Bright Dead Things (Bitter Legacies #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

There was a body in the woods.

Cillian didn’t know what to expect when he finally pulled off to the side of the dirt road and parked behind Mac’s truck.

He turned off the engine and picked up his wide-brimmed hat from the passenger seat, putting it on once he got out.

He left his rifle secured in the truck cab, but his duty-issued Glock was holstered to his belt.

Its presence was a comfort in the quiet of the forest.

At twenty-five, Cillian had always preferred the slow pace of the outdoors over the hustle and bustle of a city.

He’d grown up in Pelham, Massachusetts, busing to school in Amherst with his childhood best friend for years.

Small-town life was all Cillian had known before going to university to get a degree that would let him become a park ranger.

He liked Pelham better than Boston, liked the quiet and the seemingly endless stretch of forest he’d spent hours playing in during daylight hours as a kid, but never at night.

No one went into the forest at night if they could help it.

The Quabbin Reservoir was acres of wilderness surrounding a man-made body of water where the only recreation allowed was fishing, biking, and hiking in designated areas.

Because it served as drinking water for over two million people, swimming, boating, and anything that required an engine were prohibited.

Which meant the unfortunate hiker who’d died within the tree line hadn’t had an easy way to escape.

From what, Cillian didn’t know for sure.

“Over here,” Mac called out from where he stood beneath the shade of a white oak tree.

Cillian stepped off the dirt road into the sparse grass, the tread of his work boots catching on loose pebbles.

The black cloud of buzzing flies swarming over a body sprawled on the ground was impossible to miss.

Cillian could smell the decomposition in the air, like meat that had sat out in the sun for too long, spoiled and rotten.

“So it’s definitely a body, not a possible one like you radioed. ”

“Unfortunately,” Mac said with a grimace, looking at the corpse rather than at Cillian.

His graying brown hair was shaved close to his skull and mostly hidden beneath the wide-brimmed hat he wore.

His tan shirt with the ranger badge insignia patch sewn onto the left shirt sleeve, dark green pants, and black work boots that were good for hiking, was the same uniform Cillian wore.

Cillian’s hair wasn’t quite regulation, falling a little past his shoulders when it wasn’t tied back while on duty, but Mac had never complained.

Mac had been a park ranger for almost twenty-seven years now, having lived in Pelham most of his life.

He was older than Cillian, a good man, a great mentor, and a pillar of their small town’s community for as long as Cillian could remember.

Mac was rarely fazed by the calls they all found themselves on, but today, the most senior ranger in the Division of Water Supply Protection Rangers assigned to patrol the Quabbin Reservoir appeared tight-lipped and worried.

Cillian stopped a few feet from the corpse, knowing better than to get any closer.

He didn’t want to disturb the crime scene.

But no matter how far away he stood, Cillian knew he wouldn’t be able to get the image out of his mind of the ravaged body with its ripped-open torso and last bits of intestines and other organs hanging out from the cavity.

It was as if some vicious animal had clawed the man open and feasted on his insides.

Despite the sun overhead making the air heavy with summer heat, a chill ran through Cillian’s body. His teeth clacked together faintly for a moment, jaw twitching. “Was it a bear?”

Mac raised a hand to rub at his mouth, eyes on the body. “Best if it was.”

That wasn’t an answer. “Mac.”

“I had to call it in to the police. They’re sending a couple of patrolmen out to take over, but the county’s Crime Scene Unit and medical examiner are coming from outside Pelham. They won’t get here and be done with two crime scenes in time before sunset.”

Cillian jerked his head around. “Two? Where’s the other body?”

Mac finally raised his gaze and looked at him, something like grief in the older man’s eyes for a split second that disappeared so quickly Cillian questioned if he’d even seen it in the first place.

“This is Ray Carroll. Patrolmen went to his home after I called in my report. They found it ransacked and Juliana dead. I wanted to be the one to tell you. I’m sorry. ”

Cillian stepped forward without thinking, stopping only when Mac held out an arm to block him from getting any closer.

He stared at the body of his childhood best friend’s stepfather in disbelief.

