“There are children in the compound down below,” Jonas said. “Lily has a son. Whitney would do anything to get his hands on that child. He’s tried before. Ken and Marigold have twin boys. Whitney would like them as well. It has occurred to me that the threat I’m feeling is Whitney gearing up to make another try for the kids.”
Camellia couldn’t help but send out inquiries along both networks again, particularly the mycelium running beneath the forest, stretching far beyond her garden and even past the boundaries of the national forest into the wilderness areas. She had been using that connection for a long time and was very sensitive to every result. She could read the least little sign the mycelium returned to her, no matter if the source of the alert was many miles away. She needed the connections to spread out as far and wide as possible and tell her if there was anyone approaching the homes below her. Were there spies sent in the forest? One lone man? Two? An army? Animals that hadn’t been there?
Jonas looked up at her suddenly. “Camellia. What are you doing right now? I’m feeling something very subtle, as if there is a surge in the energy around me. Barely there. I know I blew it with you by my gut reaction, but I hope you can forgive me. I swear, none of what you felt from me was aimed at you. I just despise Whitney and what he did to me.” He thrust his fingers through his hair and made a sound halfway between a snarl and a growl. “Hell, maybe I was already fucked up, and all he really did was make me aware of it.”
Camellia had an inexplicable desire to put her arms around him and hold him. She felt a sudden surge of rage in him, red hot. He suppressed it automatically, as if he’d been doing it forever. She also caught a small edge of despair. He knew that level of aggression in him had been multiplied by Whitney and would never go away. Living with it had to be hell.
“Whitney didn’t much care how aggressive he made his soldiers, as long as he got the results he wanted,” she told him. “I’m glad all of you realized you shouldn’t document your talents. That must make him crazy.” She allowed satisfaction to show in her voice.
“I have to admit, we do talk about that a little too much,” Jonas confessed. “We hope Whitney is frustrated. We’re his first team, and we know he views us as his failures. He’d want to know everything about us that he could, if only to avoid making the same mistakes in future enhancements.”
Camellia had to agree with his assessment. She nodded and loosened her hold on the branch of Middlemist Red. She was able to breathe on her own and relax completely again, now that she realized just how difficult Jonas’s life had to be. Looking closely at him, she could see the lines etched into his face, when Middlemist Red was renowned for her antiaging benefits. Many thought that was a myth, but Camellia had barely aged, her skin glowing and flawless in spite of Whitney’s many experiments. Jonas looked young as well, but she could see those lines carved deep when he continually had to strive to control the raging instincts in him.
She sent him a genuine smile. “I know the word ‘fungus’ can sound off-putting. I don’t remember how I reacted, because I was used to all the strange experiments he performed on us. I didn’t seem to have any repercussions at the time. I was told to report anything new to him, and I honestly didn’t have anything to report. The mycelium connection is extremely subtle, and Whitney didn’t tell me what to look for. He never did.”
Jonas leaned toward her, his eyes going completely gold, utterly focused on her. She had leopard in her, and she recognized the cat instantly, but he had gone still, become the hunter as he absorbed the information. He was the predator. He couldn’t help it. That side of him was dominant. She tried not to react, not to feel uneasy. He wasn’t deliberately intimidating her, but she imagined any recipient of that stare would feel threatened.
“I was out on a mission when I first became aware, most likely the way you did, that danger was closing in on me,” she told him. “It was still a great distance away, so I knew the signal hadn’t come from any of the animal enhancements Whitney had given me. When I returned from the mission, I filtered through everything I knew for certain he had put inside me. When he told me ‘fungi,’ I looked up everything I could about mycelium and how it worked. Then I studied our brains and our nervous systems and how they worked together just in case. I had always been interested in plants, so I had already been studying and researching everything I could on the communication between them. I was extremely careful not to veer off course of what I was already working on, although I kept notes for myself off the computers and eventually was able to look up what I wanted.”