Night Game (GhostWalkers 3)

"It wasn't in the police report, I read the report myself."

"What a shocker. You said Vicq's last name was Comeaux. Did you notice the police officer's last name on the report? Everyone is related to everyone."

Gator swore softly in Cajun. "I should have caught that. So Vicq Comeaux is actually a suspect. You haven't tried to question him, have you?"

She frowned at the sharpness in his voice. "I'm not that stupid. I don't think anyone would get anything out of him by questioning him, and certainly not a woman. The best way is for someone to get drunk with him and talk trash about women. He's going to brag."

"You know a lot about people, don't you?"

"It's a survival technique. I learned it early on. Whitney was a hell of a teacher." She turned her face away from him, but not before he caught the glimpse of pain in her eyes. "My bet is on the boyfriend. Parsons's son," she continued, leaning her head against the wall and stretching her right leg out in front of her. "Something isn't right about him."

"I had the same feeling. Take the jeans off."

Her gaze leapt to his, held there. "You said you weren't going to try anything."

"I'm not. For God's sake, woman, you're beautiful, but don't flatter yourself. I'm not after your body. I'm after your leg. That's a single body part."

"You are too after my body. There's heat in your eyes and"--she waved her hands around--"evidence elsewhere."

He leaned close until his breath was warm on her lips. "I'll let you in on a little secret, cher. I'm a man. When I get near you, there's going to be a lot of evidence that I want you. Now get rid of the jeans. I want to see your leg."

"I'm not showing you my leg."

"Do you have any idea how stubborn you can look? Our children better never give me that look, although I won't mind if they give it to you. You'd deserve it."

"Where's my motorcycle?"

He groaned and leaned back, hands behind his head. "Don' be askin' me questions that are going to get you all riled up. You're tryin' to get out of strippin' for me and it won't work. I'm going to look at your leg so you might as well just get it over and take the damned jeans off. They're too big for you anyway."

"I don't have anything else to wear. My clothes were on Burrell's houseboat."

The little catch in her voice made his stomach flip. "Don' start crying again. I can't take it."

"You just got through telling me it was good for me."

"I was being manly and comforting you. Now it's just plain self-preservation. I'll buy you clothes tomorrow. You can get ten pairs of jeans for all I care."

A faint smile curved her mouth. "You're crazy, you know that?"

He continued to look at her pointedly.

Flame heaved a sigh. "I don't have any underwear on. I wasn't going to wear your brother's. My leg is sore. I kicked the driver to make him wreck. Well," she hedged, "I was hoping to break his neck and eliminate him altogether."

He reached for the waistband of her jeans. "We're going to have to do something about that temper of yours. You can't go around killing people because they piss you off, not even when you have reason to be pissed off." His fingers brushed bare skin. Soft skin. Her belly was firm, but so damned soft he wanted to lean forward and press his mouth against it.

She stiffened, her hands covering his, stopping the movement but holding his fingers against her stomach. He could feel the tremor running through her. "I'll do it myself."

"And I was having such fun."

"Look the other way. I'm not putting on a show for you, perv."

He closed his eyes obediently and lay back on the bed again, suddenly tired. It had been a long, frustrating day. He had more questions than answers. Burrell was dead. He was no closer to finding Joy Chiasson than the day he'd arrived in New Orleans, and he was certain when Flame peeled off her jeans, and he got a good look at her injured leg, he wasn't going to like what he saw.

She wiggled against him as she dragged off the jeans. Twice he heard a gasp escape as she tried to be careful removing the garment. He opened his eyes just as she dragged a sheet around her.

"Fils de putin!" He bent closer to inspect her leg. "Maudit!"

"You're looking."

"Hell yes, I'm looking."

"Stop swearing. It's not that bad. A few bruises, a little swelling. What did you expect? The bike was going fast, so was the Jeep and I kicked him as hard as I could. It wasn't all that soft when I landed either."

"How did you manage to make it back through the swamp on this leg? You were running full-out, I saw you."

