Forever Dark (Selena Raven FBI Suspense Thriller #1)

PROLOGUE

The night was dead. These were the nights when Sheriff Connor Chase enjoyed driving the most. Mid-week. No local drunks stumbling out of Roy’s Bar. No neighbors arguing bitterly over property lines. No mother going on at him about how he was forty and needed to settle down.

None of that. Just the quiet creaking of trees in the night breeze. For all intents and purposes, Eagleton, Harlan County, was a quiet grave until the sun came back in the morning, bringing with it the usual petty complaints and minor fracases Connor had come to negotiate with his eyes shut.

Turning onto Maple Drive, Connor moved the rearview mirror.

His deputy, Arnold, was always tinkering with the seat and the mirrors when he used the patrol car, and it drove Connor crazy.

For a moment, he caught a glimpse of his eyes.

He could see a few crow’s-feet at their edges, a slight blemish on his otherwise pleasing appearance.

Not that he would have thought that of himself.

“Forty,” he whispered. “How the hell did that happen?”

Maple Drive was blanketed in darkness, chattering insects the only sound accompanying the quiet growl of the car engine.

The radio on the dashboard crackled like scrunched paper.

Connor picked up the handset. “Chase.”

A woman’s voice came back warm and easy, softened by the hour. “How are you doing out there, Sheriff?”

A faint smile tugged at his mouth. “Are you checking up on me again, Cheryl?”

“Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t nodded off and ended up in a ditch somewhere.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, when you finally decide to take a break from all the excitement, I baked a cherry pie for the night shift. I’ll save you a slice.”

Connor glanced through the windshield at the road unfurling ahead of him, empty and black between the trees. “You trying to bribe the sheriff for favorable treatment?”

“Well, I am looking for a few nights off next month,” Cheryl said. “Did it work?”

A quiet laugh escaped him. “I’ll think about it. Thanks, Cheryl. I appreciate it.”

“I know you do. I make a good pie.”

“I meant checking in on me.”

“Of course you did.”

He shook his head, still smiling. Cheryl had a way of making the graveyard shift sound like a cozy kitchen conversation instead of a county job. But Connor knew he had to keep his distance. Professionalism was about the only thing he could hold onto these days.

“Night, Cheryl.”

“Night, Sheriff.”

The line clicked off, and Connor set the handset back in place.

Cheryl Tate had been on the phones long enough to know everybody’s rhythm.

She knew which deputy liked to act tougher after midnight, which volunteer firefighter needed things repeated twice, which old man in the county would report suspicious activity every time raccoons got into his bins.

She was divorced, sharp, steady under pressure, and she could make a room feel alive just by walking into it.

His mother loved her.

Not quietly, either.

Every time Connor mentioned Cheryl’s name, his mother got that look on her face. Hopeful. Calculating. Like she was three seconds from asking whether he’d finally come to his senses and realized there were still decent women in Harlan County.

He could hear her now in her old-fashioned ways.

She’s kind, Connor.

She’s got a job.

She can bake.

What more are you waiting for?

Maybe any sane man would have gone for somebody like Cheryl. A woman who understood the work. A woman close by. A woman who hadn’t blown through his life like weather.

Connor had his own rule about that. Work stayed work. Small towns had long memories, and departments in places like Eagleton ran on trust and habit. The wrong kind of relationship could sour both.

Besides, he’d been married once already.

That should have burned the lesson deep enough.

Fifteen years had passed since Selena Raven left him, and some part of him still measured time against it before she went. After she went, he hated that. Hated the weakness of it. Hated that her name could still rise in his mind without warning and leave a bruise behind.

Most days, he had things under control. That was the best way to keep those corrosive thoughts at bay.

He knew his routes. Knew the county. Knew the shape of his life and the weight of it. He had a house on the edge of town, a respectable job, a name people trusted, and a mother who still thought all of that meant there was plenty of time to settle down again.

Lately, though, the quiet in that house had started to press on him.

Not every night. Just enough.

A solitary unwashed plate in the sink. The television muttering to itself in the den. The bed with one side untouched. His life had become something orderly and dependable, which was good. He believed in orderliness. He had built himself around it.

Then forty had arrived and orderly started to look a little too much like a permanent vacancy or hole in his life.

