And she had been. She’d sat up soon enough, wanted a Coke and Cheetos, of all things. Then even mocked him when he started a simple enough conversation about arm salve.
“Do you really think it’s the herbs that are healing your arm?” Eleri shook her head at him. “She’ll kill herself if she exerts that energy for everyone. Grandmere loves you.” She’d smiled, eaten a handful of Cheetos and frowned at him.
“Have you smelled it?” She asked.
No, he hadn’t. Burns did not smell good.
She shrugged. “Honestly, it’s probably pesto.”
And that had been it. Eleri had been Eleri again.
They’d avoided the finality of the case for a short while, then filed paperwork on the bodies they’d left in the stairwell. Eleri was currently at the branch office, packing up the bones from the Aroya house to send to storage.
Christina and Wade had taken care of having Echo and Ember’s bodies transported, and calling in an F.B.I. cleanup crew to smooth things over with the poor hotel that had more than one burned room, a trashed hallway, and a stairwell that had seen an epic battle that left it with scorch marks and blood spatter.
His phone rang as the elevator doors opened.
“Lucy!” He felt himself smile. It wouldn’t hurt to see her again. He had to go home, but then he could go to L.A. for a while.
But she was talking. He blinked in the sun as he hit the front doors.
“You what?” He asked as he stopped dead under the pick-up awning. An orderly ran into him and Donovan tried to step to the side and listen at the same time.
“Your agent in charge? Westerfield? He and I have talked about a few things. He’s used me on other cases, you know.”
Donovan did know, but that wasn’t what she was talking about.
Her voice grew more excited. “He wants to send me to Quantico. To get trained as an agent!”
Holy shit. He didn’t say those words though. “That’s amazing!”
Donovan blinked in the sunlight as her words soaked in.
“He wants to start some new division under NightShade. Something for us normals.”
He almost laughed. Lucy was anything but normal. She was the Terminator. She was epic in away he’d never be. What Donovan said was, “Of course they want you in the F.B.I. You’d be amazing at it.”
Then more words fell out of his mouth. “I should come to L.A. soon to celebrate with my girlfriend.”
“Your girlfriend?” He heard the surprise in her voice and felt it in his chest at the same time.
“Too soon?”
There was a pause when everything in his chest fell a few feet. But then her voice came again.
“Nope. It’s good.”
After a sigh of relief, a little planning and more congratulations, he hung up and started toward the car again. He was just thinking how Lucy—a.k.a. Walter Reed—would be in the F.B.I. probably within a year, when his phone rang again.
This time the number made him sigh with exasperation and he ducked under a tree for shade while he fielded this next disaster. “Hello, G.J.”
“Hi Donovan. I have an update for you!”
Of course, she did. She didn’t know when to quit. He hated to ask, but it was going to come out anyway. Better to get it over with faster.
“What did you do?” He hadn’t meant it to sound that way, but it was out now.
GJ didn’t notice. “So, you know how I found Peter Aroya? And you know what they did to him, when he was a kid, at Atlas?”
“Yes.” Donovan knew. He’d been there.
“Well, you also said you couldn’t notify the families, that your Special Agent in Charge wouldn’t let you. That it would incriminate the US government or something. Well, I don’t work for the government.”
“What did you do?” He wanted the families notified, still he didn’t quite trust GJ.
“Sooooo,” she drew it out sounding like a kid. But she thought like a scientist and a bit like a genius at times. She was also capable of being obnoxious as hell. Donovan waited. “I traveled, I found them, befriended them—”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He didn’t want to know, but he did.
“—and I encouraged them to get genetic testing.”
“You what?”
“Befriended them and convinced them to get genetic testing. I have one to go. Three of them have already gotten letters from Las Abuelas. I told them to respond.” She had a smile in her voice, proud of herself.
His heart beat stronger. She’d done what he and Eleri wanted to do. With no strings.
“Oh, and I’ve found seven of them now. One was already deceased, but I met his kid and she’s getting the testing done, too!” GJ was excited. And for once, Donovan figured she should be. Then she turned more somber. “I wanted to do something for you and Eleri. I know you wanted to get this done, but your hands were tied. Mine aren’t. Consider it done.”
