Gone to Dust

by Liliana Hart

  “Make sure you’re drinking lots of water as we go,” he said. “The humidity is going to dehydrate you faster than you think.”

  “I’m a step ahead of you,” she said, drinking from one of the bottles from her pack.

  It was a humbling experience trekking through the jungle with Elias. She considered herself to be in good shape. But she felt like a career couch potato after hiking several miles at the pace he was going. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “You doing okay?” he asked her, looking back over his shoulder. “Tell me if we need to stop.”

  “I’m good,” she told him. “Though I’m not feeling too confident about the snake thing. I saw a vine back there that was bigger than my thigh, all tangled together with a bunch of tree roots. I thought I saw it move when we stepped through them all, and I almost had a heart attack before I realized it really was just a vine.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t point it out to you, then,” he said. “Because that definitely wasn’t a vine. But chances are it’s probably not following us.”

  “I can’t even tell you how unamused I am right now,” she said. “And I’m going to pretend you’re kidding so I can keep my sanity a little while longer. How far until we make it to Corazón Roto?”

  Elias stopped and took out his phone, and Miller took advantage of the break to sit down a few minutes. The pack was causing a pang in her lower back that nothing but a good masseuse was going to fix.

  “How are you getting service out here?” she asked. “My phone has been dead as a doornail since we left Santa Cruz yesterday.”

  “I have a special phone,” he told her. “I get service everywhere.”

  “That’s convenient. Where can I get one of those?”

  “I’ll put in a good word for you.” And then he said, “Elaine, are you with us?”

  Yes, Elias … she practically purred. Miller almost rolled her eyes, but remembered Elaine didn’t actually exist in human form.

  It’s a lovely day. You’ve traveled six-point-two miles and your pulse is holding steady at eighty-three beats per minute.

  “How in the world does she know all that?” Miller asked.

  All Gravediggers are inserted with a special device. It allows me to track them all over the world, and it allows me to assess their health to the fullest degree if they are ever wounded or killed during a mission. I can also determine eating and drinking patterns, anomalies in the body, and sexual activity. For instance, Agent Cole has ejaculated four times in the last twenty-four hours.

  Elias burst out laughing and Miller blushed and said, “All righty, then. That seems unbelievably intrusive.”

  “You get used to it,” he told her. “Too bad she’s not hooked up to you.” He leaned down and nipped at her bottom lip. She was hot and sweaty and still he turned her on like crazy. “I’d love to know how many times I made you come last night.”

  “I lost track,” she said. “And stop fishing for compliments. I think your ego is inflated enough.”

  He grinned and then kissed her again before returning to his phone. “Elaine, show imaging map, please, and section it within an immediate radius to Corazón Roto.”

  He held the phone flat and a miniature version of the 3-D map they’d looked at before appeared, only this time she could see the two of them standing in the map, like two little dolls.

  “We’re still about a mile out from the rock, so not too far to go,” he said. “We’ll take a break once we’re there and fuel up, and then we’ll see if we can find any sign that Justin was there.”

  “You might have to help me stand up,” she said. “I think my weight distribution with the pack is most likely to have me falling on my face.”

  “And it’s such a lovely face,” he said, pulling her to her feet.

  The idea of a break and refueling had her picking up the pace, and she almost wept with relief when the trees cleared and she saw the large rock at the edge of a cliff. She hadn’t realized they’d climbed so high in elevation, but she could see the turbulent waters from the sea inside the triangle below. It was a long way down, and it was easy to see why boats and divers weren’t allowed in those waters.

  She dropped her pack and stretched out her muscles, and then she downed a bottle of water. Corazón Roto did, indeed, look like a broken heart. The rock was taller than she was, and jaggedly cleft down the middle, so it looked like a heart splitting in two.

  “There’s a dispute over whether or not the Incans or the Spanish discovered these islands first, but the evidence is pretty conclusive the Incans were here well before the Spaniards. There are ruins of Incan settlements on Santa Cruz and a couple of the other islands, but they were pretty much wiped out when the Spaniards showed up. Most of the Incans died of diseases the Spanish brought with them.”

  “Seems like this would not be the easiest place to try and settle,” she said, looking at the overgrown jungle and uneven terrain.

  “When people keep taking your land and killing your people, you go where you can to survive. There’s a legend that’s told about Corazón Roto. When Spanish ships found these islands, the Inca were already well settled, but they were outnumbered, though their strength in battle was brutal and far outmatched the Spanish. But the Spanish were on a mission for gold and land for their queen, and their ships and numbers were enough to conquer everyone in their path.

  “The Incan king was wise and knew there was no gold to be found on the islands, so he negotiated with the Spanish general that he would offer his daughter in marriage to him, and that in return, they were welcome to any treasures discovered on the island as long as there was no war. The king’s daughter was incredibly beautiful …”

  “Of course she was,” Miller said. “They’re always beautiful. You don’t negotiate your homely daughter when forming alliances. That’s betrothing 101.”