Maybe this was it. Too many years behind him, the rest laid out in patrol miles and county fairs and tax disputes and dead batteries on freezing mornings. Good life. Honest life. Useful life.

A lonely one.

The thought irritated him enough that he shifted in his seat and adjusted his grip on the wheel. As he did so, he noticed something.

A light appeared ahead through the trees.

Connor narrowed his eyes.

St. Bartholomew’s sat beyond a low stone wall and a weed-choked yard, half-forgotten at the edge of Eagleton like something the town had meant to get back to and never had.

The old parish church had been abandoned for years.

Too damaged to repair without money nobody wanted to spend.

Too familiar to tear down. It represented many things to many people.

To Connor, it was the scene of a bad memory that played out long ago before he was married.

Most nights it was just a black shape with a steeple.

Tonight, a dull amber light burned high up in the tower.

Connor slowed.

At first, he thought it might be a trick of the angle, moonlight catching on broken glass. Then the light shifted slightly, not moving, but flickering in a way moonlight never would.

Someone was in there.

His hand went to the radio. “Dispatch, you there?”

Cheryl answered right away. “Go ahead.”

“You know of anybody working over at St. Bart’s tonight? Renovations, inspections, electrical, anything like that?”

A brief pause followed. He could picture her turning toward the board, scanning notes, pencil in hand. “No. Nothing I’ve heard. Why?”

Connor kept his eyes on the steeple. “There’s a light on in the tower.”

“That’s weird. I didn’t even know it had power.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Another pause, shorter this time. “Nobody called anything in. Father Wells has the keys, doesn’t he? Pretty sure he isn’t out there either. Last I heard he’s still staying with his sister in Pine County.”

Connor looked past the wall to the front doors. Even from the road he could see one standing open. “I’m going to check it out.”

“You want Arnold?”

“Not yet. I’m right here. It’s probably just some local kids scaring each other silly.”

“All right. I’m logging you there now.”

Connor turned the SUV through the open gate.

The headlights swept over the front of the church and turned it from silhouette into stone and shadow. Cracked steps. Rotten trim. Dark windows. Ivy climbing one side like it meant to finish the job weather had started.

He parked near the front steps and killed the engine. The quiet rushed in at once, broken quickly by the metallic ticking of the cooling motor, which sounded like chattering insects. Somewhere across the fields, a dog barked once, then stopped.

Connor sat for a moment with one hand on the wheel, looking at the church.

The place was wrong tonight.

Not just occupied. Wrong. He could feel it in his bones.

A strip of light spilled from the church over the threshold and onto the cracked stone of the entry. It looked warm, but it was not inviting.

He stepped out of the car.

Night air met him, carrying the smells of moss, soil, and the faint sweetness of cut grass from some nearby field. The church stood above him, taller and darker than it had looked from the road, the steeple cutting up into a sky with no stars visible through the clouds.

His hand instinctively settled on the butt of his gun.

“Sheriff’s department,” he called. “Anybody inside?”

No one answered. That somehow only increased the eerie feeling in the air.

Taking a deep breath, Connor climbed the steps.

The front doors were heavier than they looked, swollen with age, iron fittings furred with rust. One had been pulled open halfway. Connor looked through the gap. Just inside sat a row of glass-encased candles burning along the aisle.

His brow furrowed.

Not electric lanterns. Not flashlights. Candles.

Dozens of them.

The sight made something tighten low in his stomach. It bathed the interior of the church in, what felt to Connor, an occult light.

Tentatively, he crossed the threshold.

The church held the cold differently than outside. The air in there felt sealed up, stale and old, carrying damp wood, wax, and the faint, sharp smell of mold. Flashlight in one hand, Connor let his eyes adjust, keeping his hand on the weapon at his hip.

The pews stood in rows on either side of the aisle, most coated in a film of neglect. Dust. Droppings. Splintering varnish. But the aisle itself had been cleared. Fresh disturbance showed in the grime, a path through the years of neglect.

Boot marks.

More than one set.

Connor drew his gun. The sound of leather and metal seemed to scrape through the whole church.

“Father Wells?” he called, wondering if Cheryl had been wrong. His voice echoed up above to the unseen nooks and crannies of the old roof.

No answer.

He took another step in. Candlelight rippled against the walls, making the shadows shift across old hymn boards and cracked plaster. Near the altar stood more candles. Enough to light the front of the nave in a thin, trembling wash.