Murder Game

CHAPTER THREE

Kadan sighed. "Let's just take one thing at a time. What do you have for dinner? I'm a fairly good cook."

Tansy's mouth went dry. She couldn't sit still with the rush of adrenaline. He was going to force her to go back with him. Tansy leapt from her chair and paced across the ground to where she kept her food supplies, needing the action to hide her thoughts. There had to be a way to escape. She knew the mountain like the back of her hand. If she got out of his sight, she could get away and hide. If he really had a tight timetable, he wouldn't have the time to look for her. But she had to keep it together and not panic.

She turned from the crisp cooler and found him inches from her body. He was so silent she hadn't heard him approach. Worse, she hadn't sensed him either. She was used to feeling the energy that radiated from people, but with him, there was nothing at all to warn her he was close. She realized she was holding her breath. She inhaled and took the scent of him into her lungs. Deep inside, her body sizzled and burned in an unfamiliar way. Fear shimmered through her, not at the prospect of this man attempting to force her compliance, but because as rough and scarred as he was, he filled her senses and mind with a sensual heat she couldn't ignore.

Tansy pushed the vegetables into his hands. His thumb brushed the sensitive skin of her forearm, a long stroke that had to be deliberate. Her gaze jumped to his. "I don't like to be touched."

"You shouldn't have such beautiful skin then," he answered, sounding completely unrepentant and not in the least perturbed by her reprimand, when, truthfully, he was shocked that he'd let his guard down so far with her that he was acting out of character.

Tansy shook her head. "Don't try to flirt with me, not when you've come up here determined to drag me back down into evil."

A slow smile changed his entire face, softened every hard line, lit up the blue of his eyes, and changed his mouth from that hint of cruelty to pure sensuality. "Honey, if I was going to flirt with you, you'd know it. That was the pure truth, whether you want to hear it or not." And touching her had shocked the hell out of him.

It wasn't a few butterflies reacting, an entire forest of them took flight in her stomach. "You were flirting," she said accusingly, frowning at him.

His smile widened as he turned away to the small table where he took the chopping board from her along with the knife. "Maybe. A little. But you do have beautiful skin."

"Thank you." Tansy fired up the gas stove and put on water for rice. "I have to work tonight. And you can't come. You'll scare my cougar away."

"She follows you. I found her tracking you through the trees down to the waterfall. She's dangerous, Tansy."

"The whole world is dangerous."

"Say my name."

She touched her teeth to her lower lip and shrugged. "Kadan, then. Why does it matter?"

His blue black eyes flicked over her. "I matter, that's why."

The way he handled the knife with efficiency, chopping vegetables for stir-fry while she pulled her frying pan out of the locked chest where she kept her cooking pots, seemed to fascinate her. He noticed she couldn't stop watching the movements of his hands, so fast they nearly blurred, each stroke deliberate, and maybe he was showing off a little. Chagrined at behaving like a kid with his first crush, Kadan forced himself to focus on his mission.

"The first time you helped the police find a serial killer, you were only thirteen years old. What in the world made you do such a thing?" he asked. "Especially when the cost to you was so high." He turned to look at her. "You do more than simply pick up an object and know what a person was thinking and feeling, you're an empath. Why would a teenager ever put herself in a position such as tracking killers? That made no sense to me." And how could your family allow it? The thought spilled out before he could censor it.

Her head snapped up and she glared at him, proving she could pick up his thoughts. "My family understood my reasons, and unlike you, they believe in free will."

"So you also are telepathic. Apparently that talent didn't get knocked out of your head in that climbing accident."

She didn't even blink, but flicked him a look of censure from under her long lashes. "Apparently not."

She was cool under fire, he had to give her that. "Just how many talents do you have?"

She shrugged. "How many do you have?"

He flashed her another smile. "Good girl. Don't give away too much to the enemy." He heated a small amount of oil and tossed in the chopped vegetables. "I'm not, you know."

"My enemy? Maybe not, but I'm listening to everything you say, and I think you're prepared to use force to try to get me to track your killer."

"You really don't pull your punches, do you?"

