Lightning Game (GhostWalkers #17) -Christine Feehan Page 0,3
once set on an enemy, he would find them. Animals and birds aided him. He was silent and deadly. Diego appeared mild-mannered, but he truly was a dangerous man.
“Still, step aside. I might have to be the one to open the door. I can’t take chances that the brain in our family gets blown up. I’d have to file all kinds of reports, and I do hate paperwork. Not to mention Ezekiel would be really pissed.”
Ezekiel Fortunes. The man who had ultimately saved their lives. They owed him everything. The two boys had waited until spring before they packed what little they had and hiked to the railway, hopping the train leading out of the mountains. They rode the rails for days, staying hidden, until they got off in a big city thinking they could find work. It was a terrible mistake, one of the worst they’d ever made. There were no jobs. Now they had no home and no forest to hunt or trap in. No stream to fish in.
Everyone they loved was dead. No one knew they even existed. Not a single person cared whether they lived or died. And then they ran into Ezekiel Fortunes. He wasn’t much older than they were, but he knew the streets of Detroit. He had two younger brothers he protected, but he was still willing to take them on as long as they followed his rules.
They believed in Ezekiel so much they ended up following him into the military and ultimately into the GhostWalker program. And yeah, he’d be pissed if they got blown up because they were so careless they didn’t look for a grenade when they knew someone had been in their cabin.
“There’s no grenade,” Rubin admitted. “I’d feel it.” He could too. He could disrupt electronics with the energy in his body and he could feel traps fairly easily.
He’d been enhanced, just as all GhostWalkers had, both psychically and physically. They’d all signed on for the psychic enhancements, but they had been tricked into the physical enhancements. There was no going back. Dr. Peter Whitney had performed the surgeries on all of them, changing their DNA, giving them different traits and abilities, making them into something they were never meant to be.
The first team Whitney had experimented on was “flawed.” Many suffered all kinds of physical problems and needed “anchors” to work outside of their environments without the continual assault from the outside world on their unprotected brains. There were four teams, and Whitney had improved his soldiers with each team. No one realized that prior to working on the soldiers he had performed hundreds of experiments on orphaned girls, believing them to be useless and, in his mind, giving them a higher purpose—serving their country.
Rubin opened the door to the cabin, bracing himself for the flood of memories before walking inside. The cabin should have been dirty. Dusty at the very least. Instead, not only was it immaculate, but someone had fixed it up, repairing the sink that he’d been telling himself he would get to the last two visits. The wood around it had rotted. He was going to replace it but never had enough time. Someone had not only done so, but the job was impeccable.
Rubin turned to look at his brother, not knowing how to feel about someone invading their cabin and actually working on it. No one had ever done anything to the Campo cabin other than a Campo. He stepped into the middle of the room and took a long, slow look around, taking in everything. His brother took his back, doing the same. It was a familiar position, but they were looking at a very unfamiliar cabin.
Their cabin didn’t even smell the same. Coral honeysuckle was rare to find in the mountains and yet the cabin definitely held the subtle fragrance, mixed strangely enough with the scent of daffodils. His mother called them jonquils. All along the neighboring holler where they grew freely, they referred to them as Easter lilies. There was no hint of a musty smell at all. The loft held a new mattress. He could tell because it didn’t stink of the usual rodents that had burrowed their way inside the foam. A sleeping bag covered the top of the mattress.
Someone hadn’t been taking things from their cabin. Someone was living there. That someone was female. There were no flowers, but that fragrance told both men the occupant was a woman.