An Artifact of Death

by Anna Philpot

  The longer she remained out here in the wilderness, the more times and more men who came after her, the less likely any type of rescue seemed.

  She should have told Sam about the reverend position in Portland. She’d planned to, a couple of days ago at his house over dinner, to get his take on the situation. See if…whatever Cici felt budding between them Sam felt, too. If it was worth exploring.

  But seeing Jeannette there, seated on his back porch, just as she had when she and Sam were dating, as if the whole situation with Anna Carmen’s death, with Cici almost dying…something in that moment broke Cici’s heart. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, except that it felt like…

  Cici swallowed down the bitter taste that kept filling her mouth when she thought of that moment—the hard, almost angry look in Sam’s eyes when he met her gaze across the expanse of flagstone patio.

  She’d felt hurt. Unsure of her place in Sam’s life.

  Cici tried to tell herself her reaction was over the top—but between her overreaction to Sam and Jeannette and her need to think through the opportunity at the large church in Portland, Cici skedaddled from town at the first opportunity, landing herself here, talking to ghosts and handling supernatural phenomena. None of which was anywhere near as delightful as one might anticipate.

  Lightning continued to flick through the clouds as rain fell in a thick, cold sheet. Like the beings here—if she believed in Aci on this plane, helping to protect her, then Cici must believe in others remaining on this plane, too—were not happy with the current situation.

  If the rain didn’t stop soon, they might remain too cold and too wet to function well tomorrow. Cici capped her now-full Camelbak and stood on shaky legs. Anton did the same.

  “We need to find some shelter,” Cici said on a sigh.

  They wandered forward at first, unable to see any distance through the thick wall of water. But, like most storms in the Southwest, the rain ebbed, slowing to a faint trickle within moments. Lightning lit the thinning clouds, now moving south, and thunder rolled across the thick slabs of rock and sky.

  And…and small lights gathered in the distance. She squinted, unable to make out any detail.

  Fireflies, maybe? Huh. Cici read somewhere that some of the late-summer insects flitted across the Colorado Plateau. She was in the right part of the country for them, so she decided to take it as a sign—a positive sign of potential help with a touch of sweetness she’d desperately needed.

  From her sister? Or from the other entities Cici thought she felt watching them? Like the Chacoan’s gambler god she’d been so fascinated with as a child. Cici shivered, rubbing her arms as her sodden clothes dripped puddles of water around her feet.

  Cici touched Anton’s arm. His muscles bunched. She pointed in the direction where the small, coalescing lights danced. His look of askance caused her to shrug even as she led him toward it.

  “Why are we going this way?” he muttered.

  “Do you have a better plan?” Cici asked after she managed to clear the lump from her throat.

  “At the moment? No.”

  Cici strode forward and the tiny insects skittered farther from her, almost like a line of lanterns leading a procession.

  “Ghosts of the canyon,” Cici murmured, remembering the article she’d read years ago.

  “What’s that?” Anton’s voice was as low as hers.

  “Oh. Um.” Cici’s cheeks heated. “Chaco Canyon is ancient. I think I read the first hunters and gatherers settled in the area in 10,000 BC. There are over seventy settlements here, which means burial sites for all those people as well.”

  Anton stepped up beside her. He, too, shivered in his wet clothes. “You do tell the best ghost stories, my dear. Nothing like waiting till full dark and after we’ve been hunted down and held at gunpoint to set the mood.”

  “That’s your fault, not mine,” Cici said, but this time her tone lacked accusation. “There’s a story about a park ranger. He claims he walked up to a tall, naked man who’d stepped out of one of the pits. At twilight or just after dark.”

  “Naturally. Here at Hungo…whatever this place is called?”

  “I don’t remember the exact settlement, but my guess is not Hungo Pavi, mainly because there isn’t a kiva here. The kivas are the basic equivalent to the Chacoan church. Anyway, the ranger wanted to arrest the man for indecent exposure but when he got close, the naked man simply disappeared.”

