Chapter Two – Carter

 

I’d stripped down to the waist after the first thirty minutes of chopping wood.

Swing, split the wood, place another log, swing, split the wood, place another log.

A rhythmic, natural beat to live your life by. Sunrise, sunset. Wax on, wax off. Simple.

I liked simple.

Winter was coming in faster than I’d expected, and I needed to start now if I wanted to be prepared for next year. I’d spent most of the summer clearing the dead falls from the property, hacking out underbrush, doing maintenance on everything.

This was really my first trip up here in a few months, though, and it showed. My teeth had been on edge the whole time I’d been stuck in St. Louis as we tried to piece together the remains of our agency, Full Moon Security, after our former boss Col. Harrington up and disappeared on us. The work had dropped off for a bit while the new director, Kris Cole, got her footing. But, she’d found it all right. We had more work than ever coming in, and I wasn’t living off savings anymore.

But, still, it had been all hands on deck while we responded to every client we could, and my monthly trips up here to my little one-room cabin had suffered because of it.

Mainly, I dealt with physical security. Celebrities come to town, a pop star goes on tour, some billionaire jackass wants to feel like a big shot: they call me. I go and make them feel secure. Which is pretty easy, considering it’s damn near impossible to feel insecure with someone my size around. And that’s before I go all beast mode.

Thankfully, my request for leave had been answered. Well, not leave, but vacation time. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to call it once you get back to civilian life? Time off?

Two weeks. Two sweet, blissful weeks of no bodyguard duty. No one potentially shooting at me. No one needing my saving. Just me, my cabin, and the woods around me. After all, winter was coming, and I needed to get the cabin into shape. Right now, that was as important as anything else in my life. Besides, it wasn’t like I had a woman around. No one to spend time with, no one else for the fire to keep warm.

That was good, though. I liked the solitude.

Thunk, chop, another log. Thunk, chop, another log.

When you chop wood, the world seems to disappear around you. Everything but the fact that you’re swinging a sharpened piece of steel attached to the end of a short pole ceases to matter. Because if you don’t focus on just the rhythm of what you’re doing, the simple actions of cleaving wood in twain, you’re liable to lose something important to you. At best, it’s just a piece of wood. Middle ground, you’re screwing up your ax. Worst? Well, I heal pretty fast due to my particular genetic heritage. But, a human might very well lose a foot.

Between swings, though, I kept hearing something. A soft chirping sound off in the corners of my perception. The first couple times, I just ignored it, stayed focused on the work. After all, I was surrounded by trees on all sides up here in the Ozarks. Wildlife in all forms was more common than people, even, and hearing a bird call was nothing unusual.

But I kept hearing it, and it kept bugging me, like there was a worm in my ear, and the bird’s beak was going after it instead of just its chirps. I planted the ax in the stump I’d been using as a base for chopping logs, wiped my forearm across my sweaty brow, and picked up my shirt. I swiped away some of the perspiration from my face and beard, and cocked my head to the side as I listened for the chirp again.

The cool wind blowing out of the west felt amazing on my sweat-beaded skin. Idly, I reached up, scratched my left shoulder on a phantom tingle. A tattoo I’d gotten when I was serving back in the Navy always seemed to give me a weird itch. Most people with tattoos that I knew never reported anything like that.

Who knows?

Maybe it was just the shifter blood running through my veins, and the weird healing factor for non-silver physical trauma that came with it. Oddly, though, even the other shifters with tattoos in my agency never experienced anything like I did. Maybe it was just because I was a bear.

There it was again! The little bird’s call. I pulled on my flannel and, still buttoning it up, headed off into the woods following the baby bird’s call. After a minute or two of searching, I came across it. I hunkered down next to the bird and gave him the once-over.

I wasn’t sure what kind of bird it was, to be honest. I’d never gotten much into the Audubon Society. But I could tell as he opened and closed his yellow beak up at me that the poor little gray and black guy hadn’t even lost his pin feathers yet. I also knew that, at this age, most baby birds on the ground like this had simply fallen from their parents’ nest, and the best way to help them was just to find their home and put them back.

That whole “parents being able to smell humans” thing? That’s a myth.

