by Lukens, Mark
Joe Blackhorn—he was gone, dead two years now.
David had been dreaming of Hope’s End tonight; not the ghost town it was now, but the town it was in 1891, the way it was when he had ridden his horse there with a U.S. Marshal named Jed Cartwright.
He sat up in bed and swung his legs over, sitting on the edge, breathing out a long sigh. He was about to turn on the lamp next to his bed, but he made himself sit in the dark. There was enough moonlight shining through his windows so that he could see well enough. He was still afraid of the dark, afraid of what could hide in the dark. Joe Blackhorn tried to teach him to fight his fear so he sat there for a moment, concentrating on his breathing.
The dream of Hope’s End came back to him, but the dream was really fragments of memories, memories of Jed, Esmerelda, Sanchez, and Billy Nez. Those memories were as real to him as the memories of Stella and Cole.
And as real as the memories of the Ancient Enemy.
David felt like two people at the moment even though he knew one life had ended and he’d woken up in this life, but he also felt like he was still there in that past life sometimes, like he was living both lives on two different planes of existence, one life in the past and one in the present. And sometimes, like tonight, when he dreamt, he was back in that life. And when he woke up he was in this new life. And the Ancient Enemy was there in both of his lives.
But not this time. The Ancient Enemy wasn’t in this life because David had defeated the Ancient Enemy seven years ago.
Had he defeated it? Joe Blackhorn’s words came back to him: “You sent it back, but I don’t think you killed it.”
“How am I supposed to know?” David had asked him all those years ago when he had begun training with the old man.
“Only you will know,” Joe Blackhorn had told him.
A shiver ran up and down David’s arms and neck. The wind kicked up outside for a moment, suddenly fierce. Sand blew against the glass of his window even though the moonlight was still bright and there didn’t seem to be a storm out there.
He turned and looked at his window but saw only the darkness pressing against it. He could see the silhouette of the jagged mountain range against the dark blue night sky.
The wind died down.
The Darkwind.
David grabbed the bottle of water next to the lamp and took a sip. He picked up his cell phone and lay back down on the bed. He pressed the button and the screen lit up. It wasn’t as late as he thought it was—he hadn’t been asleep that long. He scrolled to an internet news article he had come across a few days ago, one he had bookmarked.
He had stayed in contact with Stella over the last seven years. The first few years they had written letters back and forth. Her letters never had a return address on them and the letters he sent to her were addressed to a business, some kind of cantina in a coastal town by the Pacific Ocean. Stella and Cole (now Melissa and Travis) were very careful about their new identities, their new lives.
The first few months after the Dig Site Murders (as they had come to be known) the FBI had questioned him constantly, but they had never gotten very far with their pursuit of Stella and Cole, and David had a suspicion that Agent Palmer and Captain Begay had had something to do with throwing the FBI off the trail. Those two men knew the truth about what had happened to all of those murdered people, a truth no one would have ever believed, and they knew that it was all over now.
Eventually Stella got a cell phone under her new name, probably a “burner” phone like they were called in the action movies David watched. He and Stella talked once every month or so, and they had even communicated through Skype a few times. David had asked to go down there to visit her and Cole, but she always said that it wasn’t a good time. But at least she looked and sounded so much better. She seemed healthy and she seemed happy.
Everything had been fine until he had come across the news article from Costa Rica a few days ago. He had been looking up articles or any news about Costa Rica for years now, trying to learn as much about the area as he could. He knew Stella and Cole were safe and he knew the horrors of the Ancient Enemy were really over, but he couldn’t help checking the news articles just in case. Mostly the articles were about tourism or local stories, but then he had come across a news story a few days ago about a village where everyone had been slaughtered, hacked to death with machetes, mutilated beyond recognition. The savagery was so brutal, it was almost unimaginable.
David’s first thought was that the Ancient Enemy was back, playing its twisted games again, forcing the villagers to hack each other to death. He remembered Billy Nez in Hope’s End telling them that there were other Ancient Enemies in other places in the world. Sanchez had agreed, telling them about stories his grandmother had told them when he’d been a boy, stories about the mass disappearances of the Maya in their cities in the jungle.
Reading the article again, David lay in bed, still not turning on the lamp. The cell phone’s light in front of his face blocked out the rest of the bedroom around him, the darkness crowding the edges of his vision like a living, solid thing trying to surround him. In the article, the local authorities were blaming the villagers’ murders, all eighteen of them, on a drug cartel.
But David couldn’t help thinking that this was something much worse, and he couldn’t help thinking about how close Stella and Cole were to that village—only twenty miles away.
He set his phone back on his chest and stared up at the ceiling, wondering what he should do. Should he text Stella, warn her somehow? Should he call her tomorrow?
Hope’s End wasn’t the only thing he’d been dreaming about tonight, and the memories of Hope’s End weren’t what had scared him awake. There was another dream about a shadowy man, a killer who prowled the darkness like a jaguar.
But the killer wasn’t here, David knew that. The killer was in Colorado, far away, but still close enough, stalking his victims at this very moment. The killer’s mind was twisted, but he was smart and cunning, strong and merciless; he had begun killing not too long ago, and he wasn’t going to stop now.
