The Night is Forever

“Aaron, I’m sure. I am not trying artificial respiration. Get the officers to this location. Please.”

She hung up. And then she waited.

Full darkness was coming, and coming soon. She felt that she had to keep her hand on Marcus’s shoulder, that she had to be there with him. She hated that he’d been alone when he died.

She hated that she was alone now and that the last mauve of twilight was turning to gray and would soon become black.

She always rode with a flashlight, but it was at the top of the ravine in the bag she’d attached to her saddle.

She looked up as Shiloh whinnied. The horse pranced nervously.

“Don’t you leave me, boy!” she called to him. “It’s all right—”

She broke off in midsentence.

She hadn’t actually grown up here—not right here, about twenty miles west of Nashville off I-40—but she’d grown up in the city. She’d often come out to her uncle’s small ranch during her lifetime. She knew the legends of the area.

Many times, on foggy nights, she’d imagined that she’d seen them and seen him. In the mists that covered the hills, she’d seen the Rebel soldiers, cast from Nashville in 1862, trying to fight their way back, retreating in the darkness of night. She’d imagined the bloodstained battlefields; she’d heard the cries of wounded and dying soldiers.

She’d imagined seeing Brigadier General Rufus Cunningham, tall and straight and ever sorrowful at the death toll of the war as he watched his threadbare and beaten men ride by.

But she’d never seen him so damned clearly.

There, just above her, his white warhorse, Loki, stood feet from her own nervous Shiloh. The general stared down at her with sorrow and concern. He looked around as if he’d appointed himself her guardian.

For a moment, she almost felt there was something malignant nearby, some evil that crept toward her in the night.... Was that why the general was there? To protect her?

Then she felt as if a cold wind settled near her. She felt something...like a touch on her shoulder.

She turned.

There was Marcus Danby. Watching her.

She blinked; she looked down.

Marcus was dead on the ground before her.

Ghosts.

Her family was known for eccentricity, for seeing things, for knowing when it was going to rain, for a sense of foreboding when there was danger.

Her family!

Not her!

And she was looking up at a Civil War general and turning to see that the dead man before her was touching her shoulder from behind....

She’d never thought of herself as a coward.

But she was!

“Liv,” Marcus said. “Liv...I’m dead. Help me. I didn’t slide back into drugs—I didn’t! And it wasn’t an accident. I was killed, Liv. It was murder. Help me!”

A strangled-sounding scream escaped her lips; she heard that much.

Then she keeled over on top of Marcus Danby’s body in a dead faint.

1

The meeting Dustin Blake had been asked to attend was being held at the General Bixby Tavern, just off the I-95 South exit in northern Virginia.

Dustin knew it well. He’d often stopped there when he was a kid and his parents had taken him to D.C.—a place they’d both loved. Being historians, they would have lived at the Smithsonian if they could. At the time, he’d thought that the tavern’s owners had hired an actor to portray General Bixby. Bixby had been kind to him and full of information.

Dustin remembered being humiliated and hurt, as only a kid could be, when he’d discovered that there was no actor and his parents were concerned about his invention of imaginary friends. Then, of course, he’d disturbed them both by knowing things only the general—or a much older person, and an expert on the Civil War—would know.

That had led to a number of sessions with a psychiatrist.

Dustin had then made the sage decision to agree that General Bixby was an imaginary friend. That had brought about deep thought on the part of his parents—and it had also brought about his sister. His extremely academic parents had worried that an only child might be given to such flights of fancy because he was lonely. So they’d set forth to add to their family.

That was all right. He loved his sister.

He pulled off the interstate and took an exit that led nowhere except Old Tavern Road. Soon he pulled his black SUV into the lot at the tavern and parked. For a moment, he sat and stared at the building.

What was now the General Bixby Tavern had actually been built during the American Revolution and been called the Wayfarer’s Inn. During the Civil War, it had been renamed for the gallant Union general—the kind “imaginary friend” who had, while he was alive, braved heavy artillery to save both Union and Confederate soldiers. This was when a fire had broken out in the nearby forest. While many a leader might have sat atop his horse far from the carnage, Bixby had ridden right into the inferno. Wounded after dragging at least twenty injured men from the disaster, he’d been brought to the tavern where he’d died, pleading that the nation settle its differences and find peace.

He really was a fine old gentleman. Dustin knew that well.

He exited the car and headed up the old wooden steps to the broad porch that wrapped around the tavern. This many years later, the tavern was still basically in the wilderness—the closest town being Fredericksburg. Winter was approaching and there was a little coolness in the air, heightened by the thickness of the woods around them. Only its historic importance, and the plethora of “ghost hunters,” kept it from falling into ruin.

When Dustin stepped inside the dim tavern, he blinked at the change of light. He wondered instantly if the meeting had been planned so he’d have a few seconds of disorientation—a time during which he might be observed and not observe in return.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw General Bixby seated at the bar. The general nodded gravely at Dustin, indicating a group across the room.

Dustin nodded in return, then moved toward the others. He saw David Caswell stand; he’d been sitting at a corner booth. Caswell wasn’t alone. There were two other men with him. One was dark-haired with Native American ancestry apparent in a strong face. The other was light-skinned and light-haired. When they, too, stood to meet him, he saw that they were both tall and fit. And both were wearing casual suits. Not the usual feds—if that was what they were.

“Dustin!” David Caswell said. The pleasure of his greeting seemed sincere.

“Good to see you,” Dustin greeted David, shaking his hand. He glanced at the other two men and waited.

“I’d like you to meet Jackson Crow and Malachi Gordon,” David turned. “Jackson, Malachi, Special Agent Dustin Blake. When I first started with the police force in Savannah, Dustin and I were partners. He’s the best—and rare in his abilities.”

“Thank you for coming,” Jackson said.

The men took their seats again. They studied him, and he returned their stare.

So the dark-haired man was the famous—or infamous—Jackson Crow.

“How do you like being with the feds, Mr. Blake?” Crow asked him.