so many of us. None of us ever pleased him. He’d sent her out on a mission with two of us, and everything went wrong. We were trying to get away and Ivy was wounded. It was clear we couldn’t outrun the men following us. The terrain was sandy. The air was dry. There were these formations like dunes but made of rock, dirt, sand and grass. One had a bit of a hollowed-out area. Not much. You could see it plain as day, even though it was night.”
Sebastian, as if knowing his mother was reliving a bad experience, reached out with his little baby fingers and touched her face. She immediately took his hand and kissed it.
“I’m fine, honey,” she reassured him. “This happened when I was a little girl.” She took another deep breath. “Laurel indicated the ground swelling and told us to press tight against the wall of dirt and not to move or make a sound. Just to trust her. She was wheezing bad and trying not to cough. Then she went silent. I did what she said. To this day, I don’t know why. I thought it was crazy. Anyone should have been able to see us. We were right out in the open. She put her body in front of ours, especially in front of Ivy’s. The next thing I knew, I was looking through what appeared to be a gray veil. That’s the best way I could describe it.”
“A gray veil?” Javier echoed.
She nodded. “The men following us came running straight at us. They were so close we could have reached out and touched them. They were carrying semiautomatics and cursing up a storm because we’d stolen the plans to the underground fortress and tunnel system that had just been completed. Nearly everyone who’d worked in the tunnels or on the fortress had been killed, at least according to Whitney. My guess is those guards were going to die for letting us get away with the plans. Those blueprints were kept in a vault under high security.”
“The blueprints should have been burned,” Mack said.
“It was a maze down there. I think Angelo Perez, the man who had it built, was afraid he might get lost,” Rose replied. “In any case, the guards didn’t spot us even when they looked right at us. It was so weird. Ivy was bleeding, but they didn’t see the bloodstains. Laurel was no longer coughing or wheezing, and even our normal breathing was muffled to the point I couldn’t hear it.”
There was silence in the room filled with GhostWalkers. All of them were used to the various psychic gifts the others had, but Rose was describing something a child of seven or eight had done to protect others under extreme circumstances.
“Laurel—Rory—shielded you from your pursuers?” Mack wanted clarification. Astonishment and maybe even awe showed in his tone. “At that young of an age?”
“She had to have, Mack,” Rose said. “How else weren’t we seen? Those men were right on top of us. They would have caught us. There was no way we would have gotten away from them. It cost her though. We stayed hidden for hours. They came back over and over, searching most of the night. When we were finally able to step away from the wall, she collapsed, gasping for breath and coughing. She was far worse off than Ivy.”
“I take it Whitney wasn’t pleased with her.”
“We couldn’t tell him what she did for us. No one ever told him anything. He was terrible to her. He said the worst things, even told her she was better off dead. That we’d be better off if she were dead. He had her dragged to the attic when she desperately needed a treatment for her lungs. We wanted to go to her and tell her we would have died if she hadn’t been with us, but we couldn’t get to her. We never saw her again after that. She disappeared. Ivy and I talked it over. We thought maybe she died in the attic because she couldn’t breathe.” There was sorrow in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Rose. That must have been very difficult for you,” Javier said. “For all of you. Whitney deserves a very special place in hell for everything he’s done.”
“I wish I could tell you more, but I have no idea what really happened to her,” Rose admitted.
“There’s no doubt that she’s a GhostWalker,” Mack said. “We still don’t know if Whitney took her to another facility and programmed her and then sent her here to try to take Sebastian from us. Or to harm one of us.”
“Mack,” Jaimie protested. “I investigated her background. She’s traveled all over the state for the last few years. It seems unlikely that she would have waited this long to approach us if she meant us harm.”
“Unless her background is entirely fabricated, Jaimie,” Kane pointed out. “You know that’s possible.”
“True, but it would be unlikely anyone would be good enough to hide the fact that they contrived their background from me. I’m very thorough and so is Javier. We both investigated her separately. I can’t imagine that we would be fooled.” She looked to Javier.
