by Kyla Stone
ELI POPE
DAY ONE
Eli’s footfalls echoed along the concrete corridor. The hoots and catcalls faded into background noise, barely discernible as they traveled from the depths of the interior to the perimeter.
Four COs rushed past them toward the library, batons drawn. They didn’t glance at Eli.
“Damn reports,” Davis muttered. “I’ll be writing reports all damn day.”
“You taking me to a holding cell?” They might put him in solitary. He imagined the confined space, the dank air filling up his lungs, the choking sense of hopelessness. He despised solitary almost as much as gen pop.
Davis shook his head. “The warden wants you released immediately.”
Eli rubbed his sore knuckles and flexed his fingers. Pain radiated from his shoulder. He’d nearly killed three men. This didn’t make sense. “What?”
“I know it was Sykes. I know what they had planned.” Davis eyed him, frowning. “The warden doesn’t want a madhouse of press. Or more fighting. He just wants you gone. At any rate, the governor agreed and so here we are.”
Eli stared at him. “Nickerson has the library on Mondays. He was nowhere in sight. The COs were in on it.”
“No one is going to admit that,” Davis said. “And not all of them.”
In the prison library, Sykes and his friends would be strip-searched then escorted to holding cells before being evaluated by a medical team. The officers would find the contraband weapons. Investigative Services would be brought in. Their cells would be searched, inmates interviewed, cameras reviewed, evidence collected. The COs would be looked at, too.
It wouldn’t look good for the warden, or the COs involved. Even with the cameras glitchy. There would be evidence. No wonder the warden wanted him gone.
“I was raised Baptist.” Davis said it slow, like he was chewing the words, rolling them in his mouth. “My father always preached that no man is beyond God’s grace. No matter what he’s done.”
“Some men are,” Eli said. He wasn’t sure if he was speaking of himself or someone else.
Unlike the other COs, who were either disinterested or as cruel as the prisoners themselves, Davis had always been kind and patient. He treated the worst humanity had to offer with dignity.
Eli despised him. The worst of humanity didn’t deserve an ounce of pity or compassion. These thugs deserved the hell they’d found themselves in.
They deserved worse.
Given the chance, Eli would take great pleasure in exacting a certain justice himself. Some crimes were unforgivable. Some criminals were monsters, not men.
Davis shrugged. “The press would usually be camped outside the gates. Lucky for you, the news cycles are mostly covering the sun thing.”
Davis paused, like he expected Eli to ask what he meant or comment about the weather. Eli did neither. Davis continued, nonplussed. “The news reporters said there might be temporary communication and power interruptions. Not like we aren’t used to that anyway up here.”
“Is that what took out the power?”
Davis shrugged. “Must be.”
“And the generator?”
Davis shrugged. “Dunno. I heard there was an issue, but the technicians fixed it right away. All good now, though we’re still operating on emergency systems only. Means no TV for the inmates. They’ll riot soon if we don’t get that up and running. But that sky. Wait until you see it. Never imagined anything like that. All that from plasma from the sun.”
Eli managed a grunt. He shook from the adrenaline dump. All he wanted to do was lay down and sleep. He hadn’t slept well in eight years.
It was a long walk. He strode with his back straight and his head high. Past those tiny cells, the faces watching him. The beady, hungry, hateful eyes.
Davis glanced at him. “You need medical to check you out? They came at you pretty good.”
He sucked blood from between his teeth. “Just get me out.”
“I’d feel the same.”
They strode down various hallways. At each door, Davis hit the buzzer and stated his radio callsign. The CO in the main control room verified his identity via the CCTV camera near the door and buzzed them through.
In the rec room, the inmates were riled up and rowdy, booing and hissing. A few sat slump-shouldered and staring at the dead screen in confusion like they expected it to spontaneously combust.
“You want to stop at your cell?”
“What for?”
“Your personal property. Journals, pictures, whatever.”
“I have no personal property,” Eli said.
“Anything that needs to be returned to the property room?” Davis asked. “TVs, radios, anything like that?”
Eli shook his head.
“No pictures?”
His cell was as barren as his soul. “No.”
Davis nodded to himself. “Sure, sure. Okay.” He turned right and led Eli down another hallway to an office. A mountain of paperwork waited for him, which he signed as a woman with colorless hair in her fifties droned, “Sign here” at least twenty times. He signed for an envelope with a debit card inside, giving him access to what remained of his commissary account.
At receiving, he went through another endless series of locked doors and gates, everything in shades of dull gray or vomit green. They returned his clothes. His wallet with his expired driver’s license and his dog tags.
He put his dog tags on. How he had missed the familiar feel of the chain around his neck, the tags against his chest beneath his shirt.
And then he was outside the fence.
The road was deserted. The chilly air smelled of pine trees, gasoline, and dirt. It smelled fresh. It was only forty degrees, but he didn’t care. The breeze on his skin felt sweet as a kiss.
Trees rose on either side of the road. It was dark, but that didn’t matter. It was like stepping out of a cave blinking into sunlight.
No four gray walls. No COs with weapons ensuring you didn’t take a single step out of line. No predatory men with eyes like devils and teeth like wolves.
