Jonas stepped back and just stood watching him with eyes that were ice cold and utterly detached. A rifle spat out a warning shot and then another. As Bear collapsed, slowly falling to his knees, he tried to find Crawley, sending up a little prayer the man hadn’t been shot trying to get to him. Everything had happened so fast.
Crawley stood frozen several yards away, his hands locked behind his head, a stricken look on his face. Bear fell forward, his eyes, nose and mouth suddenly buried in a thick layer of leaves and dirt. Sounds dimmed. Receded altogether. The world went black.
10
Jonas trudged along the path, allowing Jeff and Kyle to stay between Crawley and him as they continued down the mountain toward their homes. He was connected to Camellia on three levels—through Whitney’s pairing, the mycelium underground network, which was very powerful and allowed them to share feelings very easily, and another network, one even more powerful. He suspected it was the Middlemist Red Camellia.
He tried to puzzle out how that would work. Those nerve endings. He saw her work on Kyle and take away his pain. He’d thought it was the mycelium running underground and through them, but he knew it was so much more. They were bound on a molecular level, through nerve endings and even in their brains.
He deliberately hadn’t disconnected from either of the two networks that connected them together when he became his true self. Telling Camellia was different than showing her the effects of the various predatory animals and reptiles Whitney had thought it would be a good idea to shove into him. Whitney had blended and mixed those violent traits until he had the most aggressive male he could possibly come up with. He had purposely enhanced an already dominant personality into something Jonas had to fight night and day.
The truth was, Jonas was afraid to face Camellia. He’d all but told her to leave while she could when they’d first contacted Ryland. When she’d been brave enough to stay, he’d shown her the worst in him deliberately. Why had he done that? He wanted her. The longer he was with her, the more he knew she was right for him. So, what was he doing deliberately pushing her away from him? He knew she’d have to know the worst, but not immediately.
The raging testosterone in him from so many mixes of predators kept the heat banding in front of his eyes and the need for violence coursing through his body. The pathways from his brain to his nerves spread the demand as if not his life but his teammate’s lives and Camellia’s life were at stake. His mind looped over and over, determined to tell him to take out the last threat—the one he knew was the worst.
Crawley was hiding something. He’d come there to take Lily and Daniel. He would have sent information back to his troops to allow them to murder every other man, woman and child in the two compounds. And there was Camellia. She was close. Beautiful Camellia with her deadly traps. If Crawley discovered that Camellia had set the traps for his men and him, he would do anything to retaliate against her.
Jonas knew men like Crawley. They never stopped once they decided on a course. He might pretend he was cooperating, but he was already thinking of a way to avenge his friends. Like Jonas, he felt responsible for them. That threat had to be eliminated, no matter what Ryland and Kaden had commanded.
The threatening growls rumbled in his chest, but he kept them to himself. He wanted Crawley to give him any excuse at all to challenge him. At the same time, he kept a distance between himself and his teammates, knowing from experience that even his friends could trigger the terrible need for violence raging in his system. If they didn’t need him to help keep a watchful eye on Crawley, he would have run up and down the mountain paths in order to try to drain off some of the worst of the need to kill.
Every neuron in his body felt inflamed, pushed in the wrong direction as if his blood had reversed itself and spread through his body like a disease rather than something good. Now that he’d had a taste of what good with Camellia felt like, the adrenaline and hostility of the predators in his system seemed so much worse. The inflammation triggered more need for violence, a reaction that started in his brain—at least he thought it did.
He’d studied aggression in animals to see if he could better combat it, but so far, nothing worked but staying away from others. Running. Physical motion. Fighting. But when he fought, that just fed the level of aggression, and he couldn’t bring it under control. He had to channel the terrible rages combined with cunning into another outlet in order to keep from harming anyone. He would leave his team and go off to scout on his own. That was always the safest choice.
Jonas felt her first, a movement along those star-patterned cells, the neurons that spread out to send messages along every pathway. She stroked caresses over the inflamed nerve endings, settling them in the correct direction with a delicate touch.
His breath hissed out of his lungs, a long slow burn of awareness. Now, the fierce violent rage in him mixed with other much more potent chemicals that added to his hyperalertness. He saw every detail of Crawley as he moved ahead of them. He was a great distance away, with Jeff and Kyle between them, running interference, but it didn’t matter.
Jonas watched with the eyes of an eagle, noting the fluid way Crawley moved. He wasn’t in the least defeated. He was thinking every minute, taking stock of their surroundings, sizing up Jeff, the man closest to him, trying not to appear as if he was doing so. Jonas paid attention to Crawley’s hands, the way his arms swung free and loose as he walked, but his hands curled into fists, and then he’d open his fingers, spreading them wide, flexing them. He seemed to keep the same pace, but he increased it just a little bit every few miles. Jonas knew what he was doing. He thought, because they were the first men Whitney had experimented on, that meant they would be out of shape.
No one quite understood that by using the term “screwed up,” the phrase didn’t mean the soldiers in Team One weren’t as intelligent or didn’t have the same training. It meant Whitney hadn’t yet known what he was doing. He left brains wide open without filters. He gave them too many animal and reptile traits without realizing what would happen. He just threw everything together, believing more was better. He had enhanced their physical abilities as well as their psychic ones without telling them what was in them or what to expect, leaving them to discover, over time, what would come out. When they had no idea, they weren’t prepared when a trait abruptly manifested.
Jonas had learned over time to turn inward when there was anything new. He would examine whatever was happening and try to get on top of it before it escaped. Right now, Camellia’s touch on the neurons in his body produced a multitude of sensations in him. The drive to claim her was overwhelming, yet at the same time, that caressing motion began to, one by one, soothe those cells all going in the reverse direction, back to flowing correctly.
Crawley increased the pace just a little more, and this time, he stepped off the path, quickly correcting, but not before he had twisted the leaves on several bushes as he passed them. The second time it happened, he snapped a small twig so that it hung down along with the bruised leaves. Behind him, the leaves and fragile limbs of the bush slowly sprang back into perfect health. Crawley didn’t see that at first. Not until his third misstep off the trail and his glance back with satisfaction.