The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1)

by A. J. Scudiere

  It was a chance she would have to take. She had to trust her partner.

  “Run!” He yelled at her.

  Shit.

  She bolted.

  Angling out of the woods, heading toward the spot where she knew his rental to be, Eleri prayed under her breath. “Bon Dieu, keep me safe. Bind me from trouble. Aida-Weddo, protect me from this forest I walk.” It was an old prayer her great grand-mere Remi would chant as Eleri fell asleep at night. The forest was metaphorical then; tonight it was literal. Eleri muttered it again, not sure if she believed, but sure it wouldn’t hurt. Grand-mere had believed and hopefully that counted for something.

  She burst out of the tree line to see Donovan opening his car door and motioning frantically to her. His clothing was odd, disheveled, and he carried a cloth bag she hadn’t seen before. But she did as he said and frantically inserted herself into the passenger side of the car. His lights didn’t come on either. Academy training. But he shuffled a bit, shoving something in his pocket, buckling in and trying to drive at the same time.

  Eleri tried to listen. He was talking a mile a minute over the sound of the tires peeling away on the hot asphalt. The car lurched forward and she didn’t understand much of anything. “Kid” “cat” “road” were all she could make out, but clearly he was driving toward something. In a moment she realized he was headed back to the point where his tracks had connected with the other road.

  “Donovan, calm down. Tell me what happened.” She turned toward him, looking him up and down.

  “I was skirting the edge of the compound—”

  So he found it.

  “And then I—I took off after some blood and a trail leading away from the houses.”

  There were houses. Interesting. Nothing showed via satellite. Wait. Blood?

  “It was a kid, about thirteen? Fifteen? Beaten. His arm is broken. There was a puma there.”

  Holy shit. “And you left him there?” Why hadn’t he signaled her? She could have gone straight to the kid.

  Donovan was shaking his head. “I didn’t have anything on me. Nothing with me. First I ran the cat off, but then there was nothing I could do but go for help.”

  Which he’d done crazy-ass fast. Maybe even thirty miles per hour fast. She wasn’t wrapping her head around that yet.

  Her partner wasn’t done. “I gave him a few big sticks to fend off the cat. But we have to get back to him.”

  Eleri agreed. “Med kit?”

  “In the back. It’s why I wanted to take this car. I always bring a serious kit when I run in the woods.”

  He was starting to calm down. They were coming closer to where the line had intersected with the boy. This time, Donovan turned the lights on bright and slowed down. Eleri knew she should be looking for this mysterious kid. Another escapee from the City of God. This one alive. One who could talk. They needed this.

  But she couldn’t peel her eyes from the man driving the car.

  He was poorly put together. Dirty, bloody, and . . . wrong. Her brain had been working the puzzle in the back of her head while she listened, while they drove.

  Why hadn’t he stayed with the kid? He could have signaled with the GPS, drawn her an X. A circle. Something. She would have figured it out. Then again, in the heat of the moment decisions weren’t always clear. Maybe it had made sense at the time to go back to the car, get the medical kit, not wait for Eleri.

  Still, that didn’t explain everything.

  They turned the corner and watched as the boy jumped in front of the car, right into the headlights, blinding himself in the process. He waved one arm, clutching a branch, and turned his eyes away from the light. Eleri could hear him—hoarse from screaming, he used what voice he had left to yell at them. He worked frantically to flag them down, unaware that they had come specifically to find him.

  Donovan hit the brakes, throwing her sharply forward and making her glad she’d buckled in. He was out of the car and running toward the kid before she could open her door. As he dashed into the light of the high beams it hit her full force.

  The blood on him, the dirt smeared in, it was all under his clothing.

  DONOVAN LOOKED the boy up and down. The kid was on his feet again, tall for his age, or . . . Donovan corrected himself, maybe just older than he’d thought. He would have been able to tell better if the kid was dead, but he just wasn’t good with live children.

