Covert Evidence (50 page)

The moon came out and she found herself staring up into a face she knew. Her mouth opened in surprise, but his fingers encircled her throat and squeezed until all sound stopped coming out. She started to slip into unconsciousness.

“What do you see?” he asked, releasing the bruising pressure.

Horror and revulsion filled her until she blocked it all out. She couldn’t think about what was happening. About Jesse. About this man. Or the fact he was touching her like this. She wanted to live through it. She wanted to survive.

He kept asking what she could see, but her mind floated away. Her fingers inched through the sand and found Jesse’s leg. He was still warm, but she didn’t think he was alive. Tears filled her eyes, and she made herself think of running on the beach hand-in-hand with the boy she’d been secretly in love with for months. She dreamed about them sneaking innocent kisses and worrying about what their parents might say.

Her vision began to gray and tunnel as the monster peered right into her eyes as if looking for her very soul. All those years being warned about not talking to strangers, about being careful, about being safe…and all along they’d had a monster in their midst.

Cold Fear (Cold Justice Series, Book #4).

To read the first three chapters, download the *free sampler* available at all online retailers (links on Toni’s
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Read on for a sneak peek at Rachel Grant’s paranormal romance novella
Midnight Sun

A woman on the edge…

Museum collections specialist Sienna Aubrey is desperate. A prehistoric Iñupiat mask in her client’s collection is haunted, and it wants her to return it to Alaska…
now
. Tormented to her breaking point, she steals it. But when she arrives in the remote Alaskan village, the tribal representative refuses to take the troublesome mask off her hands. Even worse, the manipulative artifact pulls the infuriating man into her dream, during which she indulges in her most secret fantasies with him.

A man in search of the truth… 

Assistant US Attorney Rhys Vaughan came to the Arctic Circle to prove someone tried to murder his cousin. When Sienna shows up at his cousin’s office with the local tribe’s most sacred artifact, she becomes his prime suspect. Then the mask delivers him into Sienna’s hot, fantasy-laden dream, and his desire to investigate her takes an entirely different turn. 

An artifact seeking justice…

But the mask has an agenda, and it’s not to play matchmaker. If Sienna doesn’t do what the artifact wants, she may pay the ultimate price, and only Rhys can save her.

Chapter One

“T
his is the most insane thing I’ve ever done,” Sienna Aubrey muttered as she stared at the cold metal door. She balanced the heavy cedar box containing the stolen artifact on her hip, held her breath, and reached for the knob, silently asking the universe to make this one task easy.

As if anything about this reckless errand could be easy. Her flight had been late and her checked bag lost before she’d reached her layover in Anchorage. The rental car got a flat two miles from the airport, and the lug nuts had been machine tightened, making it nearly impossible to change the tire herself.

Now here she was, arriving at the tribal headquarters office long after close of business, and wonder of wonders, the knob turned. The door was unlocked.
At last
. Something had gone her way. It was crazy to hope the tribal cultural resources manager would still be in the office, but since she’d gone off the deep end and stolen the artifact from her client and flown to Alaska to return it to the tribe, hope was just one more slice of crazy on her overloaded plate.

The freight-elevator-size lobby was fitting for a small tribal headquarters in a tiny town in a massive state. She again wished this tribe were part of a larger corporation with offices in Anchorage or Juneau, but no such luck. This offshoot of the Iñupiat was hardly convenient. The Itqaklut Tribal Corporation, located on the remote north end of the Bering Straits, was as far off the beaten path as Sienna had ever traveled.

The lobby might be small, but it still had a directory, posted right next to a photo of the chief executive of the tribal corporation. Fourth on the list was the man she wanted to see: Tribal Cultural Resources Manager Chuck Vaughan, Suite 204. She climbed the narrow switchback staircase, her steps echoing in the silent building.

It was hard to imagine anyone was here. Why was the door unlocked? Maybe in Nowhere, Alaska, locks were unnecessary?

Halfway up the stairs, the cedar box seemed to… lighten. As if it could float from her hands. No. Not float away from her. It was
pulling
her, as it had been doing for the last two months, but this time the feeling didn’t have a malicious bent. The mask was happy.

I will make an appointment with a therapist as soon as I get back home to Washington. No excuses.

It would be easier if she truly thought she’d lost her grip on reality, but she didn’t. If she didn’t believe the mask had been communicating with her, she wouldn’t be here.

There were really only two options: either she was crazy, or the mask was possessed. Maybe haunted was the right word. All she knew was that if she stopped having nightmares, premonitions, and strange sensations after she handed off the artifact to Chuck Vaughan, then she, Sienna Aubrey, wasn’t crazy. Of course, proving her sanity meant she was a criminal who’d just tanked her career, but it was a small price to pay for a clean bill of mental health. Right?

A light shone behind the opaque glass door of suite 204.
Thank God.
She balanced the box on her hip again and turned the knob. The door slid open on silent hinges. No one sat at the front desk—not surprising given the lateness of the hour, but still disappointing.

“Hello?” she called out as she entered the vestibule.

No answer, but the suite lights were on, so she ventured down the short hall with doors on either side. Name plates marked each office, and she spotted Chuck Vaughan’s on the door at the end of the corridor—the corner office, as befitted the head of the department. The door was ajar, and a sliver of light spilled out.