"Why would I? You came up here with your own agenda. You don't really care what my reasons are for not cooperating. My reasons don't matter to you, and quite frankly, neither do I. As long as you get the job done, that's what is important to you."

Kadan sighed. "I have no more choice in this than you do. I have orders. Tansy, and people are going to die if we don't stop this."

"How does that make you any different from Whitney? For all you know he was following orders. He's a scientist and he works for the government. He could have been under orders to develop psychic warfare; in fact, in order to conduct his experiments on you, he had to have convinced somebody high up he could do it. They had to have known about his earliest experiments."

He let the first surge of anger wash over him and dissipate while he lifted the frying pan off the heat and tossed the vegetables. Setting them back on the stove and adding a little soy sauce gave him a little more time so he was able to keep his expression exactly the same. "I've been more than up-front with you. Insulting me is not going to help anything."

Her eyebrow shot up. "It wasn't meant as an insult. I think it's a legitimate question. As I understand it, your GhostWalker program is top security clearance. You're a government secret, so secret that if you can't find out who is killing people, they want to eliminate all of you. Who has that kind of power, to play with people's lives, to decide whether they live or die? I don't see that they're much different than your killer. And Whitney maybe just carried out his orders, like you're doing now."

Maybe she was hitting a little too close to home. Of course they'd all speculated that several of their bosses had a hand in creating them. Whitney couldn't have done it alone, and he was still working for the government, sanctioned by someone, because he was escaping every effort to capture or destroy him. He had friends in high places.

"I suppose you have a point. There's every possibility Whitney is following orders, but what he's doing is wrong in so many ways I count even begin to tell you."

"And if the order comes down to eliminate your fellow GhostWalkers, will you carry it out because they told you to do it?"

He removed the vegetables from the heat and turned completely to face her, his face settling into hard lines. His eyes went flat and cold, the blue turning nearly black, focused and hungry like the cougar. "There would be a war like no one has ever seen before."

A shiver of fear crept down her spine, but she liked him a lot better for it. He wasn't joking, and so far, she was fairly certain he had told her the truth about everything. She was very sure he meant what he implied-he would go to war for or with his friends. She gave him a concession, then, a piece of herself because he'd revealed a part of his character to her.

"My parents always told me I was special. That my talent was a tremendous gift, not a curse, and that I could do things no one else could do for a reason. I started tracking serial killers when I was thirteen years old because I believed that was what I was supposed to do with my gift. I heard about somebody dumping the bodies of young girls next to schools and I thought, I can stop him. So I did."

Her voice was calm, remote; no expression chased across her face. Kadan knew self-preservation when he saw it. Tansy had removed herself from her past and simply recited the details as if they'd happened to someone else-and maybe they had. Her experiences certainly had to have changed her from that young, innocent girl. And she was giving him something of herself, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

"It must have been difficult, especially with you being an empath and so young. Did Whitney help prepare you?"

Tansy frowned. "How would he have helped me?"

"There are exercises you can do to strengthen each of the gifts you have and ways to learn to combat the repercussions of using psychic energy. I would have thought Whitney would have taught them to you."

"No, he didn't teach me anything. He studied me. If there was a way to combat the rush of impressions from objects, I certainly was never told. I wore gloves, of course, but the feelings, particularly emotions that were violent, often leaked through anyway. Whitney liked to observe other people's pain. It helped with his own."

Everything in him stilled. She had revealed an important piece of information without even knowing what she was giving him. "What pain?"

"He uses other people's pain to drown out his own. I think his pain stems from perceived abandonment, real or not; he feels very disconnected from everyone around him. He has rage toward his parents and teachers, people who didn't recognize his genius. He's very patriotic and has anger toward certain individuals in the government who don't share his vision, because he believes he's smarter and they should listen to him. All of that causes pain, but he doesn't recognize that it does. He can't connect with anyone."

"He has a daughter."

She nodded, chewing on her lower lip thoughtfully, frowning while she did so. "Lily. He spoke of her sometimes, and when he did, I could feel a rush of emotion in him, but it wasn't like my parents when they touched me. It wasn't the same as anything I've ever identified with as a parent's love. He views her as an extension of himself. He's a megalomaniac, has an absolute belief that he's superior to everyone else and that no one will ever measure up to his capabilities except perhaps Lily-or her children."