  He was chagrined to think he didn’t quite know what to do. Sure, he understood that he needed to splint the arm, stop the bleeding and before that, get the kid out of the road. But he didn’t really know how to do it. Didn’t like the idea that while he tried to remember his training, the boy suffered. Donovan didn’t treat wounds that could kill, only wounds that had succeeded.

  “Help me! Help me! They’ll kill me!” Trying to scream, the boy pushed the words through wounded pipes. His broken arm hung limp at his side, making Donovan wonder if maybe the shoulder was dislocated, too.

  It was Eleri who reached out for the kid’s good hand, held it without insinuating that he drop the stick, and asked a reasonable question. “Who is trying to kill you?”

  “Abraham! Belinda!” He sucked in air. “The mountain lion!”

  This made Eleri look around. Maybe she hadn’t believed him when he told her in the car. Then again, he might not have believed himself either. Donovan nodded. “Puma. About a hundred pounds.” He didn’t add that she had cubs.

  Breathing heavy from exertion, he couldn’t ignore the cat’s scent. She was still there, lingering nearby. He wondered how many times the kid had to fend her off since Donovan left.

  “Holy shit.” That from Eames as she searched the woods.

  The cat wouldn’t come out now. Not with three of them there. She’d have to be rabid to try that, and she wasn’t. The way the kid had been crazed and out of it, his strong memory of the cat was indicative that she’d been back. Thankfully the kid had stayed awake and alive.

  The boy blubbered now, falling apart as Eleri talked over him, her bottle green eyes earnest as she tried to soothe him enough to make a real connection. Donovan knew what she was doing; he’d learned the same thing at the Academy, but he didn’t do it as well as she did. Maybe because he had nearly a foot on the kid, was dirty, and acting hypervigilant. Maybe because he’d always been bad with people in general and kids in particular.

  Scanning his surroundings, he tried to stay sharp, but the night had been long and exhausting. The run had done him good, at first. But at the end, the all-out dash back to the car, the pounding of his heart, the concern for the boy, had tapped him.

  Something grabbed at his brain, tugged his attention back into the woods.

  Turning sharply to Eleri and the boy, he hissed, “Shut up.”

  “What are you—” She was starting to ask, but she stopped abruptly when she saw his face. Donovan duly ignored her as he turned back to the trees, his eyes searching. Unfortunately, his night vision had been blown out by the headlights on the car. The three of them stood there, trying to calm the boy, keeping watch, standing like targets right in their own spotlight. There had been no reason to worry about that, they were miles away from where he’d seen the houses. But the sounds, the woods—now Donovan wasn’t so sure.

  “Get in the car, Eames. You too, kid.” He didn’t know what to call the boy; he only knew he needed to be obeyed. He heard footsteps. Human footsteps.

  The cat was long gone. Other smaller creatures scattered at the boy’s frightened and frantic pass through the woods. He’d crashed left and right, then hollered at the road and into the night. He yelled until he was hoarse. Sane animals didn’t like that.

  So the noises coming from the woods weren’t made by creatures. They were from people. Several of them. Heavy footsteps. Men. Possibly the armed ones from the camp. Probably.

  “Get in the car.” Keeping his voice low, he glared at them. Why hadn’t they moved?

  Because no one heard what he did. The boy—who should have been list
ening like his life depended on it—was too busy blubbering. Eleri was soothing the boy, thinking she was relatively safe here on the road. But Donovan heard them.

  They were too far away to see anything.

  So he slid into the car and softly pulled his door shut. Contemplated turning his lights off, then thought the abrupt change in lighting might be more of a signal to those who came than anything else. The engine started quietly, and he was grateful for the newer car. It was all he could do not to peel out.

  No one came out of the woods as Eleri far too slowly coaxed the kid into the back seat. She looked to Donovan in the rearview mirror, questioning him. She would have to trust him a little longer. The men were coming for the boy.

  But they hadn’t seen who took him.

  Donovan hoped.

  11

  They couldn’t take the boy to the Brownwood Hospital; there had already been one patient from the City of God there. Better to spread them out. Eleri tapped Donovan on the shoulder and pointed him in toward Hamilton.