  “Like…poof?” Anton snapped his fingers then shivered again. His gaze darted around, almost as if he expected the naked warrior to pop up next to them.

  “That’s the story,” Cici said. “There was another one, similar…something to do with fireflies but I can’t remember it now.”

  “Huh. Well, I can see why you’d think of it. According to you, we have your dead sister who is helping us and also potential spectral natives who may not be so friendly toward any outsider.”

  Cici pushed her drying hair off her cheek. “I don’t know if they’re friendly or not. The Chacoan dead, I mean. That’s who has to be here.”

  “And why must there be dead spirits here?”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?” Cici asked. “The supernatural?”

  Anton shook his head. “I’m surprised you do.”

  “I didn’t used to. Not until Aci…” Cici cleared her throat. Anton looked stricken, which didn’t make much sense. Cici tried to shift the topic away from whatever was bothering him. She picked at flailed bits of polyester that had once been nice hiking pants.

  “Like I said, they spent millennia in this area and were very protective of it and their way of life.” Cici shrugged. “Not unlike some of the more recent inhabitants of the state. Anyway, I guess it depends on whether or not you’ve been messing with the burial grounds and other artifacts.”

  Anton glared into the dark, his gaze foreboding. “That’s exactly what the Russians here have been doing.”

  14

  Cici

  Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.― Confucius

  “Oh, dear Lord in heaven. Mi dios sagrado.” Cici slipped into the Spanish used in the mass of her early childhood. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to release some of the tension that slammed into her body. “Did you take something?” Cici asked, her voice rising in accusation.

  The air around them turned colder, frostier than Cici had ever felt it—at least in conjunction with her sister. Both Cici and Anton shivered as it brushed against their wet clothes.

  He didn’t answer. Nor did he meet her eyes.

  “Put it back,” she hissed. “Seriously! You can’t take from a culture. It’s not yours and it’s messing with all that pent-up energy rolling through here. We need to be the good guys. So, put it back.”

  “One, you’re overreacting. Two…” He waved his hand. “This is not a good place to leave anything.”

  The wind picked up further. Anton’s scowl deepened as his eyes darted around the open mesa.

  “What did you take?” Cici demanded, hands on her hips.

  “I’m not sure it’s important. Or native to the area.”

  “What is it?” Cici asked. “Why would you do that?”

  She gritted her teeth and bit off the other questions hovering there. Anton, who was not Anton, would refuse to answer them.

  She was tired of being clueless. After all, she was as much a part of this cat-and-mouse shoot-her-up, bang-bang as Anton was. Maybe more so.

  “First off, no one said I took it. I took it back. And it was taken to do this—to stir up trouble,” Anton said.

  Cici ripped her mind from the scary daydream of Russians breaking into her church’s sanctuary with weapons blazing and refocused on Anton and his words.

  “With as many groups—apparently living and dead—as possible,” Anton concluded, his voice filled with a pain Cici couldn’t understand.

  Had Anton lost someone? And…his job was steeped in danger; he’d killed before. Maybe even
some other men in this group that was trying to kill both Cici and him now.

  She hadn’t been able to figure it out—why Anton hadn’t left her to her own devices. But when he killed those men near her car earlier, his eyes took on a hard glint that seemed to Cici to hint at revenge. The quick glance he’d thrown her way as that man held her hair flicked with concern and grief. That look of stark anguish when she’d spoken of her twin.

  Ergo, Cici concluded Anton worried she’d meet the same fate as a person he’d once cared about.

  Her heart stuttered. She clenched her fists. She could not go soft on him, not now, even if he might have lost someone he cared for and was being noble in some weird spy way by sticking by her during this ordeal. Cici needed answers—and a way to placate the thousands of years of ghosts that were not happy they were here.

  “That’s the group’s—their operative’s—whole purpose: to create chaos. Anarchy. In-fighting,” Cici said.