Kadan nodded. "That's a fair assessment of Dr. Whitney."

"You're certain he's still alive? My parents-well, my father-always insisted we use him as a doctor, but I haven't seen him since he was supposedly murdered."

"What kinds of things did he do to you?"

"He told Mom and Dad he was helping me with the headaches, but they never went away or even got better. Mostly he gave me physicals, asked a lot of questions, was very interested in whether I had sex or not, and took a lot of blood and tissue samples. He also spent a lot of time on my eyes. He was very interested in the fact that I almost always have to wear dark glasses and that I see differently than other people."

Kadan was very interested in whether or not she had sex as well, but figured this wasn't the best time to ask her. "What's different about the way you see?"

Tansy shrugged, but didn't comment.

Kadan let it go. "Did he give you injections?"

She nodded. "They hurt like hell." She frowned. "You know, I didn't always get a lot off of him, the way I do most people. Not him, exactly, his things. At the time, when I touched objects, I could read a lot about a person, but it was more difficult with him. Of course, by that time, I tried to wear gloves everywhere I went."

"You haven't felt anything even when you touch an object I've touched, have you?" Kadan asked. "I'm an anchor, which means that I can draw psychic energy away from you. I can also shield both of us from any energy and keep others from feeling ours."

He deftly added the vegetables to the rice and took the plates she handed him to serve the meal on. "My talents come in handy on missions when we need to hide from the enemy."

"But not so handy tracking serial killers," Tansy observed.

He nodded. "I'm good at working puzzles out, and once I'm pointed in the right direction, I'll find him, but I need a little help."

Tansy's heart jumped. She could never allow him to lull her into a false sense of security. "I'm sorry that help can't be me, Kadan, but it can't be. I know you've got all the ugly little details of my hospitalization. They couldn't take away all those voices, the victims-or the killers. Do you have any idea what it's like to hear screams and feel someone's desperate last thoughts all the time, and I mean all the time? To know the mind of a killer intimately? The delicious perverted pleasure he gets out of carving someone up, or burying them alive?" The door in her mind creaked ominously and whispers grew. She took a deep breath, controlled herself, and slammed it shut. "You're already bringing those days back and I haven't even tried to help you."

"I can keep most of the psychic spill from targeting you."

She turned her head and removed her glasses, looking him straight in the eye. "No, you can't, not and have me track him. I'd need to feel him, get inside his mind to do what you're asking. You and I both know you can't take it out of my head once it's there."

Kadan hated that she was right. And he hated it more that she drew on gloves. She had touched him and hadn't felt anything, he'd protected her, but she didn't trust him and for a good reason-truthfully, she couldn't. He had to bring her back with him. There were days when his job sucked, and this was one of them.

"Sit down and let's eat. You can tell me about that cat. She's out there watching us now, I can feel her staring at us."

Tansy took the plate he handed her, careful, even with the gloves, to keep from touching him. "She's curious about you. She probably hasn't seen anyone else in months. And her den is close. She's due to give birth anytime." Excitement flashed in her voice. "I'm hoping to get some great shots. If I'm lucky, she might change her mind and use the cave I've set up in to film the event, although so far she's been ignoring it."

"Why don't you persuade her?"

"I can't do that."

"You stopped her from attacking. If she'd wanted to do it, she could have done some major damage to you, but she didn't," he pointed out. "You have to have some control over her."

Tansy sank down onto a log and indicated that he could have the one chair she'd brought. "Maybe, but it's not really like that. I have an affinity with animals, I've always had it. But I don't really talk to them, not telepathically."

"Are you certain?"

She chewed on her lower lip. He liked that lower lip and found himself staring as her small teeth tugged at it.

"I 'push' a little to get them to do what I want, but it's not a conscious thing." She took a bite of the stir-fry. The man could cook. "Not bad."

"Self-preservation."