  She still didn’t know how she’d walk in the Hamilton Medical Center with a dirty, bloody grown man and a dirty, bloody boy whose name she didn’t even know. She would flash her badge and that would have to do. Westerfield hadn’t been kidding when he said NightShade was going to be different.

  Eleri had been a field agent and she’d been a profiler, but the arrests had been cleaner than this. Neater. Simpler. Though she’d stayed up all night fueled by candy and caffeine plenty of times, she’d never run an agent through the woods with only a GPS or picked up a broken child on the side of a deserted road at four a.m.

  Now that they were all reasonably calm, the roadway before them dark but open, she decided there was work to be done and turned first to the boy. “What’s your name?”

  “Jonah.”

  “Where are you from?” She wondered what he would say, especially when he looked out the window and didn’t speak.

  Cradling his clearly broken arm, he sat still, his head turned away from her. In the dim moonlight, she could barely make out the tracks on his face. Dirt had smeared in, tears made trails, blood crusted at the side of his lip. It looked like he’d been punched in the face, but Eleri held back that judgment. Open mind. Gather evidence. Give a little.

  “I’m Eleri Eames, and the man driving is Donovan Heath. You’re safe here. We’re FBI agents.” Slowly she pulled out her badge and placed it in his good hand. Now was not the time to flash credentials like she was kicking ass and taking names.

  Jonah flipped the standard black leather cover open and read her info.

  Eleri catalogued everything: Jonah could read, easily. Aside from being beaten and broken, he looked healthy, well fed and mentally stable for the situation. “We’re about thirty minutes away from the hospital. I can look at your arm if you’d like? And your leg. I’d like to stop some of the bleeding.”

  Startled, he knocked her badge off his lap and into the footwell. He gasped at the sight of his own leg, his already wide eyes going wider.

  “Let me look?” She truly wanted to take care of him. He was just a kid, clearly in a bad situation. If he was another sociopath like Baxter, he was hiding it very well. At the same time, she had to squash the urge to coddle. Jonah was a material witness to something, possibly to the very thing they’d been investigating.

  She looked him up and down, checking out his wounds. Nothing appeared animal in origin, it all looked like the results of a standard human fight. “Your leg?”

  Nodding, scared, he held the leg up to her. Though she knew it must pain him, he didn’t make a sound.

  Peeling back the fabric of what she now saw were flannel pajamas, she tried to carefully extricate the wound. Crap. Blood was everywhere. The pants were plaid, but his blood had soaked through the pattern making the fabric a uniform shade of black. She needed plastic to protect the car and collect evidence.

  Gingerly, she pulled a clear panel of polyfilm out of Donovan’s kit and laid it over her lap and under Jonah’s leg.

  “He needs water. Get him drinking.” The first words from Donovan. He’d been busy watching the rearview mirror and scanning the sides of the road. “He’s in shock.”

  Donovan didn’t ask, just diagnosed, but Eleri assumed he was right and dug out a bottle of lukewarm water. It was the best they had. She almost handed it to Jonah, then at the last minute realized he wouldn’t be able to get the lid off. Opening it, she pushed the bottle into his hand, making certain he had a firm grip, then pulled back as he shocked her by greedily chugging almost the entire thing.

  His thin chest heaved with the exertion. His eyes leaked slow tears that made new tracks in the various substances caking his face. Her heart nearly broke, and she shoved aside her worries and her own memories. But she went to work on the leg, cutting open the seams in the flannel, slowly peeling back the fabric, and trying to ignore the hiss Jonah let out as she did it. The blood was clotting into the cotton—that was good; it meant he wasn’t bleeding uncontrollably, but it couldn’t feel anything but awful.

  His leg was cut, a diagonal from the outside of his calf across the front of his leg. She could see the white of bone through the gap in skin—at least it looked intact. “What did this?”

  Maybe that would be an easier question for him to answer.

  It was. “Shovel.”

  Just the one word. Quietly spoken. Followed by a sniff and a blink of memory.

  Opening bandages, she laid them on her lap and went for the squirt bottle of saline. She could wash it out a little. “This will hurt.”

  No response.