  Anton’s tone of voice when he answered, “Yes,” seemed to include a duh as he rolled his eyes. Cici bristled at his clear annoyance with her lack of understanding. Much as she wanted to bite back at him verbally, that wouldn’t solve their current predicament.

  Instead, she tried to look for a pragmatic option that might help them better their odds. Cici’s step stuttered. Wow. Why hadn’t she asked the most obvious of questions before now?

  “How many of these men are there?”

  “Russians in the country? No idea. On this particular team? I’ve been informed of twenty.”

  “Is that a normal number?” Cici asked. Anton killed three earlier at her car. Another two went under in the landslide, three more that Anton traded gunshots with before. The two with the puma…that still left way too many men. Ten of them, at least, who had the resources, possibly, to call in more. At a minimum, they had better equipment than Cici and Anton and the ability to spread out over the area. The only benefit Cici could see on their side was the vastness of the plateaus. And the fact that the Russians did not yet know Anton and Cici had no backup. As of yet.

  Just Cici’s dead sister and a whole bunch of seemingly unhappy Chacoan ghosts. At least, Cici assumed the spectral brethren were displeased based on the cold wind still buffeting Anton and Cici. She wrapped her arms tight around her middle and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.

  “The size of the lease helps to determine the number of workers called in to run it,” Anton said.

  His lips quivered. It seemed as if the wind was colder and stronger nearer him.

  “You’re talking oil.”

  Anton nodded.

  “How did an entire contingent of Russians end up here, in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico?”

  Anton glanced up at the clouds, squinting as though he could peer through the thick layer of ice and vapor, before changing direction again.

  “Good planning,” Anton said. “Having the right people in place for a long time.”

  “They’ve been planted here?”

  “Probably for years.”

  “Wow. That’s…really?”

  Anton raised an eyebrow as he glanced at her over his shoulder. “You think we don’t plan for the long game?” He dipped into a sarcastic bow. “Spying takes careful planning and logistics. And patience.”

  “So…some dudes wait around for a long time until it’s their turn? How do they finance these endeavors of planting spies for years?”

  Anton shrugged. “Through the form of one international currency or another.”

  Cici nibbled at her lower lip, trying to decipher Anton’s meaning. “Drugs,” she decided.

  Anton shot her a speculative gaze. “You may be wasted on this soul-saving business. Right in one. But also arms. Prostitutes. Really, we haven’t evolved much in the ten thousand years since the first peoples roamed these parts.”

  The wind died down, shocking Cici. That’s what caught their attention? Sex, drugs, and war. She made a disgruntled sound, but she also sighed as her muscles unclenched, allowing her to walk more normally.

  “Okay, so the world hasn’t changed much,” Cici said. “People in power use others, exploit their weaknesses, but I don’t understand what that has to do with oil leases in Chaco.”

  Anton swung his arms as if he, too, was trying to loosen the muscles that had tightened while the frigid wind blew over them.

  “Do you know why the oil leases didn’t go through?” he asked.

  This non sequitur perplexed her for a moment, until Cici realized it wasn’t a non sequitur. Anton led the conversation in the direction he wanted her mind to go—toward connections and conspiracies she had never considered.

  Oil leases. Chaco Canyon.

  She’d read something a while back, hadn’t she? She couldn’t remember. She nibbled at the corner of her lower lip and shook her head.

  “Yeah,” Anton said with a brief nod of his head. “Neither does anyone else. At least not publicly.”

  Cici slowed, gulping, as bits of the article came to her. “Didn’t one of the senators say something about protecting cultural and spiritual landmarks?”

  “He did.”

  “Why?” Cici asked.

  Anton shrugged. “If I had to guess? Because someone briefed his committee on the possibility of this type of situation.”

  Cici shoved her water straw into her mouth, pulling in a deep gulp of water to try to stave off the growing panic.

  “How long will this continue?” Cici asked. Fatigue weighted her shoulders and made everything in her body ache.