His eyes crinkled around the edges, tiny lines showing that he squinted a lot. His long lashes were thick and dark, and helped to cover the expression in his dark blue eyes.

"I've never been afraid of animals," Tansy said. "I've always liked being around them. I can touch them and not find myself somewhere else."

"What does that mean?" Kadan's low voice slid into her mind like soft butter. "Finding yourself somewhere else? What does that mean?"

Her expression closed down immediately and she shrugged. "When I touch objects, the world narrows and I'm in a tunnel, like an alternate world. Everything bends and curves and the energy is there, preserved for me like a recording, only I'm in it, feeling everything that is happening, no matter what it is." She looked him in the eye again. "All of it. Everything. If you are cheating on your wife and feel guilty, I'm there with you. If you're worried about a sick child, or paying your house payment, I'm feeling that fear right along with you."

"If that person is in love…"

"Then I am too."

Kadan forced his gaze away from the unconscious plea in her unusually colored eyes. Knots gathered in his gut, hard and tight, giving him hell for doing his job. He believed in what he was doing or he wouldn't have come looking for her. The vicious murders had to be stopped. And if they weren't-if the faceless names above them continued to believe that the GhostWalkers were responsible for the murders, they would never risk the controversial program ever seeing the light of day. Kadan had no illusions about their lives. The GhostWalkers-he and his friends-were expendable. Worse, they were something the government would want to sweep under the carpet like dirty laundry. They'd be sent out on a suicide mission, or quietly eliminated.

He swore under his breath and kept his gaze fixed on the surrounding forest, studying the trees and brush as if each piece of foliage intrigued him. Truthfully, all he saw was that look in her eyes.

"Why the bullshit about not having your talent anymore?"

Tansy sighed. "It's complicated. I can't actually do that work anymore. I can't separate the emotions and voices, so I'm not lying when I say I don't have the talent. Once the word went out that I had a climbing accident, I was left alone for the most part. My father handles all the calls coming in, and I think now enough time has passed that most people have forgotten me." She waited until he looked at her. "I wish you would."

"Forget you?"

She nodded, willing him to just walk away and pretend he'd never seen her.

A prickle of awareness slid down his spine, and he reacted instantly, an automatic reflex, diving for her, driving her off of the log, backward, his hands pulling her smaller body into his to protect her as he took them over the small ledge to roll down the slope. He registered the crack of the bullet shattering the tree behind his head where he'd been sitting, followed by the boom of the rifle. She went with him, keeping her body tight against his so they rolled smoothly. The rocks and brush had to hurt as she went over them, but she kept silent.

Coming to a halt, he signaled her to stay low and to scoot back into the heavier timber and brush behind them. She didn't ask questions, but stayed on her belly, easing her body backward, searching with her toes for a purchase in the dirt to help drag her into concealment. Kadan backed up with her, sliding into the brush as if he were born there, drawing a gun from his boot and slipping it into her hand in one smooth motion.

Do you know how to use this?

She blinked at him, but she shouldn't have been shocked. The moment he felt the danger, he had connected with her, so that she felt it too. His entry into her mind had been as smooth as him drawing the gun and putting it into her hand. She nodded her reassurance. They were both telepathic, and somehow that made her feel less alone-less apart from everyone. She'd never actually met another human being with psychic powers.

Stay to cover. I'm going hunting.

She didn't want Kadan to leave her. He seemed solid and safe, and exuded absolute confidence. I'm guessing that's not some random hunter poaching.

Not with that rifle. You stay to cover.

He was already moving away from her, and it took every ounce of self-control she had to keep from reaching out and holding on to him.

You'll be safe, Kadan reassured her with implacable confidence. He had no other choice but to succeed. That was a sniper, and he'd tracked Kadan to this place, which meant someone very high up didn't want Kadan to succeed in solving the murders. Not that he was all that surprised; someone had wanted the GhostWalkers program gone and everyone involved dead from the beginning-and that someone worked at the White House. The GhostWalkers had been unable to pin down just whom the threat was coming from, so there was no chance to eliminate him, but if Kadan got out of this alive, they'd be one step closer to solving the puzzle. Not too many people knew he'd been sent out.

