Risen (Haunted Series Book 22)

by Alexie Aaron

  “Mia’s a fighter,” Burt reminded him.

  “She gets tunnel vision. Sometimes, it’s all about the fight. She really needs a partner to remind her that, occasionally, you need to retreat.”

  “That’s why you’re so important. I used to think that the two of you together would lessen her drive for the exploration of the paranormal, but I don’t have to tell you that you make her brave. You feed her knowledge and encouragement that she trusts without question. I hate and admire you for this.”

  “That’s painfully honest,” Ted said, keeping his eyes on the screen.

  “It is what it is,” Burt said.

  “Seems like the two of you have mended fences.”

  “I think we understand each other more. I no longer see her as a device, and she… I don’t really know how she sees me. I just hope to God, I’m not lumped in with Angelo.”

  “Angelo is someone I can’t get a bead on,” Ted admitted. “He’s there to save her, but to what end? At least Murphy is honest. He loves my wife. I’m very aware that, when I go, he’ll be there for Mia. It should give me comfort. Although, Mia thinks that, even with the superhuman gene, she won’t outlive any of us. She knows that there are only so many times she can cheat death. And I don’t know what her intention is after she dies. I can see her sticking around, watching out for us, but you and I know that the light has been seeking her since she first started crossing people over.”

  “Here’s a question for you: if Mia dies and heads for the light, will Murphy go with her?”

  “Great, there we’ll all be on the Starship Enterprise. Me, Mia, and Murphy.” Ted put his head down on the table.

  “I don’t think Michael will let her leave,” Burt said, patting Ted on the back.

  “Heaven help us,” Ted said, rubbing his jaw. “Mia would be one royally pissed off angel. She’d be the first angel in history to volunteer for smiting duty.”

  Chapter Eight

  Kevin and Fergus stopped their progression down the cave. No pirate in his right mind would have dragged his booty this deep into this type of structure. With their combined observations, they agreed that it would just take too damn long to retrieve it. They started back up towards the waterfall, searching each alcove as they came to them.

  Fergus put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Hold up, there’s someone moving fast. Up against the wall.”

  Kevin did as he was told. He almost missed his son, Stephen, who was moving so quickly.

  “Stephen!” he called out.

  Murphy turned around and approached the two ghosts. “Come on. We have to get you two off this island. It isn’t safe for man or ghost.”

  “Why?” Fergus asked.

  “Mia had a conversation with someone who escaped from what’s at the other end of this passage. Tell me, did you see anything down there?”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  “You’ve been here eighteen hours.”

  The two ghosts looked surprised.

  Murphy gathered his thoughts. “I’m sorry, no one has told you about ghost time, have they?”

  “There wasn’t an instruction book handed out as we exited the bar, son,” Kevin said.

  “There isn’t one… Oh, you’re being facetious. You’re right. I had to be told this by Mia - or was it Burt? Anyway, our time is different. When Mia OOBs into our dimension, she has to be constantly checking the time because, as you’re finding out, time means nothing to the dead.”

  “You’re lucky to have found her,” Fergus said. “She seems to be very familiar with our lot.”

  “She found me,” Murphy said. “Come on. There is a storm coming, and the sea is getting rough.”

  Kevin groaned. “I hate the sea. It unsettles my bones.”

  “Ghosts don’t have bones,” Fergus stated.

  “We have the memory of bones. I share your weakness. It must be hereditary. I can’t abide flying either.”

  “Your da spent the time curled up in the corner,” Fergus told Murphy.

  “I did not,” Keven lied.

  “You did.”

  Stephen put a comforting hand on his father’s shoulder. “We aren’t good travelers, but we are mighty fighters.”

  “All the Callens are,” Kevin agreed.

  “Speaking of Callens, where are those fleshies?” Fergus asked.

  “Climbing the cliff, headed this way,” Murphy told him.

  “We may as well stop them. There is no treasure here,” Kevin said.