  “Until they’re dead, we’re dead, or someone can extract you.”

  “All for some artifact or whatever that…” Cici racked her mind, trying to come up with the correct terminology. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs is upset that the US Interior department stole?”

  Anton turned his head, eyes narrowed. His fingers drifted toward the gun in his front pocket. “How’d you get to that conclusion based on our earlier conversation?”

  15

  Sam

  Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.― Confucius

  Jeannette’s phone didn’t stop chiming or ringing the entire drive up to Cuba—the closest lodging and still a good seventy miles from the Chaco Canyon’s main park entrance. She spoke little to Sam, but he gleaned a good bit from her phone conversations, especially those with her boss.

  “Are you in over your head?” Sam asked as he pulled off NM 550 into the best of the three motels in the tiny village of about eight hundred people. Rural New Mexico was a time warp—one he didn’t see that often because of how busy he’d been over the past twenty months.

  From what Sam remembered, Cuba did have a couple of great Mexican restaurants and, to Sam’s knowledge, its biggest claim to fame remained the national Christmas tree that was harvested from the Santa Fe National Forest not far from the village and lit in Washington, DC.

  Other than that, the small, main street and 1950’s-style motels reminded Sam of about a million other small towns he’d driven through over the course of his life.

  Bone-weary as he was, he was too keyed up to consider lying down. Cici was out there. At best, she was scared out of her mind. At worst, she was already dead.

  Jeannette scowled and kept her arms crossed, unwilling to answer him. Sam kept his mouth shut, not wanting to tick her off more.

  “You hungry?” he asked instead.

  They’d skipped dinner, agreeing instead to drive straight to their motel. Even though it was before nine o’clock, only two of the restaurants nearby appeared open. Jeannette shook her head. Sam put the car in park, then he went into the motel’s lobby to collect their room keys.

  When he returned to his SUV, Jeannette was hunched over the phone, her face ghostly white. He slid inside with cautious movements, afraid to find out what could upset her like this. To this point, he’d never seen her exhibit any emotion but irritation. For the most part, Jeannette remained imperturbable. A great qual
ity in a DEA agent, but irritating in an intimate partner.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. Something cracked in his chest, spilling an ugly, noxious film over his stomach.

  “I found out who they are,” Jeannette stuttered.

  “Who what are?” A freezing hand slithered around his heart, squeezing with painful and consistent pressure. “The men we saw on the dark web up in Chaco? They’re Bratva…”

  “No, I mean yes. Sort of.” Jeannette’s lip quivered. “I mean, we knew some things…” She turned to face Sam, grabbing his wrist hard, her fingernails digging in. “I like Cici, Sam. A lot. I didn’t realize until we’d already been together…if you and I never dated…” She looked pained as she swallowed. “She and I could have been great friends. I would have…I would have liked to call Cici my friend.”

  Would have. No, Sam wouldn’t believe it based on Jeannette’s words. “Is Cici…” The word stuck in Sam’s throat. He couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t. Not until he saw her body with his own eyes.

  He struggled to breathe around the pain, sharper than knives, spearing into his heart.

  “She’s okay,” Jeannette answered, her voice still strained with unshed tears. Jeannette never broke down—sure, she became angry, surly, unhelpful, but she didn’t show fear, worry, or grief. Until now. “As far as we know,” Jeannette added.

  “Then what’s the problem?” Sam asked. His butt seemed glued to the seat, his legs dead weight that might never regain full mobility. “You’re acting weird.” Emotional. “I don’t like it.”

  That was an understatement, but Sam didn’t know what else to say.

  Jeannette dropped her phone into her lap and closed her eyes. “This group—the one following Cici—we’ve traced one of the men back using a photo. He’s KGB, Sam. We kind of figured that. But…” Jeannette exhaled in a thick, hard gust of air. “He’s more. Part of the trained assassin group. The elite team the Russian government brings in when it wants to be sure it cleans up any potential mess.”