Power Game

by Christine Feehan

  Nonny was the type of woman a man could always count on. Steady. She didn't freak out no matter what happened around her. A knife and a shotgun were always close. They just didn't make women like her anymore. He'd never known there were women like her in the world, so if she wanted to play him for some reason, he was willing to be played.

  "I'm well aware Dr. Whitney is tryin' to kidnap Wyatt and Pepper's daughters," Nonny said with a little sniff.

  He'd upset her. He resisted the urge to press his fingers to the inside corners of his eyes. Hard. He didn't know how to talk to women. He'd never had time to learn, and now it was too late. He didn't have charm. He wasn't interesting. He was a soldier. He was damned good at being a soldier. He was a medic and he was damned good at that as well. But women . . .

  "I know you're aware, Nonny. Of any of us, you would be the one to be aware. It's just that anyone slipping through our security has to be a GhostWalker or one of Whitney's supersoldiers. Just the fact that they knew which plant you needed bothers me. They had to be watching you."

  She pulled the pipe from between her lips with a little unladylike Cajun curse. "I didn' think about that. I didn' tell the soldiers which plant I needed. Someone had to have seen me pull up the dead one from the field by Trap and Cayenne's house."

  Ezekiel didn't think anyone else would refer to the huge factory-sized building in the swamp as a "house." Trap had converted it to use as a home, so he supposed it could be loosely labeled that. Still, Nonny included Trap and Cayenne in her family circle.

  "I had four plants growin' and all of them were dead. Black nightshade is rare in these parts. I don' see it much growin' in the wild around here anymore."

  "But the plant was on the doorstep this morning?"

  She nodded slowly. "I'm sorry, Ezekiel. I should have told you right away. I figured whoever brought it to me wasn' a threat."

  He couldn't blame her. She was sweet and kind. She couldn't conceive of the evil a man like Dr. Peter Whitney was capable of. Still, she was smart. Very, very smart, and it would never do to underestimate her. She looked innocent enough, but she was very good at this game.

  "I'll take a look around, try to backtrack whoever it was." He knew that was useless. He always scouted around the house and property. There hadn't been any tracks. Just in case, he would ask Cayenne to move into the house until the others came back. The other members of his team had been pulled into an extraction mission, leaving only Ezekiel, Mordichai, Gino and Draden to guard the women and children.

  She nodded. "It will be good to have Cayenne here. Trap doesn't like her on her own when he's gone. Says she goes down to the basement and stays alone. He worries."

  "Cayenne isn't a woman you have to worry too much about, Nonny." Clearly Nonny was more worried about Cayenne than Trap. If Trap was afraid for his woman, she'd be put somewhere safe and made to stay there. Trap didn't mess around when it came to Cayenne and her safety.

  "I know she can take care of herself," Nonny agreed, "but she's spent too much of her life alone. It will be good for her to come here. I like havin' her around."

  There it was. The simple truth. What made Grace Fontenot so special. She'd taken Cayenne into her world without hesitation and now that she was there, Nonny wanted her close. Ezekiel wanted Cayenne close for a completely different reason. Mordichai, Gino and Draden would protect the women and children, and Pepper would help if needed, but violence made her physically ill. Not so Cayenne. She was as lethal as they came, and Ezekiel wanted her nearby to help protect Nonny, Pepper and the triplets if needed.

  "Give me your list, and after I get things settled here, I'll go into the Quarter and get these urgently needed spices."

  She pinned him with a stern eye. "Are you bein' sarcastic, Ezekiel Fortunes?"

  "Yes, ma'am, but I'm willing to pretend I believe you desperately need these spices or we won't be having any dinners for the rest of the week."

  She gestured toward him with her sweet-smelling pipe. "Much obliged, Ezekiel." She put the pipe back in her mouth and commenced rocking.

  Ezekiel shook his head, watching her for just a few moments longer. She looked relaxed and very pleased with herself. She was up to something, but he still couldn't figure it out yet. He enjoyed their little sparring sessions, although she should have told him about her plant immediately. He was responsible for security at the Fontenot home while the rest of his team was in the field, but more, nothing could happen to Nonny. She was the heart of their world. She had no business approaching the no-trespassing zone at Stennis, not when he could easily get in and get whatever she needed.

