Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
She wasn't getting any better.
Why wasn't she getting any better?
Voodoo had brought people back from closer to death than Indigo had been when he found her, and yet as he sat beside her on the floor of the cave, he knew he was watching her slip away.
What was wrong with him?
In the last ten years, he’d come to take for granted the fact that while he accepted he couldn’t save everybody, he could save almost everybody.
Just a couple of weeks ago, he’d healed almost on the spot after a piece of debris had pierced his abdomen when he and his team were in an explosion while searching for leads on Dr. Gardner’s whereabouts.
He’d healed his team members more times than he could count and saved innocents on ops.
A couple of years ago, he'd even saved the life of Beth Lindon, a close friend of Delta Team’s, and married to Bravo Team’s leader, Axe, after she was buried alive.
If he could do that, he should be able to do this.
But it didn't matter how many times he pressed his hands to Indigo’s infected wounds and willed his body to do what it did, nothing changed.
Not only did the wounds look just as bad as they had almost twenty-four hours ago, when he and his team had found her inside the lab, but her fever was much worse.
She’d been delirious, fever dreams making her scream at the sun to just hurry up and kill her, whimpering and crying, tearing at his heart with her sobs about how she was ready to die and no one would care.
He would care.
Didn't matter that he’d known her for a day, he knew all he needed to know.
She was one of them and she cared more about others than she did herself.
He also knew that once he got her well and back home, he was going to find out from her who he had to kill for making her feel like she was worthless.
Once he got her home.
Because he couldn’t accept another possibility.
“Keep fighting, honey,” he urged as he blotted at her sweat-dotted brow with a bandage soaked in cold water.
The cave he’d found for them was near a stream, and he’d been backward and forward between the two, making sure he had plenty of water to keep her hydrated and to try to bring down her fever.
Already, he’d gone through the IV bags he had in his med kit, so now he was having to work on dealing with her fever the old-fashioned way.
Since he couldn’t safely keep moving while carrying a sick woman with him and hope to keep evading each threat that presented itself, Voodoo had already made his peace with the fact that he’d be hiding out in the cave, for as long as it took Indigo to get well enough to move.
The broken leg was actually the only part of her he’d been able to heal in any meaningful way, and while he still couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that the bones were in the correct place, he was fairly confident he’d been able to line them up while she was unconscious.
She hadn't even roused, although the pain had to be excruciating. Chances were, even his teammates likely would have passed out from having a bone snapped back into place without any sedatives or painkillers to dull the pain.
But for this woman it hadn't even registered.
The ability to withstand horrendous amounts of pain would be a major asset in the field, and he could see why Indigo would be valuable to Dr. Gardner.
That and the fact that she had actually survived the injection process and not succumbed to the anger and suicidal thoughts.
How had she done it?
They’d always assumed the reason for their surviving was the fact that they’d bonded quickly as a team when they first signed up for the program.
Those bonds had strengthened after they were injected, and they'd had each other to lean on, support them, ground them, and as such, they’d been able to push through the rush of emotions and find their footing.
Only Indigo had survived without that kind of support system, and he was wondering if that could be attributed to her already being so used to being on her own that she was able to be her own support system.
Not that he had any way of proving that until she woke up and told him for herself.
“Which you better hurry up and do,” he told her unconscious form. If she didn't get better in the next twenty-four hours or so, he might have to rethink his entire strategy and come up with a new plan.
But he wasn't ready to accept that yet.
Wasn't used to feeling this out of control either.
One thing he and his team had been forced to learn pretty quickly after they received the first round of injections was control. They had to keep their emotions on a tight leash or risk not only losing their own lives but taking out the rest of them in an anger-fueled breakdown.
Control he’d learned from his parents, who punished even the smallest of outbursts when he was a child, that had then been honed in special forces training, and then again after entering Dr. Gardner’s program, was now slipping.
If he couldn’t save Indigo, he didn't know who he was anymore.
