Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  She didn’t say anything. There was no point, because he was right.

  Minutes of silence passed as the trail wound on.

  “It can’t be real though.” Lux said.

  Ben shrugged.

  “The woods, they change reality.”

  The woods had always been reality for Lux. The city was a weird state of dreaming to go and visit, but the trees stood as an army forever. But Ben was right. Humans only wrote the rules under city skies surrounded by metal and concrete, rules that couldn’t always be followed in the forest.

  “Why though?” Lux mumbled. “Why are they here? Why are they out there?”

  Ben laughed. “I’m not God.”

  Lux smiled weakly.

  “Good to know. He might come strolling by any minute.”

  ***

  It was nearing evening when the marked trees began to show up again. The marks were deeper, older, repeated. The marking stench around them was getting stronger too. The smell was thicker and wilder, almost making anyone who sniffed it too closely to involuntarily gag.

  “We’re getting close to something,” Lux said to Julie, eyeing the sky around them.

  She had not been pleased to know they could take to the trees. Julie was on her haunches, untangling something from the root of one of the trees.

  “I don’t like it,” Samuel said as he drew up next to her.

  “No,” she agreed, “nor do I.”

  “Look at this,” Julie said, holding something up. It was mud encrusted, which hid the form of the object somewhat.

  “What is it?” Lux said, leaning in close.

  “A necklace?” Julie said.

  It could have been a necklace. A dull and rather shapeless lump of rock hung from a leather strip. The leather was rough, a length of animal skin perhaps, that had been treated with feces and dried in the sun. There was what appeared to be a hole worn through the middle of the small rock, shaped by something about the size of a man’s finger, and that was what it was strung through.

  Samuel looked at it like he had found a shaft of gold in the middle of west Harlem. Lux stepped back and let him take over. He was, after all, the anthropologist.

  “Lux,” Ben said very low, almost whispering. The other three were still inspecting the stone jewelry. “Come look at this.”

  The look in his eyes was one she had to follow. He knew something, and she had to know what that was. “This,” he mumbled, reaching and pulling the thick branch of a low and bushy tree aside. It took Lux several long moments to absorb what she was looking at. Stacked in a neat pillar, a cairn of stones stood. She looked up at Ben. He let the leaves fall to mostly hide the stack again. It was easy to see how she missed it; the light dappled color of the stones hid them naturally. Ben was like her. He saw.

  “What is it?” she managed to get out.

  “I don’t know, but it’s too human for comfort,” Ben said.

  “There could be people,” she insisted.

  Ben raised a dark eyebrow.

  “Where did you see any human signs, anything that would suggest intelligent life other than that lump they’re marveling over? If this is human, it’s from a culture that is totally untouched by modern society. This is Texas, not the Amazon.”

  Lux swallowed deeply, and drank a little water from her nearly depleted supply.

  “Should we tell the others?”

  She was surprised he would ask her that.

  “You’re the insurance policy,” she said before she could stop herself. His face clouded. “So I should be asking you,” she hurried, but it was too late.

  “Let’s just go,” he said irritably. But as he stepped back, he bumped the brush again and she saw beyond it. He turned to face the others and took a step, the brush swallowing her view rapidly.

  “Wait,” she said, grabbing for him with one hand and reaching forward with the other.

  “Are those... graves?” Ben asked. The carefully placed rocks were deliberately organized into neat rows, perhaps a half dozen of them in a cleared area of the woods. A cleared area, which meant that somebody, or something, had done the clearing.

  “What else could they be?” Lux said.

  “We need Samuel for this.” Ben crept through the brush and silently gained Smith’s attention and brought him to Lux.

  “What?” he snapped. “That artifact is clear evidence of intelligent life!”

  “Keep your voice down, damn it!” Lux said in a whisper. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  He muttered some choicer expletives under his breath, his eyebrows forming a formidable furrow on his face.

  “What?” he groused again, clearly wanting to go back to the jewelry.

  Ben pulled aside the dark vegetation to reveal the unsettling scene before them.

  “You tell us,” Lux said.

  Smith exclaimed, far too loudly and barged through the vegetative barrier, accompanied by Hal, who had followed him to see the new discovery. Ben and Lux went around, leaving the foliage undisturbed and Julie followed suit. Three other stone pillars marked a small rectangle of land, and smooth rocks a foot high and clearly selected for their uniformity jabbed up from the earth like fingertips of some giant statue, buried deep underground and attempting to claw his way out. The rows were neat and tidy, measured. There was no writing on them, although they all bore a number of gouges, similar to those already seen on tree trunks, but without any urine stench.

  Samuel turned to Lux.

  “We need to stay here and document this, right away. This could be the anthropological find of the century. With the information we can get here, we’re going to be incredibly famous, do you understand? I’m talking Nobel Prize level of fame here.”

  His eyes lit up with the scholar’s thirst for information. Lux feared it, it was the same fervor radical preachers and political extremists had when soapboxing.

  “Mark this place on the map. We’ll come back in the morning,” she said.

  The look on his face was that of a disappointed child. Then it hardened into anger.

  “We need to see if we can find any of these creatures and see them alive,” Lux said, before Samuel could say anything. “And we are not splitting up.”

