The dogs looked back every few seconds, their slow progress evidence of their reluctance. They paused at the bend for a hopeful few seconds, but when she didn’t call them back, they disappeared behind the pine trees.
With every step she took away from the forest, her chest grew tighter. By the time she got to the harbor, Snow’s sad howl pierced the quiet morning. She’d trained them not to bark or howl near the village in fear that the townspeople would come after them with their guns, but Snow was an intuitive dog. He knew this was forever.
Forcing herself not to think about it, she rushed to the jetty. The bigger boat Erwan kept there was one with a rope start that didn’t need a key. Every step was a step away from what she loved and a step closer to the unknown, to that world that didn’t exist to islanders. From that unacknowledged place, a sound ripped through the sky. Her hands grew clammy. Her head spun. It couldn’t be.
A helicopter.
She recognized the sound long before the aircraft rose from behind the trees of the island across the water.
Chapter 5
The helicopter made another circle over the ocean. From the passenger seat, Joss scanned the meager scattering of boats on the water through a pair of binoculars. His stomach twisted when they dipped. A headache pounded in his temples. Swallowing back bile, he scrubbed a hand over his face. The prick of his stubble reminded him he looked like he felt—like dog shit.
That was the price of drowning his memories in Calvados and waking up in a megalith site drenched in rain in the middle of the night. He could put his cock on the block that he’d also had the best sex of his life, except he could only remember bits and pieces—a tight little body, soft lips, sexy as sin moans, and a climax that just about fried his brain. He would’ve thought it all fragments of his drunken imagination if not for the evidence on his naked body.
He’d fucked a virgin.
Without a condom.
Fuck.
Unease tightened his chest when he tried to remember and failed again.
What kind of asshole fucked a woman, her first time no less, and couldn’t remember her face? What kind of man fucked a woman when he was on the verge of passing out drunk? In the state he’d been in, he shouldn’t have even kissed her. Maybe he’d been even worse of an asshole and been rough. Was that why the mystery woman had left him unconscious? Not that he’d deserved better. However a number or name would’ve been nice.
Determination hardened his jaw. He’d find her. With his professional resources, he could pull satellite footage to throw light on the identity of the woman, but that would mean Cain or someone higher up would get to watch the footage before releasing it. He couldn’t do that to whoever the woman was. That would make him a double douchebag. Anyway, resorting to such measures wasn’t an option. When whoever got to watch the recording realized he was squandering government resources for personal reasons, his request would be denied and he’d end up with a warning.
On top of everything, he’d lost his mother’s necklace, the only thing of hers he’d kept. He had to have hooked the necklace on a branch and broken the chain. He’d combed the site and retraced his steps, but to no avail. The memorabilia, a birthday gift he’d bought with the money he’d earned from working all summer in one of the many new age shops that littered the streets of their village, had been his mother’s most prized possession. Now it was lost. It was as if a cord to her memory had been cut.
He rubbed a palm over his chest where the weight of the pendant was absent. Not even a day back in his hometown and he was already fucking up. He grimaced. He shouldn’t have accepted this assignment. The memories were too much. But what choice did he have? It wasn’t as if he could turn down an order from Cain.
Refocusing his attention on the moving boats, he eliminated one after the other until Bono, the pilot, spoke into the mic in his ear.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” Joss said.
They were supposed to take the old fisherman, Erwan, and his granddaughter into custody—well, unofficially and off the record into custody, because their organization didn’t exist. Last night, while he was getting thrashed, the old man and his granddaughter had slipped through their fingers. When Maya had visited the cottage early this morning, she’d found it empty, as in abandoned empty.
“Shall I turn a couple more times?” Bono asked, giving him a sideways glance.
Joss nodded at the muscled man with the shiny skin the color of molasses who filled the pilot seat so effectively he crowded the cabin.
Bono threw a thumbs-up and tilted the heli left and down.
Joss turned the binoculars to the harbor. Someone was systematically burning down the whole damn village and it wasn’t a simple open-and-closed case of arson. His team didn’t operate on normal assignments. He headed a task force of investigators that specialized in unexplainable crime. The fact that they were called in to his birth town for the mysterious and deliberate destruction of properties left him clueless.
There was speculation about Clelia d’Ambois’s mother, but it was exactly that—only speculation. He recalled stories about the Japanese girl who had been abandoned by a trawler. It could’ve been nothing, just a bunch of superstitious fishermen blaming a dry spell and their own negligence on the girl. He never knew Katik. He was only four when she died. If she’d indeed possessed the ability the Japanese men had accused her of, she would’ve passed it on to her daughter. Those were mere guesses. There was nothing concrete. Besides, he’d always been keenly aware of the very young Clelia. If a supernatural force was at play, it wasn’t in her. He’d tasted her blood once, and he would’ve known if there was something in her DNA.
He’d been to every burnt house. There were no signs to point them in any direction, no clue as to how the fires had started. For all he knew, it could’ve been the devil himself setting the buildings alight with a pointed fork.
The whole damn mystery, including the one from last night, weighted him down. He should’ve point-blank refused the mission on the grounds of conflicting personal interests, but that would’ve raised questions about his past. If Cain knew how screwed up he really was, he’d send him on early retirement if not to a mental institution. He wouldn’t put elimination past Cain.
“We have a suspect in view,” Lann Dréan, the slender blond Russian with the golden eyes, said from the ground station into the mic.
Lann was the wizard-like aeromancist on the team, who had, only minutes ago, used his art, one of the seven forbidden by common law for four centuries, to clear the weather for the helicopter to take off. If Lann had spotted a suspect, it meant he’d picked up someone via their satellite tracking.
“I’m listening,” Joss said.
“At your twelve o’clock,” Lann replied. “She’s on the jetty.”
Joss turned his head in that direction. A woman wearing a blue rain jacket and red rubber boots stood at the top end of the quay.
“Got it,” Bono said. “Turning a hundred-and-eighty degrees. Shall I take this baby down, Joss?”
“Is there space to land?” Joss asked.
He didn’t feel like dropping down with the rope again like he had to in Cairo last week. He might just spill his guts over the pier.