Dark Discovery (DARC Ops Book 8)

by Jamie Garrett

  “What was?”

  “At the forefront?” She smiled.

  “Yes, at the forefront of your attention.”

  “A lot of things.”

  “Trips to Claxtonburg?” he said. “That general store?”

  “I won’t incriminate myself.”

  “Why? It was on my mind. I knew you had to go somewhere to get the paper. Some type of small-town general store. I just didn’t know where exactly.” His gaze moved about her face, down her neck, and down further, taking her all in.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Ethan.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You’re giving me something to do. A purpose.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  She felt an energy running through her body, the vibration of electricity. Of anticipation. “Let’s go find where Tucker was taking those shots.”

  “Which ones?” Ethan said. “The ones all alone in the field, in the dark?”

  Kalani smiled, trying not to let it grow too broadly. She really shouldn’t have been enjoying it like she had. Not with Tucker’s disappearance lingering in the background. There was something a little shameful about that, even worse if Ethan knew.

  He must have known a little bit.

  The way he’d been looking at her . . . he must have felt at least a little bit of that excitement, too, no matter whose ghost story haunted around in the ethers. No matter how bad things seemed with Tucker, there could at least be some small room for good.

  Good . . .Was that was it was? Was it really that wholesome?

  She could tell Ethan’s mind had raced ahead, that it was already in the dark of the field with her. Working there. Working their case, together. And whatever else.

  No more words had to be uttered between Kalani’s proposition, Ethan packing up his equipment and slipping the SD card in his pocket, and the two of them leaving the barn together. Finally, on the move. It was like they’d been teammates for much longer than just that brief day of insanity on the big island of Hawaii, on the surging crests of a tsunami.

  “Do you come out here often?” he asked her as they waded into the darkness beyond the houselights.

  “I used to,” she said. “Before the bugs got really bad. I’d come out for a nightly walk. I guess that’s why some of the photos looked so familiar.”

  “You are going to show me the locations, right?”

  She laughed. “What? Of course.”

  “You weren’t just trying to lead me on and lure me away.”

  “Of course not.” She wouldn’t tell him how that was a big part of it, but still the more important aspect of their latest adventure was that she really had recalled some of those locations. And with Ethan and his flashlight, and how well he could handle himself in any situation, he’d find what they were looking for in no time.

  “Should I be packing?” he asked.

  She hoped he was, in every way. Both might be more than necessary. But she could only shrug in response.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “And by the looks of it, you are, too.”

  She had been walking in front of him, guiding the way along the narrow path through a moonlit field. There was just enough light for him to see all of her weapons. She was normally armed out there, especially during one of her night patrols, but it had hardly crossed her mind that the whole arsenal might be necessary. She was a little glad it was.

  “It’s nice,” he said. “The air’s nice out here. You do this to clear your mind, usually? To get away from Lea, maybe?”

  “A little bit of both. But I’ve also had some suspicions about who was really out here, aside from the animals.”

  “No, I think the Blackwoods guys fit right in,” Ethan said. “I can imagine them slithering around back here. By the way, can I ask how the heck you noticed any of the locations from the photos? Didn’t they just all look the same? Green and more green?”

  “No,” Kalani said. “That’s what I want to show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “The rocks. There’s an outcropping of rock. Granite. It’s got this really distinct blueish hue.”

  “So that’s where we’re going?”

  “Yep.” She paused at the end of the clearing, Ethan behind her, his body stopping close. She could almost feel the vibration of his life force bridging the distance between them. He was as excited as she was.

  “This is where it starts getting dark,” she said.

  “It’s pretty dark already.” But he hadn’t used the flashlight yet. She knew enough about tactics to know he’d wait until the very last minute, until it was absolutely necessary to ruin the natural adjustments their eyes would have already made to the low light. The change of eyes, from human to animal eyes. She wanted to use them on Ethan.

  “Did you already get lost?” he said. “Why don’t I take the lead, and you can be backseat driver.”

  “That’s a good compromise,” she said, enjoying how his body slid past hers to take the lead. “First thing you’ve got to do is not trip over that log.”

  “What log?”

  She heard the sound of it in the dark, Ethan’s foot running into it solidly. And then a little laugh as he climbed over the old downed trunk. She stepped over it, too, by memory, and then continued behind as they entered the forest.

  “Maybe you should stay in the lead,” Ethan said.

  “No, I kind of like watching you stumble around.”

  The path had closed in around them. The weeds and edges of ferns made quiet ruffling sounds as their legs swished through them. Moments later, when the foliage grew in particularly close, Kalani felt it necessary to reassure him: they weren’t too far off.

  And then she bumped into him. She’d been looking up through the trees at the filtered moonlight when his solid and very much stationary back almost knocked the wind out of her. She whispered an apology, just in case.

  His lack of response, or even movement, told Kalani that discretion had been the right move. She just hoped it wasn’t too late. What was he looking at? What was it?

  He turned around to face her, to whisper: “We can go back if you want.”

  Her whisper: “What? Why?”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Do we need backup? Do we need the rest of the crew?”