“Mr. Vaughan?”

A thump sounded in the office, then the door opened wider, and a man peered out. “Yes?”

“Thank goodness you’re still here. I’m Sienna Aubrey. I emailed you last week?”

Confusion flashed on the man’s face, but he opened the door wider and waved his arm toward the opening, inviting her to enter. She stepped inside, ignoring the urge to shove the box into his hands as she passed him in the doorway.

She dropped into the visitor’s chair, holding the large box—which had barely fit in the overhead compartment on the plane—on her knees. He took the seat on the opposite side of the desk, saying nothing.

It was disconcerting, this silence, this utter lack of warmth as the man studied her with Paul Newman–blue eyes. Vaughan was a tribal member, but his light hair, vivid eyes, and the arch of his cheekbones reflected his Euro-American rather than Iñupiat ancestors.

He raised a brow in silent question. A man of few words.

She cleared her dry throat. “As I mentioned in my email, this mask,”—she tapped the box on her lap—“belongs to the Itqaklut tribe
—bal
corporation.” She stumbled, reminding herself that in Alaska, the legal entity was a corporation, not a tribe. “As a NAGPRA specialist, it’s my job to return it.” Forget the fact that she was skipping every protocol required by her profession, that Alaska Native Corporations no longer had standing under NAGPRA, and that she could never explain how she’d determined the mask belonged to
this specific
Bering Coast corporation. It was enough that the artwork was specific to the region. That, and the shaman who wore the mask hundreds of years ago had invaded her dreams and demanded she return it to the Itqaklut village. Repeatedly.

Sometimes the mask was even nice to her when it pummeled her with demands.

“NAGPRA?” the tribal cultural resources manager asked.

She furrowed her brow. What CRM officer didn’t know NAGPRA? He was the equivalent of a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer in the lower forty-eight. “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act—one of the primary US laws that drives your work and funds your office and my contracts?”

“Oh.
NAGPRA
. I thought you said NPR.”

Her jaw dropped. She didn’t believe him for a moment. Was he messing with her? She glanced at the dark streaks on her hands—from changing the tire—and wondered if she had similar streaks on her cheeks. She probably should have checked her appearance in the mirror before entering the building. Maybe she looked like a lunatic. Which, of course, she might be. But she really didn’t think so.

Good lord, she hoped she wasn’t crazy.

“No. Not National Public Radio.” She frowned. It was time to start over. “Did you receive my email?”

“Last week was rough. Refresh my memory?”

“My client is a small museum in Washington State, near Tacoma. I’m auditing their collection to identify artifacts subject to repatriation through NAGPRA and came across this mask.” She set the cedar box on the floor and unhooked the latch, then lifted out the heavy carved wooden Iñupiat mask. An orca motif, it represented both human and orca spirit, and had been painted with earth pigments including ochre and burnt sienna. She’d wondered more than once if her name had something to do with her strange connection to the artifact.

“There was some confusion as to its provenance,” she continued, “but my research indicates it belongs to your tribe. I mean, corporation. Er, village.” She shook her head to brush off the verbal stumble, thankful, at least, that her voice wasn’t shaking. No way could she let Chuck Vaughan see her nervousness. “As such, it’s my duty to return it.”

She set the mask on the man’s clear desktop, more than eager to let it go. Her fingers tingled every time she touched it. Not an unpleasant sensation, but still, unsettling. The cedar box was the only vessel she’d found that blocked the feeling.

From inside the box, she plucked the handwritten delivery receipt she’d drawn up during the flight and set it on the desk before the cultural resources manager. “If you’ll just sign here that you’ve received the mask, I’ll be on my way.”

He leaned back in his chair, a slow smile spreading across his face. For the first time, his eyes showed a hint of life, no longer an icy blue. It occurred to her that he was rather hot, something she hadn’t noticed in her flustered, eager-to-unload-the-artifact state.

“No,” he said.

The force of her heartbeat increased as her body flushed with adrenaline. He
had
to take the artifact. She’d risked her career for this, not to mention her sanity. If he didn’t take it, how would she get the nightmares to stop? She couldn’t go on like this. She doubted she’d last another day. “No?”

“No.”

The man conserved words like they were a finite resource. She found the trait irritating. “Why not?” Admittedly, the receipt was a cheap ploy to defend herself from prosecution should the museum claim she stole the artifact—
which she had
—and tried to sell it—
which she would never, ever do
. The cultural resource manager’s signature would at least show she’d returned the artifact to its rightful owner, and that no money had changed hands.

“You can’t just walk in here, drop off a priceless artifact, ask me to sign a release for it, and leave.”

Priceless?
Since when did tribal cultural resource managers think in terms of worth when it came to artifacts? Usually they assiduously avoided all references to monetary value when it came to artifacts of cultural heritage—
especially
artifacts subject to NAGPRA. And this mask almost certainly had been grave goods. Odds were, it had been buried with a powerful tribal leader—a shaman, who, Sienna believed, still inhabited the annoying relic. “Are you…” She wanted to say
kidding me?
but stopped herself and instead said, “Mr. Vaughan?” managing to erase all snark from her tone.