Ashley’s hideout was more of a cave. But they arrived there an hour before dawn which meant Sawyer got to skip a painful death from the streaming sunlight. He used to look forward to the light, but not anymore.

  The rain had died off, but the air still hung with jungle sweat. Her bunker wasn’t much larger than a walk-in closet carved into a hillside. It was hidden beneath a tangle of vines and plywood which would have been completely invisible if Ashley hadn’t known it was precisely one hundred and seventy two steps off the bend of their trail. They then trudged down a ravine. Halfway up it was the safehouse.

  She pulled on the creaking door.

  Inside, the single room shelter was constructed using poured concrete walls. There was a desk, a cot, a bench, a salvaged mini fridge, and an ammo locker. Wiring fed along the ceiling and trailed outside to a couple of solar panels which she’d secured to the closest tree canopies and camouflaged with netting. The lights inside flickered sometimes.

  Sawyer and Cormac sat on the bench while Ashley took the office chair. While sitting, Sawyer spotted a second room, a little shower in the corner past a draped curtain. There was also a single folding chair beside a cooler stuffed with blood packs.

  “Cozy,” Cormac said. “Where do you keep the explosives?”

  “No room. In Panama, you learn to live small and low budget.”

  Sawyer took one of the blood packs. “Do you mind?” he asked Ashley.

  She shook her head, no.

  And so Sawyer drank.

  Cormac looked away and held his nose shut.

  “It doesn’t smell,” Ashley said.

  “And yet,” Cormac said. “I feel sick. At least you’re sucking on blood bags and not on my neck.”

  “Let him drink in peace,” she said. “Besides, you probably taste too much like sriracha sauce.”

  The taste of the blood was sweet and a little metallic. His body craved the blood like the protein shakes he used to drink every morning when he was human. Of course, he didn’t need those anymore. He only needed blood. He saw the way his brother looked at him, eyes glancing away as if he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Sawyer said, wiping his mouth. He tossed the emptied blood bag into the little trash can in the corner.

  Cormac raised his hands, surrendering. “You’re just awfully cool about being a blood sucker.”

  “You act like it’s my fault. Harland did this to me.”

  Cormac looked down at his feet. When he looked back up, his eyes grew a notch softer. “You’re right. I think Panama is messing with me. I just…dad always talked about this stuff but I rarely listened. I used to think it was all nonsense and myth.”

  “Well, I listened pretty closely,” Sawyer said, “Still, he wouldn’t let us in on everything and you know that. He built a wall around his work. There’s still a ton of information that we don’t know.”

  Ashley held out her hand.

  Knowing what she wanted, Sawyer grabbed the Black Ledger which he’d stuffed into his pocket. It felt smooth and worn in his grip, heavy and filled with secrets. He gave it to Ashley.

  “It’s time,” she said, taking it and peeling it open.

  Sawyer and Cormac leaned in closer so they could read every word over her shoulder. Like a tomb, the book creaked open.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Its pages were dense with writing. There was no title page or preface, or much context. There was just page after page of scrawled text, scribblings of etchings, symbols, ink blots, and thousands of rows of printed numbers. The text from his father’s pen shimmered in a certain way that gave the book an incredible darkness. Every other word was bold and important to his father. Which meant it was important to him. Some of it was handwritten while other parts were filled in with foreign occult symbols. Other sections were missing or torn. Much of what remained was written in some strange archaic form of Latin that he didn’t recognize or know the rules to.

  Ashley flipped the pages, skimming section after section, looking for something.

  She stopped on a page near the middle. “This is it. Look. Do you see that?”

  “I see a bunch of names and numbers,” Cormac said.

  “They’re case codes,” Ashley said. “The format matches what we use in the agency. Internal logs, probably links to operations or personnel. If we had the right database we could connect these to real cases. But right now…” She flipped through the remaining pages. “All we have is a map without roads. We need more information.”

  “And the Latin?” Sawyer asked.

  “Some of it’s ciphered and mixed with numerology. But the parts I can read?” She turned and pointed to a faded passage. “This section says the world’s top conglomerates didn’t just outcompete each other. Your father says they cheated. They invoked power from forces much older. He says BlackDiamond is one of the worst offenders…but there are others.”

  “What else does it say?” Cormac asked.

  “It says that BlackDiamond’s growth wasn’t luck. It wasn’t the result of fair mergers or patents. They used blood magic and ritual sacrifice to gain an edge.”

  Sawyer scoffed. “My father was chasing ghosts in the Fortune 500?”

  “No,” Ashley said. “He wasn’t chasing ghosts. He was hunting members of an ancient blood cult.”

  The silence sat heavy.

  She flipped more pages. There were hundreds of names. Each of them had a date, multiple case numbers, and strange markings that connected to ciphered information. Most of the names were unfamiliar, but a few of them stood out. He recognized the names of senators, generals, CEOs, and even a couple Supreme Court Justices.

  Cormac rubbed the back of his neck. “Is this real?”

  “The ledger is incomplete,” Ashley said. “But it was written by someone who knew the targets. Your father tracked every major corporate move and found occult patterns. Look here—” She tapped a heavily annotated margin. “—this is a passage about the Reapers. Your dad was investigating them, too.”

  Sawyer’s eyes narrowed.

  “The Reapers are part of the Black Choir, a secret unit of demonically manifested enforcers,” Ashley said. “It goes beyond the Reapers, though. Finnegan discovered their link to the Panama Canal and the Darién Gap.”

  “To what end?” Sawyer said.

  “We don’t know. But the book repeats the name over and over again.” She flipped to another dog-eared page and pointed to the name. “Harland Morrow. Your father suspected the same thing I did. Harland Morrow is a regional commander for BlackDiamond and operating with immunity in Panama.”

  Sawyer leaned closer. “Dad wrote this?”

  Ashley nodded. “Most of it, from what I can tell. He was trying to decode the BlackDiamond chain of command.”

  “What do you think happened to him?” Cormac said.

  “I don’t know,” Ashley said. “I know Finnegan Kestrel died two years ago from mysterious circumstances and was never found again. There’s no solid information, only dead ends.”

  “So you know as much as we do?” Cormac said.

  “Less, maybe,” Ashley said. “But I have a gut feeling he was silenced.”

  Sawyer flinched. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s a hunch. Nothing more.”

  Cormac took a slow breath. “He always said there were things he left unburied.”

  “Well…he didn’t bury this,” she said. “He found a way to pass this on to Colonel Bradford.”

  Sawyer leaned back. The bunker was quiet but you could still hear the jungle buzzing outside.

  Ashley looked between them. “If we can get access to the database for these case numbers…we can find real leads.”

  “Can’t your boys at the farm help us out?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe these case numbers connect to a CIA database, but if they do, I can’t risk the entire agency knowing about this. I have to dig more. As of now, I have no reason to believe that the agency has been compromised. But it is a possibility. If it came to that…”

  “...then we’re in deeper trouble than I ever imagined,” Sawyer completed.

  Ashley nodded.

  “So what happens now?” Cormac said.

  “We start with the names and leads that we have,” Ashley said. “We have one big name, Harland Morrow. If we come across a dead end, we can turn back to the book. If we’re lucky, we can eliminate every monster your father was hunting.”

  “That all?” Cormac said. “I’m lucky, but I’m not sure I’m at the level where I can survive another encounter with those Reapers. If that’s the sampler for the trouble we’re about to walk into…we’re going to need some help.”

  “Imagine if our luck turns sour,” Sawyer said.

  Ashley smiled thinly, then turned back to the book.