Darkest Journey

When she’d heard the sobbing. When Ethan had come to save her...

When she’d found the bracelet that had belonged to a murdered girl...

“Hey!” she called, wanting to hear her own voice. “What are we looking for again? A buckle, a knife and a canteen?”

She didn’t need to be afraid. Jennie, George, Mike and Brad were within easy shouting distance. She could see them moving across the ground where the “ghosts” had so recently walked.

“Yeah,” George called back. His voice came from much farther away than the sound of her name had.

“Found the belt buckle,” Mike announced.

“Got the canteen,” George said a moment later.

Charlie walked closer to the outskirts of the church, moving slowly and carefully over the ground, nearing the old outer, unhallowed, graveyard.

“I see something!” she cried, noticing a gleam in the moonlight.

She told herself to forget about the past—and the ghosts of the past.

She was safe now, surrounded by friends, and any ghosts here were helpful ones.

She dropped to her knees, reaching for the shiny metallic object.

“Think I’ve found something,” she called over her shoulder.

At first she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. It was just something shining in the dirt. It wasn’t until she reached for it that she realized that it was a ring. A signet ring.

And it was attached to a finger....

A finger that was attached to a hand, a hand that was protruding from the earth...

Because it was attached to a barely buried body.

It took a few seconds to resonate in her mind, and then...

A dead man. She had found a dead man.

Only then did she begin to scream.

It was happening again.

2 (#u0994b767-8e00-551e-b919-76733dbfa56f)

Ethan Delaney tapped on the partly open door to Jackson Crow’s office, then pushed it wide and walked in.

He’d been with the Krewe a little more than a month. He was still becoming accustomed to working in this office in Northern Virginia, which had its own low-key friendly ways. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been used to camaraderie among agents—he was. He’d been in the New York office for the last several years, and, due to the stress level that went with working in the Big Apple, the agents there often resorted to humor to lighten the tension.

Here, though, office doors were seldom closed, and they were never locked.

Crow was their Special Agent in Charge, directly beneath Special Assistant Director Adam Harrison, who made himself equally available. Adam had helped Crow interview Ethan before inviting him to join the elite unit. They had both treated it like an easy dinner out, but he’d known full well that his answers had been carefully weighed, and that they’d been keeping track of his body language, as well.

Relief.

He hadn’t really thought about it before, but that was exactly what he felt in his new position. In his customary work in the criminal division, he’d often needed to watch his words carefully. He’d constantly had to come up with explanations for his decisions. He’d read about the Krewe of Hunters and in fact had a good friend who had transferred over before him. Aiden Mahoney had been professional when they’d talked, not lying to him and not trying to hedge, but not saying exactly what the Krewe’s specific rules and responsibilities were, either.

But now that he was here, he’d discovered the rules weren’t written down or formally agreed upon; rather they were assumed and tacitly understood by every member of the Krewe.

He was learning, day by day, to relax completely in this new realm. Here he could be totally honest about what he saw and sensed, things others might consider extrasensory. Truthfully, most solutions were based on logic and physical evidence, but others, the solutions to the crimes the Krewe investigated, included something more.

He had all the right training for his position: Loyola, where he’d studied criminal psychology and forensics; a stint in the military; a master’s degree in forensic sciences from George Washington University; then the FBI Academy. He knew that training helped, but it by no means superseded something he’d been born with, something inherited from one or more of his ancestors, a mixture of Spaniards, Creoles, English, Irish, Italian and, as with so many Louisiana natives, Haitian and Choctaw. He had one living great-grandmother on his mother’s mother’s side who believed in the mysterious ways of true voodoo. He also had a great-grandfather from his mother’s father’s side who loved to teach him Choctaw legends. One great-grandmother on his dad’s side had emigrated from Norway, while one great-grandfather had come over from Scotland and married a woman of Italian descent, all of which meant that the stories Ethan had heard growing up covered a vast array of myth and legend.

The tales were different and yet, oddly, much the same. In most of them, the supernatural played a key role, and since that agreed with his own experience of the world, it had caused him a few problems early on in school. He’d quickly learned to guard his thoughts in regard to the world around him and to keep his mouth shut about many things he might have had to say, and he’d pretty much stuck to that plan into adulthood.

Then he’d heard about the Krewe.

On their most recent case, his first, he’d discovered that his quick ability to communicate with the lost and disfranchised—the dead—was a bonus and not something to hide. One of the dead men, a powerful lobbyist, had spoken to him, and after that the clues had been easy to follow. The murders had not been politically motivated, but rather rooted in a family financial dispute.

Ethan was glad he and the Krewe had been able to solve the case and especially pleased that he had proved his worth.

“Jackson?” he said now.

His supervisor was busy reading through a file and frowning as he did so. He quickly looked up as Ethan spoke.

“Ethan, thanks for coming so quickly,” Jackson said, indicating the chair in front of his desk. He passed the file across the table.

There were two pictures on the first page, men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, both in business suits, one a muscular Caucasian, the other handsome and looking to be of mixed African American and Caucasian descent.

“Farrell Hickory and Albion Corley,” Jackson said, indicating the men in the pictures.

“And they’re both...?” Ethan asked.

“Dead,” Jackson clarified. “Local police are investigating. Everything they’ve got is all there in the files, and I’ve also emailed you.”

“They’re sure the murders are related?”

“Both men were found in replica Civil War uniforms in shallow graves—and not in graveyards but near them.”

“Union uniforms?” Ethan asked. A twisted get-even spree by a deranged local? The Civil War had ended in 1865. Reconstruction had officially ended with the Compromise of 1876.

Long over—or so one would think. But down here, things were different.

As much as Ethan wanted to believe people, in both the North and the South, had escaped the prejudices of that era, the Klan, neo-Nazis and various supremacist groups were still around. While laws could protect people, they couldn’t always deal with old hatreds that still had a pernicious hold on too many minds. Still, he believed he lived in a better world now than the one he’d been born into. And being of such mixed ancestry himself, it was painful to suspect that any murder might be motivated by prejudice.

“Here’s the interesting thing,” Jackson told him. “Farrell Hickory was in a Confederate cavalry officer’s uniform. Albion Corley was wearing a Union naval uniform.”

“That is interesting. You wouldn’t kill your own side, so that seems to rule out someone still stuck in the Civil War,” Ethan said.

Jackson nodded. “Anyway, both men were stabbed in the heart. The forensics experts believe that both men were stabbed with a bayonet or something similar that could be wielded with a certain precision.”