Phantom Game (GhostWalkers 18)

That’s bullshit, Kyle whispered. That’s not the way it happened.

Hear him out, Jonas said. Clearly, he believes what he’s telling her.

Camellia repeated the last phrase to herself. Clearly, he believes what he’s telling her. Jonas had distanced himself from her, almost as if being close to her hurt. She didn’t reach out to him along the familiar lines of connection. They were still there, still intact, but she didn’t test them for strength.

In that moment, Camellia’s relationship with him felt fragile. She didn’t know the first thing about relationships. She could admit that. He knew far more than she did. If he thought pulling away from her when she needed them to stand strong together was the right course of action, so be it.

She needed to hold on to something, and that was going to have to be her own power. The character traits she’d come to rely on. She was strong when she needed to be. She could expertly use nearly any weapon. She had weapons no one knew about, not even Jonas. They’d talked about them, but he was really unaware of what they could do.

Regardless of what any of these men said or did, the decisions they came to, she would not allow them to harm Mari and her babies, Briony and her twins, Lily and young Daniel, or any other mother and child who happened to be in the compound above them.

“Don’t stop there, Angel,” she whispered.

“Whitney put so many aggressive animals’ genetic matter into both Jonas and Oliver. Not just mammal, but reptile as well. The two were pumped up beyond belief. They came together like animals, Jonas roaring a challenge that could be heard throughout the valley. There were no guns. No knives. They went at each other bare-handed. Bare-knuckled. Beating each other’s bodies. The way they hit should have smashed bones, but neither went down. Blood ran down their chests and necks as they circled one another, roaring like animals.”

Overhead, the owls screamed a challenge and dove at the hoary bats, chasing them through the night sky. Gray sounded so feral Camellia nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d heard him countless times.

Jeff’s telepathic gasp could be heard by all of them. At first she put it down to the owls relentlessly chasing the bats away from the small grove of trees, but his protest followed swiftly on the heels of Angel’s commentary.

“Jonas went berserk. He attacked the wounded, ripping open bandages and tearing at their wounds. He fed on the blood like a wolf and then howled for his pack to join him.”

“Angel . . .” she protested.

Again, Jeff made a soft, telepathic protest while Jonas and Kyle remained silent. She knew Angel’s account couldn’t be accurate, but Middlemist Red was assessing his voice along with her, and Red was affirming what he said as strictly the truth. Jeff and Kyle weren’t able to do anything but hear Angel’s voice and assess it themselves, but Jonas would feel what Camellia was. He would know Red was making the same evaluation she was.

The tension and hostility, as well as grief, in Shaker and Tusker were palpable. The other men’s emotions fed the need for violence into the darkness of the fog so the colors shifted slightly from blue-gray to a darker purplish gray. Or was that Jonas feeding the fog? Camellia felt the familiar flow between Jonas and her, the neurons suddenly flooding her body with adrenaline-laced chemicals.

Jonas was angry; there was no doubt about it. She would be too if she heard someone saying such things about her. Most people would never believe a story like that could be real, but she’d seen Whitney’s experiments when they’d gone terribly wrong. She’d seen his soldiers going mad, foaming at the mouth, raging, throwing themselves at electric fences and taking a hail of bullets before going down.

“I’m not making this up, Camellia. A witness who was there told the story. I swear to you. Jonas killed Shaker and Tusker’s brother. My friend.” Angel’s voice broke, and he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead for a brief moment before he lifted his head and looked at her again. He would have been looking her in the eye had she been allowing him to actually see her.

“Oliver, as wounded and battered as he was, tried to stop him, but Jonas was too strong. They fought again. Jonas tore him from limb to limb. Do you have any idea how strong you have to be to rip off someone’s arms? To break the bones so badly you can turn the arm the other direction? He smashed him. Stomped on him until his bones were crushed in his body.”

“That couldn’t have happened.” She whispered the denial.

“Ask Ryland Miller. He was there. The entire team was there. No one tried to stop him. They all had guns. They could have shot him, but they didn’t. Not one of them put a bullet in his head. They didn’t even try.”