  “It’s almost night; we should make camp, and we should make it here,” Samuel said hopefully.

  Lux frowned. They could cover more ground if they kept going for another hour or so.

  “We’re not spending the night in a graveyard. We don’t know what it is, or who tends it.”

  “I thought you weren’t superstitious? Yeah, ok, it looks like a graveyard to our eyes, but who knows what it is. Could just as easily be a stone circle, like they had in Celtic Europe,” Hal said, with wryness in his smile.

  Lux shrugged.

  “Do you want to spend the night in this?”

  Julie inched towards Lux, “No. Lux is right; this isn’t a good spot, at all.”

  “Then let’s move out. We can still cover quite a bit. We’ll come back, Sam.”

  She could tell by his face that he didn’t believe her, but went along with the will of the group. Perhaps he wasn’t quite so unreasonable as Lux had thought. Passionate, fervent for sure, but maybe he could be reasoned with.

  ***

  The tree they slept in wasn’t marked up with unknown territory gouges, but it was in the minority of the trees in this area, and they had had to move a half mile or so to the south before they found a suitable place to make camp. Lux didn’t feel any more comfortable in the tree than she did on the ground, but it didn’t matter. They would be safe, or they wouldn’t, but she couldn’t do anything about it.

  She strung up her hammock tent and squatted on the branch, tiredness in her bones leaking out.

  She really should have pulled herself out of the tracking business a long time ago. Maybe set up her own guide company or hunting outpost in Alaska and had younger, dumber guides working for her. Something to strive for, she guessed.

  Her fingers found
the charms she wore around her neck. The thin dog tag was just like one of the graves out there in the trees, only they were unnamed. Her brother had at least been recorded when he died. His name was cast forever in the steel of the tag and the marble of his grave up in Corsicana. The indentations always felt rough when she touched them, the name standing out so strong like a part of his soul was in it. Lux did not believe in that, but she wished she did. The tag in itself was not her brother, and she desperately wanted it to be. Ben watched her. Lux let the tag go and the lump of charms disappeared into her shirt, the sweaty collar swallowing them hungrily. The thump of metal braced against her skin, reminding her why she had left the woods in the first place.

  “Whose were those?” Ben’s voice said from a branch a few feet over her head.

  Lux looked into the gnarled eyes of a tree far away. The swirls of bark almost gave it a perfect human face, but it was miserable and a little angry, so she looked away.

  “My brother,” she said finally. “He was in Afghanistan. Probably the only member of my family to do anything good. Not that that war is anything good, but you know what I mean. He believed in serving his country, and he got repaid with an IED because he was in a country he shouldn’t have been in.”

  She stopped herself. It would be too easy to continue, which would lead to an argument with someone in the team for sure who didn’t share in her liberal views on interventionist foreign policy. This was Texas after all.

  “My sister died in war,” he said, something in his eyes moving like a snake in water. It was a sad look, but one that held the slickness of the city. “But not overseas.”

  Lux looked from his face to one of the tattoos on his arm. She knew the symbol, but she also knew not to say it out loud. Tracking had pulled her into the gang world a long time ago. Staying unaffiliated had been the hard part and key to her continued survival. Ben saw where she looked. “You’ve tracked one of them before, haven’t you?”

  Lux said nothing.

  “I got out,” he said, knowing what she was thinking. The sun was setting bloody on his face. “I got out when I started working for Stevens.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “Just making conversation.”

  She smiled, but there was no happiness in it.

  “True. I have tracked some cartel members. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. All I’d done prior to that was haul some missing kids out of a forest and some petty thieves out of their buddies’ attics. Kinda threw me for a loop.”

  “That was right after, wasn’t it?”

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant. When Jonathan died, Lux ran, leaving all her contacts with the cartel behind.

  “Yes,” she said, but it came out very quietly.

  “It probably saved your life.”

  “Yes, I think it did,” she agreed.

  He was silent, staring out into the wild. She could see it in him too, permeating his being, the wild. It was there, a strong wind that blew right out of most people. But his skin was strong enough to hold it in. He was like her.

  She let her fingers skim the necklace.

  “This was my mother,” she said, the bent cross showing. She didn’t know why she was talking, but it was like she suddenly couldn’t help it. And she told the truth. “She died when my little sister Trix was born.”

  “Trix, Lux, Jonathan.”

  “Trix is short for Bellatrix. It means warlike. She’s gentle as a lamb though. I think we were misnamed. She should have been Lux.”

  “You don’t wear anything from her?”

  Lux shrugged, still partially confused why she was even telling him any of it. “I’ve got this locket, and there’s a picture of her in it. There’s me and her and John and our mother.”

  “Where’s your sister?” Ben asked, his eyes curious but innocent. He was curious just for the sake of it, and Lux relaxed in the feeling of not having to gauge political motivations.

  “She went to New York; still there, last I heard. We don’t talk.”

  Ben looked at her questioningly, but she wasn’t going to talk about her and Trix. He had the sense not to ask. Something felt very tight in her throat, and she knew she should not have spoken of her family. That was her rule for a reason. She would never see Trix again, and she had adapted to knowing that, but it did not make the idea more comfortable.

