Phantom Game (GhostWalkers 18)

“No one else shared your dormitory?” he couldn’t help asking.

“Whitney had split us up to two per room in that particular laboratory. Beverly still looked after our wing of the house. We were supposed to take a sleeping aid, all natural according to Whitney, but we knew it wasn’t. It was another one of his concoctions, and neither Marigold nor I wanted to know what it would do, so we never took it. We flushed it. He knew, of course. He always knew.”

“So you said you were all in the yard and he threatened you. What happened?” he prompted.

“I told him to punish me, it was my mistake, no one else’s, but Whitney said we all had to learn the hard way. He told me I had to choose someone, that I should choose wisely because it was a permanent choice. I was looking at Marigold when he made his decree. Mari was shaking her head and pleading with him not to take any of the girls. The others were crying and begging Whitney and me not to choose one of them. She didn’t do that. She pleaded with him not to take any of the other girls. Not herself. Looking back, it was as if she knew he wouldn’t choose her. When I refused to pick anyone, Whitney had his soldiers take Ivy away. I went crazy fighting, but Marigold just sank to the ground and put her hands over her face. She doesn’t do that. She doesn’t give up like that. Marigold is a fighter through and through. Like me, even more than me, she would normally have fought to take Ivy back.”

That sorrow hung so heavy in his mind and ran along his nerve endings, the purple growing deeper, darker by the second as he assessed the memories she’d shared with him. He replayed them over and over, analyzing them from every angle, trying to find a way to clear her friend’s name. She needed him to say Marigold hadn’t betrayed her and allowed Beverly to take the blame.

“I almost killed Beverly that night,” she confessed in a small voice. “I came much closer than I told you. If Marigold was the one to betray me, I would have murdered an innocent woman.”

“Marigold was the one who stopped you.” He kept his voice matter-of-fact. He kept walking. Betrayal was one of the worst sins, no matter what form it took. That cut was always deep, and there was no taking it back. She’d had so many. Too many.

“Yes. I told her what I was going to do. I told her how much I hated Beverly and that she deserved to die.”

“Did she know you could disappear into mist or the shadows?”

“No, I was still experimenting. I wasn’t certain how it worked, and I never told anyone what I could do until I could figure it out. Also, Whitney was already starting his breeding program, and I wasn’t certain we’d gotten rid of all the surveillance equipment in our room.”

“How did Marigold stop you from going after Beverly?”

“She kept telling me I would regret it later. That I didn’t know for certain. That one of the guards could have discovered me gone. She kept pointing out how Beverly sounded like she was telling the truth when she denied reporting me missing.”

“Would Mari have done that if she was guilty?”

They were getting close to the camp. Jonas slowed his pace.

“Yes. I think she would have. She wouldn’t have wanted more innocent lives on her hands. She cared for Beverly too. At least I thought she did. She pointed out that the other girls sometimes came to visit us at night, which was true. She said she sometimes fell out of bed and the guards came running. That was true as well. I was so upset over being responsible for Ivy’s death that I couldn’t see straight. I remember being hysterical, crying, even fighting Marigold to get out of the room. The one thing she said that did stop me was that Whitney would know and that he would hold it over me for the rest of my life.”

Jonas not only heard the pain in her voice, but he felt it. Deep sorrow. She felt that pain just as deeply as she had the day Whitney had his soldiers drag Ivy from the grounds to execute her. It didn’t matter that Camellia hadn’t pulled the trigger. In her mind, the sound of that gunshot ringing out had forever branded her as the one responsible for her sister’s death. Sorrow and guilt spread to every cell until he felt so weighed down, he could barely take a step.

He shared that terrible, fateful moment with her and the aftermath, the days and nights of wanting to kill herself. Of plotting to kill Whitney. The guards were leery of her. The other women were kept away from her by Whitney’s decree. Even Marigold was kept away. At night Marigold reached out to her, whispering telepathically, but Camellia lay curled up on her bed in the fetal position, unable to accept love and friendship from anyone when she felt she had murdered an innocent. Ivy hadn’t known about Camellia’s plans to escape, and yet Ivy, not Camellia, had paid the price for it.