I felt for the little guy. I’d been nothing more than a cub when I’d been booted out on my own, too. In his case, it was probably by accident. In mine, it had been because Dad was a dick, and Mom was dead. He and I had never seen eye to eye on anything of consequence. He’d wanted me to play football; I’d wanted to focus on wood shop. He’d wanted me to join the Marines; I’d joined the Navy. So after a big falling out, I’d left a year before my service started and just lived with a friend of mine, biding my time till I could finally have three hots and a cot. I mean, I say I left, but the feeling was more mutual.

“Poor guy,” I said, straightening up and looking around for his nest. He didn’t look capable of flying, or really even walking. This late in the fall, I was wondering what kind of bird he might be. I’d always heard the birds and bees did their mating in spring.

There it was. Nestled into the crook of a low-hanging branch that had just begun to droop. The limb had actually been on my slate for pruning back in this area, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. Two little beaks sprouted up from the twigs that the parents had woven together into their little home, soundlessly mouthing for their mother’s meal of bugs and seeds and whatever else baby birds ate.

“Guess you lucked out,” I muttered. “Too busy to tear down your home, huh?”

I leaned down, gently scooped the fallen little bird into my hands, collecting a few inadvertent leaves along with him, and placed him back in the nest. “There you go, buddy,” I murmured, a grin spreading on my face as he settled into place with his siblings.

Another thing I didn’t have.

Which, believe me, was fine. The guys at Full Moon Security were my brothers by choice. And, at the end of the day, I was good with that.

With my new little friend settled back into his home, I turned and headed back towards my one-room cabin, and the wood chopping that still needed to get finished before the end of the day. The sun was hanging high in the air, but it had always been my experience that it would dip down behind the trees before you knew it was time. That’s the way the world worked, after all. Everything seemed to slip away before you were ready.

As I tramped back through the woods, the leaves crumbling under foot and the wind rustling through the skeleton-like fingers of the branches, something else came to me.

The crunch of dirt and branches under car tires.

I stopped in my tracks as my hand went down to my hip, where I normally carried my sidearm. Nothing. Dammit, I’d left it back in the cabin with my phone, figuring I wouldn’t need anything while I was chopping wood. I hadn’t been expecting anyone to come up here.

As the vehicle drew closer, I took off at a run, my heavy boots pounding the soil and dead leaves, pulverizing everything in my path as I made for the cabin’s side door. I hit the door in no time flat. If I hadn’t been perspiring already from the wood chopping, I wouldn’t have even broken a sweat. Inside my little one-room cabin, with just a bed, kitchen, comfy chair, and a small bathroom at the back, I snatched up my .45 from the side table and slammed my back against the frontward-facing wall, right next to where I’d leaned my pump action shotgun.

Breathing heavily, I ejected the magazine from the pistol, checked the ammunition, and slid it back home. After checking the safety, I tucked it down the back of my corduroys, and picked up the shotgun loaded with rock salt.

Odd choice, I know.

But I’d worked for years with the government, and not just as a SEAL in the Navy. After a few years of service in Special Forces, I was recruited by my boss Col. Harrington to work with something called the Paranormal Research Board. Silly name, but while working with them, I’d practically made a career of upsetting the kinds of people you didn’t want to upset. Upsetting the kinds of…things you probably shouldn’t upset. Ghosts, vampires, other shifters. For those last ones, rock salt and silver bullets were about as good as it got.

And the uninvited guests out front? Uninvited guests were never a good sign, especially when you lived two hours from your closest friend, and you’d made sure everything was squared away before you left town.

Outside, the car drew up in front, crunching rocks beneath its wheels as they came to a halt.

I swallowed hard, brought the shotgun up. I pumped it, racking a shell into the chamber, and took a deep breath.

Two car doors opened and closed.

“Can I help you?” I shouted.

“Grant?” shouted Kris Cole, the director for Full Moon Security. “Carter? It’s just me and Tabitha out here. Everything all right?”

I breathed a sigh of relief as I dropped the shotgun to my side and came around to the front door.

Kris Cole stood there at the driver’s side of her BMW, her long arms crossed in front of her as she looked at me with that piercing, dragon lady gaze of hers.

No, really. She was a dragon. A young one, from my understanding, but still a dragonkin shifter. She wore her office clothes like armor, with her flaming red hair pulled back in a tight bun, which told me she’d come straight here from Full Moon Security. If she hadn’t, she would’ve already been in her biker jacket and jeans.

