Once An Alpha (The S Files: Paranormal Investigation Agency – Book 1)

by McKenna, Callie

  “Agent Peyton? It’s Davey from the lab. We just finished up our analysis on the sample you sent us, and we’re sending through the full report now. Not much to say, though. It was definitely blood, and human blood at that, but it didn’t match the DNA samples we got from personal effects sent in by the families of the missing hikers. Could be anyone’s blood.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks anyway, Davey. Appreciate it,” I’d replied with a sigh before returning to my paperwork.

  And then for the second piece of bad news. The bears had been vindicated. After sending up another larger search team with experts called in from a wilderness society in Denver, there’d been zero evidence found of any grizzly bears in the area, let alone the hiker’s bodies or clothing fragments.

  Someone had posited a wild theory suggesting that maybe some black bears had gotten over their fear of humans and developed a taste for blood, but there wasn’t even any evidence that black bears had been in the area for months. In fact, the area seemed like a proper dead zone for animal activity. No animal tracks or scat samples were found in the near vicinity of the missing hiker’s campsite; not even a squirrel’s. Odd, but didn’t seem to be relevant.

  And then the third problem. Lyndon and I had tried to set up some interviews with townspeople, but they’d been of no help whatsoever. Some of them were nice, but the majority of them were rather standoffish and didn’t give us any information that we didn’t already know.

  Our case was going nowhere, despite our working twelve hour days on it.

  It was starting to affect our moods. Lyndon and I had still been practically joined at the waist for the last few days, and the sex wasn’t showing any signs of drying up anytime soon, but the stress and tension we were both feeling over the investigation was palpable. Director Armstrong had known it might take a while to solve the case, but I could have sworn I heard a tinge of disappointment in his voice when I’d called him to check in and told him we had nothing.

  Beyond that, I was starting to become one of those women I couldn’t stand. Creeping thoughts bothered me every so often concerning Lyndon. Where is this going? What am I to him? Just another conquest? I knew I shouldn’t be worrying based on the way he’d been treating me and speaking to me, but I couldn’t help it. We hadn’t exactly discussed it, and I’d started to get some sort of intuitive feeling that he was keeping something from me.

  After waking up to yet another sunny day, I sneaked out of the motel room, bought some takeout tea and coffee and then returned to wake Lyndon up.

  “Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” I said, tossing a pillow at him.

  “Yes, boss,” he grumbled, rubbing his eyes.

  “It’s Agent Peyton to you, remember?” I teased.

  He grinned. “So what’s the plan for today? More office time?”

  “Hmm. I don’t know. We do have to get through all those files eventually, but we need to change it up before we go completely insane.”

  We discussed it while we got dressed and ready for the day, and we decided on spending half the day in the office going through the old missing persons files again to see if anything jumped out at us upon a second viewing, and then the rest of the day hiking back up to the mountains to camp for the night. The way we figured it, whatever was happening to these people, it was happening at night, so as the lead investigators on the case, the least we could do is put ourselves in the same place and see what came of it.

  After reviewing the case files again, we headed back up the steep mountain trail, this time with a tent and sleeping bags in tow. I’d also stashed a bag of marshmallows in my backpack along with the other food we were bringing, because what could be better than toasting marshmallows over a campfire?

  On our way up the trail, we ran into an Australian couple who were also hiking and camping in the area. We stopped to have a chat, and I asked them if they had heard about the recent case.

  “Yeah, we have, but we’re pretty well equipped. Animals won’t attack us,” the tall blond man said. “And if they do, ehh. We’re kinda used to it, so we can deal with it. Back in Australia, there are about a million creatures that’ll try to kill you over breakfast if you aren’t too careful. We’ll be fine.”

  His partner giggled at his blasé attitude, and I hesitated, wanting to tell him there was no evidence thus far that animals were responsible for any of the missing people. But then they’d want to know what else it could be, and I had no answers. I went against my better judgment and told them, but didn’t let on that I was an agent investigating the case.

