by Selena Scott
But that wasn’t what had him pulling the map from his pack. No. It was the truth of why he’d come here. He was a treasure hunter by trade. He’d followed many maps just like this one. He’d gotten to the bottom of clues tied up in wills, buried at the bottom of the sea, left in ancient runes. It took a whole lot of finding for him to realize that it wasn’t the treasure he really cared about. It was the finding itself that he cared about. The mystery of it all. The big reveal. The answer to questions. That was really what he wanted. That one, glorious moment, when there were no more questions, when all was perfectly answered. Because, of course, there were always more questions. But there was the moment. The perfect moment, when the earth pulled between the sun and the moon and the eclipse was total and there was no before or after. That’s what he lived for.
He reached behind him with one of those long arms. He didn’t have to dig around in his pack for long before he pulled out the parchment, letting it catch the sunlight for a moment before he set it on his belly.
She was on her feet in a long, fluid line. Dang, she was tall. While he’d reclined, she’d taken off her button-up flannel and underneath was a sweaty, green T-shirt that showed her arms and clung to the lines of her stomach, soft and strong at once. Jack felt his mouth dry up and observed the phenomenon in a good-natured manner. Didn’t it just feel good to want something? To want somebody? Like a good, hard run in the hot sun. It got his system pumping, banged on the hood, made sure everything was in good working order.
She took two purposeful steps toward him and then paused, just as purposefully. Her eyes were trained on the map. Then she was next to him in a flash, just a few steps on those long legs of hers. She snatched the map off his belly and Jack forced himself to lay still. He’d fought hard for that map. Had some stories to prove it. It went against every fiber in his being to let someone whisk it right off his stomach, no matter how pretty she was.
But his patience paid off. She stared at the map, her eyes wide for just a span of a breath before her calm exterior resumed. Another skill in her that Jack found himself admiring.
“Damn it, Chet,” Thea mumbled under her breath. Either her grandfather hadn’t known that there was more than one map to this place, or he hadn’t seen fit to tell her.
“Who’s Chet?” Jack asked, still peering up at her from where he lay, using his pack as a pillow.
“None of your damn business,” Thea replied, letting the map flutter back down to his stomach and making Jack grin at her manner. “Damn it.” She cursed again because it felt good. And because she didn’t like being off-kilter. “If there’s two maps…” she looked pointedly at the tent, heard the cashier’s words in her head. The Seventh Soul…“Then there’s likely—”
“Seven maps,” Jack finished her thought for her.
“I really didn’t think I was going to have company for this,” Thea grumbled.
Jack sat up fully and watched her walk back to her pack and fish out a granola bar. “That’s what you’re worried about? Company? You’re not worried about finding a way to split treasure seven ways?”
“Treasure?” she asked him. For the first time since he met her he saw some real animation. Incredulity looked beautiful on her. “What the hell makes you think there’s treasure at stake here?”
“What else do people quote unquote ‘seek’?” he asked her, just as confused by her confusion as she was by his statement.
“Wow,” was her simple response.
“You mean you’re here for something other than a reward of some kind?”
She said nothing, but he saw the flicker behind her eyes. Still waters run deep, he reminded himself. There was something here that had dragged this woman out to the middle of nowhere. “Who’s Chet?” he asked one more time.
This time, she completely ignored him. But that might have been because her eyes narrowed in on movement through the trees. Jack sat up as well and both of them watched a woman step from the trees, a beach towel around her shoulders, a pair of beat-up, vintage shorts on over a bathing suit, and hiking sandals. She froze the second she saw them, as if she’d walked into her living room and caught intruders. It gave both Jack and Thea a second to really take her in. She had a septum piercing that caught the light and tattoos across her collarbones. Her hair was in a tight fade that led up to hair at the top of her head that went both up and flopped to the side. It was dark at the roots but dyed what appeared to be a grayish silver. Her cheeks were high and peachy and the rest of her features a bit large. Big nose, big eyes, big lips.
Hot, was Jack’s immediate, knee-jerk appraisal of this woman.
“Uhhhh,” the woman started, seeming halfway caught between indignation at having her space infringed upon and wanting to slink back into the woods.
“Hello,” Jack called to her and decided leaning forward, elbows on his knees, might make him seem a little less large. “We assume that’s your tent?”
“Yeah. I… just went swimming but the lake was farther away than I… I’m sorry. Who are you?” She looked back and forth between Jack and Thea.
“I’m Jack Warren.” He turned his head to Thea, genuinely curious to see if she was as withholding of personal information from everyone, or just him.
“Thea Redgrave.”
Ah. Just him, then. Well, that was fine. He got to find out her name either way, and it was a good name. Suited her. Old fashioned and fierce at the same time.
“Okay.” The silver-haired woman looked uncomfortable, as if knowing their names didn’t answer the question she wished she’d asked. Her hands tightened on the towel at her shoulders. “I’m Celia Lamplighter.”
“Hell of a name,” Jack commented.
She shrugged, as if there wasn’t much to be done about it either way. “I’m sorry. What are you doing here?”
