Chapter One
The Reservation
Same Time
Monday
Early A.M.
Don’t get her wrong. There was nothing like being on this side of the country. The hustle and bustle were definitely much slower, and that Elizabeth could appreciate. She could take time to smell the flowers.
While she missed DC, she liked seeing nature and being able to experience it at this time of the year. Summer was still on, and the greenery and flowers were beautiful.
Being on the rez afforded her the opportunity to get back to nature, as crazy as that sounded.
It was running time, and that was a daily necessity.
Truth be told, she was running to stay in shape while Ethan was at the cabin, getting ready to do his thing.
What was his ‘thing’?
Oh, well, that was easy.
As someone who wanted to pick up where Timothy left off, and Wyler skipped out, his ‘thing’ would be dream walking to help his father.
Apparently, the older Blackhawk wanted to talk to his deceased wife, Catherine, and as his eldest son, he promised to help him out.
Which was always shocking because Ethan and Wyler went together like oil and vinegar.
They clearly stayed separate.
They loved each other, but they tended not to mix due to a past that was rocky, and traumatic.
Still, he was planning on helping him.
Tomorrow, Ethan was going to be having a meeting with the new chief of the reservation.
Why was he doing that? Well, to pick up the mantle and do the job Timothy had done.
It was time for a Blackhawk to be Shaman again, and Ethan was that Blackhawk.
It was official.
He was taking that leap.
In the morning, Lance Running Wolf was meeting with him to discuss the idea that Ethan was willing to take the time, and dedicate himself to becoming Shaman.
Ethan was here to roost, and he wanted to give it a shot to do his grandfather proud.
Yes, she wanted that for him, and if her husband needed to do this, she’d support him one-hundred percent.
Did it make her life more difficult?
Absolutely.
Would she suck it up for her husband?
Absolutely.
As far as she was concerned, if Ethan needed to do this in order to feel whole, sign her, Gene, Callen, and Chris up.
That was their duty as partners.
They’d already moved their family to this side of the country, so that could be taken off of the ‘to-do’ list.
Move everyone west.
Take over at FBI West.
Try and survive.
Check.
Check.
Check.
She did feel bad for security. It was difficult on Ivan, who was now managing security at five locations. Someone deserved a raise. He was monitoring all of the major living spaces.
The new house build.
The DC house.
The Cabin.
The Castle.
Oh, and the monstrosity that Callen saddled them with in Damascus.
When she asked for a new house, so that they could manage the million and one problems that came with her family being out in the open, she hadn’t expected to have a gold baron’s mansion.
Yet, here she was.
She had a gold-baron’s mansion, and the name said it all. It was all kinds of tacky with the gold trim, and the flaunting of wealth that made her want to rally against that every second of the day.
It was icky, and she hated it.
Oh, but she kept that shit to herself.
Why?
Callen had outdone himself by getting the deal sealed in less than a day, to make the place theirs.
Really, and she wished he hadn’t.
Now, they were staying in this ornate mansion that was not her style. Elizabeth was pretty damn laid back, and there was too much tacky as shit ornate decorations all over the place.
It screamed beyond tacky, and something someone would like if they were out of their goddamn minds.
She.
Hated.
It.
The only things that saved the whole mess was that the yard was huge, the fence was high, and there was enough space for all of them—including her brother and his kids, Takoda, and his family.
If not for that, she would have burnt it down and danced around it.
Why?
It was haunted.
Everywhere she went in that filigree nightmare, she felt like she was being watched.
Oh, and there was no doubt she was.
When she spoke to her bestie, Tori Littlemoon, her friend told her don’t ask questions that she didn’t want to know the answer to, and that said it all.
When Tori said that, it was never good.
So, she didn’t ask, which made it a million times worse to know it was there.
Oh, Callen was in so much trouble for buying her a haunted mansion. He could have bought an apartment building, and they each could have had a space, but no.
They were sharing it with the dead.
Did she mention the small family cemetery attached to the grounds?
No?
There was a reason.
She liked her dead FAR from her when they were put in the ground. No one needed to take a walk in the yard and trip over a tombstone.
NO.
ONE.
Like her life wasn’t filled with enough creepy shit.
Now, when she was getting her rocks off with her men, something was making it a peep show.
Oh.