Healing people had always been his thing, a product of coming from two doctor parents so obsessed with saving lives they forgot all about the one they created.
After the enhancements left him with an unexplainable ability to heal himself and others, one not even Whitney could properly comprehend, it had become his entire identity.
Now it was failing him.
“Won't let you die, honey. Can't. You hear me?”
There was no answer from Indigo, not that Voodoo had been expecting one, but he did hear a sound that had his head snapping up, his gaze shifting from the woman lying beside him to the entrance to the cave.
Someone was out there.
Second-guessing himself wasn't even an option. If he sensed people approaching, then he knew someone was out there. Not his team because they would have alerted him to their presence, which meant it was more guards still combing the forest.
He was confident they didn't know exactly where he was, he hadn't lit a fire because the cold wasn't bothering him, and Indigo had been stuck mostly in fever highs, although the chills had come for her a few times.
Her broken pleas to let her in from the cold and that she wouldn't upset him again if he did so he didn't need to punish her again had simultaneously broken his heart and stoked the fires of his rage.
Keeping control of your rage didn't mean it wasn't constantly prowling around waiting for an outlet.
Anything that threatened this woman was something his anger was more than happy to latch onto.
Now he rifled through his pack, pulled out the emergency blanket, and draped it over Indigo.
It would exacerbate her fever, but it would help block her from any thermal trackers they might be using.
Then he grabbed a thin woolen blanket and draped it over her as well, which would make her less visible if anyone should get close enough to look inside the cave.
Not that he intended to allow that to happen.
Pulling his pack back on, he scooped up his weapon as he stood and slunk out of the cave and into the night.
While he might not have some of his teammates’ enhanced skills, he could still make out the sounds of footsteps and adjusted his path accordingly.
He was going to need to take them all out quickly and silently because otherwise they’d get off an alert to their colleagues of his and Indigo’s location.
Then he’d have no choice but to grab her and run.
Moving closer to the sounds, Voodoo made sure he stayed out of sight, keeping each step he took silent.
Grunts and muttered words soon began to filter through to him, and as he took another few steps closer, he saw them.
Four men moving together through the forest. From the annoyed scowls on their faces, he assumed they had long since lost interest in this pursuit.
Not that they’d give up because he had no doubt that if they didn't produce Indigo, every single one of the guards would be punished.
Between all of them he’d already killed, and the ones he knew his team had taken out, Voodoo was a little surprised that any were left out there.
Dr. Gardner must have more contacts than they’d been aware of.
Or the man was just buying teams of mercenaries much the same way he’d put out contracts on Cassandra and Rose.
Regardless of whether they were permanent members of the scientist’s team or not, they were going to die tonight, and Voodoo couldn’t deny that it was bloodlust pumping through his veins as he moved into position.
Maybe he couldn’t slay his girl’s dragons yet, not until he knew who they were, but he could damn sure slay the men out there determined to find her and return her to hell.
January 21st
8:50 P.M.
Hot.
Why was she always so hot?
Sweat was dripping from her body, pooling beneath her, and when Indigo shifted slightly, it suddenly felt too cold against her skin.
Great, chills were coming.
At least she was snuggled into her warm bed, that should help her feel better.
Only … if she was in bed, why did the mattress feel so hard?
And didn't she … not have a bed since her husband decided to divorce her for someone better and kick her out of their house?
Another rush of heat flooded her system, followed immediately by a chill that had her shaking. Her bony body bounced off the hard surface that she now realized wasn't a bed, wasn't a park bench, wasn't even one of those bumpy and uncomfortable beds at a shelter she sometimes slept on.
It was stone.
Because she was outside, but outside in the forest, not in a local park.
Because she’d been sprung by a team of men who were altered like her.
One of them had refused to leave her side, and she knew he’d been there through the raging fever dreams, and the chills that threw her body into a tailspin as it moved too quickly from hot to cold and back to hot.
Throat dry, lips cracked, she shifted a little.