Not until he finds me, David thought.
CHAPTER 40
Costa Rica—2018
“Get up!” Stella yelled at Cole, pulling the bedsheet off of him.
Cole sat bolt-upright in bed. Stella had turned the overhead light on, the one attached to the ceiling fan. He knew it was still dark outside, but he had no idea what time it was. It felt like he’d been asleep for only a few minutes, but when he looked at the alarm clock he saw it was only a few hours until dawn.
Stella’s eyes were wide with fear, her tanned skin paler than he’d seen it in years. He hadn’t seen her this frightened since . . .
Cole jumped out of bed. He wore only a pair of underwear. He grabbed his clothes he’d laid over the chair. Even though it was hot in the bedroom, the ceiling fan barely pushing the heat away, Cole felt a cold chill dancing along his skin, raising goosebumps. He suddenly felt like he was back in Colorado, back in that freezing cold with something dangerous and unimaginable waiting outside, something approaching their front door, something about to knock on the door and ask for things.
He’d been dreaming when Stella had shaken him awake. He’d been in the ghost town again in his dream, but the town was different; it was the town of Hope’s End. He was himself in that town, but he was also someone else. He waited in the saloon with a few others, all of them frightened of the Ancient Enemy that lurked out in the darkness, the monster that had slaughtered everyone else in town. He saw a woman named Esmerelda in the dream, a woman he had feelings for, but it seemed like the woman’s visage shimmered from Esmerelda to Stella and then back to Esmerelda again. There were other people in the saloon that he didn’t really recognize, but he knew them. And then there was David, and David looked exactly as he had seven years ago.
Cole was dressed in a few seconds, slipping his feet into a pair of boots and buckling the belt on his jeans at the same time. He pulled a T-shirt on and t
hen grabbed his gun from the table beside the bed.
Stella was at the bedroom door, staring down the hallway; she was tense, ready to either run or fight.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s happening again,” she told him without taking her eyes off of the hallway, like she was watching and waiting for something to come down the hall. “The Ancient Enemy . . . it’s here.”
CHAPTER 1
Stella
Dig Site – Costa Rica
Stella saw him in the jungle hiding among the brush and palm fronds. For just a moment he’d been standing there, and now he was gone.
Maria came over. She’d been painstakingly brushing dirt away from a partially exposed femur buried centuries ago down in the pit. “Are you okay?”
Stella looked at Maria, then back at the edge of the clearing where the jungle began. They were working on excavating a massive grave, an ancient burial ground, the edges of it roped off. Small tents were set up at the other side of the clearing where supplies and gear were kept: toolboxes, plastic cases for artifacts, coolers of food and drinks, even two cots. The site of this burial ground was a natural clearing in the jungle, a dead spot where vegetation refused to grow; the edge of the jungle ended neatly all around them beyond the dig site. Maria had discovered this burial ground a year ago from information she had gotten from members of a local tribe, and now the glacial process of excavating the buried rock walls and the bones had begun.
The burial ground was a mystery. It was similar to another mass grave found a few years earlier south of this site, closer to the border of Panama. Hundreds of people had been buried in that mass grave: men, women, and children of all ages, all of them dumped into the pit with no ceremony. They were all apparently killed the same way—a clean round hole in the forehead. Was it from a spear? A hammer and metal chisel? A wooden dowel? It was definitely some kind of blunt force trauma to the head. But one thing was certain, those deaths weren’t natural in any way—those people had been purposely killed. Murdered? Maybe. Sacrificed in some long-forgotten religious ritual? That could also be possible.
Another interesting comparison Stella had realized was that the skeletons at this dig were similar to other sites in South America where entire villages of people had been found buried in gigantic graves, their bodies piled together. One of the most famous finds was near the Nazca Plains where the mysterious geoglyphs and lines in the desert were discovered in the early 1930s. There were mass graves at those sites, but there were also individual graves, people buried alone and ceremonially with their possessions. Even though the individuals had been buried in ceremony, many were missing their heads, or some of them had those neat round holes in the foreheads of their skulls about the size of a quarter, like something had been rammed through their heads and into their brains.
Of course there could be other reasons for the slaughter of the people found in these mass graves, Stella knew that. She knew far more mysteries and horrifying things existed in the world; she had seen those horrifying things.
“Yeah,” Stella finally answered Maria as she stood at the edge of the dig. “I’m okay.” She even tried a smile, but she didn’t feel like she was pulling it off, not judging from the concerned expression still on Maria’s face.
“Did you see something?”
Stella gave a slight shrug, still smiling. “I thought I saw something in the trees.”
“Like what?”
Stella knew as well as Maria the dangers in the jungle, most notably jaguars. But there were other dangers like robbers. Not treasure robbers, but robbers who would threaten them for whatever they carried on them and whatever supplies they had in their tents and vehicles. Stella always carried a gun now; Cole had made her take the gun with her when she started volunteering on this dig.