  “I forgot you were an expert,” he said dryly. “My apologies.”

  She grinned at him, enjoying the break and the banter. There was a smaller rock not far from Corazón Roto with a flat side, and she sat down with her back to it.

  “Did she fall madly in love with the general?”

  “No, he was old enough to be her grandfather,” Elias said, taking a seat across from her. He took a bottle of water from his bag and tossed her a protein bar. “But she fell in love with one of the lowly shipmen, who was, of course, very handsome. Young and strapping too.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Well, as things tend to go when kings and generals are involved, the young lovers were discovered before she was able to marry the general. The king dragged the shipman before all the people and had him beaten and beheaded for defiling his daughter.”

  “As one does,” she said. “What happened to the daughter?”

  “The general decided he’d still marry the daughter, but at sunrise on the morning of her wedding, she threw herself from this cliff and fell to the turbulent waters below. The legend says when her body hit the rocks and waves below, the rock split in two. Corazón Roto. The broken heart.”

  Miller arched a brow as she finished her protein bar. “You’re not a bad storyteller.”

  He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “No one can bullshit like SEALs. It was a good way for us to keep entertained on long nights. Sleep doesn’t always come easy.”

  She’d put off asking him, but she needed to know. It had been eating at her for months, and it hadn’t gone away once they’d made love.

  “You’ve got to tell me why,” she finally said. “Why you left that night. You hurt me in a way I didn’t think was possible.” And admitting that made her a hell of a lot more vulnerable than she’d ever been in her life. “I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t expecting it. We’d been dancing around it for months, and I thought we’d have some fun and see where things led. But when you touched me …”

  “It was more powerful than anything you could’ve imagined,” he finished for her.

 
; She nodded because her throat had closed up, and she didn’t think she’d be able to talk.

  “That was exactly the reason I stopped,” he said. “I don’t know how I found the strength to walk away.”

  “It felt like you were able to walk away pretty easily to me,” she said, playing with the wrapper in her hand.

  “The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you,” he said. “But I thought it would hurt you more in the long run if we’d followed through. It might have started out as just fun and sex, but I think we both know that after we got our hands on each other it was a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “If the last thing you wanted to do was hurt me, then why did you?” she asked. She needed the truth. A straight-out answer. If she didn’t know for sure, she’d always wonder.

  “You’ve seen what we are,” he said. “What we do. My past means nothing. I’m a dead man walking, and Eve Winter owns me lock, stock, and barrel. Our duty is to the mission. There’s no room for anything more, and I thought it’d be cruel to you to bring you into a world I couldn’t share with you, and for you to always wonder why I could never give you all of me. You’re not the kind of woman to put up with that. And I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “What about Deacon and Tess?”

  “Deacon’s story is different, and not one for me to tell. But they don’t have an easy road ahead of them. He’s still at the whim of a government organization that controls him for a certain amount of time. They can make things easy or they can make things difficult. And I know Deacon and Tess have plans in place in case anything ever goes wrong.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to get through the shit when you have someone on your team who’s helping you fight the battle.”

  “I’m starting to realize that,” he said softly.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “We need to get moving,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ve only got a few more hours of daylight and from Elaine’s calculations, we can make it to the first waterfall just before dusk.”

  When he reached down to pick up his pack, he noticed the graffiti on the side of Corazón Roto and shook his head.

  “Nothing is sacred anymore,” he said. “I’m always amazed at the things people do without thinking, and then I remember that a good portion of the population spends a lot of its time not thinking at all.”

  She snorted out a laugh and glanced at the two names carved on the rock inside of a heart. “When I was at the Colosseum in Rome, someone had spray-painted ‘Texas A&M’ on the side in Aggie maroon. I’d never been so mortified in my life to be from Texas.”

  His muscles had tightened since he’d sat down and taken a break, and he stretched before he put his pack on. And then he watched as Miller did stretches of her own. She hadn’t uttered one word of complaint, and he knew he’d set a grueling pace. But his gut was telling him their time to find Justin was very limited.

  “Wait a second,” she said, dropping her pack back on the ground and squatting down so she could see the names more clearly. “Bull Brazer and Lily Crowe. I know them. Both of them.”

  “That’s not a coincidence,” he said. “Now we just have to figure out what the hell they have to do with finding him.”

  “Well,” she said, “I can tell you for sure that they’re not in love as the heart suggests. Bull was a friend of my brother’s in high school.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He was dumber than a box of hair and he once broke both his legs jumping off his roof with a sheet tied around his neck like a cape.”

  Elias’s lips twitched, but he said, “Maybe something else that comes to mind will be more helpful.”

  She shrugged. “I really don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “He and my brother were childhood friends. I think Bull moved away his sophomore or junior year of high school. His dad got a job in Oklahoma, I think. The only thing I really remember about Bull is that he was a neighborhood kid. He lived over on North Street, and my brother would ride his bike down there so they could play basketball.”