  He went straight to the kitchen door where the box with the plant had been found after texting Cayenne that he needed her and to pack a bag. She didn't ask him why, she simply texted back the time she'd be there and that was under an hour. Cayenne was a no-nonsense soldier and one they all knew they could count on. It was telling that Nonny hadn't asked her to go into town for the imaginary, can't-live-without spices.

  Puzzles bothered him. He didn't like what he didn't understand and even as he backtracked around the house, and farther out into the yard, his mind kept worrying at why Nonny repeatedly sent him into town. She was a direct woman. Ordinarily, she just came out and said what was on her mind, but this time . . .

  There it was. A brush against a branch had left the small leaves on the bush bruised. Not crushed. Bruised. Whoever had gone through that very narrow trail had been relatively small. Definitely light on their feet. He crouched down and studied the ground. The narrow path leading through the brush passed quite close to the dog kennel. He followed that track, paying close attention to the leaves spilling out into the space. Most were pristine, but there were a few that had that same bruising. He could see a small blemish near the top of the kennel where existing dirt had been smeared by a light touch. Someone had gone up the side of the fence onto the roof of the kennel and into the yard.

  The dogs were loose at night, running free in the yard, but closed up in the kennels during the day. The dogs hadn't sounded off at all, nor had they attacked, and they had to have been in the yard at the time the plant was delivered. Unease snaked down his spine. Few people in the world could get through the security at the Fontenot compound. Those few were enhanced soldiers. Dr. Peter Whitney's experiments.

  Abruptly he spun around and stalked back toward the house. He didn't expect to find much, but there was always the possibility of a screwup. He might get lucky--except he didn't. The cameras had recorded glimpses of the dogs rushing the area near the kennels but then halting abruptly, tails wagging before turning away. He studied the feed over and over, trying to catch a single glimpse of the intruder and failing. He saw the box with the plant appear in the footage twice--rather just the corner of the box, but who carried it was another matter.

  He studied that little corner of the box, trying to determine by where it was positioned just how high in the air it was. That might give him an idea of the height of the person carrying it. He went back and forth between the two frames, scrutinizing carefully. He was still working on it when his brother Mordichai came in.

  "Nonny just told me."

  "Someone definitely penetrated the security last night." Ezekiel pointed to the screen where he'd frozen the frame. "They came through the water. I backtracked them to the edge of the pier."

  "We have a camera trained on the water."

  "No boat, Mordichai, and there wasn't a ripple in the water for as far back as forty-five minutes. I'm going to have you go back even further, just in case, but you aren't going to find anything."

  There was a brief silence as they both pondered the significance of that. "Shit. We're in trouble, aren't we?" Mordichai said. "I should have known that bastard wouldn't leave us alone no matter what he said."

  "What if it isn't Whitney trying to reacquire Pepper and the triplets? What if it's the same person who tried to kill Cayenne? Because we know that wasn't Whitney."

  "Violet. That fucking bitch
. She's one of us. A GhostWalker."

  "She's not one of us. Not now, not ever. Whitney enhanced her, but she couldn't possibly have passed a psych eval. Whitney brought the women from the orphanages, and he didn't feel the need to test them before he enhanced them. He just used them for his experiments so he wouldn't make mistakes on his soldiers. If he'd tested her, he would have seen she was a sociopath and out for herself," Ezekiel said. He tapped the screen with the picture frozen. "I have to get going, but Cayenne should be here any minute. Stay sharp. Keep the girls close. You'd better warn Pepper. She might not like violence, but she'll kill if she has to in order to protect her daughters and Nonny, so use her as a last resort."

  "Are you that worried?"

  Ezekiel frowned, thinking it over. It was possible Whitney had orchestrated the other team members to be out on missions in order to reduce the size of the guards around the women and children, but he doubted it. He almost believed Whitney would leave them alone. The man wanted to see what Wyatt and Pepper could do with their three daughters, all capable of injecting venom when biting.

