Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

  “Condoms are in the bathroom if that’s what you’re looking for,” he said without looking at me. “Juarez didn’t come prepared?”

  “Funny.”

  He removed his arm from his eyes, but otherwise remained still. “Where’s your better half?”

  “Shower and a confab with Blaze. I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d check on you. Make sure you’re okay.”

  He sat up. The way he was looking at me suggested he knew my story was bullshit. I waited for him to call me on it. He didn’t.

  “I should be asking you that,” he said. “It hasn’t been an easy twenty-four hours—you’ve been playing Florence Nightingale with a vengeance since you got here.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  He sat up and nodded to the bed. “Sit.” I sat.

  “Juarez thinks most of the explosives Barnel had were in the cabin,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said. There was a hint of doubt in the word.

  “You don’t think so?”

  He shrugged. “If Barnel is the one orchestrating this whole thing, it’s possible.”

  “But you don’t think he is,” I said.

  “Not really, no.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any ideas who the puppet master might be.”

  He shook his head, which was a little surprising. Diggs is rarely short on theories.

  “Do you think Danny’s the one who took out Brother Jimmy and tried to kill Barnel?”

  “Nope,” he said without hesitation. “If he’d done it, he wouldn’t have run. He’s a hothead—not the kind who thinks about something like that enough beforehand to get away with it.”

  I didn’t question it. For one thing, I knew Diggs well enough to recognize that debating the issue would be futile. Of course, I’ve never minded futile debate with the man when I’ve had good reason. I had a feeling he was right about this, though: the whole shooting at the tent meeting had been so bizarre that I just couldn’t see Danny being the one behind it. If he was, why would he just leave his truck at Casey’s? And why would he go to Casey’s in the first place, hang out shooting the shit with her little brother, then all of a sudden hear some kind of Siren song and take off to kill Barnel?

  We fell silent. For the first time, I noticed a folder on Diggs’ bedside table. I tensed. Diggs followed my eye.

  “That’s the file on Cameron?” I asked.

  “Also known as ‘the hooded man’? That’s the one,” he said. He was amiable enough about it, but I could tell he was watching me for a reaction. He took the folder from the table, set it on his lap, and began flipping pages, casual as you please. “He’s former military, you know,” he said. He kept his eye on the page. “Born and raised in Lynn, Indiana.”

  “Where my father’s from,” I said. Theories started forming in my head before I could remind myself I wasn’t pursuing this thing anymore.

  “And Max Richards,” Diggs reminded me. “Cameron grew up a couple blocks from both of them.”

  “Do you think he has anything to do with what’s happening here?” I asked. The question had been bothering me for some time now.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his frustration plain. “I still have no clue what his motivations are. Who he works for. It could be that he really is just here checking up on you—making sure you’re following orders like a good little soldier.”

  “Which I’m trying to do.”

  “I know that,” he said seriously. He set the folder between us, open. Cameron’s face peered up at me.

  “This is exactly what he warned us not to do,” I said. “You may not care what happens to you, but I do. So far, Kat and my father have been able to keep me alive thanks to whatever it is they know, but you know Cameron won’t hesitate to take you out.”

  “I know that, too,” he said.

  “Then why are you pushing this?” I asked, my temper rising.

  “Because you aren’t. And that’s not you.”

  “It could be me,” I said. “People change. What the hell’s wrong with that? I’m trying to evolve here.”

  “So evolve,” he said, his voice rising. “I’m all for that—but don’t have a friggin’ lobotomy. You ask questions. Dig. Push so hard you almost make me nuts—that’s what you do. It’s what you’ve always done. It’s what makes you one of the best reporters I’ve worked with. It’s what makes you… you.”

  I picked up the damn file. Stared at Cameron’s face. A barrage of images ran through my head: the Payson Church burning; my father on his knees, blood streaming down his back; Matt Perkins, dead; George Ashmont, dead; Rebecca Ashmont, Noel Hammond, Max Richards, Will Rainier… All of them, dead. Diggs, hands bound, face bloodied, a gun at his temple.

  It’s not that I didn’t want to know; trust me, I did. I wanted to know who Cameron was, where he came from, what kind of background had led him to my father. I wanted to know, once and for all, why Cameron had burned down the church on Payson Isle; if he knew where my father was, or if he was the reason my father was running in the first place.

  Diggs watched me like he could see the hamster wheel spinning in my head.

  I closed the folder and handed it back to him.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen Diggs disappointed in me before. Certainly not to that extent. His eyes fell.

  “I should go,” I said. “Juarez will wonder where I am. He’s already been weird since he got here.”

  “Maybe he’s just tired of being with someone who’s in love with another man.”

  It wasn’t meant to be cruel—Diggs never means to be cruel. It still stung, though. There was a challenge to his eyes that told me he expected me to fight him on this one thing, at least. We’d get riled up, the heat would spark something…

  Instead, I turned around on the bed calmly so I could face him, pulling my legs under me. I was very, very tired.

  “Do you remember what happened the day you found out I was marrying Michael?” I asked.

  If he’d expected me to scream and shout, I definitely expected some kind of deflection from him. The flicker of regret in his eyes was impossible to miss when he nodded.