  “There it is,” he said. “Elaine, which of the two waterfalls is north of here?”

  Both of the waterfalls you earmarked for your journey are north of Corazón Roto, though neither are true north. But there is a difference of ten miles between them and an elevation difference of almost a thousand feet. They are also on two separate paths.

  “That doesn’t help,” he said. “What about Lily Crowe? Who’s she?”

  “I know even less about her,” Miller said. “Do you know Charles and Mildred Crowe? He’s been postmaster for more than forty years, and she’s been a teller at the bank for just as long. Lily was their only child.”

  “What’s their address?” he asked.

  “They live over on Mockingbird. It’s the little white clapboard.”

  “I know the one,” he said. “You said ‘was’. What happened to Lily?”

  “They used to hold Fourth of July celebrations and picnics on the other side of the lake from where y’all have your secret entrance to the Bat Cave. A bunch of kids were swimming, swinging from a rope and into the water, and most everyone else was watching the fireworks. It was dark, so kids were coming and going, and no one noticed when Lily didn’t get out of the water after her turn. They didn’t find her body until daylight the next morning. She was eight years old. But that was well before my time. I don’t know anything else about her. People still talk about it because it was such a tragedy, and things like that don’t happen often in Last Stop.”

  Elias thought about it for a minute, trying to remember the Justin he knew and his thinking patterns. He’d know Miller’s knowledge of the girl would be limited, and it wasn’t so cut-and-dried as a street name.

  “Elaine, is one of the waterfalls eight degrees north from here?”

  The 3-D image erupted from Elias’s phone, and there was a section highlighted over one of the waterfalls.

  Affirmative … uploading coordinates now.

  “Well, I guess we can assume that Cordova and his men will never figure that one out,” she said.

  “Which is why he wanted you to begin with,” he said. “Let’s move while we’ve still got daylight. We’ve got a long way to go.”

  “I’ve got visions of a good night’s sleep already in my head.”

  “You’ll have earned it by the time we get there. We’re going up pretty high. Let me know if you get light-headed or start to feel sick. It’s still pretty warm out here, and it’ll be a while before the afternoon rain comes in.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Sleep is a great motivator for me. I hardly ever get any, so having that as a light at the end of the tunnel is all I need to make it through.”

  THE RAIN STARTED four hours later.

  Elias hadn’t been kidding about the shift in elevation. She felt the tightness in her chest as they climbed higher and higher, though the temperature had cooled off considerably, so much so that she’d put on the all-weather jacket and pulled the hood over her head. It didn’t do much good for keeping the rain off, as the droplets hit her in the face and slithered down her neck.

  Her calves and thighs were on fire, and the pack on her back got heavier with every step.

  “I hope you can appreciate the fact that I’ve refrained from making any movie references about the One Ring and how heavy it gets as Frodo and Samwise Gamgee get closer to Mordor. This is a volcanic island after all.”

  “I really appreciate your restraint,” he said, using the machete to cut through the thick vines.

  She noticed he’d gotten quieter the farther they went, and how difficult it was to forge a path that wasn’t there. He was using all his strength and concentration to get them to the waterfall, and it was far from an easy battle. She hoped like hell they were going to the right one, and they hadn’t misinterpreted Justin’s clues.

  “You hear that?” he asked sometime later.

  She hadn’t heard much of anything for the past co
uple of miles. Blisters had rubbed themselves raw on both of her feet, and all she could hear was the miserable whining inside her head, and the occasional whimper she let slip. He’d been checking on her often, asking if she was okay, and she always told him yes. She didn’t want to slow them down. It was her own stupid pride that was keeping her silent, but she didn’t see what good it would do or what would change if she told him what was wrong. It would just worry him, and put them in potential danger. She’d noticed he’d spent a lot more time stopping to listen before it had started raining, and checking in with Elaine to see if the Devil’s Due had been boarded again.

  No one had boarded their boat, but Elaine had reported there were more boats in the water surrounding the islands. What couldn’t be deciphered was if the boats contained friend or foe. But Elias had said it was best to always assume the worst and deal with it.

  The rain hadn’t let up, and it was almost dark. It wasn’t often she found herself in the midst of a full-blown pity party. She was the kind of girl who took her knocks and then pulled herself up by the bootstraps and kept going. But she was physically and mentally exhausted, and she just didn’t have a lot left in her. They were both soaked to the skin, and water dripped from her eyelashes and the tip of her nose.

  “Hear what?” she asked, but she didn’t think he heard her.

  It took her a minute to focus on what he could possibly be talking about. And then she heard it. The sound of rushing water could be heard through the rain, and she almost collapsed to her knees in relief.

  “Oh, praise Jesus,” she said, trying to pick up her pace, but her feet wouldn’t let her. She would’ve taken off her shoes miles ago, but the ground was a mix of gnarled roots and rocks. Not to mention she was pretty sure she’d seen a couple of more moving vines, and she didn’t want to take the chance of exposing bare skin. At least her boots protected her above the ankle.