  “You know, I heard that they didn’t find anything to show it was animals attacking people out here,” I said. Lyndon gave me a side-eyed glanced and then nodded.

  “Yeah, I overheard some cops talkin’ about it at a bar last night,” he chimed in, playing along with me. “Could be anythin’, really. You should keep an eye out for yourselves.”

  The Australian couple’s faces crisscrossed with lines of confusion, but then they smiled. “We’ll be careful,” the man said. “Happy camping!”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  An hour later, we arrived not far from where the most recent vanished couple had camped, and a shiver went down my spine at the thought of sleeping in such close proximity to where it had happened. I also discovered that Lyndon was utterly useless at setting up a tent. Finally, something he wasn’t naturally good at!

  “Seriously?” I said, dramatically rolling my eyes at him as I tied ropes to the tent poles. It was just a little khaki-colored tent that didn’t require much effort, and I couldn’t believe he didn’t know how. “Didn’t you ever go camping as a kid?”

  He rubbed his temples. “Um, yeah, I did. We just never stayed in tents.”

  “What did you stay in then?” I asked curiously. “It isn’t camping if you booked a cabin in the woods or whatever.”

  He hesitated, then raised his hands in defeat. “Okay, I guess we didn’t go camping then.”

  Laughing, I showed him just how to tie the ropes to the poles, and an hour later it was starting to get dark. Lyndon lit a fire, and we hauled a fallen log over to it so that we had something to sit on. I collected sticks to put the marshmallows on just like we had done in my Girl Scout days, and Lyndon was disgusted as he watched me toast them over the leaping flames.

  “Couldn’t you use a skewer or something? Any animal could have pissed on those sticks. You expect me to kiss you now that you’re eating toasted marshmallows off them?”

  “Yes, yes I do,” I said, waving a marshmallow in his face. “Go on, try it…or else I’ll kiss you right now. Won’t even brush my teeth.”

  He grinned and tentatively slid his mouth over it, and he nodded a second later as he chewed up the sticky pink and white goodness. “Wow, this is actually good…wait…you hear that?”

  We froze in silence. I thought I’d heard something like a twig snapping, but it was so small I figured it was just a roaming animal. “It’s probably just a squirrel,” I whispered to him, but then I heard it again and wasn’t so sure. The earlier investigation hadn’t even come across a single squirrel, let alone any other animals in the area.

  “I’ll go have a look,” he whispered back to me, grabbing a torch from one of the backpacks.

  “Hey!” I said, my voice tinged with urgency. “Practically every single horror movie in the world begins with people stupidly splitting up after hearing strange noises in the night. I’m coming with you!

  “Fine, fine,” he said, turning his head over his shoulder and motioning for me to walk behind him.

  We carefully walked over to the west to where we had heard the sound coming from, keeping our footfall as light and evenly spaced as possible. A second later Lyndon’s torch light shone over a squirrel, and it stared up at us, twitching its cute little nose before dashing away and hiding in the underbrush.

  “Guess you were right,” Lyndon said. “Let’s head back. Hold on, do you see that?”

  “See what?” I asked, my heart pounding
. He stepped closer to me, concern etched into his features, and then suddenly he pounced.

  “This!” he shouted, grabbing me by the shoulders and pretending to shake me. I squealed and then roughly shoved him away, storming back to the campfire.

  “Hey, Myla…what’s wrong?” he asked, striding after me. “It was just a joke!”

  I turned around and jabbed him right in the chest, glaring up at him. “Yeah, exactly! A joke. You can’t take anything seriously! There are people still missing, and some disappeared so recently that there’s a chance they’re still out there alive. And you’re playing pranks?”

  He held up his hands. “Okay, okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. Just thought I’d try to lighten the mood a bit. You’ve seemed quite stressed the last few days.”