He shook his head. “She traveled to each of those places and worked at the various bars. I’d bet my life on it.”
“That’s it, then. Gideon is family. Rory is his choice. His woman. That makes her family. This is for him,” Mack said. “No one has to help. It’s strictly volunteer. We don’t know how much of a threat Rory represents. I’m going to go in with Paul and see if he can tell whether she’s been programmed in any capacity. Hopefully not with a bomb. That’s my greatest fear.”
Jaimie raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t even think of that. I guess I was wondering how you were going to tell if Whitney had ordered her to make a try for Sebastian. How would you determine that?”
All eyes turned to Paul.
“Hopefully, I’ll know when I look at her. I’m very interested in examining her lungs and bronchial system. Even if she had asthma to begin with, Whitney clearly made her situation worse. I’ll try to find out everything I can.”
“I can go with Paul, Mack,” Lucas Atherton spoke up. He had the good looks of a model and was considered charming. “I can talk with the best of them.”
“I already told all of you, this is my team and I’m responsible. If there is a problem, I make the decisions. I’m with Paul. We’ll see how things go.”
“Jaimie, make a schedule for the next couple of weeks for us,” Kane suggested. “That way we aren’t overrunning the bar. See if you can get Rory’s shifts at her work so we know when she’s on.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Jaimie agreed. “And I’ll be taking a shift as well.”
“Anyone who wants to help look out for Rory, put your name on the roster,” Mack added. “We need to make sure the camera feeds in the apartments are working, as well as the ones we added on the street. We want eyes on her.”
“Gideon has a bad feeling,” Javier said. “He said he’s sure she’s in danger. Gideon has never been wrong about his feelings.” He stood up. “I’d better get back to him before he does something crazy, like try to send his spies to her. Paul, you want to come with me?”
“I’m probably not his favorite person right now.”
“You will be when you tell him you’re going to the bar to try to make sure she’s healthy.”
“Don’t bet on it. I’m the one who had the brilliant idea to be honest with her,” Paul reminded him.
“You were right,” Rhianna said. “There was no other way to handle it. It would have been ten times worse if Gideon had lied to her about telling us.”
Javier ignored the byplay between them, suddenly anxious to get back to Gideon. As a rule, Gideon was one of the most patient of all the team members. He could always be counted on to put things into perspective. But ever since he’d been shot so many times and the wound wasn’t healing as fast as Gideon thought it should, he’d been acting differently.
Javier knew Gideon had almost died. No one, not even Paul or Marc, had expected him to live, and Paul was a brilliant psychic surgeon. Marc was an incredible medic. Had Paul not been in the field with them, Gideon wouldn’t have had a chance. Even now, Javier could tell Paul worried. Whatever he had done to save Gideon, no other surgeon could have done. Paul was aware the repair was still fragile. He didn’t want Gideon moving around the way his patient was doing. That made Javier nervous, and Javier wasn’t the type to get nervous.
Gideon was still standing in the same spot facing the bar where Javier had left him. He didn’t turn around when Rhianna, Paul and Javier joined him.
“I felt a threat to her entering the bar just a few minutes ago,” he announced to the others.
“How close?” Rhianna asked.
Gideon tapped his fingers against his chest over his heart. “He’s a distance away from her, still close to the door. I’m losing him in the crowd.”
No one would ever question Gideon’s assessment of a threat. He was right too many times. If he said there was an enemy close, they took it as gospel.
“I’m leaving now,” Rhianna said. “I’ll sit at one of the back tables with Jaimie. If I spot anyone who looks like a threat, I’ll let you know. If you can dial him in, you let me know.”
“Mack and I will sit at the bar, and I’ll see if I can get a sense of whether Whitney has done anything to make Rory a threat to Sebastian or even to herself,” Paul added.
“Is it a good idea for Jaimie and Mack to be in the bar at the same time without appearing to be together?” Gideon asked. He still didn’t take his gaze from the building several blocks down. “They give off fairly heavy energy when they’re in the same room. She’s sensitive to energy.”