He sucked in a breath and only then realized he was leaning against the tree. It probably had scorpions climbing on it, but he didn’t care. He was wiping away tears he hadn’t known he was losing.
GJ was right, he and Eleri had fought to tell the victims. The children had been stolen, people waited for them still.
Someone walked by in the parking lot, but it was a hospital. It wasn’t all that odd to see a grown man crying with his phone to his ear. When the passer by looked at him questioningly, he said, “Good news.”
“Congratulations.” The other man nodded, smiled and headed on.
Donovan still hadn’t said anything to GJ. He pushed the words out. “Thank you. Thank you for this.”
“Of course. You and Agent Eames fought for me.”
“I don’t know what Agent Westerfield will say when he finds out. But I won’t be the one to tell him. It’s your call.” The tears were still falling. The relief he felt was a weight he hadn’t known he was carrying.
GJ surprised him again. Though he didn’t know why she still could. “I already told him.”
This time he said it. “Holy shit. What did he say?”
“Actually, he offered me a spot with some division he runs. NightShade?”
For a second Donovan felt like the ground had spun beneath him then snapped him back into place. “He what?”
“He’s building a new section of his division. He said if I can pass Quantico, he’ll put me in. I’m looking at start dates . . .”
Donovan didn’t hear the rest of what she said. It went in and out his ear in droning noises. He managed to congratulate GJ on her success and even agreed to relay the information to Eleri.
He headed to the car wondering if another call would come in. If something else would rock his world. Instead, the phone stayed silent and he started the engine while he made plans.
Head home.
Run.
Go to Los Angeles and see Lucy.
Check in with Eleri.
Take a moment and be free of the weight he’d carried. Then take a moment and come to grips with the fact that he had GJ Janson to thank for that.
He pulled out of the parking lot and into a future he was less sure of than ever, but happier with than he’d been in a long time.
53
ELERI SAT at the old wooden table at Bell Point Farms.
It had seemed the right thing to come here. She’d wanted to go to Patton Hall, their family home in Kentucky. The one her mother stayed at most of the year in the decades since Emmaline had disappeared. But Eleri couldn’t go there with her mother.
Though she wanted to walk the ground Emmaline had disappeared from again, she wanted to come back as an agent. She wanted to saddle one of the horses and ride the woods they hadn’t found her sister in. She wanted to search for clues that might have somehow stayed hidden through the years. She would come back as a trained expert, not as a ten-year-old terrified she’d never see her sister again.
But if she did, she would have to deal with her mother.
While Grandmere�
��s special brand of talents seemed to have skipped Nathalie Beaumont Eames, Eleri’s mother had a way of making her talk. Especially when she wasn’t ready.
And she wasn’t ready.
Eleri looked out at the dark night, framed in the old panes of glass set in the double doors. The farm was vast. The night wide open with possibilities. But Eleri was afraid.
In front of her on the table sat something she’d never seen before.
It was a file on a set of bones found in New Orleans. For the first time, Eleri held a report that she couldn’t rule out. For the first time, she wasn’t sure that the skeleton they’d found wasn’t her sister.
Something in her own bones told her Grandmere was right.
Emmaline.
You need more A.J.
Get a whopping deal on 4 novels and 2 short stories here.
Includes TWISTED - exclusive to this set!
OR go back to the beginning with
the COMPLETE NIGHTSHADE SET!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A.J.’s world is strange place where patterns jump out and catch the eye, little is missed, and most of it can be recalled with a deep breath. In this world, the smell of Florida takes three weeks to fully leave the senses and the air in Dallas is so thick that the planes “sink” to the runways rather than actually landing.
For A.J., reality is always a little bit off from the norm and something usually lurks right under the surface. As a storyteller, A.J. loves irony, the unexpected, and a puzzle where all the pieces fit and make sense. Originally a scientist and a teacher, the writer says research is always a key player in the stories. AJ’s motto is “It could happen. It wouldn’t. But it could.”
A.J. has lived in Florida and Los Angeles among a handful of other places. Recent whims have brought the dark writer to Tennessee, where home is a deceptively normal-looking neighborhood just outside Nashville.
For more information:
www.ReadAJS.com
[email protected]
Table of Contents
Copyright
Table of Contents
Foreword
Dedication
Introduction
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Introduction
About the Author
The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4) Page 35