Thea looked to Jack this time and the simple act, the turn of her head, set something off in him. It meant that they weren’t quite strangers anymore. They’d figured something out together. The seven. That meant something to her. And though he’d been through things like this before and the big reveal wasn’t an almighty surprise to him, the fact that it meant something to her meant something to him.
“Probably the same thing that you are,” he supplied helpfully, the same words he’d supplied to Thea not twenty minutes before.
“Uhhhh,” Celia looked between them. “Doubt it.” Unless these two randos also had cryptic, semi-ancient maps with hand-written verse on the back that led them to this exact clearing on this exact day—“Oh.” All the breath puffed out of her as Jack simply held up the piece of parchment that had apparently been resting on his stomach.
It looked extremely similar to the one that was currently pressed between the pages of a book in her tent.
Unless…
Celia skirted around the two of them, and keeping her eye on them, unzipped the back door of her rather large tent. She knew she was being weird, but also, all of this was pretty weird. She ducked in without another word and instantly scrambled for the worn murder mystery where she was keeping the map. And there it was. Her map. They hadn’t stolen it. Which meant that they had one of their own.
“Fudge me,” she murmured under her breath, not at all cognizant of her long-taught habit of not actually swearing whenever she wanted to. It had been one of her mother’s only strict rules in a house with ten other siblings, and one that they all still pretty much abided by.
Feeling suddenly exposed and off-kilter, Celia grabbed a sweater from her bag that was also in the tent with her. She pulled it on over her bathing suit and instantly felt a little better. A little more protected.
When she came back out of the tent she still eyed them with caution, keeping quite a bit of space between her and them.
“How did you two find yours?” she asked.
The woman, Thea, seemed to clench her lips closed but the man, Jack, leaned forward on his knees, pivoting to face her. “Mine? I won it in a game of poker that lasted damn near three d
ays. Her? I have no idea.”
Both Celia and Thea eyed Jack. Neither of them particularly believed his story.
“So, you’re not together?”
Thea’s loud, rude snort was answer enough.
Celia meant for that question to be as broad as possible, ‘together’ in any sense of the word they wanted to take it. She was trying to acquire a hell of a lot of information all at once here. She hated being out of the loop. And in this case, being out of the loop meant being by herself in the middle of nowhere with two strangers she knew nothing about. Yeah. Not exactly Celia Lamplighter’s cup of tea. Why had she left Brooklyn?
“Ah, no,” Jack answered, raising a scarred eyebrow at Thea. “No, we’re not. We’ve pretty much just had this same exact conversation with one another.”
“Hm,” Celia said shortly, still sticking tightly to her tent. Why did the fact that she was the only one who’d set up a tent make her feel stupid? It was a perfectly logical thing to do, seeing as how she’d come to see the total eclipse, and whatever came directly after it. What was she supposed to do? Hike back out in the dark? No! She took a step in front of her tent, perhaps in an attempt to make it look a little smaller, a little less ‘just-bought’, but seeing as she wasn’t much over 5’2”, she only succeeded in making the tent look even larger. “Are there others?”
“Good question,” Thea said thoughtfully, her head cocked to one side as she studied the curious woman in front of her, seemingly a perfect mixture of confidence and self-consciousness. “We think there might be seven of us, total.”
Celia nodded her head thoughtfully. “Huh. I guess it makes sense that if there’s three then there’s seven. Considering the verse on the back of the map.”
“Smart cookie,” Jack said, watching her thoughtfully.
“That’s what they tell me,” Celia said, shrugging. “But there was no one else here and it didn’t occur to me there could be more than one seventh soul. Got used to the idea of finally being the only one,” Celia muttered the last part under her breath in a way that told Jack that she was also used to muttering things under her breath.
“Well, we mean no harm,” Jack assured her. “We’re only here for the big show.”
Celia, her eyes on both of them, finally eased her way to the ground. “You,” she pointed at Thea, “I have no idea about. But you, Tex, I can only assume that by ‘big show’ you’re not referring to the eclipse.”
He grinned at her. “Got that right. Except for the Tex part. I’m from Louisiana.”
“Ah. Well, your accent is muddled enough you must have spent a lot of time traveling around.” Celia said this with certainty. She wasn’t asking, she was telling. They seemed to have found a subject matter that she had some expertise on. “So, what’re you expecting to have happen tonight?”
Thea, though interested in Jack Warren’s answer, whirled around to face the woods behind her, jackknife in hand. There was that noise again. That raincoat swish. And pretty soon, there was a man to match that swish.
A very large man. As he came through the brush, Thea might have wondered if he wasn’t two men walking side by side, if not for the inherent grace in his movements. Each of his biceps were the size of one of her thighs and he had to be over six and a half feet tall. He stepped out of the trees into the clearing, blinking in surprise to see other people standing there.
Thea got a good look at his face and, to her surprise, immediately trusted him. His features were plain, but well ordered, he had high cheekbones and a full beard that she knew, instinctively, was a new addition to his personal style. His hair was light brown and so were his eyes.
“Hello,” he called, in a surprisingly deep baritone.
She was about to call back when she felt Jack’s warm presence beside her, and then slightly in front of her. “Afternoon.”