  I sighed and sat back down on the log, and he followed suit, slinging an arm around me. “Come on Myla, tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  “I just hate this. I hate everything that’s happening with this case. I like being able to construct some sort of rational explanation for things, but this… we just have nothing! It’s like we’ve been given a jigsaw puzzle to solve but with half the pieces missing. And I don’t want to leave my first case on this posting as a failure,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked. “Not every case gets solved. That’s just the way it is. You can’t beat yourself up over it too much.”

  “Yeah, but this is different! I can feel it. Something is not right here; it’s really like something is missing. It should be such a simple case, and when we had the bear theory, that seemed so plausible. But now? Nothing. Nada.”

  Lyndon hesitated for a second. “Well…maybe it’s time for you to start thinking about alternative theories. Like Armstrong said…keep an open mind. Consider a possible shifter presence in the area.”

  I turned my nose up at him. “Seriously? I was assigned to the S Files to prove that shifters and other paranormal things don’t exist. I guess as a foil to you, who clearly thinks they are real.”

  He stared silently at the campfire for a moment before continuing.

  “I’m just saying, maybe there are things we don’t know about yet, even scientists. Like how five hundred years ago they were all totally convinced that the world was flat.”

  “Actually, that’s a pretty common myth,” I interjected. “Five hundred years ago, they were well aware that the world was a sphere.”

  “Oh, shut up, brainiac. You know what I mean!” he replied, ruffling my hair. And I did. He was right. We didn’t know everything, so maybe it was time for me to accept that and start investigating more esoteric leads.

  “I guess I’m just…I feel really stupid right now,” I admitted. “Can’t seem to solve this case no matter how much I think about it. We’ve been through all those files a million times, and nothing jumps out. None of the people really had anything in common, so there’s no pattern to these disappearances if they are abductions. The only thing I can think of is that they were all fairly young, but that can be explained pretty easily – younger people are way more likely to go hiking than older people.”

  “You shouldn’t feel stupid,” Lyndon murmured, rubbing my shoulder blades with one hand. “Because if you’re stupid, then I must be a total idiot.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it’s you,” he replied, the campfire throwing shadows on his handsome stubble-lined features as he turned his face to mine. “You’re a genius. And you take charge. You know what you want and you go after it. Hell, I was a cop for six years before I even thought about joining the academy, and even then I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. But you…you always know exactly what you want and you go right out there and get it.”

  “So you don’t know exactly what you want?” I whispered, looking at him right in the eyes. A silent question lingered between us; the one I had really meant to ask. Do you know what you want from me? Firelight danced in his green irises, and he hesitated before leaning down and kissing my forehead and then looking back at me.

  “Myla, I…”

  He was cut off before he could say anything else by a strange sound that made my ears perk up and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It had almost sounded like a deep growl somewhere in the distance, but I had no idea what sort of creature could have made such a sound.

  “What the hell? Did you hear that?” I asked, frantically looking around to see if I could spot anything. “Please tell me this is another one of your jokes.”

  “It isn’t.” Lyndon shook his head. “Let me go look. Don’t come with me, though. Just stay here and guard the camp.”

  “No, we can’t do that! We can’t split up!” I replied, but it was too late. He’d already grabbed the torch and dashed off into the woods, and I called after him. “Lyndon!”

  It was no use; he was gone. I paced nervously around the campsite, wondering what was going on. Was he okay? Had he found anything? And what on earth was taking so long? I’d never been one to believe in any sort of religion, but when ten minutes had passed and he hadn’t returned, I found myself looking up at the sky and murmuring.

  “Oh god… please be okay, Lyndon. Please.”

  Another ten minutes later he came crashing back into our campsite, his brawny arms and the sides of his neck covered in scratches. I dashed over to him and threw my arms around him, almost sobbing with relief.

  “Lyndon! What happened out there? I thought…”

  I cut myself off. I didn’t know what exactly I’d thought, only that something terrible might have happened.

  “I’m fine,” he replied, brushing a loose strand of hair out of my eyes as he gently stroked my face.

  “Why are you all cut up?” I asked, motioning to the scratches.

