“If Whitney conducted these experiments on military men . . .”
“Specifically men trained in Special Forces,” he interrupted.
“Great. That’s all I need.” She pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “If you’re military and no one has heard of GhostWalkers, this information has to be classified.”
“It is.”
Tansy swung away from him, keeping her back to him to hide her expression. He didn’t need to see her face or look into her eyes to know she was in pain. He swore silently as he followed her up the trail toward her camp.
“Don’t tell me any more,” Tansy cautioned. “Really. I don’t want to know any more, not if it’s classified. You want something from me I can’t give you. There’s no need to say another word about whatever is going on. Find one of the other girls.”
“They can’t do what you do.”
He refused to lull her into a false sense of security, or lie to her, or even try to soft-soap her. She was going to be walking into hell with him. The only thing he could do for her was to try to give her all the truth, and to give his word that he’d be standing beside her the entire time. That was all he had for her.
“I can’t do what you think I can.”
They were nearing the top of the trail. The sun was setting and the colors changed abruptly as they topped the ridge. Orange and red poured down from the sky like molten fire. Tansy paused to survey the colors and Kadan stepped up beside her, admiring the view. Below them was a valley and then beyond that another granite peak. Stretched out as far as the eye could see was pine and fir forest. Small natural lakes and a few spilling waterfalls dotted the hills while the setting sun washed the granite in gold.
“There’s a big difference between can’t and won’t,” Kadan said, keeping his eyes fixed on the beautiful sight surrounding them. “I think if you let me explain what’s going on, you’ll understand why I needed to come all this way to pull you out of retirement in spite of the fact that your last case landed you in the hospital. I wouldn’t have made the decision lightly.”
He said it so matter-of-factly.
Landed her in the hospital
. As if it had been a small vacation for her—or as if she had been slightly wounded. Tansy swallowed the bile rising and began meticulously counting again, keeping her mind on her foot placement as she hurried along the winding trail to her campsite.
Shadows shifted as the sun dipped lower and the wind picked up, ruffling the trees. With the breeze came a rush of sound, voices murmuring, slyly laughing, the first burst of visions, blood splashed on the walls. A soft moan escaped, fear clogging her throat. She pressed her fingers hard against her eyes. “You have to go. You have to go now.”
They were on the edge of her camp, her space, her sanctuary. He couldn’t come here, couldn’t be allowed to take it away from her.
“I want to go,” he said quietly. “I would if I could, but too many people will die if I do.”
Tansy shook her head in despair, glanced at the radio and then away. She could call her father and he might be able to put a stop to this. If he had known the military was sending someone with a request, he would have warned her—or would he have? In one revelation, this stranger had changed her entire world all over again.
She drank from a bottle of water, keeping her back to him, trying to sort out the things he’d told her. “Does my father know you’re here?”
“Only the general. This mission is classified.”
“I’m not in the military.” Tansy sank down into the one lawn chair she’d brought and forced her gaze to meet his.
He spread his hands out. “Do you think I want to come here and upset you like this? People are dying . . .”
She sighed. “People are always dying, Mr. Montague.”
“Kadan,” he corrected. “And not like this.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t do it anymore. Yes, I do have some special gifts. I can leap high and I have fast reflexes, I can feel violent or threatening energy, but I fried my talent, or short-circuited it, or something, when I fell while I was climbing. Maybe it happened when I went to the hospital. I honestly don’t know, but when I touch things, nothing happens. And I’m grateful for that. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”
Kadan shrugged out of his pack and stretched, loosening his muscles as he surveyed the campsite. She knew what she was doing; sheltered from prying eyes even from above, the camp was comfortable, protected, but could catch the breezes coming in.
“I have a gift for sound, Tansy, and you’re lying. I can hear it in your voice.”
She shrugged. “You can think whatever you like, but I can’t help you. There are a few others I’ve heard of, psychics that can track killers. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You need me to go after a killer.”