She shrugged. "I found out a long time ago, you can endure anything if you have to. Whitney didn't defeat me, Raoul. I learned a lot of very valuable lessons." She looked him straight in the eye. "He isn't going to get me back. I'd rather die. If you or anyone else managed to get me there, I'd take down his house and everyone in it. I mean it. Think long and hard on that before you decide to try bringing me back."

He looked down at her mottled leg. From knee to hip her thigh was black and blue with ugly swollen blotches that might indicate internal bleeding. "Fils de putin." He swore again under his breath, his hands going to her leg, lifting it onto his lap as if he could magically take the pain away.

"Are you listening to me?"

"I heard you. You need to see a doctor, Flame."

"I meant it. I can't go through that again. I really meant it."

"I know. What the hell are we going to do about your leg?" His palm stroked down her skin, his touch feather-light, barely there, but she felt it all the way to her bones. "I'm taking you to Grand-mere. She knows the treateur--the healer. They've been best friends for years."

"Take me tomorrow. I can't be around anyone tonight." Her chest hurt. She felt as if someone had dropped a hundred pound weight on her. A part of her wanted to scream and scream, another part wanted to flood the world with tears, but the worst part of her, something cold and dark and ugly, wanted to go hunting. "Did you tell Lily you found me? She's the one who sent you after me, didn't she? If you or your friend told her . . ."

"Lily doesn't know we've had any contact. No one told her anything. If Whitney is alive and he's aware of your presence here, it didn't come from any of us."

She believed him. She rarely believed anyone, not really. Not all the way. But with Raoul, she felt almost as if she knew him intimately, the real Raoul, not the one everyone else saw. And God help her, she actually believed him. "Maybe I'm just tired." She murmured the words aloud.

"You didn't do this, Flame. You didn't cause Burrell's death."

"How do you know that? Whitney's capable of anything, even killing a kind old man just to get the end results of his experiment. He must have changed a lot over the years to have you think he wouldn't do it, or he hid that side of himself well."

"I didn't much like him. None of us did. He was cold. Inhuman." He shifted her as gently as possible until they were turned around in the bed. "Lie down." He waited until her head was on the pillow before he pulled a blanket over her. "I never could understand how Lily loved him. She didn't know he wasn't her biological father. She found out after he died."

"He isn't dead."

"Maybe he isn't. In all honesty, you've got me halfway believin' the man is out there somewhere recording every move we make." Gator switched off the lights and stretched out on the bed beside her, careful to avoid touching her leg.

"I should leave."

He heard the sound of his heartbeat accelerate. He knew she heard it too. The protest surged up, a strong tidal wave of denial. The walls rippled with a low pulse of dissent. She laid her hand over his.

"I'm not going. I have to find out who did this to Burrell. I'm just saying, it's the smart thing to do. And there's Joy. Someone did something to her. I wish I could believe she was dead, but I don't."

In the darkness he turned his head to look at her. "You don't think she's dead? Why? What makes you think she's still alive?"

She would never have told anyo

ne else. Ever. She would have gone to her grave and never told a single soul. "Sometimes when I go places I hear echoes of sounds." She waited for him to snicker. To laugh. To say she was crazy.

He twisted his fingers through hers and brought her hand up to his chest, over his heart. "Go on."

"I think plants sometimes absorb the sound. It gets trapped there in certain plants and I can hear it."

"You think the sound is trapped in the plants?" The pad of his thumb brushed idly over the back of her hand. "I've heard it too, the echo of screams, or laughter. The murmur of voices. At first I thought it was because my hearing was so acute, but then I realized that I was hearing something that had taken place in the past, minutes to months earlier. I thought it could be pockets of space, like the air pockets in a car when it sinks under water. But sound disperses. That didn't make any sense at all. But plants don't have ears. How the hell would they hear?"

