Gracie flashed her friend a plastic smile. At this point, she’d settle for living 10 percent in the moment.
“I’ll keep ya safe,” Scott said. “All you need to do is get out of the plane, and I’ll be in charge after that. Just enjoy the ride.”
Mentally Gracie knew what to expect, but emotionally she was all over the place. During their thirty-minute crash course, Gracie had learned how to exit the plane, arch her body in freefall, and assist her instructor in flying the parachute. They’d spend the first thirty seconds falling at speeds of up to 120 mph before Scott opened the chute. A breathtaking canopy descent would follow. HD cameras attached to their helmets would capture the rollercoaster ride so Gracie could relive her act of courage over and over again.
She was looking forward more to watching the video than having the actual experience. God, she was such a chicken.
Perhaps the close quarters of the Cessna were affecting her, too. Scott was attractive, and being so close to such a cute guy after her break-up was not exactly calming her nerves. There was something both intriguing and unnerving about the intensity of the man holding her life in his hands. The unnerving part worried her. He would smile at her jokes but there was a bit of a delay, like his mind was elsewhere. For a moment, she even wondered if he might be on something, but he didn’t act like a pothead. There was an intensity and focus there, a devotion almost. Was it a skydiving thing, perhaps?
Stop sabotaging the experience, girl, she scolded herself. You’re not getting out of this one, so just relax and try to have a good time.
Gracie gritted her teeth and focused on her breathing and being present. Only a few minutes later, the pilot flashed them the thumbs-up sign.
Vanessa wiggled her body into position, preparing to jump first. With a big grin, Gracie’s best friend cranked the lever that opened the Cessna’s door.
A sudden rush of icy wind assaulted the cabin, and goosebumps rose on Gracie’s skin. The roar of the air mixed with the throb of the plane’s engine.
Vanessa turned toward Gracie, her eyes gleaming with excitement. Air tousled her hair, which was sticking out of her helmet. Gracie felt a pang of envy at Vanessa’s fearlessness.
“You can do this, girl! Woohoo, I’ll see you on the ground.”
With these words, Vanessa smoothly rolled out of the plane.
They swapped one last glance and poof, she was gone. Vanessa’s disappearing act had happened so fast that Gracie barely had time to process it. She stole a glance outside, still unwilling to accept that only seconds separated her from her own jump.
Scott’s voice rumbled behind her, “Alright, Gracie, it’s your turn. Are you ready?”
Are you fucking kidding me?! she thought while she nodded yes, a thin smile frozen on her face.
Next birthday, she was going to a bookstore and her favorite café. Why had she agreed to this?
“Remember what we went over earlier. Just lead the way, roll out the door, and position your feet on the landing gear and your hands on the wing strut until I tell you to let go.”
Gracie swallowed hard. The wind whipped her face and drowned out most other sounds as she inched toward the open door. Her heart slammed so hard in her chest she thought it would burst. She looked over her shoulder at the handsome instructor, then down at the muscular forearms wrapped around her. He had an odd, triangular tattoo on one arm. She momentarily wondered what the image represented until Scott nudged her toward the door. Without even realizing it, she’d frozen up.
So much for staring the adventure right in the eye. Her cowardice was embarrassing.
Gracie gazed down at green fields as they zipped past her, thousands of feet below, and made a choice.
She could back out right now, or she could toughen up and do this. She thought of her ex, channeled all the anger she felt toward the cheating bastard.
David had always thought she was too cautious and conservative.
Well, she would show him.
Gracie clenched her jaw as she fought her way out of the plane. To her surprise, she still had some feeling in her legs after being pretzeled inside the tiny Cessna. The wind slapped her face as her feet touched the landing gear.
“You’re doing great,” Scott said.
You bet I am.
She felt Scott position himself behind her and shift his weight. They started tilting forward.
“Let’s fly.”
A heartbeat later, they did.
One moment Gracie was bracing herself against the landing gear, and the next she was plummeting toward the Earth below at 120 mph.
As Vanessa had promised, everything happened so fast that there was no time to process it.
It didn’t even feel like she was falling. Instead, she was flying like a superhero. Scott gripped her tightly, and his calm strength and sense of control eased her fear.
Vanessa had warned her of sensory overload earlier. “It will feel like your brain is still stuck in the airplane looking down, even after you jump.”
Well, Gracie was having a slightly different experience. She was under no illusion that she was still inside the plane. But to her amazement, her fear was gone, and she was enjoying every second of this insane adrenaline ride. What a rush!
For a moment, her fear vanished as she took in the soaring beauty all around her.
She was flying, flying…
The ground was rushing up at her, details jumping into view. She could now make out individual trees and see where brown stretches of earth separated the green fields.
Wait, shouldn’t Scott have deployed the parachute by now?
Both Scott and Vanessa had explained that they would only experience freefall for thirty seconds. It was easy to lose track of time when you’re blasting through the sky at incredible speed, but this had been going on for longer than thirty seconds, that she was certain of. Gracie’s eyes ticked back and forth, panic kicking in.
“The chute!” she screamed over the wind.