Thea blinked in surprise at Jack Warren’s back. He suddenly was looking every inch of his 6’2”. She realized, with something akin to good will, that Jack must have been doing his best to look smaller and less intimidating to the two women. That was probably why he’d been lounging on the ground like he was on spring break. But now, with this strange, extremely large man joining them, Jack was no longer hiding his natural size. Interesting.
Thea stepped up and stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack.
Celia, on the other hand, had taken two sharp steps backwards, one of which had crumpled and muddied the corner of her tent. Her hand was over her shocked mouth for one second before it snaked around to the back of her neck, which was hot with mortification and shock and ohmygod.
Holy guacamole.
Jean Luc LaTour, former star quarterback for the New York Empire was standing thirty feet away from her. Wearing all Nike everything, looking gorgeous as always and big as a house and… Jesus, she needed to sit down.
Jean Luc scanned the clearing. Let’s see. To his calculations he was looking at a hobo cowboy, an outdoorswear model—if that was a thing—and a punk rocker looking like she wanted to sprint into the woods and never come back. Weird.
As a very famous man, he’d learned to be on guard about unexpected situations with strangers. But as a veritable giant, he’d also learned that generally, he needed to be about six times as friendly as other people in order to keep people from being scared of him.
“My name is Jean Luc.” None of them said anything. “Anyone mind telling me what’s going on?”
The hobo cowboy smiled and sighed, turning toward the tough little black-haired model. “Your turn,” he told her.
CHAPTER FOUR
The four of them waited for the eclipse and, they all silently knew, for the others. As the afternoon turned into evening and the shadows drew closer to them, they all drew a bit closer to one another as well.
Soon, they were sitting in a circle and Thea figured that putting a fire in the middle of that circle was as good a plan as any. She cleared the brush away, found enough stones in the field to make a suitable fire circle, gathered kindling and bark and a few mid-sized branches, and made a fire.
She didn’t ask for help, Jack noticed. And he didn’t think it was a statement of some kind or another. He thought that she didn’t need help, so she didn’t ask for it and that was that.
“Impressive,” this guy Jean Luc said to Thea after she’d dusted her hands off and came back to sit next to her pack, her feet pointing toward the cheerily dancing fire she’d just built. Jack wasn’t quite sure what to make of the guy, but doing what he did for so many years, Jack had developed a bit of a nose for the character of a man. And this guy, Jean Luc? He didn’t seem particularly dangerous to anybody sitting around this fire except for himself. Jack had the distinct impression that the man sitting across the fire from him was in a world of hurt.
The fire danced over all their faces and made it feel later than it already was. Truth was, it wasn’t much past 8 p.m., and it being the summer, the sunset was still in full force. There was still more red to the air than blue. Jack watched the light play over the face of both of the gorgeous women sitting on either side of him, but it was Thea’s face he kept going back to. She had this strange mix of delicate and strong beauty. Like the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, he decided. Intricate and elegant and well designed. But also built to last.
“Did that hurt?” Jean Luc asked Celia across the fire.
“Huh?” she responded. Brilliant response, Celia. She closed her mouth. It was the first thing he’d said directly to her and for some reason, the simple question, the one that she’d been asked hundreds of times, sent all the blood arrowing out of her head. God, this was embarrassing. She was a grown woman. And though she’d always thought he’d been cute when her brothers had watched him on football Sundays, she’d never been a swooner. Or a daydreamer. She’d never dreamed of meeting him or kissing him or… Yikes! Red alert. Whose body was this? She was hot and fidgety and come on, Celia! Get it together! He was just a person! Another human being. There was no reason to be this… butterflyish.
Jean Luc tapped his nose and then pointed at hers, to indicate her piercing.
“Oh, my septum piercing? No.” She almost winced at how final and unfriendly she sounded. Not as bad as my tattoos. It hurt, but not as much as you’d think. Not if your piercer is good at what she does. Yeah, but that’s sort of part of it. Come on! There were a hundred things she could say that would have kept the conversation going. But instead she’d lobbed a ‘no’ at him and the conversation came to a screeching, silent halt again.
Celia opened her mouth to ask him a question back, any question, just something to get the conversation going, show she wasn’t a complete asshole, when something caught her eye in the forest behind Jean Luc’s head. She rose to her feet, squinting, and realized that Jack had risen, too. He was already ten feet away from the fire, peering into the woods.
“Incoming,” Jack called over his shoulder.
Thea stood and walked to his side. Celia wondered if she should do the same, but noticed that Jean Luc was remaining still, by the fire. She slowly sat back down, her eyes trained on the movement through the leaves. Could that be…? No.
There was no way there was a horse picking its way through the brush toward them.
***
Caroline Clifton oscillated between wild joy and a sort of chagrined caution. It had been years since she’d ridden a horse, but it had come back to her like riding a… bike. She felt a rising, almost boundless joy leaping forth from her as she and her horse slowly picked a path through the forest. She was thankful that for most of the way, there’d been a fairly reliable horse path. And for the last thousand feet or so, Caroline dismounted and carefully led Rook, her rent-a-horse, through the dimming twilight.