  “No,” he said quickly. It was a surprise. “I mean, I feel bad that I brought you along. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

  “Be like what?” she said. A gentle breeze played through leafed branches above them. An air that was lighter and cooler than she’d felt all night. Kalani suddenly felt refreshed and almost carefree. “Come on, I used to walk out here all the time.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What was it? What did you hear?”

  “It’s what I felt,” Ethan said. “And now, what I feel guilty about.”

  “Guilty?” she said, waiting for what felt like an eternity to hear his clarification. It was a response that never came. Finally she said, “Ethan, this used to be my path out here. I’d always walk it. Alone, even.”

  “The situation is a little different now.”

  She was getting annoyed at his vagueness. “Well, let’s go back, then. Why can’t we go back and get the others?”

  He turned to look away from her, peering out through the dark. Without a word, he pulled his gun from the holster.

  Kalani whispered, “Ethan . . .” And then drew her own gun. She held it close, looking around his shoulder, still trying to identify the threat.

  “We can’t involve them right now,” he finally whispered. “I saw something in the photos . . .”

  “What?”

  “I saw someone,” he said. “Your sister. In one of the photos out here in the woods. It looked like Tucker had been following her along the trail, tracking her. And in the last photo . . .” He fell silent, arching his ear into the sound of a tree limb groaning in the breeze.

  “What?” Kalani said. “What last photo?�
�

  “The last photo he took was of Lea, talking to some guy out here. I have no idea who. Just a . . . well, he didn’t exactly look like a local. He was a big dude. Tattoos everywhere. Mean-looking guy. Did she ever bring a friend around?”

  “No,” Kalani said. The betrayal seeped into her. Burning her. She didn’t know it or understand it. She didn’t know if it was justified, but she still felt its heat.

  “She never had a guy come around?” Ethan said.

  “No.”

  “And you’ve never seen anyone like that? Anyone like from the picture?”

  “I never saw it.”

  “What?”

  “The picture,” Kalani said.

  “But how I described it.”

  “Fine, no, of course not.” She thought again of how quiet it had been. How free their house had been of men that looked anything like the burly crew-cuts she’d imagined from Tucker’s photos and from Ethan’s worst fears. “Well, I mean all you guys sort of look like that. Right? Big, burly. You sure it wasn’t one of your own team? You’re new, right? And maybe it was someone from the SWAT training? We’ve already had some guys come over here. You know, um . . .” She was grasping at straws—for anything that would mean Lea wasn’t . . .

  He still had his gun drawn, looking out in the dark.

  And so did she. “So, you saw Lea . . .”

  “It was the very last photo,” Ethan said.

  She had been willing to stay logical and keep her head above the waters of an escalating paranoia, trying so much harder since the episode back in town. She had tried to be the level-headed one. But that simple little fact of her sister getting caught in the last photo began eating away at her most recent efforts at helpful detachment. And now it was cognitive dissonance. Of course it didn’t sit right. Of course it was strange. But her sister . . . Lea . . .

  Kalani waited until he faced her again. “So that’s why you don’t want anyone to know. You don’t want to tell her.”

  “I don’t want them to know about it,” Ethan said. “Because I don’t know what it means yet, and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And, she’s your sister.” Even through the dark, he looked almost sick. The moonlight made him not only pale, but almost green in its nightmarish reflection.

  “What do you mean, Ethan?”

  “What I mean is . . . I’m probably fucking up big time. I’m trying to protect . . . Well, I don’t know. Fuck. I don’t know if I’m protecting her or you, but . . .”

  “Do you want to head back?” Kalani asked. It was her turn to offer him the easy way out, to let him off the hook. It was okay. It was a nice gesture, but she didn’t want to take him down with her. She didn’t want him to feel, as he’d said before, “guilty.”

  “Let’s keep moving.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is. I’ve painted myself in a corner.”

  He still hadn’t moved. So neither did Kalani.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a corner with you in it. Right?”

  “Ethan . . .”

  “No matter what I’m screwing up or possibly throwing away, it’s a corner with you. It’s with you. Right, Kalani?”

  15

  Ethan

  He waited for what felt like a whole night, staring into the pale outline of her face. Two glints of eyes, white specks in the dark staring back at him. He’d taken a chance on that shape, on those eyes. An even bigger chance on something inside her, what he’d hoped was a soul that matched the goodness and beauty of its outer shell. For this reason, he’d even entertained the idea of risking his career and personal reputation on protecting Lea. They were blood, the same DNA. And while they might have different careers and life paths, there must have been that same cosmic goodness in both siblings. Ethan had once before called it fairy dust, some absurd ethereal connection. A blind trust in the goodness of not only Kalani—which came easily—but the pair of them.

  But there was something disturbing about the recent cloudiness that had come over the sisters, blotting out the normally shimmering fairy dust. Blotting across Kalani’s face when she’d talk about Lea, when trying to hide the obvious buildup of fears, and of growing suspicions about Lea’s lingering involvement in her Blackwater past. It was funny, or horrifying, that just when Ethan felt ready to trust Lea, he’d get this glimpse. The way Kalani was looking at him in the dark.

