Christine Feehan: Predatory Game

“I liked you, Brian. You’re very good at what you do.”

“You don’t have to stop liking me. I’m no different from you. I do a job. My job was to look out for you and I’ve done it. The next time you have a maggot on the ground, Saber, kill it. You’ve been taught right. Just because you don’t want to work as an assassin anymore doesn’t mean all of your training should be thrown out. You should be able to keep yourself alive.”

Brian glanced over at Brady. “I’ve got to go. There are a couple of people I want to see before I take off.”

She took a step toward him. “Not Jess.”

“Of course not Jess. Back off, Saber. I wouldn’t want to have to knock you out. I don’t like seeing bruises on you. I’m going to see Patsy, just to make certain she’s all right. I’m not going after Jess.”

“She has guards on her,” Saber felt compelled to point out. She liked Brian. She thought of him as a friend. And she was stunned that she had worked with him night after night and never once caught on to the fact that he was a GhostWalker working for Whitney.

“He’s evil, Brian. You have to know that.”

“I’m a soldier, Saber. Just like you. I take orders.”

“You’re not in his breeding program?”

“That’s a rumor, nothing more.”

She shook her head. “You’re lying to yourself because you don’t want it to be true. Why do you think he let me go? He wants Jess and me to have a baby.”

In the distance they heard the wail of sirens. Brian didn’t look away from her. In his eyes, on his face, she saw respect-the respect of a fellow soldier-admiration for what she could do.

“I do my job, Saber. Go where they tell me and carry out orders. I’m going to see Patsy and then I’ll be gone. You stay out of trouble.”

“Brian, get another assignment. Anyone but Whitney. Ask for a transfer to one of the other GhostWalker teams. Someone is out to kill all of us and we have no idea who. Not Whitney, but someone high enough up that they can mess with assignments. Some of the GhostWalkers have been sent out on suicide missions. You need to know that and all the men on your team need to be aware of it as well.” She talked fast, keeping her voice low, aware of the janitor and two other security guards hesitantly coming toward them.

He smiled at her. “You take care of yourself. I have to get out before the cops arrive. Be safe, Saber. And don’t let your guard down.”

She was going to miss him. She watched him walk over to Brady and held her breath as he crouched down, took a pressure bandage out of his jacket, and handed it and Brady’s gun back to the ex-SEAL. Brian went over the side of the mountain, using the exact escape route Saber had scoped out months earlier. He would have a car and a pack stashed close by.

She ran over to Brady and knelt down beside him. He tore open the packaging with his teeth. She ripped at the material of his trousers. His thigh was soaked with blood.

“Here, give it to me. The paramedics will be here any minute.”

“Brian’s military,” Brady said. “Man, I didn’t catch that. He blended so perfectly.”

That was what a GhostWalker like Brian did. A chameleon, becoming who and what everyone expected. She shook her head. She’d heard of them, of course, but Brian was the first one she’d encountered. They could become anyone.

“Yeah, he’s military.”

“He executed that man.”

She didn’t reply, but sat back, rubbing her hand over her face, exhausted. Without Brian to pull the energy from her, she felt the aftereffects, although most of it was already dispersed. She held out her hand. “You have a cell phone.” Because all she wanted to do was talk to Jess-hear the comfort of his voice.

Brady lay back in the grass beside her. “My pocket.”

She glanced at him sharply. He was gray, with beads of sweat on his face. “Hey! You’d better not be thinking of dying on me.”

Alarmed, she bent over him and pressed her fingers to his pulse. At once she felt the rhythm of his body. She could read it easily now, after working with Patsy and Jess. He was losing too much blood too fast. Swearing, she knelt beside him.

“Close your eyes and try to relax. You’re going to feel warm, maybe even hot.”

A faint grin told her he wanted to give her a snappy comeback, but he didn’t have the energy to deliver it.

She sent out a tentative current, reading the feedback until she found the tiny nick in the artery. She closed herself off to all sights and sounds and sent a small pulse of heat to repair the tear. The electrical current stimulated cells to step up the repair process as well as closing off the artery.

Brady caught her wrist as she sank back on her heels. “What are you?”

She grinned at him. “I’m top secret, my friend.” And she could save lives as well as take them.

She found his cell phone and flipped it open to call the one man she needed to share that piece of news with.

“Logan and Neil checked out Les’s home and most of it was stripped clean. All but the little homemade dungeon he apparently had waiting for you,” Jess said.

Saber shuddered. “There are just some things in life it’s best not to hear about and Les’s dungeon is one of them. What do you mean the house was stripped clean? Weren’t there any prints?” She felt awful. So tired she could barely stand, and twice now she’d had nosebleeds. She’d covered it up at the police station when she was giving her report, but all she wanted to do was crawl in a hole somewhere.

Jess leaned forward in his chair to reach the cup of coffee she put on the table in front of him. It had been a long day with the police, checking on Brady at the hospital, visiting Patsy, and then talking with Logan and Neil. Saber hadn’t even gone to bed. They lost both soundmen at the radio station and he sure as hell didn’t want Saber to go in to work. He didn’t want her away from him.

“There were prints, but they didn’t tell us too much that we didn’t already know. I ran his prints when I hired him, and nothing popped out at me. It seems he failed to mention on his resume that he spent a couple of years working at the Whitney Research Center in California.”

“Brian said Les was reporting to Whitney, but he was a very sick man. Do you think Whitney knew he was sick and that’s why he sent Brian as well?” Saber asked. She yawned and pressed two fingers to her throbbing temples, trying to stop the incessant pounding. “It’s all too complicated for me to figure out.”

“They found recordings of Les’s ramblings. Most of the recordings were missing, so I’m assuming the ones referring to Whitney were taken, but there were enough left to show his descent into madness. It seemed to happen over time.”

There was something in his tone that had Saber going on alert. She reached across the table and caught his hand, waited until his eyes met hers. “It had something to do specifically with me? Did Whitney set him up?”

“We don’t know, baby, but it’s a possibility.”

She jumped up and turned away from him to pace across the floor. Even her legs felt rubbery, her body trembling with weakness.

“Whitney had another man like this working for him, a very sick doctor. Logan thinks it’s part of a larger research project Whitney’s conducting.” As Saber went by him, Jess caught her arm to stop her. “We all believe that Whitney has psychic ability. That he reads people. How else would he find infants with psychic ability? He isn’t the kind of man to have a couple of deviants working for him unless he wanted to study them.”

She frowned and pulled her arm away, not wanting him to notice she couldn’t control the trembling. “Whitney sent him on purpose? How could he know that he’d come after me like that?”