  "I just think we should be extra vigilant. We've got someone, obviously enhanced, watching us and penetrating security. Nonny said they had to be watching her when she goes to harvest the plants because they knew which plant had died that she needed. She went to Stennis to try to dig up another one."

  Mordichai's eyebrows shot up. "They turned her back?"

  "Said they weren't nice about it. I'll have a talk with the guards and warn them they don't want a lesson in manners."

  Mordichai grinned at him. "That'll go over big."

  Ezekiel shrugged. "It won't hurt them to learn to be polite, especially to an eighty-plus-year-old woman who has lived her entire life here." There was an edge to his voice he couldn't prevent. No one was going to fuck with Nonny and get away with it. He'd pull rank if he had to, but he'd rather beat the shit out of them. His brothers always retained the lesson when it had been delivered that way. "She's got me on another bullshit run to the store for her. Not just a grocery store, where I could stay closer to home, she wants me to pick up items only found at a specialty store in the Quarter."

  "What's her game?"

  "I haven't figured that out yet, but it's important to her or I wouldn't go."

  "Wyatt says she's got the second sight."

  Mordichai smirked a little, and Ezekiel resisted the sudden urge to punch him. "If she does, she should just tell me what the hell she's seeing instead of making me go into town when I'm needed here."

  Ezekiel glanced once more up at the screen and then froze, staring. "Upper right corner, Mordichai, right by the nearest cypress trees. Right inside them. You see anything?"

  Mordichai stepped closer and peered at the small flat screen. "Maybe. A ripple for sure. Run it slow."

  Ezekiel did, frame by frame. Something made the water ripple outward. For one moment something came up out of the water, but it was impossible to tell exactly what he was seeing because it was the exact color of the water, even rippled like water. Then it reached up to grasp the root of a gum tree sticking out of the ground just up from the shore. He saw a hand. A human hand. It was small, not a man's.

  He let out his breath. "You see what I'm seeing? That's a woman, Mordichai."

  "What the hell is she?"

  "I saw her hand before she touched the root. The moment she touched it, her hand disappeared." He took the recording back to the moment the hand was in midair and froze the screen. "Definitely a human hand, a woman's or child's. I think a woman."

  "Another one of Whitney's fuckups he sent here for termination?"

  Ezekiel shook his head and reached out to the screen, running his finger along the knuckles of the hand as if by touching it he could figure out just who it was. Enemy or ally? "I wouldn't refer to them as fuckups, not in Wyatt or Trap's hearing. If this is someone scheduled for termination, Pepper and Cayenne didn't know about her or they would have told us."

  Mordichai shrugged. "That doesn't mean anything. The ones scheduled for termination were kept apart because they were deemed too dangerous. Cayenne was never let out of her cell unless they were testing her. Even then they transported her drugged. The girls admitted there could have been others they didn't know about."

  Ezekiel turned away from the screen and stared out the window into the swamp. He liked the peace of it. The way the world disappeared and there was only the sound of nature. The insects. The alligators. The wind in the trees. Birds. He never wanted to see another city as long as he lived. He could make his base here. He would. But first, they were going to have to ferret out every secret and destroy every enemy sent their way.

  He was born for battle. He knew that. He didn't like it, but he knew he was too good at it to be anything else than what he was. His friend Wyatt had found a woman and settled down with Pepper and their triplets--meaning as settled as any GhostWalker could ever be. Trap had followed. That had been a complete shock. Trap wasn't the kind of man to ever settle. Cayenne, his woman, wasn't the type of woman most men could ever live with. One bite and it could be the end, but Trap got off on that.

  Ezekiel accepted that no such woman existed for him, one who could understand his need to protect his family and his fellow soldiers. That need drove him and always would. Wyatt had a woman content to stay home and raise her children. She would protect them if she was forced to, but it wasn't in her nature. Trap had a woman just the opposite. She would fight by his side, and throw herself into every dangerous situation without hesitation. He knew neither woman would suit him. He needed a Nonny, and it didn't seem like there were any women like her left in the world.