  “My father taught me tracking,” Lux said, the words spilling like a tipped glass. She pulled the locket out into the air and nearer to Ben. “He tried to teach all of us, but it only really caught with me.”

  Ben continued. “My mother taught my brother, who taught me. She was from El Salvador, never learned English.

  “My father was in and out of prison most of the time we were young, and when he was out he wasn’t around. Julian was seven years older than me, hauled me after him everywhere.” Ben had half a smile at the memory, just barely visible in the moonlight.

  Where is he now? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Ben already answered that with his tense face.

  But he saw the question on her face.

  “He went home,” he said.

  Going home, she had learned on her first tracking assignment with Ben’s old gang, meant suicide.

  ***

  Lux did not like the morning the instant she woke. Whatever had been wrong in the air for the past several days was much stronger. The musky scent in the air had her gagging out the side of her hammock, her stomach dry-heaving its empty contents. They had penetrated too deep into forbidden territory, and now the very air itself was angry. Lux was glad they had left the graveyard. There was a sullenness in the air over breakfast and as they broke camp. The heavy smell of anger and animal permeated every thought, and Lux was sure she felt the cold rake of unnatural eyes on the back of her neck the whole time.

  “Where are we headed?” Hal asked.

  “East,” Lux grunted.

  “Why?” Samuel said.

  “Because I said so,” Lux said.

  “That’s not good enough.” Hal dropped his pack from his hand, demanding an answer.

  “Hey, we follow the tracker, so deal with it,” Ben interjected,shutting down any argument.

  Lux tied her pack up and set off, the others following. The watched feeling only increased, along with the soporific, cloying smell infesting the forest. A nagging fear – no, not fear, more subtle than that, a gloaming dread – swelled and bit away at Lux. What if there were monsters in the forest? She had never considered it before, but flashes of the horns she had seen by night flitted through her brain. Those horns had definitely been there, and definitely had not been natural. Whatever she had seen had not been natural, couldn’t be an animal born out of evolution. Bipedal, with horns. That didn’t make sense. And that scared Lux. They had only been walking for about thirty minutes before Julie called a halt. “Guys, wait,” she said.

  “What?” Lux said, trying not to let her annoyance crawl into her voice. She was not annoyed with Julie per se, more the situation. Being turned from predator to prey was not in the mission brief.

  “I don’t like this. Can you guys feel it? It’s like… the air pressure before a thunderstorm, but the sky is clear.”

  “This is what we’re looking for,” Hal said excitedly.

  Julie gave him an incredulous look. “But did you really expect to find it?”

  “Yeah, why else would I have come?” Everyone looked at Hal.

  “You’re the only one then,” Samuel said.

  “We came out here to find Bigfoot. So we’re going to find something because I’ve worked with Stevens before. He doesn’t make mistakes. He says there’s something here,” he shrugged, “then something’s here.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see it and then go, I guess,” said Julie.

  “I really don’t like this,” Julie said. “We have no idea what we’re walking into here. We should be cautious.”

  “After today or tomorrow, we’re headed ba
ck,” Lux said. “We’ve found evidence, and that’s what we’ll do today, find more. Then all that’s left to do is leave.”

  Even as she spoke, Lux saw a flash of dark movement in the trees.

  Keep calm, she told herself, keep calm. It wasn’t working. It was stupid to be afraid of something in the woods. She had been in much worse situations, much more dangerous situations. But there was an eerie feeling to the forest that made it absolutely impossible to calm down. It was the fear of the prey animal, when faced with something larger, smarter, and more dangerous than itself.

  She patted her holster, finding the reassuring weight of her pistol. The solid feel of it let her pull in a deep breath that pushed her lungs open.

  She looked across Julie to Ben. His bird eyes were dark, almost supernatural in their own right. He had seen it, too. But the other three were oblivious. Fools! They had not paid attention, and now they would not believe even if Lux and Ben both told the group what they had seen.

  Lux felt a panic swelling and billowing in her. She had to find a way to lead them out without becoming Bigfoot’s next meal or garden decoration. The absurdity of Bigfoot stalking them was gone, replaced by the very real sensation of terror. Lux started a loop to lead them back around to the west. There was safety the way they had come, she hoped. They were deep in the creatures’ territory now, so they just had to navigate their way out of it, as a little boat must run before the coming hurricane.

  Chapter Four

  She failed. Despite her best efforts to lead them to salvation, the devil himself had cornered them, not far from where they had camped the night before. It had been a mistake to pass this close to the graveyard. With her team in single file behind her, she stood frozen, gazing into green eyes wilder than the wild trapped inside of her and Ben. No one moved, all of the others could now see what Lux and Ben had already witnessed. Lux couldn’t feel her hand as it gripped the butt of her pistol, she wasn’t sure if she could even draw it, let alone fire. Intelligence, mean and flickering brightly, shone from the eyes holding her. If she moved, it would charge, she knew that. But if she stayed, it would eventually do something. The creature stood just taller than her, pale brown fur standing up along its shoulders. It was dappled like a hyena, horned like a goat, built like a bear.