“Would you look at that,” Davis said.
Eli didn’t answer. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky.
The northern lights flared bright in the night. The red flames of an aurora burned overhead, dancing and flickering, wavering and pulsing.
He stopped, stunned to stillness. He tilted his head back and stared up at it. It was stunning. And disconcerting. The way it undulated like a living thing. Transparent, ephemeral.
“You have someone to pick you up?” Davis asked.
“Nope.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
“You have a cell phone?”
Eli shook his head.
Davis hesitated. “There’s a pay phone at the bar a few miles down the road. The Bear Trap Bar. You’ll know it when you see it. You can call a cab. They know the number.”
Eli said nothing. A bar at the end of the world, the most desolate place imaginable for ex-convicts with nowhere to go and no one to love them. He couldn’t think of anything more depressing.
Davis shook his head, sighed, and turned back for the prison gates. “Good luck, man. You can do whatever you want. You’re free.”
Eli didn’t respond as the CO returned to the prison.
Eight years he’d spent in a dungeon. His father had died three months ago while he was in prison. He had not visited once. His mother was dead.
Now he was out.
He’d never expected this. He was supposed to wither and die in there. Or bleed out on the shower floor. He didn’t know what came next.
Eli started walking. One foot in front of the other. Gravel beneath his boots. His boots. Not the state’s property—his own. He wore the same khaki hiking pants and black T-shirt he’d been wearing the day they came for him.
The day Jackson Cross came for him.
Eli would never forget the haunted look in his friend’s eyes as he’d slapped the cuffs o
n his wrists, the pain in his voice as he’d read him his rights. The judgment. The condemnation. Chaining him like an animal, a demon the rest of humanity feared and could not understand.
When your own best friend betrayed you, what was left?
That was the question. What was left for him in Christmas, Michigan? In Alger County? What was left for him anywhere?
His father’s house.
A bit of cash in his pocket.
His dog tags.
Eli looked up at the heavens again. The stunning red lights filled the entire dome of the sky, like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast.
It was a supernatural thing. A reminder that humans plotted and planned and schemed, but in the end, Mother Nature ruled.
Eli blinked and kept walking. A spark in his chest, hard and bright. An inexplicable desire to weep.
There was one thing. One thing he wanted.
What Davis had said rattled in his brain. Freedom. Such a charged word. And it meant what? He’d fought for freedom, joined the military for freedom. Risked his life and sacrificed brothers in arms for it. He’d had it stolen from him, too.
Freedom meant different things to different men. To Eli Pope, freedom meant one thing and one thing only. He touched his dog tags beneath his T-shirt.
He had one goal in his ruined life.
Vengeance.
Find the person or people who had framed him for murder, who had destroyed his life. And kill them.
Not quickly, but slowly. With great care and attention to detail. He felt no shame at the thought, no remorse, only a burning hatred.
They had taken an innocent man and turned him into a monster.
A monster was what they’d wanted. So, a monster he would become.
Hell, he already was.
JACKSON CROSS
DAY ONE
Thirty-six-year-old Jackson Cross watched the sky turn to fire.
Here in the northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula, the northern lights were not a rare occurrence. In winter. In the dead of night. And usually in shades of green streaked with violet.
The news had reported the eerie red aurora sightings across the United States, Canada, even into northern Mexico and as far as India, Japan, and China.
Sightseers and aurora-watchers had traveled north by the tens of thousands to get better views. No one had ever seen anything like it.
Unlike many, it gave him a disquieting feeling of dread.
“Deputy Sheriff?” Michelle Carpenter asked. “Is everything all right?”
He stood outside the IGA Country Store, which Michelle Carpenter owned and managed. The IGA was in the town of Christmas, a tiny blip on the map about three miles west of Munising.
Mrs. Carpenter wrung her hands. “I know what you’re thinking, Jackson. But it’s different this time. I know it is. I can feel it.”
This wasn’t the first time Jackson had been called here. Ruby Carpenter, a beautiful redhead with attitude to spare, was a troubled sixteen-year-old. She’d been arrested for shoplifting and underage drinking. Last year, she’d dropped out of school to chase her next high. She’d run away three times.
A lost cause, the sheriff claimed. Jackson Cross, however, was the patron saint of lost causes. Or so Lily Easton had told him once.
In the seven years he’d served as undersheriff for Alger County, Jackson had worked plenty of similar cases. Most had not ended well. He scratched his stubbled jaw and glanced down at his notebook. “Let me check into this and get back to you, Michelle.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “I know I haven’t been the best mother, Jackson. I know my failings.” She gestured vaguely with one trembling hand. “This place, it can be hard on the young ones.”
Jackson knew it. He’d grown up here. This place was in his bones, had dug in beneath his breastbone like a lover. Or maybe a parasite.
Everyone complained, but few people left once they got a taste of it. The isolation and peace. The stunning but forlorn beauty. The closeness, the connection. The comfort of people you’d known your whole life.
It was different for this generation, though. Fewer jobs. Even less opportunities. The small towns and wild spaces could become claustrophobic. Could strangle you if you weren’t careful.
