Street Game (GhostWalkers, #8)(41)

“She should have gone to the hospital,” Mack said, angry with himself. He didn’t trust her being in a hospital. It would be far too easy for an assassin to get to her. Too many doctors, nurses, and orderlies going in and out of her room.

Joe shook his head. “Too risky. She’s a target. You couldn’t take the chance and you know that.”

Jaimie continually moved her head, trying to get his hands off of her. Her moans were becoming cries of distress. Mack leaned close to her and whispered in her ear. “I’m here with you, honey. He’s trying to help you.”

His voice seemed to soothe her a little. She subsided, her fingers sliding across the sheet to find his leg.

“You know why they want her dead?” Mack asked.

“I have my suspicions. I hope I’m wrong. I originally was assigned to guard her to keep any foreign governments from trying to acquire her. What about you? Do you know?”

“We just arrived last night. We grew up together.”

“You must be Mack McKinley. I read her file. She had a very different background. All of you were friends before you ended up on the same team.” Joe visibly relaxed, although his fingertips never lifted from Jaimie’s skull.

She cried out softly in protest again and began to thrash under him again. Kane gripped her hand to keep her from ripping out the IV. Her lashes fluttered and she tossed her head, trying to get rid of the insistent fingers and the heat they were generating.

“This is hurting her,” Mack said. “She wasn’t doing this before.”

“I’m operating without anesthesia. Did you think it would be easy? She’s a GhostWalker, she’ll be able to handle it.”

“She’s not like the rest of us,” Mack protested. His stomach was in knots and there was a bad taste in his mouth. He felt as if they were torturing her. Jaimie wasn’t cut out for what they did, no matter how powerful her gift. If she opened herself in public, too much energy rushed in to overpower her. He had believed that with practice, all of them could protect her. They were anchors and in theory, the energy should rush to them, but something about Jaimie was different. He’d known it since she was a child, that her psychic gifts worked differently than all of theirs, and that hers was stronger.

“What was she doing?”

“Jaimie isn’t an anchor. If she uses her abilities, she pays in a big way.”

Joe did look at them then, staring from one to the other. “I read that all of you belonged to Team Three and all of you were anchors. She should have been protected.”

“It doesn’t matter when it comes to Jaimie.” Mack’s gaze met Joe’s. “Why do you think you were here? They probably told you to record everything you could about her. No one can figure her out. Short of taking her to Whitney’s lab and dissecting her, they don’t know how her radar ticks or anything else about her. And as for a foreign government kidnapping her, she may have to worry about Whitney wanting to do the same thing. He likes his little experiments.”

“Whitney didn’t send me,” Joe said.

“Sergeant Major Griffen did, Mack,” Kane said. “Acting on my request.”

There was a long silence, punctuated by Jaimie’s distressed moans. Mack kept his face absolutely blank. He didn’t know or trust Joe Spagnola all that much and refused to spill his fury over Kane’s admission in front of a stranger. Once again, Jaimie had tried to tell him Kane had been involved in the “coincidence” but he’d chosen not to listen or believe her. If it felt like betrayal to him, then how would it seem to Jaimie? And the man she’d spent time with, carefully chosen out of hundreds of applicants, how would it feel to her to know he’d been working undercover to watch her? Most important, when GhostWalkers usually could identify one another just through the psychic energy, how had Joe managed to mislead Jaimie? And did Griffen or those above him know?

His stomach was a mass of hard knots and he couldn’t believe the anger roiling in his gut. Kane was his best friend, the man who walked through death with him, waded through blood. Trust was everything, and he had trusted Kane implicitly his entire life. He had allowed Jaimie to walk away from him because he wasn’t about to abandon Kane and the others after he’d led them to Whitney.

As if sensing his distress, Jaimie opened her eyes and looked at him. Her eyes were bloodshot, red and not very focused, but relief swept through him at the awareness there.

“Hey there, honey. You’ve given us all a bad scare.”

Her perusal took in Kane and then Joe, who still had the pads of his fingers in firm contact with her head. The heat he generated couldn’t fail to tip her off to what he was. That should have made him happy, that she’d think her hero had feet of clay, but instead, he felt sad for her. He wanted to gather her into his arms and hold her tight against him, shelter her from every hurt.

He’d chosen this life for them all, and he’d embraced it. There was a part of him that still did, maybe the biggest part of him. He loved what he did. He had even grown to love the psychic and genetic enhancements. But Jaimie was everything to him. He needed her. He just didn’t know how to reconcile the two. He had told her so many things that night. He’d like to forget he’d said them, but two years had gone by and he had plenty of time to remember word for word how he’d told her she’d come crawling back, begging him to take her back, that she couldn’t make it without him. He’d been so angry at her—at least he thought he’d been. Over those long two years he realized he’d been angry at himself for ever putting her—any of them—in the dangerous position they were all in. It was his responsibility and he couldn’t walk away, not even when he couldn’t seem to breathe without Jaimie.