Opposite her, on the passenger side, stood Tabitha McManus, our resident witch. Her long blonde hair hung loose to her shoulders, and she fixed me with that faintly inquisitive stare. All of us had come over from the Paranormal Research Board together and started Full Moon Security with our former boss Harrington, and I’d known both women for years. They were almost like sisters to me, at this point.

“Calling ahead too much to ask? I was about to drop both you and Tabitha here like a bad habit.”

“Good to see you, too,” Kris drawled.

Tabitha adjusted her cat’s eye glasses, pushing them back up the bridge of her nose. I could see the rings under her eyes and the puffiness of her eyelids behind the glass of her lenses. Someone looked like she’d had a late night.

“Told you we should have gotten a hold of him before we drove all the way out here, Kris.”

“Well, it’s not like we didn’t try calling first,” Kris replied. “But someone wasn’t picking up their phone, now were they?”

“Oh,” I said with a sniff. “Sorry about that, left my phone inside. Spent all afternoon chopping wood.”

“Yeah,” my boss said. “I can smell it.”

I frowned a little. I knew I was a little ripe. But so bad she could smell it all the way down at the car?

“The chopped wood, I mean.”

“Right.” I crossed my arms and leaned my sizable bulk against the frame of the cabin’s front door. “What brings you out here, anyways? Just looking for ways to ruin my vacation?””

“You could say that,” Kris said with a nod, her full lips pressed into an almost imperceptibly thin line. “Mind if we come up?”

“Might as well,” I replied, pushing off from the frame and straightening up. “Drove two hours to see me, so why the hell not?” I turned and headed into the cabin as, behind me, Kris and Tabitha started up from the car. I held the release button right behind the trigger, pumping the shells from the shotgun’s internal magazine. The five red casings flew out onto the cabin floor, and I set the gun aside.

As I was busy scooping up the discarded shells, my two female coworkers came walking in through the door behind me.

“Have a seat wherever you like,” I said, gesturing to the recliner and my small kitchen table with its one chair.

“Watch 300 a few too many times?” Kris asked as she looked around the room, her nose wrinkled.

“Little too spartan for your taste, then?”

“A little.”

“It’s not supposed to be pleasant or luxurious,” I said as I went over to a utility shelf I’d mounted to the wall. I pulled down a half-empty box of shotgun shells and put away the ones in my hand, saying, “It’s supposed to be an escape from the city. Free of distractions.”

“Figured you’d be up here hibernating,” Kris said from her spot at the kitchen table. “Not keeping a shotgun by your side.”

I sighed, shaking my head a little. “Hibernation? How’s a guy supposed to sleep all winter when his boss shows up at his door unannounced on his second day of vacation?” I turned back to them. “As for the shotgun, I’m sorry about that. You’re the first two people up beside Sam.”

“Figured,” Kris said. “You two are thick as thieves.”

I shrugged. Samuel Fitzgerald was another shifter at the agency, a wolf. Just like the rest of us, he’d been in the service and worked with the PRB till we all moved on to start Full Moon Security. He was the only one that really seemed to appreciate the woods and mountains of Missouri like I did. I liked the guy.

Of course, he hadn’t been around too much in the last month. Not since he’d brought home one of the sweetest women I’d met in a long time, Faith Riley. She’d helped him with a side job down in East Texas, where they’d hunted down a centuries-old vampire that had been ensconced in a small community since its inception.

I was happy for the guy, happy that he’d managed to find someone who could accept him for who he was. They were perfect for each other. Even went down there and helped him move her and her roommate out of the little ramshackle farmhouse they were living in. Of course, it meant I’d temporarily lost the one person willing to help me fix up the cabin.

“Coffee?” I asked, already pulling out a can of already ground coffee. Regardless if they wanted any, I certainly did.

“Sure,” Tabitha said.

“And, while it’s brewing,” Kris said, “we can get down to business.”

“Was wondering what would bring you up here.” I got out my metal percolator, began to fill it with water.

As I went through everything, Kris began to speak.

“I’m not sure how much Sam told you about his last job, the one down in Texas.”

“A little. Just that it was a vampire, how he did the job. The usual debriefings.”

“I’m sure you must have realized how different things have been since Col. Harrington left.”

“Understatement of the year award, right there.”

“Well,” Tabitha added in, “when Harrington left, he took something with him…”

“All of our contacts,” Kris finished. “He’d been the one bringing in all the information for our side jobs.”

