The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  “How you doing?” Sully called up to him.

  Dez stopped for a breather, straightening as much as he could without risking catastrophe. “Great. Next weekend, I think you and I should go check out the climbing wall at the Science Centre.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No.”

  Returning to the task at hand, Dez managed to make it a couple more steps before a huge fallen tree in his path had him changing his mind. “I don’t know about this,” he called down. “One thing for sure is no one came this way. Even if Lars could make it, no way Tessa could. She doesn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type.”

  Dez returned full attention to the cliff, casting his eyes over it as he searched for the best way up. He didn’t like what he saw. “Listen, man, even if I’m somehow able to get up here, I don’t want you trying it. I displaced a lot of stuff on the way, and this next bit is gonna be a bitch.”

  “Okay,” Sully said. “Just come down. We’ll figure something else out.”

  Dez turned and took his first good look below. It was like a hell of a long way. “Jeezus, man, I don’t know. I’m thinking they might have to bring Search and Rescue in here for me. Maybe even the Army.”

  Sully’s laugh cut short in his throat, and Dez’s blood ran cold at the expression on his brother’s face. It didn’t help when Sully next spoke, directing a yell at something behind and to the side of Dez.

  Something he couldn’t see when he turned his head.

  “No! Carter, don’t!”

  Dez heard something shift, then the sound of stones rolling and pelting off larger rock as they headed for the cliff’s base. Horrified, he watched as the large tree slid toward him.

  “Dez, move!”

  Dez had once been on a traffic stop in which he’d had to dive to the ground to avoid being struck by a drunk driver who’d missed the flashing reds and blues of the police cruiser. He wasn’t a cop anymore, but instincts kicked in nonetheless as he treated that now-rolling tree like the drunk’s car. Left wasn’t an option, but there was room on the right. He hadn’t tested the ground there for stability, but anything seemed better right now than being bowled over and crushed by a massive, dead tree.

  He leapt, landed. A shock of pain radiated through him as he came down, although he didn’t have time yet to ascertain the nature of any injuries. Even here, away from the largest part of the tree, the branches whipped at his back and side, and then the weight of the trunk rolled over him. He slid with it a moment, body caught up in the movement, taking him partway down the slope on his belly.

  He came free of the branches, but momentum had him continuing downward a few feet until he collided with what proved to be a larger and immovable boulder. It hurt, but he counted himself lucky the impact was on the side of his body furthest from his still-healing broken rib.

  He lay there a moment, breathing hard, shock slowly giving way to pain. He could hear the tree thundering down the slope, and it was only worry for his brother that had him wrenching his eyes open and blinking back a few tears to look.

  Thankfully, Sully had always been quick on his feet. Once the tree came to rest below, against a net of its living counterparts, he came into view, rushing up the slope.

  “Dez! You okay? Say something!”

  The strain of movement was in Sully’s voice as he demanded an answer Dez was ill-equipped to provide. Landing against the boulder had winded him, and the attempt to reply left him hacking.

  He could make out the sound of movement around the pounding of blood in his ears, and he was trying to work his way to sitting when a hand rested on his shoulder.

  “Dez, talk to me, man. You okay?”

  He looked up into Sully’s panicked face. “Ten-four. How the hell’d you get up here so fast?”

  “The tree probably took out a bunch of the looser stuff on the way down. It doesn’t matter. Are you hurt?”

  With Sully’s help, Dez finished the process of sitting up. He gave his limbs a test and shifted a little, mentally checking the sorest spots for anything that might require a hospital visit.

  Luckily, he came up with nothing catastrophic, nothing beyond scrapes, superficial cuts and what was likely to be a colourful collection of bruises once they’d had time to fully settle in and reveal themselves.

  “Nothing seems broken,” he said. “Give me a hand up.”

  He stood for a few minutes with Sully on the boulder, taking breaths deep enough to prove he hadn’t caused worse damage to his rib. He’d gained the injury during a fight with the man who’d kidnapped Sully; Dez felt like he’d just lost the brawl all over again.

  “How’s the rib?”

  “Not bad,” Dez said. “Got lucky, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry, D. You could have been killed.”

  Dez would have liked to swat Sully harder than he did, but anything more forceful could send one or both of them rolling down the hill. “Don’t do that. It’s not your fault.”

  “It was Carter,” Sully said. “He was somehow able to shift the tree. He’s my baggage, not yours.”

  “Don’t. I mean it. The last time you talked like that, we nearly lost you. You and me, man. We’re a team, just like Dad always told us we should be. Now, I know this may come as a shock, but you’re not responsible for someone else’s decisions, even a dead guy’s. And let’s not forget, we’re not actually here because of you or Carter. We were tracking Tessa. If we’re going to blame anyone, let’s pin it on the judge. Guy’s an asshole, anyway.”

  He was relieved when Sully smiled. “I guess I can get on board with that.”

  Dez turned to study the slope. Sully had been right; the tree had taken out some of the looser material on its way down. Whether that made the upcoming descent less treacherous or more remained to be seen. He was about to point that out to his brother, but Sully’s gaze had moved up the slope rather than down.