  “Burt says the treasure is on another island in the Great Lakes,” Murphy informed them.

  “Then why are we here?” Fergus asked, irritated.

  “I’m really not sure, except the Callens were convinced that this was as good of a place as any to start looking,” Murphy said.

  “Ahoy, in the cave,” Mia called out.

  “Mia’s here?” Kevin asked.

  “Not officially. She came to save Sabine. I’ll tell you the story once we’re rid of this place,” Murphy promised.

  Mia pulled off her sunglasses and stared into the cave. She clasped her hands in front of her to stop her from making accidental contact with the rocky walls. “It smells bad in here,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  Patrick had to step out of the entrance to get a handle on his physical reaction to the revolting smell.

  Mason pulled his t-shirt collar over his nose, preferring the smell of his body odor to the stench that the cave now seemed to breathe. “What is causing that horrible smell?” he asked.

  “We found bits of flesh clinging to the walls a dozen yards in,” Fergus reported. “Along with some scratch marks, which seem to match up to the human hand.” He flexed his fingers before making a claw.

  “Might be evidence of what may have happened to the people Whitney is looking for,” Mia said and moved to withdraw one of her gloves.

  “NO!” Murphy shouted, forcefully pulling Mia out of the cave.

  “What the hell, Murph?” Mia sputtered when she found herself being drenched from the falls. “What gives you the freaking right to control me?”

  The Callens had followed them out of the cave and watched as Mia and Murphy glared at each other.

  Murphy spoke first. “Touching this cave would paralyze you. We need to get off this island, and we need to do it now.”

  Reason flickered in Mia’s eyes. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Come on, ghosties, time to go.”

  Murphy, who hated being called a ghosty, put a firm hand on Mia’s arm until she had cleared the slippery platform behind the plummeting water.

  Kevin watched the battle of wills with concern. He sensed that Mia wanted to haul off and punch Stephen but knew that this kind of childish tantrum had no place in this investigation. His son’s jaw was clenched. He too was holding back anger. How could two beings love each other, yet could at any time throttle the other? They were too much alike in temperaments. No wonder Mia thrived under the accepting nature of Ted. Kevin was starting to understand the dynamic between the two beings bound together by love but separated by fate.

  “You’re deep in thought,” Fergus said, catching up to his friend.

  “Yes, I think I’m becoming a connoisseur of the human condition.”

  “Ah, that’s just the whiskey talking.”

  “That may be, but there is a reason God put this in my hand for all eternity,” Kevin said.

  Fergus looked at him sideways. “God, huh? Is this the same creature that gave me a knife, your son an axe, and that poor girl a lovesick ghosty?”

  “To the Almighty’s sense of humor,” Kevin said, raising his flask before he drank from it.

  “Blasphemous but apropos.”

  “Fergus, I’m thinking you’ve got the makings of a professor with all that new jargon you’re spouting.”

  “Nah, it’s just the poet in me trying to force himself out.”

  “The day people identify you as a poet is the day I stop drinking,” Kevin promised.

  Patric
k stopped at the edge of the cliff as they rounded the corner. “Where is the yacht?”

  “They may have relocated. Remember we have a storm brewing. I see Bob waving. I think we better beat feet before he leaves without us.”

  Kevin and Fergus moved past the others. Their naturally quick movements made it difficult to walk alongside the others. Murphy resumed his firm hold on Mia’s arm when she stumbled.

  “Don’t worry, if I fall, I’ll fly,” she reassured him.

  “I don’t think that’s wise. Too many eyes. Whit comes to mind.”

  “But he’s not here.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it. That big boat would not have moved unless he wanted it moved.”

  “You may be right. The demon has stopped trying to pry open my head. I fear its attention is elsewhere.”