  He shrugged. “Guess I wasn’t too careful about avoiding low-hanging branches. Anyway, I didn’t see much out there. I thought I heard voices and saw a light, so I followed the trail a bit further back the way we came in.”

  “And?”

  “And it was just that Australian couple from earlier. They’re camping not far from us.”

  “Oh.”

  I crawled into the tent, slightly placated now that Lyndon was back but still confused and frightened over the noise we’d heard. I wasn’t typically a paranoid kind of person, and I had definitely heard some sort of weird growling sound near our camp. Hadn’t I? I grumbled as I slid into my sleeping bag. This is what I hated the most about this case. Never before had anything made me doubt myself so much.

  Lyndon got into the sleeping bag next to me, and we lay in silence. It was the first night we hadn’t had sex since our little fling had started, but neither of us were in the mood. We were too caught up listening to the rustle of branches in the wind and the chirping crickets outside, all the while staying on alert for any other less-normal sounds.

  I finally fell asleep to the sound of Lyndon lying next to me, his heavy chest rising and falling with each breath. Somehow it comforted me, and for the first time in days I slept properly, with no crazy dreams or anything of the like clouding my exhausted mind.

  Chapter Seven

  Bzzt. Bzzt. Groggily, I leaned over, grabbed my vibrating cell phone and held it up to my ear. “This is Peyton.”

  “Myla, sounds like I woke you. Sorry. It’s Ted.”

  The masculine voice on the other end of the line sounded crackly, and I was surprised my cell phone even had any reception this far up in the mountains. Then again, Valerie Markovic’s missing daughter had managed to call her before she disappeared, so there must have been a cell phone tower somewhere within range.

  “What can I do for you, Ted?” I asked, glancing at my watch. Holy crap. It was already ten o’clock in the morning. Lyndon and I had passed out and slept like logs for almost twelve straight hours.

  “There’s been another one,” he replied. “A couple camping off the trail near here has gone. They were supposed to check back into their hotel early this morning to go on a wildlife tour east of here, but t
hey never showed up. Hotel called us and let us know.”

  “Maybe they changed their minds,” I said, hardly daring to believe that yet another lot of hikers could have vanished. On our watch, too.

  “That’s what we thought. After all, it does take a while to hike back down the mountain, so we figured they’d slept in and missed the check-in. But after what’s been going on recently, we didn’t want to take any chances. So we sent a team up there to check just in case.”

  “And?”

  “Their tent and all their belongings are there. But they are gone. We thought maybe they’d just wandered off somewhere, but we scoured the area. Nothing. They were camping near where you and Agent Lyndon said you’d be. Did you see or hear anything? It was an Aussie couple. Shane and Emma Tillbrook.”

  I sat bolt upright, almost dropping my phone as blood furiously pounded through my veins. “No way. We met them yesterday. Lyndon even wandered down to their campsite last night. They were right near us.”

  Ted paused. “Oh, jeez, Myla. I’m so sorry. But for your and Agent Lyndon’s safety, I think you should pack up and get back down here as soon as possible. We’re considering closing all hiking trails in the area until we’ve got this sorted. Four people in just two weeks…it’s not looking good for us.”

  I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Sure, Ted. Thanks for letting me know. We’ll get back down into town as soon as we can to help out.”

  “No problem. We’ve already got a team assembled to track the couple’s last movements. I suppose I’ll see you at the station later on. And Myla?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Please be careful.”

  I woke Lyndon and told him what had happened, and a dark expression clouded his handsome features. “Shit. Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No. We need to get back down to the office right now.”

  He shook his head and wiped the sleep from his eyes, and then we hurriedly packed the tent up and headed back down the trail towards Bakewell Springs. I was still somehow tired despite all the sleep I’d had, but there was no way I’d be able to rest again for quite some time. My heart was racing and yet somehow felt as if it had dropped all the way into my gut. We’d been so close to the Australian couple; only a fifteen minute hike away, and they’d vanished, just like that, at some stage in the middle of the night.