  “God, Sully, please don’t tell me he’s still there.”

  “No, he’s gone. But he left something behind.”

  Dez wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but there was no getting around it. He turned and followed Sully’s index finger to a spot on the side of the sunken cliff. There, now noticeable in the spot previously concealed by the tree, was a sizeable hole.

  “I don’t think Carter was trying to hurt you,” Sully said. “I think he was trying to show us another way in.”

  A smile was plucking at Sully’s lips, but Dez was miles from being able to meet it.

  “That’s great, Sull,” Dez said. “If he doesn’t care about crushing a guy beneath a tree to show us a hole in the ground, I sure as hell don’t want his help exploring a collapsible cave.”

  16

  Sully edged closer to the hole but found any remaining progress barred by Dez’s hand on his arm.

  “Close enough, bro,” Dez said. “We don’t know how stable the ground is around that.”

  It was a fair point, particularly given the cave’s history. But Sully suspected in this case, they would be fine.

  “Evan said the search team expanded an existing opening to let them drop inside,” Sully said. “If that’s the case, it should be more or less stable.”

  “Why isn’t it marked off or sealed?”

  “Maybe that’s what the tree was doing. Could be it was shifted by Search and Rescue to cover it up. Not like anyone would have counted on ghostly intervention.”

  “I still don’t like this.”

  Sully wasn’t crazy about it, either. Having narrowly avoided death in a cave two years ago, he wasn’t particularly eager to try for a second round. Yet here he was, kneeling and opening his backpack to remove a rope, gloves and a pair of flashlights.

  When he stood back up, Dez was facing him with crossed arms and a frown. “What are you doing?”

  “Going down there.”

  “Bullshit, you’re going down there. No way, Sully.”

  “He showed us the opening for a reason, Dez.”

  “Either that, or he wa
s trying to kill me to prevent us from getting in there. You said it yourself, that it seems he’s worried about getting someone in trouble. I mean, holy hell, a dead guy made of air just moved a tree that probably weighs a ton. You going to tell me he isn’t capable of causing a collapse in there?”

  “First of all, ghosts aren’t really made of air. It’s energy. Some of them can harness it and interact with the physical world.”

  “Are we seriously having a lesson in metaphysics right now? The real issue is what happens if you’re down there and this guy decides the world could do with one less psychic.”

  “He’s not going to do that.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” He wasn’t actually, but the truth wasn’t going to do either of them any good.

  Anyway, Dez had his own truth, and it often got in the way of Sully’s. “That’s great, man. In that case, I’m not sure. You’re no spelunker. I’ll go.”

  Sully chuckled. “Come on. Seriously, D, you’re six inches taller than me, and you outweigh me by at least seventy pounds. I can’t lower you down there or pull you back up.”

  “So we’ll tie off to a tree and I’ll lower myself.”

  “Look around you,” Sully said. “I wouldn’t count on any of these trees being up to the task.”

  That logic made sense. Sully knew it. Dez had to know it, too.

  Logic wasn’t going to help this situation. Not when blind fear had settled over Dez’s face.

  “Dez….”

  “No, Sully. Just, no. We’re not doing this. I’m not doing this. You don’t get it. I still have nightmares, all right? With Aiden and Dad, it was bad enough losing them, trying to adjust to life without them. With you, I was there. I was there, Sully. I thought you’d died right under my fucking feet. So, no. You’re not putting me through this. I can’t deal with it.”

  Dez had never been good at controlling emotion even at his most level moments. He was known to cry over television commercials and videos posted to social media. Sully could only imagine the amount of willpower it was taking to keep the sheen in his eyes from swelling to full-blown tears.

  There could be no arguing, not like this. Sully had a path to follow, one Carter had just done his damnedest to lay before him. But, at the end of the day, he was a brother first. And he was the reason, after all, his brother was standing here, fighting back grief and, apparently, post-traumatic stress.

  He’d put Dez through enough. Even if Sully failed in finding peace for Carter, if he could promise a little to Dez, he could live with that.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay. I won’t go, all right? I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing to me.”

  “I mean it. You wouldn’t be dealing with all this if I hadn’t put you through that.”

  “I said, stop fucking apologizing!”

  Sully caught himself before taking an involuntary step back. Dez switched through emotions sometimes like he was being run by one of those old-school telephone operators, cord pulled out of one jack and shoved with rapid efficiency into another.

  The knee-jerk response was to apologize, but Sully managed to bite it back before he made things worse. Silence was sometimes the best policy with Dez, to let him work his way through by himself. When they’d been kids, their mom Mara had insisted on Sully’s going to a counsellor to deal with the abuse and neglect he’d suffered during his years in foster care, and the abandonment that had led him there in the first place. It had helped. A lot.

  Dez hadn’t benefitted in the same way when his parents tried to take him in the days following Aiden’s death. After a few weeks, he refused to return. For two years, he lived with his anger, his only escape in video games and television—anything to quiet his turbulent thoughts by focusing his brain elsewhere.