He circled around Tansy's camp, keeping his distance, and his head down. Movement attracted the eye, and he wanted no part of showing any of his body to a sniper, or even to give away his position. Whoever they'd sent after him would be good.

He allowed himself grim amusement. But they wouldn't be good enough, because in a world of kill or be killed, there were few men like him. He was wearing clothing that reflected the images around him, nearly making him invisible. He cloaked himself, changing his skin color like a chameleon to blend in with his surroundings. And then he began to move with the stealth of a wolf.

He went up, going to high ground, continuing to circle so he could come up behind his stalker. There'd been only one bullet, and the sniper would have moved immediately, but once Kadan found the trail, he would be able to follow it.

He was taking a chance leaving Tansy. Not that the sniper could get to her; Tansy was too clever to give herself away. But she'd be making up her mind to run, and she knew the mountain. She'd been living up in the Sierras for months. She'd have confidence in herself and she was too smart to go back to camp. He sighed. He'd have to track her down again after disposing of their enemy.

He stayed low to the ground, making his way through the forest until it eventually gave way to the great granite boulders and jutting cliffs. There wasn't as much foliage, but he blended in with the rock and moved at a steady pace, not too fast to draw the eye, but fast enough to get around behind the sniper. The man would be moving toward Tansy's camp, taking the shortest route, with as much cover as possible. He would want to get the job done as quickly as possible, and that meant he had to be on the move.

Kadan skirted several jagged boulders, looking for a way up so he would have a better view of the area surrounding Tansy's camp. A giant boulder rose over the top of several granite slabs, one sitting precariously on top of the other, some leaning and a few shooting through the middle like great towers. He reached up with his fingertips and found an indentation. That was all he needed for the climb. He went up slowly, like a spider, clinging to the rock face, careful not to disturb the loose dirt and rock on his way to the top.

He had microscopic setae on the pads of his fingers and at the end of each individual seta were one thousand tinier spatulae, or tips, which were so thin as to render them under the wavelength of visible light. Not even his fellow GhostWalkers knew why he could cling to any surface, including the ceiling, but a single seta could lift nearly fifty pounds of weight. He could support his entire body weight with just one hand. It had taken him a great deal of time to learn to use his ability to "walk" over any surface, even hanging upside down, but the weeks of training had been well worth it. He could stick and unstick himself at least ten times a second as he ran up walls.

He moved slowly now, but ordinarily he could climb the face of rock in minutes. Sticking was easy enough. Unsticking was a bit more of a problem, but he'd learned the technique over time, until he could move with incredible speed when necessary. Unfortunately, he often wore a thin pair of gloves to cover the fact that the pads of his fingers were different. The microscopic hairs were bristles, unseen but felt. He knew what Tansy felt like always having to cover her differences. He'd learned to live with the strange pads and embrace the things he could do with them, after the first wave of anger at discovering he was genetically altered as well as psychically. If the GhostWalkers' enemy in the White House knew that all the men and women in the program had been genetically as well as psychically enhanced, Kadan was certain the order would have already gone out to destroy them all. Or maybe he knew and thought of them as abominations and that's why he was so determined to rid the government of their services. Kadan had heard the term applied to them before.

Once above the forest, he lay flat and took a cautious look around the area below him. He studied each section. Tansy would have slipped deeper into the woods below. It would take a few minutes for the shock to wear off, and then she'd seize the opportunity to make a run for it. He sighed, knowing he was going to have to track her again for sure.

Kadan picked out the route that would be the sniper's best choice and spent a patient ten minutes watching the brush for movement. The wind picked up in strength as the night wore on, and the needles in the trees and the leaves on the bushes began to gently sway. Everything in him tightened. The sniper would move with the wind.

Motion just south of Tansy's camp caught his eye and he focused there, catching sight of a blur of darkness moving behind the trees before disappearing. He let out his breath. He had the man now, and he quickly plotted a course to intercept. Just as he began to move, he caught a glimpse of something sticking out from behind a fairly large tree trunk. He studied the shape carefully, wishing he hadn't shrugged out of his pack. He could have used his field glasses because he suspected that strange shape was something commonly known as "tree cancer," a body part protrude from behind the trunk that indicated that a sniper had set up shop there and was waiting for his spotter to mark a distance.

