Breaking Danger (11 page)

Oh no. Her breath blocked in her chest. Her hand slid from his and her back hit the chairback with a thud. “You
knew
this was coming?” she whispered. The words would barely come out between numb lips. “You knew and you didn't stop it?”

He grabbed her hand back. “No, God no. We didn't plan for
this
. For a massive outbreak of a deadly virus, no.”

Her lungs expanded on a loud gasp. For a second there she thought—
No.
Arka had engineered the virus, not some people on a mountaintop in Northern California.

She had to wait a minute to be able to speak, though. “Okay,” she said when she could keep her voice even. “Explain why you have a community that plans for sieges.”

He didn't answer right away. He simply looked at her, his bright blue eyes burning into hers. He didn't try to hide his scrutiny, didn't try to pretty it up. He just stared so intensely, it felt as if he were walking around inside her head, picking at her thoughts. Turning them over. What was he waiting for?

Finally, he spoke. “Okay.” He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. The touch was casual, a friendly gesture, no more. But she shivered.

He noticed. Those bright ice blue eyes noticed everything.

“Two years ago I would have been shot by the U.S. government for telling you this, but I think, all things considered, that soon there might not be a U.S. military to shoot me anymore, so it's a moot point.”

“If you told me, you'd have to kill me?” she teased. A thousand movies had used that line.

He wasn't smiling. “Exactly.” The way he said it sobered her. “If I had talked to you about us two years ago and someone in my chain of command found out, you'd have been tracked down and disappeared. No one would ever have heard from you again. Least of all me.”

This happened in the real world. She knew that. Her smile was gone. “Your chain of command is probably gone,” she said softly.

His jaws clenched. “It's definitely gone,” he answered. “Mac, Nick, and I belonged to a deniable military unit. Deniable means that if we were ever caught, Uncle Sam would deny our very existence. We were Ghosts. We were off the books, our pasts wiped out, our military records erased. All photographs tracked down and destroyed. We didn't exist. We deployed on missions where the U.S. government could not be seen as intervening. Posse comitatus didn't apply to us, since technically we didn't exist. Do you know what that is?”

Sophie nodded. “Sure. It's the law that stops the military from acting on American soil.”

He gave a sharp nod. “Exactly. But technically we weren't military. We weren't anything. So when the military got word that a lab in Cambridge was very close to perfecting a weaponized version of
Yersinia pestis,
they called us.”

She gasped. A weaponized version of Yersinia was one of the worst things she could think of. Almost as bad as what was happening outside her windows. “The plague! A genetically modified version of the bacillus that can spread quickly—maybe airborne—it would be a disaster!”

“Oh yeah.” His face tightened. “Believe me when I say that the seven of us—the founders, the plankholders of Ghost Ops—were highly motivated to retrieve the material and shut the research down. We had a very short chain of command. Our team leader, Captain Lucius Ward reported to General Clancy Flynn, who reported to the President. So when we got our orders from Lucius, we were ready to go in fifteen.”

“Who were the other three?”

“Three of the best teammates you can imagine. Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist.”

Something about the way he said their names . . . “Did they die in the mission?”

Something dangerous flashed in his icy blue eyes. “No. It might have been better if they had. They ended up on the wrong end of a scalpel. They spent a year under the knife.”

Sophie blinked.

“It was a trap, Sophie.” His voice had been calm up until then. Now the heat of rage shaded through it. “It was an Arka Pharmaceuticals lab and General Flynn and Dr. Charles Lee wanted to get rid of Lucius and get rid of us. Nobody was weaponizing bubonic plague. They were actually perfecting a cancer vaccine. We were sent into battle under a lie. We were ambushed in a firefight and an explosion took out the lab. Only three of us survived, or so we thought. We thought Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist died and Lucius escaped. We thought he'd betrayed us for money.” His jaws clenched and he looked away for a moment, visibly trying to control himself. “The thought that the captain would betray us for money—well, it nearly brought us to our knees. Mac particularly. He was recruited by the captain, trained by the captain to head up the Ghost Ops team. Mac would have gladly given his life for the captain. All of us would have. And here we were—betrayed, under arrest, on our way to a secret court-martial.”

