Night Game (GhostWalkers, #3)(10)

Had they sent an assassin? The fire in the sanitarium had been a hit, plain and simple. The Whitney Trust had wanted to cover up the fact that genetic and psychic experiments had been done on babies. Damn Whitney and his government contacts. It wasn’t all that hard to create accidents and make people disappear, especially girls who were considered unbalanced or different.

Anger smoldered and that was bad. The ground shifted slightly, a minor seismic anomaly. Flame took a deep breath and let it out slowly to calm herself That wouldn’t help matters. The dog whined off to her left, sensing the small shift beneath the ground. She quieted the animal with a touch of her mind as she weighed her chances. They would send someone well trained after her, someone with at least equal the skills they would assume she possessed. Chances were better than good that they would underestimate her. And chances were better than good Whitney would want her alive.

She’d hacked into Whitney’s secret files and destroyed what she’d found on her training and had even managed to destroy some of the files on the other girls after first copying them. Whitney had an impressive empire and his contacts within the government ran deep. There was no doubt in her mind he would eventually send an assassination squad to get rid of the evidence if he couldn’t bring her in—and she wasn’t going back alive. The fire in the sanitarium was proof she was right. She’d read about Whitney’s death, a murder with no body and she doubted the truth of it. He was a monster, pure and simple, and he would do anything to cover up his crimes.

Flame tapped her finger against her thigh while she worked out her next move. She could play cat and mouse with the hunter, but she couldn’t afford one screwup. Using every sense she had, she once again attempted to locate the shadow. Absolute stillness came back to her. Not even a scent. She wanted to doubt the shrieking alarm bells in her head, but she knew, knew, someone was on to her. Then it hit her—the dog. She reached for the animal, trying to connect enough to get the impression of where the other intruder was. The dog would know and if she could get it out of the animal’s mind, she’d be in a much better position.

The moment she touched the dog she knew it was completely under the control of the other intruder. Her heart accelerated abruptly and she had to breathe deeply to counteract the sudden flood of adrenaline. “Rat bastard,” she whispered to herself. “You only think you have the edge.”

She slid farther into the darkness behind the hedges and vines crawling up the side of the massive house. She knew exactly where the safe was and how to get to it. She was fast and strong and could be in and out in minutes. Whitney’s hunter had no idea what she was doing or where she would go in. She went up the side of the house, clinging like a spider, moving with stealth and speed to gain the second-story balcony. She went up and over the wrought-iron railing, dropping into a crouch and remaining still while she listened.

Flame glanced at her watch. The guard would be patrolling on this side of the house. She’d timed his movements several times and the idiot always took the same route. He was as reliable as a Swiss clock. She stayed very still waiting until he had gone around the corner before unzipping her pack and pulling out her crossbow and hook. This balcony was the only real access to the tower roof and the skylight above the office where Saunders kept his safe. Smug jerk that he was, he thought he had it covered with his narrow staircase, the only exit in and out with two guards situated in the house at the bottom of the stairs. The tower had no balcony and no other access, only sheer walls and wrought-iron stakes below should one fall in an attempt at climbing it.

“Amateur,” she sniffed. Saunders was as dirty and as greedy as they came. She had no compunction whatsoever about proving him an amateur in the area of crime.

The angle to reach the roof was tricky, and there was only one small target she could hook, but she was sure of her aim and took the shot without hesitation. She controlled the sound, keeping the noise of metal grinding on the roof from reverberating through the night. Crouching, she waited for a reaction, hoping the darkness would cover the line pulled taut from balcony to roof. Saunders had some very good guards, but he also had a few lazy ones. She didn’t imagine that he would have many intruders and the guards had to be bored. Still, Saunders had the reputation of being as mean as a cottonmouth. He’d probably put a few dead bodies in the swamp over the years. She didn’t plan on being one of them.

The guards wouldn’t hear the hook, but she had to believe there was a possibility that the man hunting her might if Whitney had sent him. The smart thing for him to do would be to kill her while she was breaking into Saunders’s tower, but it would be nearly impossible for him to collect her body and Whitney would definitely want it. Flame weighed the odds. More than likely, her stalker was sure of himself, certain he could take her when she came out, but much more likely, he was sent to bring her back. Whitney wouldn’t want his multimillion-dollar experiment axed if he could still find a way to use her.

She shrugged, shouldered her pack and hooked her legs around the line, sliding hand over hand out above the grounds toward the tower. She couldn’t help the little twinge of fear rushing through her at the expectation of a bullet, but she held on to the fact that she was worth more alive than dead to Whitney.

Whitney was a man who liked answers and his adopted daughter was very much like him. Flame had hacked into Lily’s computer a couple of times and had I recognized the quick mind and the same driving love of science. Traitor. That was how Flame saw Lily. There had been so much favoritism on Whitney’s part, Lily had what he wanted, become his willing puppet, his accomplice, his doting daughter so he could continue his experiments.