“I can try.” He kissed the top of her head. “If I can’t rouse Merc, I’ll reach out to Ash myself. Failing those two options, I can have Lautaro get her. He’s been all over Valle de Lágrimas. He’ll be able to help too. Go back to bed. Let me see what I can do.”
Summer nodded. She knew Sam needed to concentrate, but she wanted to be nearby to help Ash if she could, so she stayed out of sight in the hallway, waiting for Sam to go inside himself for his journey. After a moment, he came out of Merc’s room. Taking her hand, he led her to their room.
“What happened?” she asked, hurrying beside him.
“Nothing. I couldn’t get through to Merc, but I didn’t need to. He was already attending to Ash.”
Summer pulled her hand free and stopped walking. “Shouldn’t we stay near in case we’re needed?”
Sam smiled. “Merc doesn’t need our help for this. Let them have their time.”
“Will this set his healing back?”
Sam’s smile widened. He wrapped his arms around her, then bent, picked her up, and carried her to their room. “The opposite, I think. Guerre’s right. Ash may be just what Merc needs. He’s been lost a long time.”
Merc slowly became aware of his surroundings as if surfacing from a particularly deep sleep. This waking had been happening more frequently lately. At least, he thought it had. He wasn’t able to become fully conscious, due to Guerre’s chokehold on his mind. He had no way of knowing what day it was—or even if it was a different day than when they’d brought him home from Colombia.
In some ways, what Guerre was doing to him—yes, for his own health and wellbeing—made Merc think of his early days as a new mutant, when someone outside of himself had manipulated his body and mind, overriding his autonomic systems.
His mind drifted to the woman who’d come into his dream. Ashlyn. Slim, brunette, midnight-blue eyes, she was the opposite of his wife’s short height, round softness, and curly blond hair. Tina had had happy, trusting eyes. Not eyes like Ashlyn’s, with their complicated blend of excitement, fear, curiosity, and distrust.
It irritated Merc that it was Ashlyn’s dark eyes that came to his more clearly than his own wife’s. Every night since Tina’s death, he’d held his wife as his last thought, living with her once again in some memory. His wake-up routine repeated the same steps—pretending her heart was still beating, pretending the girls would come running into their room to wake Mum for breakfast.
Those memories were all that gave his life meaning. And Ashlyn had stolen that from him by inserting herself into his mind.
He thought he might hate her, or hate the Matchmaker for bringing her to him. That fiend had penetrated his dream to stand watching over his and Ashlyn’s first meeting.
The Matchmaker’s Curse said that the mutant would die if he couldn’t bring his heart mate into their mutant world. But if he did, it was the mutant’s heart mate who would die. Little did the fiend know that Merc was perfectly fine being the one to lose his life.
He’d just finished that thought when Summer came into his room. Merc could feel her fear and desperation for her friend.
Ashlyn.
Merc didn’t let Summer into his mind, and he didn’t try to punch through the barrier Guerre had around him, keeping him in a restful stasis. He let Summer’s emotion roll over him, through him, fighting its pull, but at last, it was his obligation to Liege and his woman that roused him to action.
Without giving any outward signs that he was surfacing from his coma, he sent himself on an astral trip back to Valle de Lágrimas. He had only to home in on Ash’s energy to find her in the jungle, where she was heading toward the death pits.
A rough road had been cut into the jungle, but the dense, low-hanging canopy made it seem far narrower than it was. True to the promise the group had made Ash, they kept her in the middle as they walked from a high field into the dark woods. Ash lifted her collar, admitting to herself that she wasn’t an intrepid jungle explorer. No, she was more the urban type of girl. All she could think of was the venomous reptiles, monster centipedes, and huge spiders. And la Tunda, of course, whatever the hell that was. Probably just a local legend to keep tourists like the five of them out of the jungle and away from the pits.
The trill of bugs grew louder the deeper into the bush they went. Now and then a cry from a monkey or some night raptor ripped into the night.
Larry and Bean had researched the location of the gravesite back at the hotel using satellite imagery. They calculated that the mass graves were about a mile into the woods. A mile. She was totally screwed if they had to turn tail and run. She’d been trying to memorize bits along the way, but the foliage all looked the same and roots that grew across the path were indistinguishable from one another.
At last, the group came to a stop. Ash almost bumped into Celia in front of her. She looked up to see the lights from their phones and flashlights sweep over a cavernous space that opened inside the jungle. They’d come to a wide clearing, and though it was open to light from the moon, it seemed blanketed in unnatural shadows.
“Damn,” Larry said, his voice hushed with awe. “You rolling, Bean?”
“Yeah. We’re live. Let’s walk around and get a feel for the place.”
Let’s don’t, Ash said to herself, but there was no stopping now. She turned her phone light toward the area of the three large trenches. Two were empty. One had a pile of something in the middle of it. Ash followed the others to get a closer look and realized there was a row of feet sticking out of the dirt layered on the heap. Lots of feet.
She recoiled in horror. The museum had said the mass graves had been cleared out and an effort was underway to identify the remains. Was that a lie perpetrated by the government? Or was the violence in this area ongoing, leaving new victims here? Tearing her gaze away, she shined her light on the two other pits.
“Oh my God. They’re looking at us,” Bean whispered as he held his camera on the other end of the mound of bodies in the first pit.
“It’s the portrait effect,” Celia said, coming even with him. “You know, when stationary eyes seem to follow you.”
“No, it’s not that,” Larry said. “Look. Their eyes are moving. They’re alive.”
“I don’t see it,” Celia persisted. “It’s just a trick of the light.”
“Whatever. Let’s do a challenge,” Larry suggested. “One of us needs to go into the pit and lie down.”
“There are bugs all over them.” May grimaced. “I’m not doing that.”
“Then go into one of the empty pits,” Bean said.
“You go,” Celia said.
Larry looked over at her. “We can’t. We’re filming.”
“Give Celia and me the cameras.” May held out her hand. “We’ll film you.”
A rustling sounded in the brush across the clearing, behind the graves. The guys lifted their cameras, trying to catch whatever it was.
“The Tunda, maybe,” May whispered.
“More likely, it’s the boys from town trying to scare us,” Celia grumbled.
Something about that last pit nagged at Ash. It was about the same size as the other two, long, wide, as deep as Bean was tall. She was struck by a world where so much death could exist without anyone to mourn such a huge loss of human life. She looked back at the first pit. Perhaps the government hadn’t gotten to it yet. Maybe they were doing things in stages so they didn’t overwhelm their forensic teams.