  ~

  Captain Holloway, the commanding officer of the Ross Bell, watched as Lead Agent Martin was helped aboard the cutter. He seemed at odds with the Coast Guard protocol. He suspected that the Fed didn’t come from any military branch of the service but instead was mined from a police force somewhere. The group of agents brought strange equipment with them. Holloway was used to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s men and women. They worked hand in hand with the Coast Guard to keep drugs from moving through the Caribbean. The DEA took the time to understand the workings of a Coast Guard cutter, unlike this group who treated the ship and its crew as instruments to be used and discarded.

  Agents Boullé and Simpson frequently disregarded the chain of command when working. “Whatever gets it done, son,” was the answer Simpson gave anytime he was questioned on his orders.

  The two agents met briefly with Agent Martin on the deck.

  Whitney Martin looked at the stills from the satellite surveillance. He concentrated on the cove with the crescent-shaped beach. “They aren’t there. Where are they?”

  “Sir, the yacht appears to be anchored outside the reef on the other side of the island,” Boullé said, pointing out the small boat in the still.

  “It doesn’t make any sense. Why land a team on the rocks?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you, sir.”

  Whitney had joined his group after collecting intel from a captured drug dealer. He said that Lanfé was where his supplier typically dropped his cache to be picked up by the locals. It was safe on Lanfé. No one in their right mind would venture there.

  “Are you telling me that the reputation of this island is just a smoke screen?” Whit asked the man.

  “What I’m saying is this: what better place to make a drop or a pickup,” the man said evenly.

  Whit took his statement at face value. He wasn’t looking to catch a drug dealer; he was looking for the missing cruise passengers and crew. Could they have inadvertently got in the middle of a drug pickup? If so, they could either be dead or taken. The island would be the place to find answers.

  “The storm’s two hours off,” Simpson reminded Whit. “Although, we may have bad seas preceding the actual rainfall.”

  “Then we go now. Hit the beach, and find me some evidence of what happened here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Agent Martin seemed to not like the answers he was given to his inquires. Simpson pointed to where Holloway was standing before he and Boullé left.

  Whit looked up and studied the captain for a moment. He sought out the quickest way to the bridge. He knocked on the side of the open door before stepping in. “Captain Holloway, may I have a moment of your time?”

  “One moment,” the captain said. He directed another officer to take his position before he walked over and encouraged the agent to follow him to his office. Once there, he offered Whit a refreshment which the agent declined.

  “I won’t keep you long,” Whit promised. “I wanted to bring you up to date on our progress and ask a few questions, if I may?”

  “I’ll answer what I can under your clearance,” the captain promised.

  “Fair enough,” Whit said. “First, I will be turning this investigation over to the DEA. I have come into information that a ring of drug runners have been using the island as a drop for product distribution. The cruise passengers and crew may have found themselves in the middle of a major transaction gone wrong. They are most certainly dead, but I would like to check out the island for any evidence of survivors before I leave. The DEA will follow up on the evidence we have collected.”

  “That sounds fair. You mentioned questions?”

  “Why aren’t you in visual contact with the Azure?”

  “They have a shallow hull and can easily cross the shoals and reefs. They have anchored on the other side of the island. We have a satellite trained on them. If they move, we’ll know it in time to respond. So far, all they have done is launched a Zodiac to take three passengers to the island.”

  “Which three passengers?”

  “Two men and a woman. The woman matches the description you gave us of Sabine Norwood.”

  Whit frowned for a moment. “I wonder why they’re there?”

  “Honestly, I get a treasure hunt vibe from these folks, agent.”

  “It wouldn’t be that unusual. The woman is a known sensitive, a very expensive clairvoyant. Perhaps they are using her to seek out answers from the past.”

  “Agent, with all due respect, that’s claptrap. The only thing that’s in this island’s past are drug runners and, before that, rumrunners.”

  “I hope you’re right, Captain. I hope you’re right,” Whit said.

  “Anything else?”

  “I need two boats - Zodiacs will be fine - to ferry us to the island and to retrieve us once we make a scan of the beach. The coming storm may destroy any evidence of what really happened to the cruise passengers.”