I finished filling the percolator basket with ground coffee. “How’d we get Sam’s, then?” I looked to Tabitha, our resident witch, with a raised eyebrow. “You?”

Blank-faced, she shook her head. “Not quite.”

“Then who?”

Kris reached into her pocket and fished out a flip phone, one of the cheap ones you could find down at a gas station that was pre-loaded with minutes. We all had them, at least in our bug out bags, along with a supply of other useful and needed tools.

“What’s that?”

She shifted in her chair, seemingly uncomfortable. “Phone Sam and I found taped to the back of a bookshelf in Col. Harrington’s office at Full Moon.”

“And?” I asked, looking to Tabitha. “Clearly, that’s not all.”

“A woman called that phone, and Sam picked up. Gave him the lead directly,” Tabitha said. “I tracked the number back, and it just led to another burner.”

“She knew we used to work with the colonel,” Kris added. “What we do, now.”

I stopped, my mind following along with the implications of what she’d just said. I leaned back against the kitchen counter, crossing my arms as I swept my eyes over both women. “That means they have our files. Or they have someone who’s personally familiar with the PRB.”

“One thing’s for sure,” Kris said, “they know more about us than we know about them.”

Silence filled the room, a silence broken only by a pop of one of the pieces of wood as fire began to spread through it, and the whole pile shifted and settled in the belly of the stove.

The idea that someone out there might have our number, both figuratively and literally, was worrisome. I agreed with that part.

“But, you said she gave you intel that led to us bringing down a vampire that had practically enslaved a small town? Right?”

Kris shifted uncomfortably again, looked like she was about to say something, but instead thought better of it.

“Well?” I asked.

She shrugged and nodded.

“You’re not wrong,” Tabitha said as she got up from the recliner and came over to join us. “Which is part of the reason why we’re actually bringing this to you.” She set her own phone down on the table next to the burner, a recording program open on its screen.

“We got another call last night,” Kris said. “We’ve been switching off on watching it, and last night was Tabitha’s turn to phone-sit. She recorded the woman’s message.”

They both looked at me, as if they wanted, or needed, my permission to run down this rabbit hole. And I knew that from the moment they hit play, this was going to be a whole can of worms that wouldn’t ever go back inside.

What could I do, though? This was the reason I’d joined the PRB. To fight the supernatural. More importantly, it was the reason I helped form Full Moon Security when we left. The home front hadn’t had anyone focused on it. When we’d worked for the government, we’d only dealt with what could be termed “existential threats to national security.” A little vampire in east Texas, like what Sam had dealt with, wasn’t even a blip on the PRB’s radar.

And, for a little while at least, Full Moon had been like that. Do a corporate or physical security job here and there, use the money to fund a mission out to another state to track down and pacify a paranormal creature hurting people. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t like we were saving the world every other day. But it felt good.

When Harrington had left, though, things had changed. Those side jobs had dried up.

And I knew that the moment I listened to this recording, I was going to be chomping at the bit to get wherever I needed to be. To try and protect people from whatever was going on. To try and save at least one life from the danger it posed.

I sighed. “All right. Let’s do this.”

Kris nodded, her full lips still pressed into a grim line, her brow still furrowed. “Sure?”

I nodded.

Tabitha reached over, pressed the app’s play button on her phone screen.

“Hello?”

“Good evening,” a British woman’s voice said on the recording. Her enunciation was perfect. “Am I correct in assuming that this is Tabitha McManus?”

A pause. “Yes. This is she. May I ask who’s calling?”

“I have information regarding an ongoing incident in a town named Shamrock,” the woman replied, completely ignoring Tabitha’s question. In the background, there was some kind of noise, but it wasn’t loud enough to disrupt her voice or drown her out. “Does the phrase spontaneous human combustion mean anything to you?”

“It does.” On the recording, Tabitha took a deep breath before continuing. “But I’d still like to know—”

“People are in danger, Ms. McManus. Four people have died already, including a fire chief. It’s likely more will follow. Your knowing my name, or whom I work for, will do nothing to change those facts.”

Tabitha’s voice was louder, more frustrated, when she spoke on the recording again. “Now wait just one goddamned minute. I’m not telling anyone about this unless you tell me exactly who you work for. I need some—”

“Ms. McManus,” the British woman snapped, her voice exactly like a schoolteacher reprimanding a first grader, “that is quite enough. Now, look into Shamrock, and put a stop to whatever’s going on in that town. Before more people die.”

