Predatory Game (GhostWalkers, #6)(101)

His thumbs brushed against her soft skin as he stared down into her eyes. It was difficult to ignore the fear he saw there, but he was going to try the experiment. He’d had too many operations and had worked too hard to give up.

“Do you have any idea what this will do to us?” she asked. “The changes it will bring?” She had to bring it up. He had to go into this with his eyes open.

“Having me on my feet can only make things better.”

“Is that what you really think, Jesse? Because I love you enough to try this madness with you, but you’ll go back to active duty. You will. It’s what you live for. You and your team will be all over the place and where will that leave me?”

He shook his head. “You’re part of us, Saber.”

“How? How am I part of your team? How could that ever be? I assassinate people and I do it alone.”

“You can heal people, Saber. You could be the ultimate safety net for all of us.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it abruptly. Could that be true? Was it possible she could really use her talent for something other than death? She’d helped Patsy, but that had been a fluke. She ducked her head, not wanting him to see her expression, knowing that he’d stirred hope and it was there in her heart, in her mind. She’d always thought of herself as a kind of terrible plague people should avoid.

“Saber? Honey, look at me. You’re amazing. The things you can do are amazing. And if you can do this for me, imagine what you could do with someone wounded. I’ve thought a lot about this.”

“I could screw up big time, Jesse. My childhood was a training ground to kill, not save lives. I need to practice and I don’t want it to be on you.” She was listening to him, wanting it, wanting to be someone different, wanting the prize he was holding out to her, but there was a cost. She wasn’t willing to gain her new life at the expense of his.

“You can already read my biorhythm, right? You monitor my pulse, even my blood pressure. Start slow. See what you can do. We don’t have to do the regeneration all in one day, in one session. Neither of us knows how it will work.”

“It’s an experiment, Jesse, and a darned dangerous one. If Lily did this, she could have the equipment ready in case anything happened to you.”

“She could have equipment ready after the fact, but you can prevent disaster from happening in the first place. You’ll know if my heart starts to go crazy, or anything else goes wrong.”

“Maybe—but you’re betting your life on a very big maybe.”

“And the other thing, Lily has no way of monitoring the cells themselves. She would have no way of knowing the cells were becoming overstimulated, so she would be guessing at the electrical pulses used. You’ll be far more accurate.”

“Jesse,” Saber shook her head, holding her shaking hand out in front of her. “You don’t have a clue of the process any more than I would have for moving objects. You’re guessing because you want it to be true.”

“Am I?”

Saber closed her eyes and let her breath out. Eric and Lily couldn’t know the amount of electrical current to introduce. How could they? Their guesses would be less precise than hers.

“Okay. But you tell Lily.”

“She’ll want to be here, and I want to start now.”

“I don’t care. We can start, but you tell her what we’re doing. If she has advice or objections, I want to hear them.”

“I thought you didn’t trust her,” he grumbled, pushing his chair down the hall to his office, with Saber walking behind him.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

He unlocked the door and waved her inside. Saber took the most comfortable chair and waited until he brought Lily up on the monitor. As Jesse explained what he wanted to do, the dawning excitement on Lily Whitney’s face made Saber’s hands clench the armrests of her chair. “Jess! I should have thought of that. It was there in his file about cell regeneration, but I didn’t think about Saber. Can you really do that? Is it possible, Saber? Can you monitor him internally and know when to stop?”

Saber shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“I studied your file. You’re unique. I’ve never run across anyone else like you, with your talent, so this would be such a gift to the GhostWalkers if you could actually use electrical currents. There’s so much I could teach on manipulating cells for wounds. This could be historic…” She broke off. “I’m sorry. I get carried away sometimes. You must be really frightened thinking about trying it on Jess.”

“It terrifies me,” Saber admitted. She still found it hard to trust Lily—to trust anyone. “No one has any idea if it will work or even how to do it.”

The thought of Jess without his wheelchair was scary. She hadn’t realized how much she relied on that chair to keep her safe. She’d seen glimpses of the real Jess Calhoun, confident and skilled, a warrior, a SEAL, a GhostWalker. He would demand she give everything and he’d give just as much. What if it worked? What if it didn’t? She could barely breathe she was so close to panic, and that was simply—unacceptable.

“If you want to try with me here, I’ll be glad to help monitor him,” Lily offered. “I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, but we can talk about it as we go.”