Circle of Fire (Damask Circle 1)

“So I heard.” Mack lit his cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully. “Find any clues yourself?”

“No.” As usual, the only sign of injury had been the small wound on the kid’s wrist—a cut so small it might have been missed. Only there wasn’t a drop of blood left in the child’s veins. But Mack knew that; he would have seen the same coroner’s reports that Jon had.

“Then why are you here?”

Why was Mack here? There was no such thing as a coincidence where the FBI agent was concerned. “Maybe I’m just taking a break.”

Mack exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Yeah. And I just might sprout wings and fly.”

His gaze narrowed. Had Mack been digging around? Though where he would look for such information, Jon couldn’t even begin to guess. It wasn’t the sort of thing kept in any official records he knew of.

“What can I do for you, Mack?”

“You know another kid went missing a week ago.”

Jon nodded. He wasn’t about to tell the big man about Maddie’s nephew. He had a feeling she didn’t want to get involved with cops—of any variety.

“Well, this time they’ve taken two.” Mack reached inside his jacket and pulled out a photo. “Have you seen this woman around?”

It was Maddie standing beside a lanky kid who could have easily been her son. Evan, obviously. She looked different, he thought, staring at the photo. It was Maddie as she should be. Happy and laughing. He studied it a moment longer, then handed the photo back to Mack. “Why do you expect me to know every pretty lady in the district?”

Mack smiled. A shark with a dental problem, Jon thought.

“The woman seemed to know about the disappearance before it happened, then went missing shortly after. The kid’s father is the local detective, and he’s raising a hell of a stink. He seems to think she knows more than she was telling. It just might be the break we’re looking for.”

Maddie was in deep trouble. And though it would have been easy to let Mack grab her and haul her in for questioning, it wasn’t fair. Not when she’d saved his life. He owed her more respect than that.

“What has all this got to do with me?” he asked casually.

Mack took a final puff on the cigarette, then threw it on the ground and crushed it under his heel. “I want to know what you know, Barnett.” His cold gaze fixed onto Jon’s. “We know you’ve recently started working on this case at the request of the parents of several missing kids. We know you work for the Damask Circle, a supposedly charitable, worldwide organization. Yet you, and others, curiously turn up to investigate the more bizarre police cases—and often get there before the police do. I want to know why you’re in Taurin Bay, and what you know about the kids that have gone missing.”

Jon smiled grimly. Mack had obviously been doing some research into the Circle. Professional, or personal curiosity? “I don’t know much.” And wasn’t that the damn truth!

“So tell me what you do have, then.”

He had nothing to lose by doing so. Besides, it was always better to keep on the FBI’s good side. Things got dangerous when you didn’t.

“Whoever is taking these kids is using them for some sort of ritual that’s performed on the night of the new moon. If we don’t find them before then, we won’t find them alive.”

“Why Taurin Bay?”

Because an old witch told me the evil was centered on this area—for now. But Mack was not likely to believe that Seline, the president of the Damask Circle, was anything more than the harmless old lady she appeared.

“The bodies of four of the kids currently missing have turned up in nearby areas,” Jon added. “The nick on the wrist, the lack of blood—it’s all exactly the same as the five that were found in California last year.” And the six in Nevada before that. Though the killers had been active in Oregon for close on six months, how long they’d remain here was anyone’s guess. But if history was anything to go by, they’d soon move their operations to another state. Which meant they had to be stopped soon. “Taurin Bay is the one thing all the recent disappearances have in common—they were all at school camps here sometime within the last year.”

“Interesting,” Mack drawled softly. “We’ve just found another body.”

Jon stood up straight. “One of the missing kids?”

The big man nodded. “Found him up on Saddle Mountain.”

The same area where Jon had been shot. “Which kid?”

“Samuels. The kid was only missing for a month.”

“What did the autopsy results say?”

Mack studied him for a moment, then drawled, “The state of decomposition suggests he’d been dead for about three weeks.”