"The echo of the past in certain places really bothered me." She sniffed, still trying to get a handle on her emotions. It helped that Gator had bantered a little with her, but she still wanted to cry a river of tears for Burrell. For Joy. For herself. She forced control, wanting to share something of herself with Gator, just because he cared enough to comfort her. The casual rubbing of his thumb over her hand should have been trivial, but it wasn't.

"I did consider that maybe Whitney had managed to drive me out of my mind, but then I remembered it had happened a couple of times when I was really young, before I realized just what a monster he really was, so I did some research. I wrote down each time I heard the sounds and tried to remember everything that was around me at the time. The one thing each incident had in common was that there were plants there. Not a single plant, but a large group of plants."

"I never thought of plants. How would they hear things?"

She was acutely aware of his thumb on her hand, stroking caresses back and forth. It wasn't sexual. She almost wished it were. There was comfort, an intimacy, the small gesture tying her to him where any other touch might have driven her away. She stared up at the ceiling, shocked she was talking about things that mattered to her, revealing secrets she'd never dared to tell another soul--things she'd never wanted to tell another person.

"There's an Asian plant with transparent leaves called Hydrilla verticillata. Under a microscope you can see live streaming protoplasm. And before you think I'm brilliant and a scientist, I looked it up and someone else had conducted an experiment. In the research I read about, Huxley used a tuning fork and managed to speed up the protoplasm by using sound."

"And this relates to the voices we hear, how?"

"I love the sarcasm in your voice. You're such a skeptic." She laughed softly, a small sound that actually held humor when deep inside she was weeping. Flame had a difficult time analyzing why she wanted to share her theories with Gator and why he could make her smile in the midst of overwhelming grief. She didn't even know why it was okay with her to be lying in the dark, his body solid and warm and so comforting she wanted to cling like a small child to him. The sound of the rain beat down on the roof and only added to the surreal feeling.

"Well come on."

"We can destroy things with sound, why not make them grow? For years scientists have believed songbirds contribute to plant growth by singing all the songs in the early-morning hours. A French physicist conducted a very successful experiment exposing how plants respond to sound waves. He composed musical note sequences that helped the plants grow. Each note is chosen to correspond with an amino acid in a protein with the full tune corresponding to the entire protein. It's done with electromagnetic energy . . ."

"Sound waves."

"Exactly. He also warned musicians not to play the notes because they might become ill." She loved the sound of his voice, the way he drawled his words. She could lie in the dark and listen to the combination of his voice and the rain forever.

"So low frequencies. You think the plants absorb and possibly retain low-frequency notes in their makeup?"

"As well as high acoustical sounds. Like laughter. Like screams. The low murmurs we hear and the edge of violence."

He brought her hand up to his mouth, his teeth nibbling gently at her knuckles. He seemed unaware of his action, but she felt it all the way down to her toes. Her stomach did a series of interesting little somersaults. She tried to be analytical about the strange sensation, but all she could think about was the feel of his teeth and tongue on her skin.

"So you caught something repeating back from the past that had to do with Joy? Where? What?" His teeth nipped the end of her finger, a tiny stinging bite instantly gone when he drew her finger into the warmth of his mouth.

Her breath hitched but she couldn't quite bring herself to pull her hand away from him. She heard her accelerated heartbeat, but it meant she was alive, living, able to experience whatever she could before time ran out. She wanted to be with Raoul Fontenot, tonight, this night, when her world had once again crashed and she'd failed yet another human being. She wanted to lie beside him and feel his heat and his solid body, to let him comfort her in the darkness.

"I heard Joy cry out. She begged someone not to hurt her. Most of what he said was very unintelligible, but I caught something about her coming to enjoy the things he would do to her. I don't think whoever took her meant to kill her, at least not right away. I think if we work fast enough, we have a chance of finding her alive."

"But you have no clue who the man was?"

"None. The more I tried to listen, the less I heard. The bottom line is, we have to find Joy Chiasson. I won't be able to live with myself if we don't. I believe she's alive and I think she's in the hands of a monster."

"Then we have to search together. Where did you hear this?"

"Just outside the Hurican before I went in to sing. She was there."