“Not just an ordinary killer, a GhostWalker. I’ve got an enhanced Special Forces-trained killer on the loose, and I need to track him down and eliminate him immediately.” Kadan reached for the coffeepot, dumped out the old liquid, and began filling the pot with water.
Tansy flicked him a glance from under long lashes. He moved with fluid grace, at home in the wilderness, completely confident in his abilities. He scanned the surrounding area several times, and she knew that if she asked he could tell her where everything in the camp was positioned and the best escape route available to them should they need one. She’d worked with men like him, cool under fire, dangerous as hell, yet he had something different, something even more. Power clung to him.
“I can’t help you.”
“The GhostWalkers are like you, Tansy. Their lives have been changed forever. They have the same headaches, the nosebleeds, the seizures. They’re good men and women and they are under fire every minute of the day. They carry out missions no one else could touch. They put their lives on the line every day. You’re one of us.”
She shook her head, keeping her voice calm and firm. “I wish I could help you, I really do, but I lost the one talent you need.”
He sighed softly. “I swear to you, Tansy, I don’t want to do this the hard way. I want you to understand how important it is so that you at least comprehend why I had to come up here to get you. The GhostWalkers are considered too dangerous to be under suspicion like this. I’m under orders not to trust any of them. I can’t confide in them or ask for help or even tell them that their lives are in jeopardy just because of what they can do. These are my friends, my teammates. Men I’ve trained with and gone into combat with, men who have had my back and saved my life. Some of them have families.”
She recognized that he was a man of few words, that he rarely explained himself, but that he was going out of his way to do so for her.
I don’t want to do this the hard way.
Her heart jumped, but she kept her face composed.
“Were you given orders to bring me back?” Men like Kadan Montague carried out their missions no matter the cost to them—or to anyone else. She waited. Holding her breath.
“Yes.”
“Whether I agree or not.” She made it a statement, but there was a breathless plea in her voice she couldn’t stop.
CHAPTER 3
Kadan sighed. “Let’s just take one thing at a time. What do you have for dinner? I’m a fairly good cook.”
Tansy’s mouth went dry. She couldn’t sit still with the rush of adrenaline. He was going to force her to go back with him. Tansy leapt from her chair and paced across the ground to where she kept her food supplies, needing the action to hide her thoughts. There had to be a way to escape. She knew the mountain like the back of her hand. If she got out of his sight, she could get away and hide. If he really had a tight timetable, he wouldn’t have the time to look for her. But she had to keep it together and not panic.
She turned from the crisp cooler and found him inches from her body. He was so silent she hadn’t heard him approach. Worse, she hadn’t sensed him either. She was used to feeling the energy that radiated from people, but with him, there was nothing at all to warn her he was close. She realized she was holding her breath. She inhaled and took the scent of him into her lungs. Deep inside, her body sizzled and burned in an unfamiliar way. Fear shimmered through her, not at the prospect of this man attempting to force her compliance, but because as rough and scarred as he was, he filled her senses and mind with a sensual heat she couldn’t ignore.
Tansy pushed the vegetables into his hands. His thumb brushed the sensitive skin of her forearm, a long stroke that had to be deliberate. Her gaze jumped to his. “I don’t like to be touched.”
“You shouldn’t have such beautiful skin then,” he answered, sounding completely unrepentant and not in the least perturbed by her reprimand, when, truthfully, he was shocked that he’d let his guard down so far with her that he was acting out of character.
Tansy shook her head. “Don’t try to flirt with me, not when you’ve come up here determined to drag me back down into evil.”
A slow smile changed his entire face, softened every hard line, lit up the blue of his eyes, and changed his mouth from that hint of cruelty to pure sensuality. “Honey, if I was going to flirt with you, you’d know it. That was the pure truth, whether you want to hear it or not.” And touching her had shocked the hell out of him.
It wasn’t a few butterflies reacting; an entire forest of them took flight in her stomach. “You were flirting,” she said accusingly, frowning at him.
His smile widened as he turned away to the small table where he took the chopping board from her along with the knife. “Maybe. A little. But you do have beautiful skin.”