  “Michael announced the engagement at that faculty thing we all went to at BU,” I said.

  “I told you I remember, Sol,” he said quietly. “And he only did that because I was there. He was a forty-five-year-old, smooth talking, womanizing prick. You were twenty years younger, and you were gorgeous. And the friendship between you and me drove him nuts.”

  “I know,” I said. I wasn’t so sure about the gorgeous part, but the rest of the story certainly held up. “And as I recall, I apologized for that. Michael and I fought. I left the party; Michael stayed.”

  “To go home with his best friend’s wife,” Diggs pointed out. Correctly, as it happened. He closed his eyes. “Do we really have to relive that whole night?”

  “I just want to make sure you remember the same things I do. Because the way George was talking the other night made it sound like I was the one who broke your heart. And that’s not how I remember it.”

  “Fine,” he said. He scratched his head and blew out a lungful of air. “Go ahead. Michael stayed at the party. You left.”

  “And at midnight, you showed up on my doorstep. Drunk. High as a kite. Any chance at all you remember what happened next?”

  “I told you not to marry Michael.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he’d gone home with his best friend’s wife, and he was a womanizing prick who didn’t deserve you.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And we kissed.”

  His eyes darkened. “If that’s all you remember, your memory’s even fuzzier than mine. We did a hell of a lot more than kiss that night, kid.”

  I felt my cheeks warm. “I was getting to that part, kid. We had sex.”

  “We had bone-melting, burn-the-house-down, once-in-a-lifetime sex,” he said. Images from that night blew past me in a way I hadn’t expected: my body pressed to his; the things
he’d whispered and the way he’d whispered them; the heat of his mouth on my… everything; the way it had felt afterward, wrapped in his arms, like all the pieces of my life suddenly, out of the blue, fit.

  He watched me like he knew exactly what I was thinking. My cheeks got warmer. I persevered.

  “Remember what I told you, after?” I asked.

  That regret flickered in his eyes again. “You told me you wouldn’t marry him. If I was serious about you and me—if I wanted to give us a shot, you’d tell Michael it was over.”

  “And we fell asleep in each other’s arms,” I said. I was still surprisingly calm. Maybe I was having a breakdown. A very, very zen breakdown. “And when I woke up in the morning…”

  He wet his lips. Scratched his head again. “I was gone,” he said.

  I stood up, too tired to fight anymore. “And the next thing I heard, you’d moved to Kentucky and married Ashley Durham.”

  “I know.”

  “So you don’t get to act like this is all my fault, Diggs. Like I’m some stone-cold bitch when I’m not ready to jump back in bed with you just because—right now—you think it’s what you want. I was protecting you last summer. I’m still protecting you. But also? There’ve been way too many times when I’ve thought we were about to ride off into the sunset together, only to wake up and find a note on the pillow and a fucking twenty-dollar-bill on the dresser.”

  He sat there, his eyes burning a hole through me. Regret and fatigue warred on his face, but behind that was that intensity I’d never trusted in the way he looked at me. Historically, whatever it was—love or lust or some combination of the two—had been too easily forgotten the moment I began to trust it might stay.

  He nodded slowly. I started for the door. I was almost there when he spoke again. I stood there, my hand on the doorknob, and didn’t turn back.

  “I know I’m not perfect, Sol,” he said. “But you talk about evolving… What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the past four years? There’s something between us. I’m through running from it. Juarez is a good guy.” I heard him get off the bed and start toward me, his voice low now. “He deserves better than being your security blanket because you’re too scared to put yourself out there anymore.”

  When he spoke again, he was directly behind me—his hand around mine on the doorknob, his body warm against me. His breath on my neck.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll drop it. No harm, no foul.” His mouth brushed against my ear with the words. My knees had turned to mush.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. I couldn’t turn around, and I couldn’t quite say it with a full voice, but at least I got the words out.

  Diggs kept his hand on mine and turned the knob. Opened the door for me. “Liar,” he said, low in my ear.

  At that point, I should have turned around, looked him in the eye, and told him he was full of shit. Instead, I jabbed him in the stomach, hard, with my elbow—partly because he deserved it, and partly because any ability I might have had to come up with some kind of intelligent retort had flown out the window the second his lips hit my earlobe.

  He let out a sort of oof and pulled back, but he was grinning when I looked back at him. It was an evil grin, too. No wonder half the people in Justice thought he was the antichrist.

  “I’m going back to my room now. To sleep. With my boyfriend.”

  “You do that,” he said, all cool and arrogant and stupidly… hot. I walked away. He closed the door.

  Private Abbott nodded his head in an impressively military fashion as I made for the stairs. I passed the vending machine again on the way back to my room. Still not working. Twenty candy bars mocked me from behind the glass.

  Stupid Apocalypse.

  <><><>

  Juarez was in bed when I got back to the room. He rolled over when I slid in beside him, naked beneath the sheets. His hand found the hem of my t-shirt and pushed it up, his knuckles brushing against my stomach.

  “Sorry—have you been back long?” I asked.

  “A few minutes. It’s all right. I knew you’d be along.”