Hell.
No.
So, when Ethan wanted to be here as often as he could, and Wyler too, she was more than happy to tag along. She’d rather stay in the cabin on the rez instead of the house that greedy gold barons built.
Don’t get her wrong.
The reservation was haunted, but there were no dancing debutants turning on music at all hours of the night.
Imagine her horror as she went to get a snacky-snack after some sex, and walked by the ballroom, yes, the ballroom, and caught two people dancing from the corner of her eye.
What the hell?
And the music playing.
From what?
She had no goddamn clue, but waltzes at three in the morning were not her crazy, and never her rodeo.
PERIOD.
All she knew was this mausoleum of nightmares was going to be donated to some historical society as soon as they were the hell out of there.
Bet.
On.
It.
There was no way she was getting woken up to a waltz at the witching hour. There was no way she was getting tapped to take a spin around the ballroom.
Fuck no.
The creepy needed to stay in her day job, not her mom job. When Catherine asked if they could take the ghosts home…
Yeah, no.
She said no a lot of times in reference to that house.
She now slept between Ethan and Chris to ensure that if the dead decided to drag one of them away, she’d have time to whip her crucifix at it and run for the goddamn hills.
Sorry, Gene and Callen.
She wasn’t going to be the victim of a drive-by ghosting in her own bedroom.
At least when Trey had haunted her house, he was funny. He would tell her jokes on her phone. Dead dancing debutants were NOT funny in her world.
PASS.
So as soon as they were getting out of there, whenever that was, if they ever got out of there, the gilded menace was going, going…gone.
Trust and believe she wasn’t playing when it came to this either.
Not with those kinds of dead.
NOPE.
Oh, she tolerated a lot.
The windchimes from Timothy, and knowing the plaid menace, one-point-oh was around, sure. A haunted castle in Scotland where there was an ongoing mystery of who did the deed—the deed being homicide, sure.
Dead strangers were not on her bingo card for this year, or any of the next ten.
If she didn’t love that half-Native man as much as she did…her ass would be in DC in a non-haunted compound that was looking like it would never be called home.
And that sucked.
BIG-TIME.
Why?
Well, it felt fleeting.
Deep down, she suspected that they were never going back, and that saddened her a great deal. They had raised their kids there for a good chunk of their lives.
And she missed being a city girl.
She was a busy director, and didn’t have time for nonsense, but here she was.
Eyeball deep in it.
On top of being trapped in Damascus, Ethan had come to her and begged her to help him plan a wedding. He wanted to surprise Gene, and she always had their backs. Being married to multiple people meant doing quadruple duty more days than not.
It was laborious.
Planning a wedding from across the country was NOT easy.
Doing it without Gene getting wind of it…that was more difficult.
The man was her partner in the field, and she wasn’t quite sure how much longer she could hide the party planning under the guise of classified calls from DC.
At some point, he would catch on. He wasn’t exactly a newbie. The man had been a Fed, and then a Hunter, and was now a Fed again. He rolled as her partner, so he could see shit coming a mile away.
This was challenging at best.
Next weekend, they would be heading back home, and sneaking the kids back too, so she just had to hold on and get through this.
Fingers were crossed.
Oh, and she couldn’t drop the ball on this.
All she wanted was to be back in DC to smell the city air, and to remind herself that she was just doing this temporarily.
Yeah, she didn’t believe that.
Not.
At.
All.
This felt very LONG term.
What she’d noticed after they walked in after Ethan had told them he needed to stay was that her husband, the other raven, had found inner peace since coming back.
The bottom line was that he was thriving here.
Blackhawk was making his life here, and she knew there were only so many options. Her choices were limited.
It was break up the family and move half of them home, or take one for the team and stay here to the bitter end.
Well, she was wearing her big girl panties on this one. That was for sure.
All she could hope was this all worked out, or she was going to be holding court in FBI West until she retired in seventeen years.
Yay.
What she wanted to do was fix everything to make Ethan feel better, but she knew that was his journey, and not hers.
He was coming alive here, and it came down to her staying married, or giving him space.
This was a bad place to be.
Seriously.
Only, she didn’t complain out loud, so Ethan wouldn’t feel guilty for taking this for himself.
Mum was the word.
At least the kids were happy here, too.
There was that.