Authors: Delilah Devlin
“We’ll get the key back to you tomorrow,” she said.
Dr. Thurgood nodded. “Just…don’t touch anything—if you can help it.”
Cait lifted a hand and followed Sam out the door. They paused outside the professor’s door.
Sam shoved the key in his pocket, then handed her the photocopy. “Not feelin’ good about this guy.”
She glanced at the picture of the dough-faced man with dirty blond hair and a hint of a scraggly beard.
Michael Donnelly.
“Think Lisa’s disappearance might have nothing to do with the supernatural?”
One side of his mouth curved. “What’s the matter? Would you be disappointed if Lisa was the victim of a run-of-the-mill kidnapping?”
“Not at all.” A shoulder shrugged. “So much simpler. I just hope she’s still alive. But it will mean this is a bit of a tangent if it’s not connected to Henry’s death at all.”
“Worried you won’t get paid if it’s not about Henry?”
Cait snorted. “I’m not an asshole, Sam. And you forget. The Farmingtons have Jason and me on retainer now. So this is still my case.”
“But we’d have less reason to communicate. Maybe she was just the reason Henry was here. His death might not have a thing to do with her. He was a homicide detective. If someone he crossed got wind he was back in town…”
“Think someone who wanted revenge used some magic to snuff him out? Be a helluva coincidence.”
Cait didn’t believe in coincidences, and from Sam’s dark frown, neither did he. No matter how much he might wish it to be true in this instance.
They made the drive to the dig site in silence. The ride was the first time Cait had a chance to really think about what had happened that morning as she’d left her apartment. The woman in the gray outfit had passed right through her. Unlike in TV or movies, she hadn’t felt an electric jolt, hadn’t noticed anything other than what had felt like a breeze, warm and soft, sifting past her body. If she hadn’t seen the woman, she wouldn’t have noted the sensation at all.
But what did it mean? Was the happening a one-off thing, or had burning her mom’s spell bag opened a completely new doorway? Had this been her natural path before her mom had partially closed the door?
Her mother’s gifts had included a touch of clairvoyance and a truly deft hand at casting spells. Cait never had a premonition of the future, and until today, never considered herself particularly gifted in the magical arts. The success of the masking spell might have been a fluke, her powers enhanced by all the dark magic swirling around them.
This seeing a ghost thing was brand-new. And completely wigging her out. Voices were bad enough. And she hadn’t known the woman was dead until their paths had crossed. What would walking in a world peopled by ghosts be like, not knowing who was dead or alive? She could strike up a conversation with a stranger, not that she ever would, but if she did, what would the living folks around her think?
“Cait!”
She jumped. “What?”
“We’re here. You take a nap?”
“Just woolgathering.”
His gaze said he didn’t understand the phrase.
“Something my mother used to say.” She shrugged.
“I asked why the rush to come here first? Would have made better sense to round up Donnelly for questioning.”
“We can do that.
After.
I need to see that body.”
His expression darkened. Her vague explanation telegraphed she suspected another magical connection. Sam didn’t say a word.
He parked the sedan along the street opposite the museum and in front of one of the berms overlooking the river. The mounds, which were originally built by Native Americans and then fortified by the French and Spanish, had been used by the Union Army after it took Memphis to observe traffic moving on the Mississippi during the war. Cait remembered studying them during high school, remembered the pictures of Union soldiers posing beside large cannons with mountains of cannonballs, ready to blast a suspicious boat from the river.
Sam punched the button on the glove box and pulled out a flashlight.
She let herself out of the car.
Orange-and-white sawhorses blocked the entrance to the work site. Sam moved one aside. “After you, babe.” He pulled open the flap of the white tent to let her pass. A small gesture, but not one she got much of these days.
She flashed him a quick smile.
He’d always been a gentleman, even when she hadn’t acted like a lady.
A large opening in the side of the hill that looked like one of Wile E. Coyote’s train tunnels was covered by a makeshift wooden door. The bricks that had enclosed the bunker were stacked neatly beside it, numbers marked on the ends of each one.
Sam unlocked the padlock, swung open the rickety door, and stood to the side. Another considerate gesture. All this politeness was getting her hot.