  “I messed up,” Ethan said. “Didn’t I?”

  Still a silent, unmoving shape. He felt the beginning edges of terror. Just how big did he screw up? One sister, or two?

  Finally, Kalani said, “I never told you to do anything like that, to start . . . taking risks for her.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m with you, Ethan. Of course I’m with you.” She grabbed the sides of his arms, little clutching hands tying to pry him into her.

  But Ethan’s resistance came to a very sharp point. A question. “Why didn’t you tell me if you were having these kinds of doubts about her?”

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  “So?” Ethan said, knowing that such a reason could only work to a point. Knowing that there had to have been a cutoff. “So if your sister goes and . . . if she goes and kidnaps—”

  “No, no,” she said, cutting him off. “But if I start suspecting something, I really have to . . . I have to know I’m right. It’s taken me a lot just to get to this place where I’m even questioning her. If I had some solid evidence, of course you’d know about it.”

  Her hands still held on to him. He believed her. It was that simple. It was her touch, her energy. It was her, in him.

  “She and I have gotten close again,” Kalani said. “Even through all the fighting and everything. That doesn’t matter. The fighting almost makes us closer. But we’ve reconnected after all these years, and finally I want to start calling her, you know, to really start calling her my sister.” She sniffled, wiping a tear as it dripped down the side of her nose. “And now I start feeling like this. I . . . I don’t understand it. I don’t know what to do . . . Right now it’s still so . . . up in the air.”

  Now it was his turn to hold on to Kalani tighter. “Maybe we can solve some of the mysteries, then.”

  She shrugged and made a sort of groaning sound.

  “You’re afraid to,” Ethan said.

  “Yeah, but we have to. There’s no choice but to find out some horrible truth about her.”

  “It might be horrible,” Ethan said. “It might not be anything.”

  She had let go of his arms and had begun pacing gently. Kalani took a big sigh and said, “You know what I don’t get?”

  “What? How I can trust you so pathetically fast?”

  “Pathetic?”

  “Never mind,” Ethan said. “Keep going.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Kalani said, “is where all the bugs went. Have you noticed?”

  Ethan laughed. It was sort of a relief. He said, “The wind.” He felt it, thank God, brushing by his face. He could hear it in the trees. If it had been a little brighter, or if the moon hadn’t been hidden by a mix of clouds and branches, then he’d perhaps see how it played with her hair. That was one thing he’d wanted to see, one thing he really missed from Hawaii. The sea-salted breeze combing her hair.

  “Shall we continue?” Kalani said.

  “We shall.”

  They started walking again.

  “Do we know what we’re looking for?”

  “Not exactly . . . But I think we’ll know it when we see it.” His mind went back to Tucker’s photos. Tucker had seen something, and he’d known enough to record it for posterity, a documentation. Potential evidence. Ethan knew, too, perhaps, that Tucker’s photo could have been meant as a type of communication in case he wasn’t able, or around, or alive. Ethan thought again how he’d found the camera . . . with the messy and uncharacteristically rushed
packing job, the dirty clothes, the bag that might have been handled by someone else. The quick fumbling hands of some hired goon who could have easily missed that one curiously lumpy pants pocket.

  “So, how far will you take this?” Kalani said, “Without telling your guys?”

  “I guess that depends how far Lea took things,” Ethan said, suddenly feeling a little badly. He eased up and augmented it off with, “If she took it anywhere at all.”

  “Well, she took it far enough to meet someone out in the woods.”

  “But like you said, it could also have just been . . .”

  “Also what, Ethan? I’d love to know what you’re implying.”

  “Well, it could have been,” he said, chuckling, “a booty call?” He snickered again. He couldn’t help it. He was also a little glad for the levity.

  “She could also have never really left the captain,” Kalani said, her voice remaining hard and straight. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s what we’re all afraid of, I’m sure. They were in love, you know.”

  “You think it was the captain in the photo?”

  “I have no idea who that could be. And isn’t he locked up somewhere?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “Well, the closest thing to it.”

  “She and the captain, though. I think, for as sick as he seems, and as sick as they are together . . . I think she thinks there’s something real there.”

  “I know,” Ethan said. “Or at least, I heard. I just have a hard time believing anyone can be in love with someone like that.”

  “No one’s saying you have to believe in their love.”

  “Well, I believe in love itself,” Ethan said, already aware of how corny it sounded. And so another augment, “And I know it can make you do some pretty crazy stuff.”

  “Crazy like help a guy like Tucker get kidnapped? Someone’s partner?”

  “He’s all of our partners,” Ethan said.

  “I meant Macy.”

  Macy was the woman Tucker had rescued from Africa. She’d been practically smuggled aboard a container ship to flee killers that had been contracted by her own government. And once in her country, after what seemed to be a ceremonious landing, she’d realized there was an even older enemy, all starting from the captain’s associate, a corrupt St. Louis police chief. A shared enemy. Perhaps Tucker’s abduction was payback.