  Sully knew he’d changed everything; his arrival had proved the unexpected fix Dez needed. Where he was stillness, Dez was a whirlwind, creating a balance proven to work—and to work well. In maintaining that surface of calm—and sometimes surface was all it was—Sully was usually able to help Dez reach the same place.

  Usually.

  Dez knelt, stuffing the gear into the backpack like he intended to push it through the bottom of the bag. “Let’s just get the hell out of here, all right? I can’t deal with this right now.”

  Dez sealed the bag up hard enough to test the resilience of the zipper, slung it over his shoulder and took two steps.

  And disappeared.

  A shout sounded as he fell from sight, the ground opening and swallowing him as Sully watched, helpless, from topside.

  It took a moment to register, as if his brain were sorting the difference between dream and reality. Once it snapped into place, Sully dropped to hands and knees, screaming his brother’s name into the dark void below.

  When no answer came, Sully tried again, and again.

  Still nothing.

  He pulled out his phone with a trembling hand and tried to still his fingers enough to push the buttons. He’d need to get some help in here, even if it meant revealing himself to the authorities. It didn’t matter, not when it came to Dez. He’d face Gerhardt or Lowell or his homicidal birth family in a heartbeat if it meant saving his brother.

  Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

  “Sully?”

  “Thank God. You okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. Landed in a pool of water. Took me a minute to decide if I’d actually survived the fall.”

  “You sound far down.”

  “You sound far up.”

  “No chance of you tossing me the bag with the rope in, then,” Sully reasoned.

  “I’d say that’s a hard no.”

  “I’ll get help, okay? Just hang in there.”

  “Don’t you leave me here! I mean it!”

  “I can call. I don’t have to leave. They’ll know how to find us if I say we’re near where the cave entrance was.”

  “You can’t call the authorities, Sully. They can’t know you’re alive, remember?”

  “Does that really matter, right now?”

  “Of course it bloody matters!”

  “So what do you want to do, then? Are you happy treading water, hoping some random hiker will be carrying rope and a pulley?”

  “Don’t be a smart ass. It doesn’t suit you. Anyway, I’m not in the water. I pulled myself out. It’s pretty deep, but there’s a ledge next to it. I’m thinking it gets a lot of runoff coming down that hole. Or maybe it’s coming from somewhere else. Hey, maybe call Eva. She can bring rope. Think Marc could come give you guys a hand? I’m heavy enough when I’m not soaking wet.”

  Sully let Dez ramble while he returned his attention to his phone. He stood to scroll through his contacts, the ones he’d bothered to put back in. No point reminding himself of the ones he used to have, the ones for whom he no longer existed.

  He found Eva’s, and hit the button to talk, but received a “no service” message on the screen.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, before yelling down into the hole, “Do you have any cell coverage down there?”

  There was a pause, presumably as Dez removed his phone and checked. “Huh. I’m a little surprised it survived. Guess they were right about this thing being waterproof.”

  “Cell coverage?”

  “No. I’m in a bloody hole, Sully. How would I have cell coverage?”

  Sully rubbed at his jaw, exhaling against his hand. Their options had just been whittled down to one, and Dez wasn’t going to like it.

  “I need to go for help.”

  “You can’t!”

  “No choice, okay? You can’t stay down there.”

  “You can’t leave me here! It’s dark, and….”

  He left the rest unsaid, but Sully smiled as he completed the thought in his head. There’s a ghost around.

  “I won’t be long. Promise. And don’t worry about Carter, all right? He’s just a kid. He won’t hurt you.”

  Sully put
his phone back inside his pocket. Then, with the intention of plotting out the best route back down the hill, he turned.

  A smashed and bloody face stared directly into his.

  Sully started, taking an automatic blind step backward.

  And felt the ground disappear beneath him.

  “Sully? Sully, talk to me, man.”

  He awoke to a biting chill and the heavy sensation of wet clothing. A bright light shone in his face, but it didn’t strike him as particularly heavenly. Nor did the rough, cold hand alternately shaking his chest and slapping his cheek.

  “Sully, come on!”

  He batted Dez’s hand away and managed a mumbled response. “ ‘M’okay.”

  “You hit the water hard. You weren’t moving, so I had to pull you out. How bad you hurt? I couldn’t feel any breaks, but that doesn’t always mean anything.”

  Sully tried again. “I’m fine. Really.”

  He tried to sit up, but Dez wasn’t allowing it, not until Sully had taken a minute for residual shock to pass and to complete an internal self-scan for pain. He had a bit of a headache but thankfully, as near as he could tell, nothing worse.

  This time, Dez did let him sit up, helping by pulling and propping him against the cavern’s rock wall before dropping next to him.

  Dez played the flashlight around the chamber, but their surroundings proved so huge, the beam disappeared into the pressing blackness.

  “Thank God Dad always pushed waterproof flashlights for camping,” Dez said. “The other one’s a little wonky, though. I think it got damaged when I fell.”

  Dez set about disassembling the item in question while holding the working one between his knees.

  Sully watched him work, until the inevitable question came.

  “What happened up there? How’d you fall?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Sully said.

  “He pushed you, didn’t he?”

  “He didn’t push me. Not exactly, anyway. He startled me, though. I ended up taking a bad step.”