Camellia’s fingers slid over his temples, barely felt, a wispy brush like a passing butterfly’s wing, leaving behind the need for more. The trail of her touch led straight to his hair. The pads of her fingers settled there, buried deep and began a slow rhythm, a fluttering dance, like the butterfly’s gentle awakening. Pumping wings to dry them after emerging from the chrysalis. Each touch on his scalp brought relief to the pounding in his brain.
He became aware of the starships, those neurons with the outstretched arms, connecting with one another via synapses so that chemicals could flow to every part of his body, chemicals or electrical signals or both. Camellia sent a brilliant pink-red chemical flowing throughout his veins, carrying it to his brain. After the chemical, a series of electrical charges followed, flashing and igniting as they rushed to his brain. The little explosions should have made the migraine worse but instead seemed to knock it completely away.
For the first time all night and most of the day, he was able to take a full lungful of air. He dropped his chin on top of her head. “I don’t know how you manage to do what you do, Camellia, but don’t ever tell me you aren’t my angel.”
Her laughter was muffled against his chest. “Someday, I’m going to be really upset with you, and you’ll see I’m no angel.”
“I’ll wait for that day. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep thinking of you as my personal angel.”
He sighed, determined to finish telling her about Oliver so he wouldn’t ever have to bring that day up again. He stepped back into the middle of her porch, tugging on her hand until both were standing where the Middlemist Red Camellias had the thickest and longest branches. The blossoms were spectacular. Red leaned toward them, the branches moving in a circular motion as if the huge tree-shrubs could surround them.
“Oliver went into crisis at the worst possible time. I had been keeping a close watch on him because I’d been worried for months. I knew the moment I took out the first assassin and saw the fight and smelled the blood that I was in for trouble with him. The battle was too much and tipped him over the edge.”
Before he could put a hand to his roiling gut, her palm was already there, pressing over the exact spot where the well of rage was always pooled, waiting for the aggression to overflow. Now it was gone, responding to her touch.
“You were trying to keep him quiet. Fighting him off the dying men. Trying to reason with him.”
She saw right into his mind.
He nodded. Oliver had gone into a fit of madness, foaming at the mouth, wanting to paint his body in the blood of the enemy. He seemed to be in a kind of fury, yet he refused to hunt, forcing Jonas to take the lead. Jonas could no longer trust Oliver at his back. Oliver had gone cunning and feral on him, not something entirely new—Jonas often had those traits spring to the forefront, but not quite like this. Oliver was off in a way that Jonas instinctively knew was dangerous to him.
Oliver watched Jonas as if he were an enemy. Oliver refused to make a single kill, yet as soon as Jonas did, Oliver would rush to the body and desecrate it in a manner that Jonas found reprehensible. Sickening. He found himself caught between needing to warn Ryland about Oliver’s behavior and needing to protect his friend. In the end, he had tapped a code to Ryland and sent him a short recording. If Oliver managed to kill Jonas, it would take more than one of the GhostWalkers to destroy Oliver. They would need to know what they were dealing with.
Showing Oliver’s sick insanity to Ryland—which meant showing it to Kaden as well—had felt like one of the biggest betrayals of his life. Jonas still sat in the dark thinking of whether or not it had been necessary to send an actual recording to Ryland. Would a simple warning have been good enough? He knew Ryland had saved the recording in order to protect him even though he had asked Ryland multiple times to destroy it.
Jonas had managed to eliminate seven of the enemy while keeping track of Oliver, but he’d been distracted and hadn’t climbed up as high as he should have. When Ryland signaled the team to come through the pass, Oliver was to continue climbing upward with Jonas, ensuring there were no more snipers or hidden units. Oliver didn’t follow protocol. Instead, he went to ground, stealthily moving back toward the GhostWalkers coming through the pass.
Jonas had been too afraid Oliver was going to turn on his team. He had stopped his forward scouting to go after Oliver. The guns above them caught the team as the last man moved out from the rocks of the narrow pass. Half went down with wounds. The other half dragged those wounded to cover and set up return fire.