“Scavengers could have dragged the bones off somewhere. Scattered them,” El suggested.
Rain shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I doubt they’d have messed with one body and left the others.”
Elan frowned. “But why would anyone want a bunch of bones?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Might not have been bones. Depends when he was taken.”
“Why would anyone want a dead body, then?” Elan got up to fill his mug again. Rain decided that was her cue to get out before he passed out.
“No idea,” she told him as she rose to leave. “But I’m going to find out.”
“Yeah,” he saluted her, “you do that.”
She strode to the door, then turned and gave him a look. “I will.” She closed the door firmly behind her.
RAIN SHRUGGED OUT OF her jacket and flung it across the bed before sinking down onto the old club chair. On reflection, her own room was nearly as Spartan as El’s.
Oh, she’d tried to make the place comfortable, warm it up a bit, but it still had the hallmarks of a typical room in the compound: Cement walls, steel door, no windows, zero natural light. Even covering one wall with scenic pictures from an old calendar and hiding the ugly gray floor with what Padre Pedro called a “Persian rug” still couldn’t hide the reality that Sanctuary wasn’t really a home, but a fortress.
Rain liked to pick up things on her missions to decorate her quarters, things that spoke of a world she couldn’t remember. She’d only been three years old when the dragons came.
She’d found the calendar still hanging on the wall of an abandoned office building, flipped to the final page: December 2012. The picture had been a gorgeous scene of a giant tree decorated in colored lights surrounded by a sheet of ice where people dressed in bright clothes and happy smiles skated back and forth. Rain envied the simple joy of that picture.
She’d never been happy like that. Never skated before. Hell, she’d never even seen ice before.
Her pride and joy was a small bookshelf leaning haphazardly against the wall next to her chair. The bookshelf was crammed with every book and magazine she’d been able to salvage during her missions. Few had survived the fires that had raged across the world, so those she’d found were more precious than gold. At least to her. And Padre Pedro.
Rain smiled to herself a little as she pulled a small hardback off the shelves. There was a little black scorching along the spine, but the dark green cover was otherwise in pristine condition. She could still read the gold letters spelling out the title Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier. The most amazing thing of all was the date listed on the inside page: 1884. Imagine that. A book published over one hundred and fifty years ago.
It wasn’t the book she wanted, it was what lay hidden between its brittle pages. She carefully leafed through until she came to a page marked with a photograph. She tilted the photo to the light, a wistful smile hovering at the corners of her mouth.
She’d found the photo in another bunker hidden in a box under another pile of rubble. This one had held files. Files of long-dead heroes who’d fought in countless other wars. Wars that seemed so trivial and useless, such a waste of human life now that the dragons had come.
Stumbling across his file had been a minor miracle. A sign, Padre Pedro would say, though a sign of what exactly, she had no idea. All she really cared about was the photograph.
It was an official one, with him in his dress uniform against the background of the flag of the old United States of America. His eyes stared straight at the camera, not even a trace of a smile. Still, lack of smile couldn’t hide the delicious fullness of his mouth, the almost too-sharp cheekbones, the blue eyes rimmed in ink-black lashes, or the strong jaw line that barely saved him from being too pretty. Micah Caine had been one hell of a stunning man. Breathtaking, actually.
Rain heaved a sigh. She knew it was incredibly stupid mooning over a dead man. Heck, even if he would have survived the Wars, he’d have been over sixty years old. An old man. These days you were lucky if you made it to forty without turning into drag food.
She tucked the photo carefully between the pages of the book and slid it back on the shelf. Stupid. Stupid. She had wasted so many years of her life mooning over a man who’d been dead nearly as long as she’d been alive, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
She pulled the dog tags out of her jeans pocket and laid them gently on top the bookshelf. They glinted in the soft light from the lantern. Sutter would tease her mercilessly if he ever found out she was being such a sentimental idiot.
She kicked off her boots and propped her feet up on the well-worn footrest. She’d found it in a huge building belonging to someone called Ethan All. She didn’t know who Ethan All was, but she figured he wouldn’t mind since the building had obviously been abandoned for years. Not to mention, the man had owned an awful lot of furniture.
Her head told her to forget Micah Caine. The man had been dead over two and a half decades, after all. Her heart was another matter. Or maybe it was the thing Padre Pedro called intuition. Whatever it was called, it was screaming at her that something wasn’t right about the death of Micah Caine. There was more to be discovered.
But how? She couldn’t very well go bang on the door of the local Marine base and demand to know the truth of what happened all those years ago. They probably wouldn’t know anyway. Most of them were younger than she