Maria’s eyes darted to the edge of the jungle, which was a wall of green vegetation thirty feet away. The vegetation from the jungle only crept into the clearing a little bit, like an invisible barrier held it back in every direction around the burial ground, like the dirt of this clearing wouldn’t support life of any kind, an infertile ground.
“Was it an animal?” Maria asked, still studying the jungle. She wasn’t going to let this go.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” But that was a lie. She was sure she’d seen a man standing among the palms and brush.
“Was it a jaguar?” Maria asked.
“No,” Stella said. “I’m sure it wasn’t a jaguar.”
Maria relaxed just a little.
“It’s nothing,” Stella said, but she could still feel a crawling sensation tightening her skin, a chill dancing along her flesh, a heaviness on her chest, making it difficult to breathe, the feeling of dread weighing her down.
“You’re sure?” Maria asked.
Stella nodded.
Maria went back to the pit, climbing back down the ladder into the gigantic hole that had been carefully dug over the last eight months. There were only three other people at the dig site, two men and a woman, all college students from Maria’s archaeology class at the university. Maria had kept this crew small and sworn to secrecy. This was going to be a big discovery for her, with book deals and speaking tours coming in her near future.
Stella had offered to volunteer with Maria at the university two years ago. She and Cole had been in Costa Rica the last seven years, and only in the last two years had Stella felt comfortable enough to volunteer and rekindle her passion for archaeology. Cole hadn’t been happy about her volunteering to help at the dig site, afraid of her being alone in the jungle or with only a few college students around, but in the end he had relented—he knew how much this meant to her, how normal it made her feel again. But he still made her take the gun with her.
She and Cole had healed quite a bit during their last seven years together in Costa Rica. They had flown down here from Arizona seven years ago after the horrors they had experienced in the cabin in Colorado and then in the ghost town in Arizona. They were still traumatized when they’d gotten here, hardly able to believe the Ancient Enemy was really gone. Cole drank a lot then. He slept during the day and stayed up all night, like he was on watch, her personal sentinel.
Cole had contacts everywhere in Central America, and he had used up all of the favors that were owed him, but now they had new IDs (Cole was Travis Hartwell and she was Melissa Burrows), and they had plenty of cash. The rent and food were cheap in Costa Rica, and they probably had enough money to last the rest of their lives.
For the first few months they were here they ate, drank, rested, and healed. Cole mourned the loss of his brother Trevor and Stella the loss of her friends at the dig site in New Mexico. She also missed David.
But this was a new life now. She couldn’t go back to her old life, back to being Stella Weaver, an archaeologist working out of Arizona State University. She had contacted Alice a few times when they first got down here, and Alice had let her know that she and Cole were still persons of interest, and that the murders had never been solved—many were calling them the “Dig Site Murders.” The press blamed the murders on a serial killer or a group of killers. Some suspected a cult. It was a modern-day mystery how a string of grisly murders had occurred in two states over the span of a few days and then suddenly stopped.
Some days it felt good to be somewhere new, to be someone new, to pretend that none of those horrors had happened. She wanted to go back home sometimes, but she was afraid the places familiar to her would always be tainted by what had happened—nothing would ever be the same again. She wished she could totally delude herself with the fantasy of a new life and forget every remnant of her old one, but there were two things holding that fantasy back: one was David, she still kept in contact with him every few months or so; the other was her love of archaeology, her passion for it. And she yearned to be in the field again, unearthing ancient cities and civilizations. And finally, two years ago, Cole had given in and she’d begun volunteering with Professor Maria Soto.
&nbs
p; In these last two years Stella had begun to feel almost normal again. The beaches of Costa Rica were beautiful, the jungle and mountains breathtaking; it was like being on a never-ending tropical vacation. And she could almost allow herself to dive fully into the fantasy of a brand new life.
But then the nightmares had come back.
And Cole understood because he still had the nightmares too. They had fewer nightmares now than they used to, but they were still there. When they had first come down here, Stella would often wake up, choking back a scream. She would sit bolt-upright in bed and see Cole sitting in a chair with his gun in his hand, watching over her as she slept.
The first few weeks they were down here, the nightmares had been the worst. She and Cole had awakened in a panic, clawing at the air, screaming, punching and kicking at the other (they had both suffered a few nosebleeds and black eyes from their frenzied awakenings, trapped for a moment in that netherworld between sleep and full consciousness, fighting anything close to them). But as the years passed, the nightmares weren’t as frequent or as horrible.
She loved Cole. She was sure of that now. And she was sure he loved her. He could have left her so many times. He could have left her and David right after the cabin in Colorado, abandoning them as he drove away on the snowmobile. He could have left them at the Mountainside Inn or at the Navajo Reservation. Maybe he had stayed because he knew David was the only one who could protect them, but after it was all over, after David had sent the Ancient Enemy back to its own world in the ghost town, Cole could have left then. But he chose to take her down to Costa Rica with him. He had taken a risk. He was still a wanted criminal (and she was still a person of interest, according to Alice), so there was always the danger that she could talk. He could have left her here in Costa Rica at any time. He could have disappeared into the underworld of fake names and identities, and she never would have found him. No, he had stayed even though it probably would have been so much easier for him to leave.