His heart contracted painfully. What the hell were they setting up? Or whom?

Tansy, where are you? No bullshit. There's two of them. I need to know your position to know that you're safe.

Telepathy over long distance was always shaky, especially connecting with the same wave length of someone he wasn't very familiar with. Often times there could be a few seconds-or even minutes-delay. He counted every heartbeat, wondering if she was being stubborn or hiding from him. Wondering if she knew that the more they communicated, the easier the intimacy of mind contact would become. She wouldn't want that. She wouldn't want him running around in her head. She already had too many strangers there.

Then she was there, flooding his mind with her. His body reacted to her close proximity, the sweetness of her, the feminine rush of heat and silk. The taste of cinnamon bursting in his mouth. There was fear, determination, even courage, although she didn't recognize herself as courageous. Mostly she was filled with concern-not for him, certainly not for herself-but for the cougar.

He groaned aloud. That damned cat. She'd flung herself in front of a gun for the animal. He should have known she'd be unwavering in her resolution to keep the animal safe.

I'm making my way up to the cougar's den.

Are you heading south from your camp? He knew the answer before her words formed in his mind. The spotter was edging toward the southernmost paint of Tansy's camp. Maybe he saw her earlier tracks, or maybe something she'd done had tipped the man off to her presence in the brush, but the spotter was tracking her.

Yes, I'm in the rougher terrain, and circling around to make my way up into the granite to get closer to her den. I have a blind up there, and I can urge her to go to safety if they come close. They won't see the blind.

Her voice still had the little lag time that often accompanied a new connection, but already he felt more familiar with her, his mind adjusting so they rode the same wave with precision. Few were as skilled as he was, and he'd never met anyone untrained able to use telepathy as smoothly as he could, but although she sent out her thoughts in a slightly different way from him, she was definitely adept.

I don't want you to move. Stay right where you are, even if they come close. I'm going to draw their attention away from you…

No!

She sent an instant and adamant rejection of his idea, and he immediately caught the image of a cop pushing her away and going down, blood on his chest. He'd read the reports, so many of them, dating back to her teenage years, and that particular case had been vicious and bloody and took its toll on everyone. They'd lost the cop and she been so broken up over it, and that had been in the early years of her tracking career.

He took a breath, let it out, breathing for both of them. Listen to me, Tansy. I have skills no one else has. I'm a GhostWalker. The things I can do, psychically as well as physically, give me a huge edge. And I've had more training than most men know what to do with. He was already on the move, soothing her as he used the granite cliff to shortcut his way to the sniper.

This time he moved fast, using the pads of his fingers to allow him to climb around and then down. If his boots had been off, he would have gone headfirst even faster, but he just used his upper body strength and fingertips, crossing the wall of granite, moving at breakneck speed, crossing slab after slab. Several times he leapt across gaps, catching by his fingertips.

Both the sniper and the spotter should have targeted him by now, but the expected bullet didn't come. He didn't make the mistake of slowing down; he almost leapfrogged across the rock walls, zigzagging and moving up and down.

I smell him close to me.

His heart jumped again. Adrenaline poured into his body. He looked down and saw the surface of another giant slab of granite. This one had several smaller pieces jutting out from it. It was the fastest way down, but a fairly large jump. He'd have to push off from where he was, catch himself on a rock across and down from him, about five feet away, and then spring back, making another five-foot jump.

Stay still. I'll draw his attention.

He pushed off, deliberately brushing his elbow against loose dirt and rock, sending an avalanche tumbling to the ground below. The gap between boulders was wide, but his fingertips caught and held. The second jump was already planned in his mind, and he turned and leapt, just as the bullet hit the granite beside his left shoulder. Rock splintered, driving slivers into his arm. but he was already in the air, going for the surface below him. As soon as he landed, he let himself drop to the ground, rolling for cover. He kept rolling, smashing into the thicker brush and then going still.

