Camellia regarded what she was as a miracle. Something extraordinary. Maybe because she had realized all the amazing things she could do thanks to her enhancements. Middlemist Red and the mycelium protected her and kept her company. Middlemist Red gave Camellia the opportunity to create her garden and surround herself with beautiful plants and trees. She could grow food easily all year round, even during the coldest part of the season. She wasable to set up illusions and use both the mycelium and Middlemist Red networks to establish grids of alarms to alert her if anyone came near her home.
“Camellia.”
Jonas continued to level that golden gaze at her. Now it appeared glittery. More cat than not. A warning. A little shiver crept down her spine.
She let out an exaggerated sigh. He had sacrificed his pride; so could she. “I know how people react to me when they find out what I am. I’ve learned to live without that kind of prejudice, and I’m not willing to think badly about myself again. I have no interest in having people know what I can do. I especially don’t want anyone to think they can use me for experiments or even to tell me what to do ever again. I’ve been my own person for a long time. I don’t need or want a chain of command.”
She could see that resonated with him. It was the truth, or most of it, the way she saw it. She might want to see her sisters, the women she’d grown up with, but they were different. They’d moved on. They had lives completely different from hers. She didn’t want to blame them and she didn’t want to envy them. She wanted to be happy for them. She no longer trusted anyone. She had to fight to keep from being bitter. It wasn’t in her makeup, and she refused to allow it by starting up relationships better left alone. Jonas didn’t need to know any of that. She wasn’t about to explain it to him.
Camellia was also aware she couldn’t stay here if she didn’t go down and at least let the GhostWalkers know she was on the same mountain with them. Before Jonas’s arrival, she’d been wrestling with the choice between starting over somewhere else or forcing herself to actually be around a GhostWalker team. Sadly, when it came to the GhostWalkers, she just couldn’t see putting herself in that position. Jonas’s reaction had simply reinforced the conclusionshe’d already come to. She knew her decision was based on more than that, but she didn’t allow her mind to dwell on anything else. That was enough.
The moment Jonas was gone, she was going to get out.
“It doesn’t make sense to go it alone, Camellia,” Jonas said.
She could tell he was choosing his words carefully, trying not to dictate or use his naturally commanding voice.
“Whitney put that tattoo on you so he would always know where to find you. He’ll keep sending his supersoldiers after you. If you’re with a couple teams of GhostWalkers, they’ll still come at us, but we’ll have a much better chance of keeping them from taking you. And if they do, we’ll find you.”
“Now that I know he’s embedded some kind of satellite tracking in the tattoo, I’ll find a way to get rid of it, just the way I did the one he put in my hip,” she responded.
She didn’t believe for one single minute the GhostWalkers would risk their lives coming after her if she was taken. They might use her to try to find Whitney, but if they didn’t think she was with him, they wouldn’t come for her. She’d already seen Jonas’s reaction to her, and he was paired with her.
“Do you honestly think you can outrun him forever?”
“Nothing is forever, Jonas,” Camellia said. “I never thought I’d be free, but I have been. I’m not trading what I have for another kind of prison.”
“Do you think I’m in prison?”
“Only you can answer that question,” she countered. She was giving too much away. He knew she wasn’t going to stick around. She didn’t feel a threat from him, and so far, Middlemist Red hadn’t reacted as if she should be on alert, but then the plant might not. Camellia was in uncharted territory. Red would consider Jonas an ally. On their side. There was no way for Red to know that he was an enemy.
“I’m not in prison, Camellia,” he answered decisively. “You wouldn’t be either.”
“So, there isn’t a chain of command? You aren’t sent out on missions whenever someone deems it necessary for you to go? You just said to me, not even five minutes ago, that on more than one occasion, the mycelium beneath the ground warned you of danger, aiding you in saving your team.”
“I’m a GhostWalker, Camellia, a soldier. I have certain skills, and I use them in service for my country. You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. That doesn’t mean you can’t live in the compound with us. Not all the women work with the teams. That’s where freedom of choice comes in. I told you, we don’t report our talents to everyone. We don’t always document them.”
She analyzed his voice. It seemed to ring with truth. Red didn’t protest, so she took him at his word. “Not even to Lily Whitney? You don’t tell her? Or her husband?”
“Ryland is the head of our team. Sometimes a talent might be useful to the team, if we can learn to control it, and we share. But that’s our choice, not a requirement. At this point, we have so many attributes suddenly emerging that we don’t always know what to do with them. We have to work on the talent for months to get it under control enough to be in any way useful. Sometimes whatever comes out is more of a hindrance, like rage or the need to hunt at inopportune times. It’s a balancing act all the time.”
Camellia didn’t want to feel for him, but she did. She knew Whitney wanted to make his soldiers as aggressive as possible, and he’d used many of the most violent and predatory species to enhance them. Everything from leopards and wolves to reptiles and raptors, whatever he thought might make them more efficient killers.
Later, Whitney had acknowledged his mistake in blending so many strains into some of the men. Fortunately, he hadn’t done itto all of them, but in the ones he had, the mixture had been lethal, and not just to their enemies. Jonas was one of the few still alive. That meant he was a well-kept secret, because otherwise, he would have been sent out on a suicide mission. Or simply terminated. That meant his team was intensely loyal to him. She was grateful for that and a bit surprised. The guards Whitney employed in the various bases and laboratories she had been taken to were not in the least bit loyal to one another.
Now that she had time to think without being so hurt by his reaction, she realized how difficult it must be for Jonas to live with the need for violence all the time. He had to be at war with himself. She hadn’t been enhanced the way he had been. Whitney had gone shockingly insane with his enhancements and admittedly went too far with his first team.
Camellia acknowledged to herself that she should have cut Jonas a little slack at his first reaction to the revelation that he had mycelium in his physical makeup. No one would ever conceive of such a possibility—that Whitney could even make it a reality. By doing so, he had connected Jonas to the underground network that ran beneath the forest, or anywhere mycelium guarded the trees and shrubbery above ground. Jonas was clearly sensitive enough to tap into that network without realizing it.
Jonas had most likely believed his “danger sense” was one of many other mammalian or reptilian attributes Whitney had enhanced him with. When he realized none of the other GhostWalkers were aware of danger as early as he was, he had to have figured out that Whitney had given him something the others didn’t have. Something more, when he was already contending with enough.
She suppressed a sigh. She didn’t want to feel compassion for him. She wanted to sever all connection to him and make a run for it without feeling the least bit guilty. Instead, she was alreadyremembering every word Whitney had said about these first soldiers and how they were going to be able to go undetected behind enemy lines and wipe out entire camps without anyone ever knowing they had been there. He had designed them for perfection. They weren’t going to be the failures the women had been, because men were steadier and had better nervous systems and were so much stronger than women.
Whitney lectured the women, telling them he had bumped up the soldiers’ levels of aggression and enhanced their abilities to see and hear in any situation. They were perfect killing machines. He had bragged to them until he realized the soldiers were having the same problems as the women, some of them unable to go out on their own without severe repercussions.
It was the first time Camellia had ever seen Whitney thrown, if only for a short time. He was furious with the soldiers but soon turned the blame on the women. Somehow, it was their fault Whitney hadn’t prepared for the problems the soldiers faced. She knew some of the other women had taken his accusations to heart; by that time, thankfully, most of them knew better.
Camellia needed to change the subject, to steer it away from the things Jonas wanted to know and anything she might learn about him that would put more compassion in her heart. Already she melted each time she looked at him or heard his voice. She didn’t need to know things about him that would make him more amenable to overlooking his reaction to her.