She ducked through the opening and stepped into the darkness.
Sam clicked on the flashlight, but the beam didn’t penetrate the darkness very far. Dust motes floated in the air. Around them wooden crates were stacked, all numbered, likely to correspond with an inventory to track what the students had found and where.
They passed the crates, walking deeper into the bunker. Rotting timbers braced the dirt roof. It smelled of damp earth, like the inside of a grave. The air was still.
Twine marked areas to the left and right of the path they followed. A sieve and shovels were stacked against wall. Dirt boxes had been dug in even layers to a depth of about three feet for the students to sift through for artifacts.
Toward the rear of the cavernous bunker, they found another such twine-marked dirt box. In the center lay a figure wrapped in fabric strips like a mummy. Only partially excavated, the body was still trapped in the dirt it had been buried in. A small, flat circle rested on its chest. The fabric strips were intact except around its head, where they rested loosely over its face.
Cait carefully stepped down into the hole and knelt by the body. She didn’t see any harm in moving the strips to see what the professor had noted. She pulled a pen from her jacket.
“Should you be doing that?”
“I’ll be careful.” She lifted the strips with her pen and let them fall away from the face. The bones were stripped nearly clean. She noted a slack metal band that encircled the head, under the jaw and over the top of the skull. “Why do you suppose they did that?” she asked, not expecting an answer.
“You see what you needed?”
“Just a second.” Again, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her cell phone, turning it on and touching the screen for the flashlight. She shone it on the circle. Her chest tightened. The same symbol that adorned the grave of Jonas Worthen rested on the corpse’s chest. She activated the camera and took a picture, slid the phone back into her coat, and reached up a hand to Sam, who pulled her from the pit.
He shone the light back the way they had come.
As they neared the entrance, she saw a movement—a flash of white beside the crates—and touched Sam’s sleeve. “Someone’s here,” she whispered.
“Stay behind me,” Sam rasped, and drew his gun.
“Like hell.” She pointed to the right of the crates, then at herself. Then pointed him toward the left.
Sam aimed the flashlight beam away, giving them enough light to make their way but not enough to show whomever was hiding Cait’s movement. He was drawing the intruder away from her.
She came around the tall stack of crates, heard a rustling toward the entrance, then a rasp like the flick of a cigarette lighter. Light flared, and then she heard a familiar hiss. A face was illuminated in the light as it turned to give her a sneering smile.
Michael Donnelly.
But he wasn’t. Not really. Not the way his eyes glowed and then turned a liquid black, the color expanding from his pupils to completely suffuse the whites.
Cait’s heart stopped. “Sam, run for the back! Dynamite!”
She ran, Sam on her heels. She jumped into the first roped-off pit, huddled against the side, and clamped her hands over her ears.
Just as Sam leaned into her, pushing her against the dirt wall, an explosion rocked the bunker, so loud her ears popped and sounds grew muffled. So bright the light blinded her, even behind squeezed-shut eyes. Dirt rained on them from above, and timbers snapped all around them.
The roar was over in a second, but the shower of rock pellets and dirt from the ceiling continued. The bunker was collapsing over them.
She pulled her T-shirt over her nose to block out the dust, although she could already barely breathe, as tightly as Sam held her.
She shoved her shoulder against him and turned her head. “You OK?” she shouted through the cloth.
“What?” he shouted back, leaning away.
Angling her body around, she ran her hands over his head, shoulders, and arms, searching for injuries, but other than a thick coat of dirt, he seemed fine. “Are. You. OK?”
Something metallic slapped against flesh, and the flashlight beamed right in her eye. She reached up and pushed the beam away. “Easy. You’re blinding me.”
“Cait, you OK?” Sam asked, his voice roughened.
She rolled her eyes. “We’re in the middle of a fucking cave-in. What do you think?”
His teeth flashed white in the darkness. “You’re bitchin’. Must be fine. Let’s see how bad this is.”
He clambered out of the pit and then pulled her up beside him. Timbers groaned all around them. Sam whistled between his teeth. “Did you get a good look at who did this?”
