He handed the bowl off to Ezekiel and took the blankets Malichai brought, tucking them around Pepper’s shivering body. “The light is hurting her eyes, can you get rid of it?” If Malichai kept staring at her, he wasn’t certain what he would do, but he had to get himself under control.
She was slipping away from him now, drifting in a sea of pain. “You two may as well go to bed,” he said to his teammates – his friends. He needed them gone. He needed just for a few minutes to allow himself to think about what she was and how he was going to handle her. “I’ll stay with her.”
Both Ezekiel and Malichai were trained medics, but Wyatt was a doctor – a surgeon as well as a natural gifted healer. He told himself Wyatt was the logical man for the job, but he knew he wouldn’t have turned it over to either of the other two. He didn’t want to leave her. He couldn’t leave her, especially not with another man.
“Tell Nonny to put the baby to bed, Ezekiel. They both need sleep. I think the baby will understand if you tell her Pepper is doing fine and she’ll be okay soon.”
Ezekiel raked both hands through his hair. “There’s a part of me that wants to go into that place and kill them all for this. The idea that someone would do such a thing to a baby sickens me. On the other hand, I have this need to take out threats to my family, and that includes you, Wyatt. That child in there is a ticking bomb. We both know that.” He gestured toward Pepper. “And this one. She’s pure poison. I can feel her working us all against each other.”
“Zeke.” Wyatt sighed and sank down onto the floor, his back to the low-slung couch Pepper rested on. “You could no more kill a baby than you could kill Malichai. Nor could you kill a helpless woman. You’re tired. I’m tired. This is all one hell of a mess.”
“Yeah. I know. But that baby is a little freaky. On the other hand, I just wanted to pick her up myself after I heard what the woman said, and hold her close. That’s not like me.”
Malichai nudged his brother with his foot. “You used to hold Mordichai and me at night and rock us back and forth and tell us stories.”
“I did not,” Ezekiel denied hotly. “I told you to shut up and go to sleep.”
Malichai handed his brother a cup of coffee. “There’s a pot of some kind of fish stew on the stove and it’s good. Don’t listen to him, Wyatt. He’s a master storyteller. He can do all the voices and make the stories come alive. He’ll be a great babysitter.”
“Go to hell, Malichai. I never told you a story in my life.”
Wyatt grinned at him, suddenly knowing things were going to be all right between him and the others, even with Pepper sitting between them all. “Ezekiel. The big bad wolf. You did. You did tell him stories. I always know when someone’s lyin’, and you’re lyin’ your ass off right now.”
“Yeah, well, both of you can go to hell,” Ezekiel snapped.
“Boys.” Nonny raised her voice from the next room. “This young’un is still awake and can hear your foul words. I have a bar of soap ready and waitin’.”
Ezekiel went to the door and peered into the darkened room. “Sorry, Grand-mere. I have a problem when someone starts harming babies. I feel like I have this rage inside of me and there’s nowhere for it to go.”
“Don’ you worry, none, Ezekiel,” Nonny said. “You and my boy will get those other babies out of that place and when they’re safe, I have no doubt you’ll go back there and read ’em all from the good book.”
Ezekiel studied the small child curled up in Nonny’s arms. She was very small with her mop of wavy dark hair and fair skin. Her eyes were different, yet almost familiar to him. He was certain he could see a hint of the snake – and something else – something that pulled at him.
He turned back to Wyatt. “I didn’t think, when I signed up for the psychic enhancement program, how they ever arrived at the engineering. The experiments that would have had to go before us.”
“We were told it would make us enhanced, better soldiers as well as stronger psychics,” Malichai said. “We skimmed a bit over the genetic parts of it, mainly because that’s not our field of expertise.”
Wyatt didn’t have that excuse – and worse – he hadn’t considered the experiments either. How had they come up with the perfect cocktail to enhance muscles, hearing, eyesight and to make them so much stronger and faster? No one ever got it right the first time. There were always mistakes.
What had Pepper said? She denied being like him. She was one of the mistakes. The children had been slated for termination. Had she been as well? Was that what Wilson Plastics really was? A disposal site? They could do their last experiments out in the swamp, kill whatever had been created and use the ocean and swamp to get rid of the bodies. A thought struck him. If they cremated the bodies on site, they wouldn’t even have the issue of hiding their tracks.
“We’re goin’ to have to get inside that compound,” he told Ezekiel and Malichai. “We need to see for ourselves what’s goin’ on.”
Chapter 4