He looked away again, jaws clenched. The memories brought him pain, distress. Sorrow came off him in almost visible waves, though his face betrayed nothing. It didn't have to, she could see the pain.

Sophie didn't know what to do, so she did the only thing she could—she touched him. Since childhood she'd had two different types of touches. Normal touch, human skin to human skin. It could be a hug, walking arm in arm, accidental touches. But over and above that, she could also Touch. It was an entirely different thing altogether and she still didn't understand it, even after a lifetime of it.

She'd become part of the Arka research project not just to understand the science of paranormal phenomena, but to understand herself.

To understand how she could heal.

Not all the time and not always fully, because it was erratic, but when she threw a switch on inside herself, something that had no explanation in normal science happened. She was a scientist and she'd always gotten straight As in everything, including English. So she should have been able to explain to herself what happened when she threw that switch, but she couldn't. She could barely describe it.

But Sophie let it happen, this gift she barely understood.

She warmed up in a flash, heat crackling through her in a palpable wave. The heat was entirely subjective, though, because she'd taken her own temperature during a healing session and it never went above 98.6. The heat didn't feel like a fever. Fevers were a reaction to a pathology. This didn't feel like pathology, it felt . . . right. As if she were throwing a circuit of nature, and power flowed from her to the sick person.

Her first conscious use of her Touch had been at the age of twelve with Fritzi, the dumb and the beautiful. He'd been run over by a car on the street outside their house. The house had had a fence around it, but later they'd discovered that Fritzi had dug his way out. She and her parents had been having breakfast on a Saturday morning when they'd heard a loud thump and then anguished wailing.

Rushing out onto the street, they'd seen Fritzi lying on his side, whining, trying to lick his red hindquarters. Sophie's father had gathered Fritzi in his arms while Sophie clung to her father, crying as he carried the wounded animal to their porch.

While her father took out his cell to call the vet, Sophie threw her arms around Fritzi, burying her face in his soft golden fur that smelled of shampoo and dog and . . . something happened. She felt waves of heat that didn't burn. She was barely aware of the fact that Fritzi's whines had stopped and that he'd started licking her arms instead of his hindquarters. All she knew was that she loved this beautiful dog who'd been a puppy during her own puppyhood.

He stood up.

Sophie had fallen back, so weak she couldn't stand up, though Fritzi could.

They took Fritzi to the vet and a surprised Dr. Felsom told her parents that the X-rays showed bone fractures that had recently healed.

Sophie healed Nana Henderson's arthritis, her mother's breast cancer, and her father's broken femur. She'd healed an aneurysm in an old family friend, Emma Price. Aunt Emma's aneurysm had disappeared after a session with Sophie, and it was only her father's influence that had stopped Aunt Emma's cardiologist from publishing the incredible results—the clear aneurysm on the angiogram on September 12, no aneurysm on the angiogram on September 20.

No one told the cardiologist that Sophie had spent an afternoon with Aunt Emma on the seventeenth. And no one told him that Sophie spent the next week in bed, too weak to get up.

From that moment on, she was forbidden to help anyone.

Sophie had never tried to heal the spirit, but she felt that Jon had an ailment as deathly as an aneurysm. A bone-deep sorrow that in any other human would have been crippling.

The sorrow was profound and deep and old. Not linked to the suffering outside the window. That was like rain falling on an already flooded plain.

So she Touched him, and was nearly staggered by the waves of pain and sorrow.

“Go on,” she urged. “Tell me.”

Jon shook his head, frowning. He looked at her, opened his mouth and shut it. Something was happening to him, something he couldn't explain. She was absorbing his pain, trying to withstand the onslaught.

“Mac knew of an abandoned mine inside Mount Blue.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “That's the place Catherine mentioned.”