She shrugged, still thinking about what she’d seen. Donnelly wasn’t really Donnelly. How the hell was she going to explain when she didn’t know how that could be? For now, she’d worry about their current predicament. “This is bad, Sam,” she whispered. “Thurgood’s gonna be pissed.”
“Right now, he’s the least of my worries. He’s not expecting us back until tomorrow. At least Jason knows we went to see him. If the ceiling doesn’t completely give way, we’ll be OK. It’s just a matter of time before someone comes looking.”
“Really want to wait?”
He gave a sharp shake of his head. “Pull off your jacket. Put it over your head. It’ll give you a little protection.”
She shrugged out of her leather jacket and then draped it, glad to have something to keep the dirt from falling in her eyes. Sam stripped off his dress shirt and tied it like a bandanna around his head.
“I saw shovels by one of the pits,” she said, eyeing her action man. Was it the wrong time to tell him the white tee he wore did wonderful things for his chest?
“We’re gonna need them.” He trained the flashlight ahead of them.
One side of the bunker was completely closed off, the other, through the row of excavated pits, was clear. Toward the front of the bunker lay the remains of splintered crates and bricks and an impenetrable mountain of dirt.
She made her way carefully to the shovels, picking up two.
“No, I’ll dig. You stay back with the flashlight. If the roof goes, I’ll need you to get me out.”
Knowing he was right, she nodded, not liking that he put himself at more risk. They’d be faster working together.
He must have guessed she was going to argue. “Please, Cait,” he said, no trace of anger in his expression. Worry shadowed his eyes. “Find something to get under, in case the roof goes.” He handed her the flashlight.
With a hesitant move, she traded him a shovel.
Before he turned away, she grabbed his arm, pulled him toward her, and went up on her toes. She pressed her mouth against his for a quick kiss. “Don’t get yourself killed, Sam.”
He grunted. “I love you too.”
What the hell? Her jaw dropped as he strode away.
Chapter Twelve
Cait sat on the edge of one excavated pit beneath a timber that seemed to be holding, shining the flashlight beam upward while Sam pulled aside splintered wood and rocks. He’d found the original roof of the bunker and dug from just beneath it, his body half in and half out of the narrow hole.
“Hope he doesn’t think I’m crawling through that rabbit hole,” she muttered, although she knew she’d have little choice. She hated small, cramped spaces. Hated pitch-darkness.
Sam didn’t seem to have the same fears, and she wasn’t sure how he was managing to move so much dirt. He’d refused to allow her to crawl up beside him to flash the light into the hole for him to see. Yet soft dirt and gravel slid down the side of the debris mountain as he pushed it behind him, the chink of the shovel sounding sharp or dull depending on whether he struck rock or wood or soft soil.
Since he’d said what he had, they hadn’t spoken other than Sam shouting to get her butt back to safety the one time she’d crawled up beside him.
Maybe he’d said
it
out of reflex. Or maybe he’d said it because he thought they were going to die, and he wanted her to think about something else. Right now, he was probably regretting the impulse. He hadn’t meant it. Couldn’t. Not after everything she’d put him through.
I love you too.
Did he really think she still loved him? The key on her door ledge had been about booty calls, not a signal she’d welcome him back into her heart.
Just the thought of falling into that old familiar rut, the one where they’d lived together, barely talking, his crystal gaze watching for her first mistake, made her belly rumble. Too much pain was in their past to contemplate ever retracing those steps.
She’d fuck it up again. This booze-free stint was only a short-term thing. She didn’t intend to stay straight past this one job. Now that he knew her reasons for drinking, he shouldn’t expect it.
And Sam didn’t trust drunks. He had his own good reasons not to. A deadbeat dad who’d put his mother through hell before he’d done her a favor and killed himself driving drunk. Despite how well they were working together now, in the long run she couldn’t maintain the sobriety. She wasn’t that strong. Liquor dulled the voices, dulled her senses and her pain. Mental fuzziness was a warm comfort that kept her from thinking of past mistakes and foolish dreams of an impossible future.
No, she couldn’t handle sobriety, not when she knew now that spirits weren’t just chatterboxes. They also made pacts with demons…