"Everyone knows that, she never made it home from the club. You're not going back to the Hurican to try to tempt every pervert there to follow you home."

"I wasn't tempting perverts."

"That's exactly what you were doing." His teeth nipped a little harder at her finger but before she could protest, his tongue swirled around to ease the slight ache. "You were trying to draw out whoever took Joy and make them come after you. You had no backup, no real plan, no help whatsoever."

"So what's your big plan? I don't see hanging out in the clubs did you much good. You had less information than I had."

"I found out that James Parsons lied his ass off to the cops. He isn't the least bit broken up over Joy's disappearance, other than the attention it's gotten him."

She gave a little sniff of pure disdain. "You didn't find that out in the club. You met him and we discussed it."

"Briefly. It was a brief discussion. I have sharp perception when it comes to readin' people, cher."

"Only after I said he was a good suspect," she reminded. "Was there a fire in here? You have scorch marks on the windowsills and around the door. What happened here?"

"Dahlia was here. After the attack on the sanitarium, Nico, one of the men in the Ghost Walker squad, brought her here. She has this little problem with energy although she's working on controlling it."

Dahlia. Flame remembered Dahlia, a rebel, so very much like herself. Whitney had despised them, even in the early ages when they were barely five years old. Dahlia had been in so much pain, rocking back and forth, the nurses begging Whitney to let her be with Flame or with Lily. Either of them could ease the pain, but Whitney had isolated her, just as he'd isolated Flame. The terrible memories crowded in, memories of unbearable loneliness, of fear and rage. Memories of the slow realization that Peter Whitney, the man who held absolute power over her, was a monster. Worse, that one moment in her childhood when she'd become aware that a monster had begun to grow inside of her. A small sound of despair escaped. She never opened those doors, never looked back. But it was all there, reaching out with greedy claws to suck her down into a dark hole she remembered all too well.

Flame yanked her hand away from Gator and pushed at him. "Leave. You have to go." She was going to cry again, she could feel the choking in her throat, the burning in her eyes and the weight pressing hard on her chest. "Hurry. Get out of here." Because if she sank into that darkness, she couldn't trust herself and she wasn't going to take a chance on hurting Raoul.

"Maudit! Stop pushing me away. I'm not going anywhere."

She buried her face in the pillow. "You have to. You don't understand how dangerous it is for me to lose control. I can't stop crying and I'm so angry with Whitney. I try never to think about him because I don't know if I can maintain discipline. You have to leave. Please, I'm asking you to leave. You don't know what I've done. What I'm capable of doing. I don't want to hurt you."

"Do you think you're the only dangerous person here, Flame? I'm like you. I'm worse than you. He developed me into a damn weapon and sent me into a field to test the results without having a clue what would happen. I went like a good little soldier and I did what they told me to do. I killed five people. One was a friend of mine. I injured nineteen others. Try living with that on your conscience. Whatever you've done is nothing, nothing compared to that." He pulled the pillow from her face, bracing his hands on either side of her head to stare down into her eyes. "I murdered them. Men I'd sworn to protect. Don't talk to me about discipline or danger. I smile and I swallow anger and I back away from anything that might make me lose control. Not now. Not this time. I'm here to stay. You got that? Are you hearing me? I'm not leaving this time. I'm not giving up something I want as badly as I want you because that fils de putin did this to us."

She shook her head, her fingers brushing his face. Lightly. With tenderness. There was regret on her face. "I don't even care if he did something to make us want to be together. You're an incredible man, but you're a family man, Raoul. You know you want it all. You want a wife and a house filled with children. You deserve that. Wyatt will get married and your children and his children will all be best friends. You can't want me the way you're looking at me. You don't even know me."

"Flame." There was a stark ache in his voice. Heat. Desire. He had never wanted a woman in the way he wanted her. "Don't say I don't know you. I've known you forever. You see me. The real me. You see me where no one else does, where no one else ever will or could. You can't ask me to give that up. And I know you. You don't have to be afraid or hide from me."