  “I applaud you for being thorough,” Captain Holloway said.

  Whit hopped out of the boat and waded into shore. He carried a metal detector. If there had been gunplay on the beach, it would have been impossible to recover all the spent shells. If he could get some evidence to back up his theory, he could hand this off to the DEA. One less unexplained case on his books.

  “Agent Martin, there’s a storm coming in. One hour, no more,” the crewman from the Ross Bell reminded him.

  Whit nodded. He motioned for his group to begin.

  Simpson and Boullé put together the metal detectors and started moving in a grid pattern while Whit and the junior agent walked the perimeter of the white sandy beach.

  “I think I have something!” Agent Boullé called out.

  Whit signaled for the others to continue their work while he walked over to assist Boullé, who was carefully moving sand, looking for the expected bullet shell. With every swipe of his gloved hand, he used a smaller metal detector to make sure he hadn’t swept it to the side. He had worked his way down two feet when the clouds broke briefly and the sun overhead illuminated something shiny.

  “I’ve got something,” he said. “But it’s not…” Boullé stopped talking. It wasn’t the horror of finding the remains of a human hand closed in a forever fist with the man’s wedding ring reflecting in the sunlight; it was the unexpectedness of it. “It’s attached,” Boullé said, probing downward with his small trowel, “to his arm and, I assume, his body. Damn, it’s his left hand, so over here should be the top of his head…”

  “Stop,” Whit said, pulling the agent away. “Attention, everyone! Stop what you are doing. We may have some quicksand pits. Probe the ground before walking,” he instructed. He turned back to Boullé. “Mark the area. We need to bring in a forensic team, geologists with ground-penetrating radar.”

  “Sand’s moving over here,” Agent Simpson called out.

  “Get to the boats,” Whit ordered. “This beach is too dangerous without the right equipment.”

  “Help!” Simpson called out. “Something’s got my leg!”

  Whit and the other agents ran to Simpson. They watched helplessly as the agent disappeared under the sand before they could reach him. W
hit dug frantically, trying to reach the man before he suffocated. The sand moved behind him. Whit saw something, he would later swear was a tentacle, break the surface moving towards him.

  “Boats, now!” he ordered.

  The remaining three men dodged tentacles that burst out of the sand, running for the water’s edge. They assisted the crewmen in launching the boats and soon were heading towards the reef.

  The motor of the boat carrying Boullé seemed to have a strange whine to it. Whit looked over and saw the Zodiac being lifted out of the water by a large version of what attacked them on the beach. It was wrapping the boat, flattening the men inside it like the contents of a closed freezer bag. The boat was pulled into the water.

  “Zigzag!” Whit ordered.

  The movement might have saved them if the beast hadn’t already started to wrap the Zodiac. The junior agent shot six rounds into the arm. The bullets seemed to have no effect aside from producing a second tentacle which grabbed the agent out of the boat.

  Whit pulled out his knife and dove after the man, only to see him disappear into the sandy bottom of the cove. He twisted around in the water and watched, horrified, as the large monstrous arm which was wrapped around his boat pulled the boat across the bottom of cove where a large hole appeared. The boat was pulled into the opening, and the sand closed in around it.

  Whit let his natural buoyancy draw him to the top of the water. He turned on his back and breathed. He theorized that motion and water displacement must be how the apparently eyeless arms found their prey. With this understanding, he kept his body still, letting the waves pull him towards the shore, only making small corrections with his hands, trying to direct himself towards the rocky outcropping. Whit knew that, as he approached the shallow water, there would be a buoyancy problem. He anticipated this by slowly turning over, preparing himself to run as soon as he could no longer float. He didn’t let his mind dwell on anything but survival. He was going to get out of this. Whatever this thing was, it was paranormal in nature and acted intelligently. It brought its victims underground, be it from the beach or the water. Sand seemed to be important to it. It used it as camouflage, much like a sea predator will bury itself in the sand and wait for food to come to it.