Two more bullets hit the ground to the right of him and just in front of him. He belly-crawled backward into much heavier brush, careful not to disturb branches. Once in the small tunnels made by animals and debris catching on brush, he crawled, using elbows and toes to propel his body along the ground, making his way to where the sniper had set up his rifle.

Within minutes he could feel the violent energy coming at him in waves. The man was sweating; the scent of him carried on the wind. Kadan slid the knife from his boot, transferring it to his teeth as he crawled toward the sniper.

The man stared through his scope, scanning the area, trying to get a bead on Kadan, and Kadan could sense the man's shock at how fast Kadan had come down the granite wall. Even though the sniper had seen Kadan leap with his own eyes, he obviously was beginning to think he'd imagined it. The night shadows had lengthened and grown, and Kadan's reflective clothing and skin tones had made him virtually impossible to see until he moved. The sniper had fired on instinct, but now doubted himself.

Kadan let out his breath, shielding his psychic energy automatically. He didn't have the impression that the sniper was a GhostWalker, produced from Whitney's list of rejected psychic candidates, but he always erred on the side of caution. He had to get close. Very close. He moved again, this time out of the brush. He was more exposed, relying on stealth and his reflective clothing and skin changes to keep him invisible. Moving inches at a time allowed him to keep from drawing the sniper's attention, although more than once, as the man surveyed his surroundings, he looked right at Kadan.

Kadan ceased all movement until the sniper settled behind his rifle once more and took a careful survey around the heavy brush. Once the sniper was busy, Kadan eased his body closer, hardly breathing, not allowing a single leaf to crackle beneath his weight.

The sniper knelt beside the tree, eye once again to his scope, and Kadan rose, still nearly invisible, his knife held low, blade up. The sniper turned and Kadan struck, taking the man out quickly and efficiently, doing his best to make the kill clean. Blood splattered across the trunk and over the rifle. Kadan stepped back, avoiding the bright red streaks. He waited a few moments before reaching down, without expression, and checking for a pulse. He wiped the blade clean and then checked the sniper's hands, hoping to get a fingerprint. He wasn't surprised to find that the prints had been burned off. This man was a sanctioned killer and wouldn't be traced back to anywhere. More than likely he would have been declared dead years earlier. He was a ghost with no name and no home.

Kadan shook his head. This wasn't the life he wanted for the GhostWalkers. He left everything right where it lay, not even touching the weapon.

Kadan? Tansy's voice wavered.

I'm fine. Did the spotter turn away from you?

Yes, he's gone. He took off running back toward the camp. She hesitated. I don't feel a wave of violence. I can't tell what happened.

Kadan slipped the knife back into the scabbard and backed into the heavier brush. The spotter would be coming right to him.

Just stay put and let me take care of this.

He felt her hesitation and shook his head. He'd disturbed her peace just by coming to her. She knew he intended, one way or another, to bring her back with him. Now he'd brought two men who wanted them dead. She wasn't going to stick around to see what happened. He was tired. He desperately needed sleep. He didn't even know what time zone he was in anymore, but he was going to have to go chase Tansy.

I'm just too damned tired for games. Don't take off.

There was a small silence and then he felt her stirring in his mind. That same impression of heat and silk, and maybe now a hint of fire to go along with the taste of cinnamon in his mouth. Yeah, there was passion underneath all that cool. Anyone who would volunteer at the age of thirteen to track brutal serial killers had to feel passionately about life.

Do you really expect me to stay?

Her voice brushed at every nerve ending, tightening his body when he needed to remain in absolute control. If Whitney had designed his soldiers to work in pairs, he certainly hadn't taken into consideration the effect the right woman could have on a man's body.

I wish you'd give me the consideration of at least hearing me out.

There was another small silence.

I did. There was finality in her tone.

Kadan could hear the second man now. The rustle of leaves as he brushed by bushes. Breath coming in short gasps. The spotter suddenly ceased all movement. He hadn't gotten to the body, but the rifle wasn't up where it should be. He may have caught a glimpse of the barrel sticking out of the brush, lying on the ground.

Kadan crouched low, ready to spring, relying on his clothing and skin to camouflage him.