He couldn’t see the man Ray had been in the ragged remains of his face, but Cillian recognized the gold Catholic saint medal the electrician had always worn.

Other details clawed their way through the shock, rattling through him, making it difficult to breathe, making it impossible to deny the bloody truth lying at his feet.

Ray Carroll had been Bran Gallagher’s stepfather since he was thirteen and Cillian fourteen.

Juliana Gallagher had married Ray but hadn’t taken his name, even after they had a daughter.

Cillian hadn’t much liked the man growing up because Bran hadn’t, but he’d never wish this kind of death on Ray.

He didn’t think even Bran would, and Cillian hadn’t seen Bran since the night before their high school graduation, when he’d ruined everything by pushing the younger boy away.

Seven years since that fateful night, and Cillian still thought about Bran.

Which meant, in that moment, he thought about Aisling as well.

“Where’s Aisling? What happened to her?” Cillian asked, forcing himself to work past the shock and focus on the job at hand, which was worrying about Bran’s younger sister. The thought that she might be dead as well made his stomach clench into a horrific little knot.

“She wasn’t in the house or on the property. The police are checking with the neighbors. If we can’t find signs of her, we’ll need to start a search. First places we’ll look will be the cabins.”

Cillian looked past Mac at the trees stretching deep into the forest and the shadows that existed beneath the leafy canopy.

It was instinctive to want to stare, but he knew better than to look for long and so jerked his gaze away from the trees.

“Why? You don’t really think the stories are true? That it’s the lights?”

Mac’s lips twisted up at one corner, the grimace looking as if it ached. “Is your iron secured?”

The answer was in the question, and Cillian could only put his hand in his pocket and pull out the small iron disk the size of a quarter he carried with him every hour of every day he was outside his home.

He forgot about it most of the time until moments like this.

Mac stared at it for a few seconds before nodding curtly, and Cillian returned it to his pocket.

Everyone who grew up in Pelham carried a bit of iron with them wherever they went, admonished by the older generations to do so.

Younger generations laughed off the stories that had been around as long as the town, but those who stayed never went without iron.

Even those rangers who didn’t call Pelham home but were in their division carried iron because Mac made it a mandate, always saying the forest might be beautiful, but it wasn’t kind.

Cillian had lived his entire life with those stories whispered as warnings by town folk, but had never seen anything that meant they were real.

Still, the unspoken threat was why Cillian didn’t leave Mac there alone on that dirt road, waiting with him until the patrolmen from the Pelham Police Department arrived.

They exchanged greetings with the pair closer to the road than the forest, with Mac offering up a brief verbal report to the senior patrolman, a man about a decade older than Mac.

“Hikers found Ray’s body when they were coming back from the trails,” Mac said.

“Two deaths on the same day,” the older patrolman said, staring at where the body lay in the tree line. The name on his badge read Wilson. “We’ll need to warn for bears.”

Cillian frowned, eyeing the forest. He’d been a kid the last time there was a bear attack, and his mother had kept him inside the entire summer. He hadn’t even been able to see Bran except for a few times when Juliana had dropped the younger boy off for a sleepover.

Mac only nodded at the patrolman’s statement.

“That’s the plan. I’ll have my rangers post signs at the area gates and begin outreach with people coming to the reservoir.

It’s been years since we’ve had to discourage people from coming out here.

We’re lucky the Fourth of July celebrations are over, but school is still out.

It’ll be tough to convince people to find somewhere else to go for their recreation. ”

“Better you than us.”

Mac snorted. “I’m not the one who needs to talk to the medical examiner about bear attacks.”

“The crime scene at the home is worse than this, from what I’ve heard, but the body looks the same as Ray’s. I don’t think it should be a problem.”

Mac flinched ever so slightly, but the patrolmen either didn’t notice or pretended otherwise.

Cillian noticed. Cillian knew Mac and his wife had been friends with Juliana and Ray.

As for Cillian, he was trying not to think about Bran’s mother being dead because that was a grief he couldn’t deal with right then.

His right hand started to itch, a faint burning sensation creeping across his palm. Cillian ignored it.