  "You all right, Zeke?"

  Mordichai rarely called him Zeke. It was a leftover from childhood thing, but one that twisted at his heart. He shot his brother a careless smile. He didn't feel like smiling. He felt dead inside sometimes. All around him the swamp teemed with life. Wyatt's little girls made him long for something he couldn't have. He didn't want his brother seeing into him. Seeing that he'd hit some kind of wall and wasn't certain where he was going or what he was doing anymore. "Just a little tired."

  Those three little girls. So beautiful. Running around as if they didn't have a care in the world. He liked to listen to them play together. Their little voices laughing while they made up imaginary games. His hand was always near a weapon, and he liked knowing he could protect them from any harm. He couldn't imagine men wanting to destroy those three babies.

  They crawled in his lap when he was reading, demanding stories from him. He gave them stories when no one was around. Hell, he'd told his brothers stories when they huddled together in the dark of an alleyway. He knew stories, and he had an imagination. He just didn't like showing it to anyone. It made him feel vulnerable, and he had never liked that feeling.

  The three little girls were very intelligent. Too intelligent for their own good. Fortunately, so were Pepper, Wyatt and Nonny. They had to be to stay one step ahead of the girls. He took the triplets out with him on the river whenever he was familiarizing himself with the waterways. He told the others he wanted them to learn as well, but it was really to tell them stories and have fun with them. Sometimes they snuck into town and he bought them snowballs. As far as he knew, they didn't ever tell Wyatt, because he was fairly certain he'd never hear the end of it.

  Aside from his two younger brothers, he'd never been around children. Ginger, Thym and Cannelle made him realize he wanted a family of his own. He just wasn't the type of man to have one.

  "Were you out on the roof again last night?" Mordichai persisted. "You don't need to be. We post a guard every night on a rotation, and most nights Draden goes running. I don't think he actually sleeps. Ever."

  "I like to take a look around," Ezekiel admitted. "Without the rest of the team to guard the girls, I just want to be extra vigilant." That sounded lame and gave away more than he wanted to. Mordichai knew him too well to allow him to get away with too much.

  "You're
getting restless again." His brother made it a statement.

  Ezekiel shrugged. It was never good when he got restless. All around him bad things happened. He usually went off by himself. It was much safer that way. Still, there were the three little girls, the women and Nonny to hold him there at least until his team came back.

  "Last time . . ."

  "Yeah. I know." He didn't want his brother to say it aloud. He knew what happened. How many men he'd hurt. How close he'd come to really losing it. "I'll take off if I need to. It's better out here. Not so many demons." That much was the truth. It was far better living on the edge of the swamp, right along the river where the wind called to him and he felt as if he could breathe.

  "Whitney's enhancements made it worse."

  There was no denying the truth of that. What had been born and bred in the streets and alleyways of the city had grown into a monster inside of him. When he'd been chosen for psychic and physical enhancement, he hadn't realized the extent of what would be done to him, or the complications it would create.

  "I handle it," he said softly, needing to reassure his brother as he'd always done. Mordichai studied his face, so Ezekiel kept his features carefully blank. He was handling it, but the need in him was growing and it was ugly.

  "You almost killed them," Mordichai reminded softly.

  "They started it." Why he felt compelled to defend himself he didn't know. He never defended his actions. What the hell was wrong with him? He needed to get away for a while, at least be alone until the need building in him passed. "I've got to pick up the spices for Nonny or we won't be eating. At least that's what she claims."

  He didn't wait for his brother to reply. He found Nonny on the porch in her rocking chair. "The girls?"

  "Pepper put them down for a nap. She's watchin' them. You know they're little escape artists." Nonny sounded proud, a smile in her voice.

  "Keep the shotgun close. Something's not right. Early this morning I received orders to go to work at Stennis. That's fairly standard, and usually I would consider it a good thing, working so close to home, but with most of the team gone, now I'm worried. We're getting shorthanded around here."