Girls like Ruby needed out. They needed something this place couldn’t give them.
He placed one hand on Mrs. Carpenter’s shoulder. Her bones beneath her flesh felt thin and fragile. “We’ll find her, Michelle. I promise.”
“You’re a good man, Jackson. I’ve always known it.” Mrs. Carpenter met his gaze and nodded. “Bring my baby home.”
Jackson ran a hand through his mussed, sand-colored hair. At 6’3, he was tall and broad-shouldered. Handsome enough, but he was married to the job. “I’ll do my best.”
Devon Harris, the new deputy, exited the patrol truck and strode across the parking lot, her expression tense as she shoved her long black braids over her shoulder. She was short but fit and muscular.
Her warm brown skin crinkled around her eyes when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling now. “A call just came in, boss. We’ve got a dead body.”
Jackson stiffened. Dead bodies were rare. He remembered the last time a body had been found in Christmas, Michigan. The Broken Heart Killer case.
The brutal crime that had nearly destroyed their small town, that had ripped apart friendships, families, and left them all scarred.
“Who?” Mrs. Carpenter asked, stricken. “Who is it?”
“Caucasian male in his sixties. They haven’t officially identified the victim, yet.”
Beside him, Mrs. Carpenter let out her breath. Not her daughter. Not her problem, but definitely Jackson’s.
“What else?” he asked.
“The 911 dispatcher said the witness reported signs of foul play.”
He reached for his radio. “Where?”
“Off County Road 581.”
Jackson froze. “Give me the address again.” He prayed it would be different this time. That he’d heard wrong.
Devon rattled it off. He hadn’t.
“That’s Amos Easton’s place,” Mrs. Carpenter said.
It was still cold in May, around fifty degrees, since summer didn’t reach the Upper Peninsula until July. A chill passed through him that had nothing to do with the weather.
“Anyone else?” he asked Devon. “Any children involved?”
She shook her head. “That’s all I have.”
A rising dread thrummed through him. He needed to get to the scene. He needed to make sure. “Let’s go.”
“Please don’t forget about my daughter,” Michelle Carpenter said.
“I won’t,” he promised, but he was already striding toward the white and brown patrol truck emblazoned with Alger County Sheriff in orange on both sides. He gestured to Devon. “Get in.”
Devon hurried after him. “I get to drive.”
“Absolutely not.”
She huffed but didn’t argue.
Jackson knew the county and forest roads, the campsites, the ATV, hiking, and snowmobile trails like the back of his hand. He knew every resident of Christmas and many of the folks in Munising, the closest town and home to the famed Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
They left Mrs. Carpenter standing forlorn in front of her store, the faded siding peeling, the weed-choked asphalt peppered with cracks.
Jackson headed west on M-28. Huge jack pines stretched on either side of the road. They passed local stores and restaurants with holiday-inspired names—Yule Log Resort, Silent Night Campsite, Santa’s Storage Facilities.
For a few minutes, Devon stared down at the phone in her lap, frowning. She was from Detroit; it showed.
“Stupid Sprint,” she muttered. “They promised cell service here.”
“They lied. First thing you should know about the UP is cell service is a gamble anywhere, no matter who you have. Be prepared for that.”
“Just great.” Devon rolled her eyes She switched on the radio,
changing channels but they were all the same. Static. “This is eerie. This solar storm thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
They turned right on County Highway 589, headed northwest. Lake Superior stretched to their right, usually invisible in the dark, except tonight the water shimmered tangerine. Small rippling waves glittered as it reflected the aurora’s colors.
He could feel the lake, that sense of vastness. The native Ojibwe people called the great lake Gichigamiing—the “great water.”
“Social media is down,” Devon said. “Maybe so many people are posting photos that it crashed. I bet it’ll be back up and normal by tomorrow. It’s strange to think about, if it went down for good. What that’d be like.”
“It’d be a blessing.”
She snorted. “What would any of us do without TikTok in our lives?”
He had no idea what the hell TikTok even was. Devon was young at twenty-seven. At thirty-six, he felt ancient, weary to his bones. “Hell of a day to find a body.”
“Yeah.” She chewed her thumbnail. “You know who it is, don’t you? The victim.”
He gave a curt nod. “I do.”
He turned left onto County Highway 587, his fingers gripping the steering wheel as a lifetime of memories assaulted him. He thought of the last time he’d processed a crime scene at the Easton place.
Every detail was seared into his mind. The silent house. The bed, the faint spatters of blood. The cold dead body of the girl. So vibrant in life, so shockingly still in death.
Lily Easton. Here and then gone. In a blink, in a frenzy of violence. The girl he’d loved from afar his entire life.
His best friend had killed her.
And Jackson, a naïve, fresh-faced deputy, had helped convict him.
Now this. A killer released on a technicality. A dead body found on the same property, separated by eight years and a lifetime of grief.
The solar storms lit up the northern hemisphere like a warning. The aurora had a weight to it, a physical presence. He could feel it pressing down upon his soul.
As they drove up the narrow winding driveway, a disconcerting sensation filled him. Some terrible thing was bearing down on them all.