  Usually, Jack is a pretty straightforward guy, but there was something cloaked, sad, about the way he was looking at me now. I traced the line of his jaw, thinking of the nights we’d spent together over the past three months.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said. “You’re not happy.” He kissed my fingertips, pulling me closer. His hand slid down my thigh and wrapped around my knee, draping my leg over his hip. I could feel him, naked, hard, pressed to me.

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” he said softly.

  I nodded. “Okay.” I kissed the corner of his lips. His right hand was in my hair, his left burning trails of fire along my side, tracing the line of my breast through my t-shirt. “We don’t have to talk now,” I said.

  He leaned in, taking my bottom lip between his teeth as his hand moved to the small of my back, holding me still. He drew back and watched my face, his dark eyes nearly black, as he pressed inside me—just barely, hardly moving. My breath hitched and my eyes sank shut, heat coiled tight somewhere low in my belly.

  Since we’d started dating, I’d learned some things about Jack Juarez: the way he liked his eggs (over easy); which part of the paper he read first (international headlines); how he took his coffee and which sweets he couldn’t pass up and the few things in life that would make him postpone (but never skip) his morning run. I’d also learned that there were parts of Jack that he never quite unleashed—even when we were in bed together. I always got the feeling he was holding himself back, maintaining control at all cost.

  Now, his fingers curled into my side. That tenuous control was slipping; I could see it in his eyes. Feel it in the way his body tensed beside me, nearly shaking with some kind of need he wouldn’t give into.

  I hitched my leg up higher, pulling him deeper. Leaned up and took his earlobe between my teeth.

  “You don’t have to be so careful with me,” I whispered. I kissed his neck, dragging my teeth along his sweetly salted skin. “Take what you need, Jack.”

  His fingers twisted in my hair. Another second passed, taut and silent, before he gave in. His kiss was rough, nearly bruising, as he rolled me to my back and we began to move.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DIGGS

  9:45:00

  I was sure I wouldn’t sleep after Solomon left. I was wrong. I woke at quarter past two from a light coma, sore and still tired. My file on Mitch Cameron was still on the bed. I thought of Solomon again. There were things I could have said to her, pushing the issue of the two of us a little further: I’d changed. She’d changed. It was written in the stars. Maybe I was full of shit, but I actually believed some of that. But at the end of the day, it didn’t change the fact that Jack Juarez was waiting for her—a good guy who would give her everything she deserved: less scars, less turmoil, less heartache.

  Assuming we all survived, I should just go back to Costa Rica when this was all over. Surf and write and, maybe, meet someone else.

  Put all this shit behind me.

  I opened the file on Cameron and stared at his beady eyes. He was proof positive that Solomon truly had turned over a new leaf. Not once in the past few days had she asked to see the folder.

  I was more disappointed by that than I cared to admit—it didn’t say good things about me. I should be happy for her and her new life. A new life in which she was no longer a woman hell-bent on getting answers. Instead, she was some stranger who patched people up and listened to everything her boyfriend said. I thought of Juarez’s words on the subject: If you think anything just slid off Erin after last summer, you don’t know her as well as I thought.

  I knew that—I did. I was beside her while Rainier tracked us like dogs, after all. I watched while he whispered God only knew what in her ear, that belt looped around her neck. We’d both known for a long time that the world is a scary place, but I don’t think either of us ever had a clue just how dark it got until Black Fa
lls.

  Maybe it really was for the best that she was moving on from all that.

  And maybe if I told myself that story enough times, I’d start to believe it.

  I went into the bathroom and set my shiny new gun and my virtually useless cell phone on the counter, then turned on the shower. The water was cool, but I’d had worse. I stripped down and stood under the spray, letting the cold wash over me.

  I thought of Solomon kneeling over the little boy who’d almost died today. That thought led me to Jessie Barnel’s terror-filled eyes as she wielded a shotgun and defended a grandfather whom, I suspected, she didn’t even like. Why? And what the hell was Barnel’s endgame in this? What did he honestly expect to accomplish? Or did he really believe he was getting orders from on high, as Jessie had suggested. He’s goin’ back to the beginning... Back to where it all went wrong.

  It seemed a safe assumption that Barnel wasn’t going all the way back to Eden. It had to be something more personal than that. Billy Thomas seemed like a safe bet: the psychopath who’d raped and killed those three girls before allegedly killing himself and—according to legend—stapling the inverted cross on his own chest. It didn’t seem presumptuous to assume that Billy hadn’t, in fact, done that at all. Which meant someone else was behind the killing and the stapling.

  Jesup Barnel wasn’t a man to be trifled with; I’d learned that the hard way almost thirty years ago. As a young man just starting out on this path, what would he have done if one of the boys he’d supposedly purged of demons turned around and did the unthinkable?

  I had no doubt that Barnel would exact revenge for that.

  So, all I needed to do was figure out where Barnel considered the beginning to be, where Billy Thomas was concerned.

  Before I could continue with that line of thought, I heard something in the other room—a shuffle, then a bang like something had fallen. My heart skipped in a way I’d become accustomed to since Black Falls, that breathless moment of blind panic before I got my wits back.

  “Solomon?” I called out. “That you?”