“Thank you.” Tansy fired up the gas stove and put on water for rice. “I have to work tonight. And you can’t come. You’ll scare my cougar away.”
“She follows you. I found her tracking you through the trees down to the waterfall. She’s dangerous, Tansy.”
“The whole world is dangerous.”
“Say my name.”
She touched her teeth to her lower lip and shrugged. “Kadan, then. Why does it matter?”
His blue-black eyes flicked over her. “I matter, that’s why.”
The way he handled the knife with efficiency, chopping vegetables for stir-fry while she pulled her frying pan out of the locked chest where she kept her cooking pots, seemed to fascinate her. He noticed she couldn’t stop watching the movements of his hands, so fast they nearly blurred, each stroke deliberate, and maybe he was showing off a little. Chagrined at behaving like a kid with his first crush, Kadan forced himself to focus on his mission.
“The first time you helped the police find a serial killer, you were only thirteen years old. What in the world made you do such a thing?” he asked. “Especially when the cost to you was so high.” He turned to look at her. “You do more than simply pick up an object and know what a person was thinking and feeling; you’re an empath. Why would a teenager ever put herself in a position such as tracking killers? That made no sense to me.”
And how could your family allow it?
The thought spilled out before he could censor it.
Her head snapped up and she glared at him, proving she could pick up his thoughts. “My family understood my reasons, and unlike you, they believe in free will.”
“So you are also telepathic. Apparently that talent didn’t get knocked out of your head in that climbing accident.”
She didn’t even blink, but flicked him a look of censure from under her long lashes. “Apparently not.”
She was cool under fire, he had to give her that. “Just how many talents do you have?”
She shrugged. “How many do you have?”
He flashed her another smile. “Good girl. Don’t give away too much to the enemy.” He heated a small amount of oil and tossed in the chopped vegetables. “I’m not, you know.”
“My enemy? Maybe not, but I’m listening to everything you say, and I think you’re prepared to use force to try to get me to track your killer.”
“You really don’t pull your punches, do you?”
“Why would I? You came up here with your own agenda. You don’t really care what my reasons are for not cooperating. My reasons don’t matter to you, and quite frankly, neither do I. As long as you get the job done, that’s what is important to you.”
Kadan sighed. “I have no more choice in this than you do. I have orders, Tansy, and people are going to die if we don’t stop this.”
“How does that make you any different from Whitney? For all you know he was following orders. He’s a scientist and he works for the government. He could have been under orders to develop psychic warfare; in fact, in order to conduct his experiments on you, he had to have convinced somebody high up he could do it. They had to have known about his earliest experiments.”
He let the first surge of anger wash over him and dissipate while he lifted the frying pan off the heat and tossed the vegetables. Setting them back on the stove and adding a little soy sauce gave him a little more time so he was able to keep his expression exactly the same. “I’ve been more than up-front with you. Insulting me is not going to help anything.”
Her eyebrow shot up. “It wasn’t meant as an insult. I think it’s a legitimate question. As I understand it, your GhostWalker program is top security clearance. You’re a government secret, so secret that if you can’t find out who is killing people, they want to eliminate all of you. Who has that kind of power, to play with people’s lives, to decide whether they live or die? I don’t see that they’re much different than your killer. And Whitney maybe just carried out his orders, like you’re doing now.”
Maybe she was hitting a little too close to home. Of course they’d all speculated that several of their bosses had a hand in creating them. Whitney couldn’t have done it alone, and he was still working for the government, sanctioned by someone, because he was escaping every effort to capture or destroy him. He had friends in high places.
“I suppose you have a point. There’s every possibility Whitney is following orders, but what he’s doing is wrong in so many ways I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”
“And if the order comes down to eliminate your fellow GhostWalkers, will you carry it out because they told you to do it?”
He removed the vegetables from the heat and turned completely to face her, his face settling into hard lines. His eyes went flat and cold, the blue turning nearly black, focused and hungry like the cougar. “There would be a war like no one has ever seen before.”