There were tears in her voice. Jonas felt them running in his veins. Heard her weeping in his mind. He needed to pull her into his arms and comfort her, but he knew he couldn’t do that—yet. “I’ve never met her, but she married a member of Team Four, a really good man. One of the best: Rubin Campos. He’s a doctor and just about the nicest man you’ll ever want to meet. She’s surrounded by a team that’s very lethal. Rubin has a brother, Diego, and three other adopted brothers: Ezekiel, Malichai and Mordichai. Snipers, great trackers, all enhanced, all genetically engineered and elite GhostWalkers. She’s safe and happy, from what I’ve gathered.”
Camellia reached up to wrap her fingers around the Middlemist Red branch. Jonas could see she was seeking comfort.
“It’s difficult to take all this in,” she admitted, her voice shaky. “I thought she was dead. All this time, I thought she was dead. She had no anchor, and the energy was brutal on her.”
“She lives in Louisiana near New Orleans. When you’re ready, I can take you to visit her so you can see for yourself she’s alive and well. I know they’d want to see you.”
She moistened her lips, immediately drawing his attention to her mouth. “What of Dahlia? Do you have any news of her?”
“She’s married to a teammate of mine as well. Nico and Dahlia have two homes. One up here in the mountains and another at an undisclosed area. They spend more and more time up here, but it can be difficult for her sometimes. Energy rushes to her and she has to get rid of it. Lily has been helping her to build shields, but it’s a slow process. Nicolas is able to take most of the energy away from her. They’ll get there. She works hard at it, and she loves Nico and wants a family with him. He would do anything for her. She’s in good hands.”
“I was so afraid of talking to you, Jonas, and you’ve brought me such great news of many of the women I regarded as sisters. We went through so much together. You told me about Rose having her baby with Kane. I know she wanted to be with him, and I’m so grateful she was able to.”
“Ken Norton, one of the members of Team Two, is married to a woman you know. Marigold. She escaped the same time you did. Marigold had twin boys a few months ago, but she’s been very ill since, and they can’t move her. Part of the reason, when I felt this vague uneasiness, was because I knew she was having problems, and I thought it best just to be on the safe side.”
Camellia took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was a movement through his veins again, and this time as his blood circulated, he paid attention to the way it traveled through his brain. She was sending out inquiries, using two vast networks, both that he had stumbled onto but wasn’t certain what they were or how he’d gotten onto them.
Next, she sent out a call to the alpha wolf. He got that one immediately. The last was to the pair of Great Gray owls. She was very familiar with them and he felt her affection for them. She called them by name, Blue and Gray.
“Do you still feel a threat, Camellia?”
She nodded. “It’s still very vague, as if far off. I thought it was you.”
He gave her a small smile. “And I thought it was you.” He looked around him. “This place was unexpected. Your security system is amazing. I’m still not certain what you hooked into to make it work.”
She tilted her head to one side, and her dark hair fell like gleaming silk, catching his eye. “You really don’t know, do you?”
Jonas shook his head, watching the way that sliver of a moon played through her hair, turning sections of it into a waterfall of black silk.
“And yet you were able to tap into the networks and use them to your advantage. You hid yourself in plain sight.”
He shrugged. “I’ve always been able to do that. My friends sometimes call me Smoke because I disappear. Completely. They don’t know how.”
“Do you know how you do it?” There was curiosity in her voice.
Jonas had the feeling she knew exactly how he was able to disappear, but he didn’t want to get too far off the subject if the two weren’t tied together. He needed to know about the security network she was using. He had women and children to protect from Whitney and the well-funded faction in the government that relentlessly kept coming after them, and what she’d set up here to hide herself in plain sight and defend her territory would go a long way toward protecting his people.
“I don’t, but I’d like to learn.”
She sat back in her chair, the blue in her eyes cooling to a color somewhere between silver and blue steel. “The Middlemist Red Camellia, of course. That’s how you disappear as well. You’re a phantom, just as Red is. A ghost, Jonas, at will. That was why the plant was slated to be stamped out. Red will defend itself vigorously, which is exactly what it did in the early days. Red’s history is every bit as brutal as ours.”
Jonas frowned, rubbing his left temple with the pads of his fingers. How could a plant have anything to do with her security network? Or the fact that he could disappear at will? She wasn’t making sense. “I don’t understand.”
“You know that Dr. Whitney was obsessed with growing exotic flowers, right? He keeps greenhouses at the various laboratories he frequents. When he isn’t present to tend to his plants himself, he hires specialists to look after them. If any plant dies, he kills the person that let it happen. He’s ruthless when it comes to his flowers. If there is one thing he loves above all else on this planet, it’s his exotics.”
He nodded his head for her to continue.
Camellia tapped her fingers on her thigh. A strange habit for someone who didn’t strike him as a nervous person. She had to be weighing how much she was going to tell him. He couldn’t blame her. He was a stranger to her and yet he wasn’t. They didn’t feel like strangers. They felt as if they belonged. That was probably the biggest hurdle he had to overcome with her. Nothing real happened this fast.
It occurred to him that if she was leery, he should be doubly so. He had his team, women and children to protect after all.
“You must feel threats before they manifest, right? You know things when you’re out with your team on a mission, no matter where you are.”
How could she know that? He narrowed his eyes, focusing completely on her, watching every small movement, missing nothing. The entire situation with her was strange, even to a man used to constantly encountering weird shit.
She was right that he felt threats to the team when no one else could. They all had built-in radar when it came to feeling danger. The animal genetics embedded in their code gave them all kinds of abilities to know when an enemy was near, yet Jonas had the ability in spades. He always detected potential threats far in advance of the others. The team had come to rely on his early warning system.