A second later, the line was empty.

“Well, shit,” Tabitha said on the recording, just before it stopped.

I glanced up at the blushing Tabitha as she reached forward and retrieved her phone.

“That’s it?” I asked. “Nothing else?”

“Well,” Tabitha said, going back over to the recliner. She bent over and retrieved a folder from her purse, then came back over, saying, “I stayed up all night putting this together.” She set it on the table in front of me.

I opened the folder, looked at the stack of printed-off news reports, and began to flip through them. They were threadbare, to say the least. Local reporting online wasn’t what it used to be.

“No major news outlets?” I asked, as I looked them over.

“Nope. Maybe it’s too strange for international news? Too tabloid?”

“Or someone squashed it,” Kris said. “You know they have people who can put a foot on any news executive’s neck.”

I nodded and continued to go through them, my eyes flying over each page as I tried to take in all the details. “Says they’re suspected gas leaks in all three cases.”

“Right,” Kris agreed. “That’s the official line. If you read the quotes from the witnesses, though, it’s classic SHC.”

“And, don’t forget, it’s not three cases, either,” Tabitha added. “There’s four. The fire chief went up in a separate incident at the scene of the third case. It’s getting lumped together as a mishap, but it doesn’t make sense.”

“What’re we thinking, then?” I asked.

Tabitha shrugged. “Most cases of SHC are actually normal. They do happen. Mostly overweight alcoholics or people who use sleeping pills—some source of ignition like a spark or a cigarette, and they go up and just don’t awaken during the fire. It’s called a wick effect, because the person’s clothes use their own body the way a candle wicks up the melted wax.”

I winced.

“Gruesome, I know, but perfectly natural, with a perfectly natural explanation.”

“And this definitely isn’t one of them, is it?”

“People don’t just burst into flames in public, Carter,” Kris said, shaking her head. “You know that as well as I do. There has to be a supernatural cause. Demonic possessions, pyrokinetics, poltergeist. Something.”

“And if the fire chief going up at the scene is any indication, it’s both getting worse, and spreading.”

“Whatever the cause is, though,” Kris continued, “we’re not going to find it by just looking around on the internet. We need boots on the ground.”

I drummed my fingers on the table as I sat there, listening to them both. I turned my attention back to the folder, flipping past the news reports until I reached a short collection of dossiers, all based on publicly available information.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Intel I could find on Shamrock first responders,” Tabitha said after glancing down at the folder. “Since a fire chief was a victim, I thought it might be worthwhile for you to know who worked for the city.”

I stopped when I got to one, my heart feeling like it had just gotten the order for a double-time march. Shoulder length chestnut hair, full lips, knowing gray eyes. And a look on her face that, despite her little upturned nose, told you she wasn’t going to take your shit, that guy’s shit, or that woman over there’s shit.

Lucy Skinner. Fire investigator.

Damn. She was beautiful.

“Want me to make contact with them, or something?” I asked, my eyes still on the little color printout.

“What?” Kris asked, making a face as I looked up at her. “Fuck, no. Why would you think I wanted you involved with the locals? You keep your head down, and stay the hell out of their way. Less contact you have with them, the better. You know Harrington’s rules.”

Just my luck. “Yeah,” I said. “I remember them. No innocents in the crossfire, keep local contact to a bare minimum. They ask questions, you lie and lie.”

“So?” Tabitha asked. “What do you think? Think you can help these people?”

I closed the folder, considering my options. Honestly, though, I didn’t see that I really had any. This was what I’d signed up for when I joined Full Moon Security. It was my calling.

“We could always give it to Ryder or Luke, or even Sam,” Kris said, her tone doubtful-sounding. “But we’ve already got them assigned.”

“And I’m on vacation, so why not just bother me?”

Kris made a face. “Look, I know getting the cabin ready is important to you.”

“Compared to this?” I asked. “No, it’s really not. The cabin can wait.” This could take me all winter, and the roof could cave in from the snowfall, for all I cared. Just as long as I saved one life, nothing else mattered. Period.

“So you’re in?” she asked with a sigh of a relief.

I nodded, an image of Lucy Skinner flashing unbidden before my eyes. “Yeah. I’m in. Let me grab a shower, and I’ll hit the road. You can see yourself out, right?”