Is it possible? Diego asked. ’Cause this doesn’t feel like a lie.
I don’t know.
“Are you saying that when a storm brews you can actually direct lightning? Not only direct lightning from the storm but produce it?” Rubin asked.
He had to work to keep his voice mild. He didn’t want to sound in any way like Whitney had to have sounded when she had been a child and the cold-blooded man had tested her over and over. Suppressing excitement wasn’t easy. There was no one like her in the world that he’d ever heard of, if what she said was true. A human lightning bolt?
“I can’t direct lightning. That was the problem. And disappointment. Just produce it.”
But he could direct it. Jonquille was the weapon. Rubin was the trigger. He met his brother’s gaze over her head. Whitney had definitely paired them.
2
Jonquille didn’t take her eyes from Rubin. He was either going to believe her or he wasn’t. He was her last hope for any kind of a life. “Do you think you can help me? Can you find a way to undo what he did to me?” She hated that her voice was thin and weak.
She wasn’t a weak person. She had depended on herself because she had to. She didn’t dare be around others. Even Whitney had gotten to the point that he was afraid to be around her. As she’d grown up, her ability to control her talent had gotten worse, not better. Her body had drawn so much energy from others that she could barely contain the electrical charges.
“What do you mean by helping you?” Diego asked.
He had busied himself preparing food. It smelled delicious. She was hungry after hiking all day in search of flowers and mushrooms to sketch. It was nice that someone else was cooking, although he hadn’t specifically said he was going to offer her food. She just took it for granted she’d be included for dinner.
She lowered her lashes. That didn’t sound good. What did he think she meant? She’d just confessed to being a human lightning bolt. “I was hoping your brother might be able to make me normal.” It took effort to keep sarcasm from her tone. She didn’t enunciate as if he were two and couldn’t possibly understand her, although the desire was there. She had the feeling that wouldn’t win her any points with Rubin. The brothers appeared to be close.
“What’s normal in the GhostWalker world?” Rubin asked gently. “None of us are normal. Whitney experimented on all of us.”
She resisted rolling her eyes. Instead, she pushed the hem of the sleeve of her sweater into her mouth and bit down to keep from calling him on his far-too-obvious shit. He was the elite. Team Four. Pararescue. The holy grail of GhostWalkers. Word was, they were perfection. They could do no wrong. They didn’t get brain bleeds. They didn’t accidentally set the world on fire or slam lightning bolts into laboratories.
She attracted electrical energy from everything around her. The moment she entered the cabin, she should have known she wasn’t alone. She should have known Diego was close by when she approached the cabin. Neither brother gave off enough electrical energy to cause the least bit of alarm. She always knew when another GhostWalker was close. At least she thought she knew. She relied on her warning system. Now she was very concerned that all this time she had been wrong and she couldn’t identify other Ghost-Walkers. That would be a disaster for her.
Jonquille had managed to escape from Whitney and had been on the run ever since. She was extremely good in the wilderness. She’d excelled in her training as a soldier, particularly in isolated situations. She could blend into her surroundings easily. She could be still for hours if necessary. Had she kept to the mountains and forests, she would have stayed safe, but she wanted to find a way to undo the enhancements Whitney had amplified in her. The only way she could do that was to understand what was happening to her body in relationship to the electromagnetic fields around her. That meant consulting with experts.
She hadn’t just studied lightning in the hopes of finding a way to undo Whitney’s experiment that way. She’d also gone the medical research way, using fake IDs and going into labs late at night, using computers, covering her tracks but trying to find out exactly what Whitney had done in order to reverse the damage. She’d boldly become a research assistant to one of the leading experts in the field studying lightning, helping to provide for his every need as he developed his theories. She’d covered her bases, and so far she hadn’t been able to find a way to reverse the process.
“You can say no one is normal, but you can interact with others,” she pointed out. “I’ve seen you. You have the luxury of being a doctor and helping patients. You could have a relationship if you wanted. A family. It’s your choice whether to have a wife or children. I don’t have those choices. Several of the women raised with me didn’t have those choices.”
“Why don’t you have a choice, Jonquille?” Rubin asked, his voice as gentle as ever.
She considered showing him. Right there in the room. She could feel the heightened electrical charge moving through her. She wasn’t drawing it from him or his brother. Their combined energy was still too low to be a magnet for her body to feed off of. Her hair moved of its own accord, a subtle wave, but one she recognized as a dangerous warning.
Diego turned toward her alertly. “I wouldn’t do anything silly. I might be cooking, but the moment you threaten my brother, you’re dead.”
The moment she struck in the close confines of the cabin, they were all dead. “I could leave.” She made the offer because it was beginning to look as if that was her only option.
“There’s no need for this,” Rubin said. “We’re talking. You were telling me why you don’t have a choice, Jonquille.”
“I think that’s rather obvious, Rubin.”
She had liked him. At the conferences, she liked his personality. His calmness. He came off as a gentle man. He spoke with authority, and everyone, even the most expert there, deferred to him, and yet he didn’t have an ego that she could perceive. He presented his findings on the ability to redirect lightning to save crops and reduce damage to populated areas. At the military conference she’d attended, he was able to speak with authority on how lightning could be used to direct strikes on enemy bases. He had extensive knowledge of the uses being harnessed or potentially harnessed as weapons.
Never once did she detect a change in his vanity as others treated him with such deference. If anything, he didn’t like the spotlight. He had come to each conference to absorb as much as he had to share. She thought of him as a good man. Jonquille was also very honest with herself, and she thought he was a very attractive man. The more she watched him, the more she considered him appealing. Everything about him attracted her. In the end, that was why she decided to take the chance and ask him for help. Clearly, that wasn’t her best idea.
“It isn’t obvious to me,” Rubin persisted.
Jonquille forced down her rising temper. That low, gentle voice hadn’t changed in the least. His brother had the same soft voice, but the threat came off him in waves. There was no threat emanating from Rubin at all. None. Nor did he put up any defenses. She had been honest with them.
She’d been born with an abundance of electrical magnetic fields, far more than what were in the human body. Whitney had enhanced her further, giving her the DNA of animals as he did other soldiers, but mostly trying to construct a human lightning weapon he could use against other countries. He had failed, and like all his failures, it had angered him considerably. He never believed the fault was his—rather, the failure fell squarely on his test subject. She had suffered quite a bit at his hands while he tried to force her to “work” correctly.