Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2)(3)

“How could she possibly exist in the outside world without being taught shields?” one of the men sitting in the shadows asked. Lily turned her head to look at him, sighing as she did so. Nicolas Trevane always seemed to be in the shadows, and he was one of the GhostWalkers who made her nervous. He sat in such stillness he seemed to blend in with his surroundings, yet when he went into action, he exploded, moving so fast he seemed to blur. For part of his childhood he was raised on a reservation with his father’s people, and then he spent ten years in Japan with his mother’s relatives. His face never seemed to give anything away. His black eyes were flat and cold and frightened her almost as much as the fact that he was a sniper, a renowned marksman capable of the most deadly and secret of missions.

Lily bowed her head to avoid looking into his icy eyes. “I don’t know, Nico. I have fewer answers now than I did a few months ago. I’m still having trouble making myself understand how my father could have experimented on children and then again on all of you. As for this poor girl, this child he virtually tortured, if I’m reading these notes correctly, she was eventually trained as a government operative, and I think it’s possible they’re still using her.”

“That’s not possible, Lily,” Ryland objected. “You saw what happened to us when we tried to operate without an anchor. You said your father had tried using pulses of electricity on all of you. You know the results of that. Brain bleeds, acute pain. Strokes. It just isn’t possible. She’d go insane. The experiment Dr. Whitney conducted opened all our brains, leaving us without barriers or our natural filters.

We’re grown men, already trained, yet you’re talking about a child trying to cope with impossible demands.”

“It should have driven her over the edge,” Lily agreed. She held up the notebook. “I’ve discovered a private sanitarium in Louisiana that the Whitney Trust owns. It is run by the Sisters of Mercy. And it has one patient—a young woman.” She looked at her husband. “Her name is Dahlia Le Blanc.”

“You aren’t going to tell me your father bought out a religious organization,” Raoul “Gator” Fontenot protested. He hastily crossed himself. “I won’t believe nuns could possibly be a part of Whitney’s cover-up.”

Lily smiled at him. “Actually, Gator, I think the nuns are fictitious, as is the sanitarium. I think it’s really a front to hide Dahlia from the world. As the sole director of all the trusts, I was able to dig fairly deep and it seems she’s really the only patient, and aside from the Trust picking up all her bills, she has a sizable trust in her own name with regular deposits. The deposits coincide with entries seemingly indicating my father had become suspicious she was being used as an operative for the United States government. Apparently he allowed her to be trained and then when he realized it was too difficult for her, he moved her to the sanitarium and, as always, when things went wrong, he left her without following up.” There was an edge of bitterness to her voice. “I think my father tried to create a safe place for her there, just as he created this house for me.”

Ryland bent his head to Lily’s, his chin rubbing the top of her sable hair. “Your father was a brilliant man, Lily. He had to learn about love, it wasn’t shown to him as a child.” It was a refrain he reminded her of often since it had come to light that not only had Dr. Whitney experimented on Lily, removing the filters from her brain in order to enhance psychic ability, she wasn’t his biological child, as he’d led her to believe, but one of many children he’d “bought” from foreign orphanages.

There was another silence. Tucker Addison whistled softly. He was a tall, stocky man with dark skin, brown eyes, and an engaging smile. “You did it, Lily. You actually found her. And she’s a GhostWalker like all of us.”

“Before we get too excited, I think you should watch some of the other training tapes I found. Each of these is labeled Novelty.” She signaled to her husband to press Play on the machine to start the video running.

Lily found herself holding her breath. She was certain the child Novelty and Dahlia were one and the same. “According to the records, Novelty is eight years old here.” The child’s hair was thick and as black as a raven’s wing. She wore it in a clumsy braid that hung to her waist in a thick rope. Her face was delicate, matching the rest of her, and the thick hair seemed to overpower her. “I’m certain this is the same child. Look at her face. Her eyes are the same.” Lily felt the child was hiding from the world behind the mass of silken strands. She looked exotic, her origins Asian. Like all the missing girls, Dr. Whitney had adopted her from a foreign country and brought her to his laboratory to enhance her natural psychic abilities.

In the video, the little girl was on a balance beam. She didn’t walk carefully. She didn’t even look down. She ran across it as if it was a wide sidewalk instead of a narrow piece of wood. She didn’t hesitate at the end of the beam, but did a flip off of it, landing on her feet, still running without breaking stride. She was far too small to leap up and catch the bars over her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. She launched herself skyward, her hands outstretched, her small body tucked as she connected with the bars and swung over them with ease.

A collective gasp told Lily the men were all watching. She let the tape play through. All the while the little girl performed amazing skills. At times the child laughed aloud, bringing home to them the fact that she was alone in the room with only the cameras catching her incredible performance. Lily waited for the end of the tape and the reaction it would bring. As many times as she viewed it, she could not believe what she was seeing.