It didn’t take long for Jerry to return. Flame must have been aware of his measured tread coming down the hall toward the room and she’d forced Jonquille to halt her healing session. Jerry flung open the door and took a step inside, and the expression on his face went straight to comprehension and horror as he took in the sight of Flame at the end of the bed with her torn panties and Vern on the floor with his cargo pants open and his genitals exposed.
Swearing, Jerry rushed to Flame. “Did he hurt you? I shouldn’t have left you. Did he hurt you? I swear to God, I didn’t know what he was going to do.” He had a phone out. “I need a nurse in here now. Send Colleen.”
Colleen was the one nurse the girls all liked. She was the most compassionate. She tried the hardest to be kind, no matter how much Whitney wanted the adults to distance themselves from the girls. They knew she wouldn’t last long—the nice ones never did. Whitney wouldn’t tolerate them once he realized they would help the girls. He was afraid they would get too close and might help them escape or give too much of the outside world to them.
“We need a doctor. It looks like Vern suffered a heart attack. He’s dead.” Jerry’s voice was cold when he added the last. He put his phone away and went to the bathroom to get another wet cloth for Flame. “I’d cover you up, honey, but I want Colleen to see exactly what that bastard was trying to do to you, just in case someone accuses you of killing him. They seem to think you girls can kill anyone.”
Colleen came running in, skidding to a halt as she took in the scene, one hand going to her throat, the other reaching toward Flame. “Baby. Did he touch you? Did that horrible man touch you?” She moved around Jerry, reaching for the sheet only to discover it was damp. “This is a disgrace. She should never have been left like this. My God, these people are animals.”
“Shh, Colleen,” Jerry cautioned. “This place has ears and eyes everywhere. Can you take pictures and then clean her up? I’ll take pictures of him. We can exchange them so they can’t destroy them. She didn’t kill him. There isn’t any way. She’s too damned weak. I never should have left her alone with him. I’ve never been good with puke. I have this stupid reaction.” He sounded ashamed as he took out his cell and crouched down, taking a series of photographs of Vern.
Even though she was so exhausted, Jonquille liked the guard. She liked his energy. He was angry. He was really angry, but she still liked his energy a lot. She liked the way his energy merged with Colleen’s vitality and the way there was a protective drive to the energy he surrounded Flame with. That was when she learned men could be many things. Before, they were all bad or evil. Jerry taught her men were much, much more.
Soon, Flame’s room was overrun with people, and Jonquille dozed as they surrounded Vern to examine him, a doctor pronouncing him dead of a heart attack. Whitney demanded an autopsy immediately and the body was removed. Whitney remained impassive as Flame was examined to ensure she hadn’t been raped by Vern before he had his heart attack, even though she assured them several times she hadn’t been.
She was questioned repeatedly by the military police Whitney brought in. Jerry was questioned separately. Through it all, Whitney directed Colleen to sponge wash Flame, braid her hair and change her bedding as if he cared about her. A clean waste bucket was brought in. Windows were opened in the room so a cool breeze took the scent of vomit out. Fans were brought in to take the temperature down. Whitney paced up and down, all the while his sharp eyes looking at the floor and ceiling, examining the walls for any signs that Flame might not have been alone.
Once the others had left the room and only Jerry and Colleen remained at his command, Whitney pinned Flame with the eyes of a dead fish. That was the way Jonquille saw him. A dead fish.
“Which one of the girls came here tonight?”
“No one was here.”
“They always come. It isn’t in your best interest to lie, or theirs. I don’t care about a dead guard. Especially one that would rape a child. I am not going to punish one of the girls for saving you from him. I give you my word on that, Iris.”
“There wasn’t time for one of them to come,” Flame replied. “They wouldn’t sneak in when the guards were here. They wait.”
That much was true. They always waited. Jonquille would have waited. She hadn’t because Vern was truly evil. She couldn’t wait, not when the energy he had been throwing off had been so disgusting it made her feel sick.
Whitney stared at Flame for a long time and then his breath hissed out in a long rush of annoyance. “The cameras on this floor never work. Do you know why that is?”
Flame looked genuinely surprised because she was. She shook her head. “No.”
Whitney studied her for what seemed forever. Abruptly, he turned and stalked out of the room, his guards following him. Colleen let out her breath. Jerry stood in the corner looking uncertain. When Colleen would have spoken, Flame shook her head and indicated the windowsills and along the door frame where Whitney’s guards and been standing so quietly. Jerry went to look, and sure enough there were the usual bugs left behind.
“Do you still feel sick, Iris?” Colleen asked. “You have to stay hydrated when you’re vomiting that much, that’s why I’m putting an IV in you. I know you hate them. You can use the bathroom first if you want. And this is portable so you can move around with it. Once you’re feeling better, I’ll take it out. This is anti-nausea medicine. Hopefully, that will help as well. This is cold water as well as juice. Ice chips. I’ll check on you every half hour. Dr. Whitney doesn’t want you sick, he’s trying to make you better. The medicine feels like it makes you worse, but it is supposed to kill the cancer.”
Once she was back from the bathroom, after washing her face and brushing her teeth, Flame lay motionless in the bed, too exhausted to move while Colleen put in the IV. Jonquille slept in the vent, recouping her strength. She made the trip down to Flame’s bed three times that night in the dark, her energy disrupting all recordings so she could work on the cancer eating away at Flame’s body. After the first and second sessions she forced herself to climb back into the vent. Flame slept through all of the healing sessions.
The third healing session of the night, Jonquille knew she had to make it back to her room. She couldn’t take the chance of sleeping in the vent even in the early morning hours. If it was reported to Whitney that she wasn’t in her bed or she didn’t make it to breakfast, he might suspect that she had been the one in the room with Flame. That she had killed Vern. When he found Flame’s cancer reduced, he might suspect Jonquille of healing her.
Jonquille found herself back to the present, tears on her face. She rarely allowed herself to think about the other women in her past, those girls she had shared a nightmare childhood with. As she had grown and the electrical energy in her body had increased, the charging had grown worse and she had been forced to separate herself from the others in order to keep from drawing their energy to her. They would talk to her at night, but she couldn’t be in the same room with them and it felt like isolation all the time. Whitney had clothes that helped, but he deliberately wouldn’t let her wear them to be with the other girls unless she was training.
She wanted freedom. She wanted to be able to use her healing gift. Rubin was a doctor. He could help others. She was born to help others, but she couldn’t do that. She could only live in the woods or in a small drab apartment and sneak into a laboratory at night and do her research to try to find a way to reverse the things Whitney had done to her.