Scott’s answer was to grip her tighter. This time his strength didn’t make her feel safer.
The ground, which had seemed so far away at first, was closing in fast.
Gracie wasn’t flying any longer.
They were falling and falling… and Scott was still not opening the chute.
Her hand reached for Scott’s cord, but his steely grip stopped her.
No.
The ground rose toward them, almost as if eager to explore the skies.
Help…
Gracie saw trees tear past them, felt branches reaching out for her, reality reduced to a green-brown blur…
As the Earth came up to greet her, a primal scream of terror exploded from Gracie’s lungs.
Vanessa was gently floating toward the ground on her parachute. She watched in confused concern as Scott and Gracie ripped past her, then with growing horror as they hurtled toward the ground. She could only observe helplessly as Scott and Gracie slammed into the field thousands of feet below her.
For poor Gracie, there wouldn’t be any future birthdays.
By the time Vanessa’s feet touched down on the ground, tears were streaming down her grief-stricken features. She was too shocked to notice that the wind had picked up mightily around her, almost as if the air itself was mourning the two brave souls who’d perished here today.
Little did Vanessa know that this wasn’t the only skydiving accident that day in the Los Angeles area. Two more people died that same afternoon at another skydiving school, located just miles from the one where Gracie and Scott had lost their lives.
Within hours, the two skydiving accidents lit up the airwaves and became the story of the day. Speculation ran rampant whether the tragic deaths were freak accidents or murder-suicides. Could two parachutes fail to deploy on the same day in such close proximity? Was it all a giant coincidence, or was there something far more sinister at play here?
But the public’s attention span is notoriously fickle, and viewers’ focus shifted to a new, more
pressing story a few hours later. The worst windstorm in a century was rapidly approaching the Los Angeles area. By late evening, no one was paying attention to the story of the skydivers who’d met their end only a few hours earlier. Folks were too preoccupied with their own safety and survival.
Meteorologists anticipated 20–35 mph winds with 60 mph gusts. Their predictions turned out to be conservative at best. The violent winds roaring through Los Angeles paralyzed the city, uprooted trees and knocked down power lines, leading to countless outages. The high wind warning would last for days.
No one suspected that Mother Nature’s ferocious display was connected to the terrible skydiving accidents that had occurred only hours earlier.
The weathermen had no way of knowing that the Doomsday Disciples had performed their first two sacrifices.
And as Vanessa blamed herself for the death of her best friend, she did not know that more deaths would soon follow. Gracie was just the beginning. The killing had only begun.
Chapter Two
5 Days Later. Los Angeles.
Detective Robert Mason pulled up to a beautiful Hollywood Hills property in his unmarked Ford and parked in a driveway lined with police cruisers. Robert was in his forties, with over twenty years on the job. Murder was his beat, but dispatch had warned him to steel himself for what was waiting inside the luxury home.
Robert traded a glance with his younger partner, an idealistic kid who’d risen swiftly through the ranks. Despite his youth, Manuel had put in his time and racked up some serious arrests. His partner was street-savvy, smart and methodical, and Robert respected the younger detective despite the twenty-year gap between them. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little protective.
“Word is that this one is real bad,” Robert said.
The younger man nodded. Manuel was young and didn’t spook easily.
They both got out of the car and made their way to the property’s front entrance. Uniformed cops swarmed the place, their haunted expressions confirming to Robert that dispatch hadn’t exaggerated the crimes. Something sick and horrifying had transpired behind that sunny, luxurious facade.
Once inside the property, another detective met them. The man’s name was Candela, and he looked a shade or two paler than usual. There was a green cast to his face. What the hell was so bad that it could make a veteran like Candela sick?
They exchanged perfunctory greetings, but when Mason pressed the detective for details on the murders committed within these walls, Candela told them to follow him outside.
Candela led them through the richly decorated living room and a series of glass sliding doors. Forensics guys were combing every square inch of the place.
Manuel let out a low whistle as the young detective took in the wealth on display here. From the ergonomic leather furniture to the abstract art on the walls and the high-end entertainment system, all indicators suggested that this family was loaded.
“What did the head of the household do?” Mason asked.
“Jon Pogue was some hotshot movie producer, made a bunch of high-profile action flicks.”
Mason chewed on this information as they stepped out onto the large patio and approached the swimming pool. More techs circled the water, which glittered invitingly in the early morning sunlight. For an irrational moment, Mason wanted to strip off his suit jacket and just dive in.
And then he spotted the two police divers, their black wetsuits forming a sharp contrast against the pool’s turquoise tiling. Suddenly Mason wasn’t in the mood to take a swim any longer.
Mason drew closer, Manuel at his side. They reached the edge of the pool and stopped as their eyes found the victims.
All four of them.
The bodies were only vaguely visible at the bottom of the pool. They appeared to be holding hands underwater. The logical part of Mason’s detective brain wondered what was keeping the corpses from floating to the surface.
Mason crouched down and struggled to get a better view of the distorted figures beneath the water’s surface and make sense of it all.
Candela must have read his mind.