He had hesitated just a second before saying the name of the location, just as no last names had been exchanged when she was talking with Elle and Catherine Young.

Jon's head was still in the Old World. In this New World, all secrets were gone. How could there be state secrets when the state had disappeared? He hadn't understood this yet, but he would.

“Right away, we had people who just . . . come to us.” He raised his eyebrows, rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “The damnedest thing,” he muttered. “It's like we became this—this magnet. For people on the run, for misfits, for people with gifts that got them into trouble. One of the first was an engineer who'd worked for a criminal construction company that got a lot of people killed and framed him for it. He just . . . showed up one evening.”

His eyes slid to hers.

“You have to understand something. Mac, Nick, and I are experts in security. We're the best. The very first thing we did was surround our hideout with remote sensors so thick a fly couldn't fart without our knowing about it. And Eric—he just waltzed right in. No one should have been able to do that, but by God he did. So we knew he was either going to be a dangerous enemy or a strong ally. Turns out he's a strong ally. He built us a beautiful place that somehow just attracted people, the right kind of people.” His beautiful mouth kicked up in a half smile. “Do you know who our cook is?”

Sophie shook her head. “But I'm not up on trendy chefs, so I might not recognize the name.”

“Oh, you'll recognize this one, all right. Stella Cummings.”

Sophie's mouth fell open. “Stella Cummings?
The
Stella Cummings? The—”

“Actress, yeah.” Jon looked as if he were enjoying her astonishment.

“Wasn't she—”

“Slashed by a stalker, yeah.” Jon's face turned grim again. “Took her two years and ten surgeries to get over it, and she was badly scarred. She just left Hollywood behind. Got a job slinging hash up north because she'd always loved to cook. I was with her in the diner in a small town when there was an announcement on the news that her stalker had escaped from prison. She'd barely put her life back together. Working as a cook at the diner grounded her, she said. We'd struck up a sort of friendship. We never exchanged names, though I knew who she was. She looks like Stella Cummings, only chopped up and put back together again. She was shaking so hard she could barely breathe. I told her I could take her to a place where she would be safe and she came, and now we can't do without her.”

“So all these refugees streaming into . . . your headquarters are—”

“Eating like kings. Speaking of which”—he lifted a forkful of her zucchini omelet—“Fabulous.”

“Thanks. So you guys set this place up. People came and found refuge with you. Did I get that right?”

“You did. And since the people who came don't want to be found, we keep it hidden. And we'd prepared for the worst case scenario—a siege. We've been working nonstop on our community, and it is almost completely self-sufficient in water, food, and energy. Now Catherine and Elle are setting up a clinic. Refugees are pouring in, but we have the space and huge food reserves, so we're going to be okay. Haven will survive this storm. We just have to make sure as many people survive as possible.”

A howl came from outside. It sounded like an animal cry, but wasn't. Sophie shivered. There might be one safe space left, but it was far away and too late for this city she loved.

Now it was Jon's turn to comfort her. He put down his fork and leaned toward her, arms open. Sophie burrowed there, arms sliding around that broad back, hands pressed flat against the thick muscles of his back

“It'll be okay,” he said softly and kissed her hair.

Yes. Maybe. Sophie's gift was great, but she wasn't going to be able to save the world. All she could hope for was to make it back to this safe community, snugged inside a mountain, and help produce as much vaccine as possible. If they made it. Another howl came from outside, and another. Sounds of animals snarling, fighting.

Only they weren't animals.

They were people.

She buried her head against Jon's shoulder. His arms tightened around her.

“Take me to bed, Jon,” she whispered against his shoulder, eyes closed tight.

He stood so quickly his chair tipped over to the floor. He picked her up and carried her away—away from the terrible noises.

Mount Blue

Haven

His cane slammed to the floor, crossing right in front of two of the most beautiful female legs on planet Earth. The woman's eyes looked at the cane running obliquely in front of her, following it up to his hand, then going all the way up to his face.