  Not adding that “this will also collect possible evidence,” she washed the deep gash just a little, then pressed the bandages along the fresh red wound. It was worse than she’d thought. The bone wasn’t deep at the shin—just slice through the skin and there it was, but his calf was flayed. She could see striations in his muscle. Someone had been trying to stop him and had no desire to stop themselves. Eleri didn’t make any comments.

  She was reaching to check Jonah’s arm, though she was already certain it was broken, when Donovan spoke a second time. “His shoulder looks dislocated. You shouldn’t move his arm at all. Just bind it to his torso.”

  Clear, concise directions.

  She followed them and Jonah allowed her. Already handing back the water bottle, empty now, he stayed silent as she completed what must be painful tasks for him.

  “Can you tell us where you live?” She tried again. Soft voice. Simple words. Same question asked a different way.

  This time he answered.

  “I used to live at the City of God.”

  His phrasing was certainly odd. “And now?”

  Again he looked out the window, but this time he shook his head and she strained to hear the single word. “Nowhere.”

  Eleri’s eyes connected with Donovan’s in the rearview. Jonah could be a jackpot.

  Donovan’s voice came through again. It was sterile sounding, straightforward, and she wondered if that was his idea of soothing. He clearly wasn’t comfortable. “We’re about ten minutes from the hospital. We’ll get you right into the ER.”

  Eleri heard the undertones loud and clear. Ten minutes to get the information they needed now. Then Jonah would—rightly—fall under the care of physicians and possibly surgeons for a good period of time.

  “I don’t have any money.” Jonah shook his head slightly.

  Wanting to set her hand on his shoulder in reassurance, Eleri found there was nowhere to touch him without hurting him or being just plain odd. She settled for leaning closer. “We’re with the FBI. We’ll take care of it. You’re in good hands.”

  Blinking, Jonah looked straight into her eyes for the first time. The grief there would have overwhelmed her had she not dealt with the likes of it herself before. She didn’t wait for him to ask for clarification, she just gave it. “It’s all covered. You won’t owe us anything. You need medical help and you’ll get the best of it.”

/>   Something passed behind his eyes, something dark, and Jonah stared her down. He spoke with the conviction of a child on the brink of manhood. She remembered it, that moment when you realized you could make your own decisions, when you understood your family’s beliefs didn’t have to be your own. His words confirmed her perception.

  “Joseph doesn’t believe in medicine. Only prayer.”

  She was about to ask what Jonah believed, but she didn’t have to.

  “I don’t believe in Joseph anymore. I’ll go.”

  HER BODY CONVULSED, bringing her instantly awake from depths darker than she wanted to remember. Eleri’s eyes flashed open, scanning the area for threats. When she found none, she checked for people who might have seen her thrash herself awake.

  The hard chair of the waiting room only emphasized that she was alone. At ten a.m. she would have thought there would be more people here, more surgeries scheduled. But it wasn’t a big hospital, and anyone else in surgery right now didn’t have anyone waiting in this lonely box of a room with its right-angle chairs.

  She wouldn’t have thought the nightmares would come here—not in the waiting room, not in a well-lit place, not in the morning. But Jonah had consciously reminded her of Emmaline; it was no wonder her subconscious had run with it.

  Eleri dreamed often. Weird, nebulous runs of thought and idea. People morphed one into another and she, the dreamer, thought nothing of it. Her dreams of Emmaline were always starkly different from that. Her sister would stand before her, still frozen at age seventeen while Eleri got older and older as time passed. Emmaline often spoke in relevant sentences, told her secrets. When Eleri awoke she would still hear her sister’s voice, feel the brush of breath on her hair, in the shell of her ear.

  This time Emmaline had not spoken at all. She simply walked toward Eleri, the two of them in a field, surrounded by old, twisted trees. The wind had kicked up, and Eleri felt it. It grabbed at the cotton fabric of the shirt she wore, a pale-blue button-down made out of T-shirt knit. Her shoes had squished in the mud as she walked toward her sister. And when they met, Emmaline hugged her. Eleri felt it. It was too real.