“We believe Mr. Pogue and Mrs. Pogue both played an active role in this murder-suicide. They’re wearing fifty-pound weight vests and ankle weights, which suggest some serious premeditation and commitment on their part. They cuffed themselves to their daughters and to each other before diving into the deep end of the pool.”
In Mason’s mind’s eye, he saw the crime unfold. The Pogue daughters, fifteen and seventeen respectively, were pleading with their parents. These were the two people in the world they were supposed to trust the most.
The poor teens probably didn’t even know what was happening until they hit the water. But as they dropped to the bottom of the pool, their lungs screaming for precious air, the horror must have sunk in. The vests and ankle weights ensured that no one could change their mind once the water closed in over their heads.
Why had they done it? What would drive a successful, seemingly happy couple to obliterate themselves and their own damn kids?
A shiver ran down Mason’s back as he left the mansion ten minutes later. Manuel looked like a shell of his normal, wisecracking self. By the time they reached the unmarked car, it had started to rain.
Later that day, the pictures the police divers had taken landed on Mason’s desk. His hands trembled as he took in the bloated faces of the Pogue family—bodies suspended in the water, hair swirling, eyes bulging. The two photos of the teenage girls were especially hard to stomach.
For a moment Mason placed the photos aside and peered out the window, almost as if he was hoping that the daylight outside would chase away the darkness in this world. Too bad the storm had blotted out the sun.
Mason drained the rest of his coffee and turned his attention back to the images splayed out on his desk. Going over the underwater photography, Mason noted that both Mr. and Mrs. Pogue sported inverted triangle tattoos on their forearms.
This made Mason think of another case from a few days back.
Two skydiving instructors hadn’t deployed their parachutes, killing both their students and themselves. The jury was still out on whether the deaths were freak accidents or chilling murder-suicides. If memory served Mason right, the skydiving instructors also had triangle tattoos.
A few more taps on Mason’s computer keyboard confirmed this. The tattoos in question were triangles with a line drawn through the bottom.
Looking at the similar, yet different tattoos linked to both cases, Mason knew the time had come to make the phone call. Not to his chief—that would come later. First he had to call one of the richest men in California.
Unbeknownst to everyone else at the LAPD, Detective Mason secretly reported to a billionaire based in San Francisco, in exchange for a tax-free monthly donation to his bank account. Mason’s job was as simple as it was unusual. He was to call the number on the gray business card that he’d just fished out of his wallet and provide a brief report whenever he came across crimes with occult undertones.
Mason’s benefactor was a self-described nut when it came to cults and ritualistic crimes. “Just call me an eccentric billionaire with one hell of a weird hobby and money to burn.”
The billionaire in question was Simon Casca—the head of Xtel, a company that manufactured about 25 percent of all the computer chips on the market. Detective Mason had crossed paths with Casca during a murder investigation at Xtel’s Los Angeles offices. Casca must’ve been impressed enough to add him to the payroll. Or perhaps the billionaire sensed in Mason someone who could keep a secret and who’d appreciate the additional cash flow. Either way, he’d worked for the billionaire for a few years now and dutifully updated him whenever he found a case that might be of interest.
These recent murder-suicides sure fit the bill.
Mason slipped out of the bullpen and went outside to the rarely used smoking area for a little privacy. As he gave his report, rain washed down in sheets. It rarely rained in Los Angeles
, so when it did, it was big news. The city shut down, people stayed home, and the roads became a nightmare.
Within hours, the initial showers would turn into a torrential downpour that would shatter state rainfall records and trigger mudslides, car accidents and power outages across Los Angeles County.
Detective Mason was a good cop, even if he was on the take from a strange billionaire. But even the best detective in the LAPD couldn’t have figured out that a terrifying ritual had just entered its second phase.
Chapter Three
Mark Talon had not chosen this war against the occult; it had chosen him.
After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade, Talon had been ready to put his military career behind him and settle down with the love of his life, Michelle Rossi. Fate had other plans for him. When a diabolical cult murdered his Michelle, Talon signed up for a very different kind of conflict—a war fought in the shadows between the forces of good and evil.
The night Michelle Rossi died was the night Delta Force Operator Mark Talon became the occult assassin.
He discovered a most unusual ally in this new conflict when he crossed paths with Simon Casca. At first glance, the rugged professional soldier shared little in common with the polished Silicon Valley billionaire. But if you looked past their surface differences, you would find two men united by tragedy and bonded by a common enemy. A satanic cult had invaded Casca’s lavish home when he was but a boy and sacrificed his sister before his eyes. During this horrific experience, young Casca encountered true demonic evil and subsequently devoted his life to finding answers that might explain his traumatic experience.
Some folks would call Casca’s obsession with the occult an unusual hobby; the Silicon Valley billionaire saw it as preparing for war.
Casca, with his considerable wealth and knowledge, was uniquely suited to running operations from his secret command center, but he was no soldier. What the billionaire needed was an individual both dedicated to fighting the war against the occult and skilled in combat and infiltration. He found that man in Mark Talon.
Occult Assassin: The Complete Series (Books 1-6) Page 54
