Ghostwalker 03 - Night Game

thinking of her as Flame rather than Iris. It didn’t look like a rendezvous with a wealthy businessman. He ignored the out of character possessive feeling that churned in his gut as his gaze pierced the night to find her.

    He caught a glimpse of her near the thick vines growing up the side of the house. She moved with stealth, knees bent, carefully placing each foot as she skirted the huge windows. She turned her head suddenly and looked right at him.

    Someone was following her and he was damned good at it. Flame hadn’t spotted him, but her heightened awareness told her she wasn’t alone. And that meant he was a professional. She waited, flattened against the wall, her breath slow and even, her body perfectly still. He was there, close, somewhere inside the estate walls. And the dog hadn’t given a warning.

    Her heart lurched. She had cased the area many times and if anyone went near the brick wall, the dog roared a challenge. It was always on the alert, well-trained and eager to ferret out any intruder. She should leave, wait for another night, but she had run out of time. She had to pull off the job tonight in order to meet the deadline. Who else could control a dog that ferocious? She was keeping it from giving away her presence with little effort, but if someone else was also manipulating the dog, that meant they could take control of it.

    She swore under her breath. Whitney had found her. It had to be that. She knew she couldn’t run forever. The story in the newspaper about a sanitarium out in the bayou burning to the ground had drawn her. It was exactly the type of situation she knew better than to pursue. If Peter Whitney or some covert branch of the government he was connected to was looking for her, they would know she wouldn’t be able to resist hunting information. The moment she realized the trail led back to the Whitney estate, she should have gotten out. She’d gotten involved with some of the locals, the way she always did, and she’d stayed much too long.

    Had they sent an assassin? The fire in the sanitarium had been a hit, plain and simple.
    The Whitney Trust had wanted to cover up the fact that genetic and psychic experiments had been done on babies. Damn Whitney and his government contacts. It wasn’t all that hard to create accidents and make people disappear, especially girls who were considered unbalanced or different.

    Anger smoldered and that was bad. The ground shifted slightly, a minor seismic anomaly. Flame took a deep breath and let it out slowly to calm herself That wouldn’t help matters. The dog whined off to her left, sensing the small shift beneath the ground.
    She quieted the animal with a touch of her mind as she weighed her chances. They would send someone well trained after her, someone with at least equal the skills they would assume she possessed. Chances were better than good that they would underestimate her.
    And chances were better than good Whitney would want her alive.

    She’d hacked into Whitney’s secret files and destroyed what she’d found on her training and had even managed to destroy some of the files on the other girls after first copying them. Whitney had an impressive empire and his contacts within the government ran deep. There was no doubt in her mind he would eventually send an assassination squad to get rid of the evidence if he couldn’t bring her in—and she wasn’t going back alive. The fire in the sanitarium was proof she was right. She’d read about Whitney’s death, a murder with no body and she doubted the truth of it. He was a monster, pure and simple, and he would do anything to cover up his crimes.

    Flame tapped her finger against her thigh while she worked out her next move. She could play cat and mouse with the hunter, but she couldn’t afford one screwup. Using every sense she had, she once again attempted to locate the shadow. Absolute stillness came back to her. Not even a scent. She wanted to doubt the shrieking alarm bells in her head, but she knew, knew , someone was on to her. Then it hit her—the dog. She reached for the animal, trying to connect enough to get the impression of where the other intruder was. The dog would know and if she could get it out of the animal’s mind, she’d be in a much better position.

    The moment she touched the dog she knew it was completely under the control of the other intruder. Her heart accelerated abruptly and she had to breathe deeply to counteract the sudden flood of