The Night is Forever

A Ghost Rider in the Sky?

What happened here, on a historic ranch outside Nashville, during the Civil War? And what’s happening now?

Olivia Gordon works at the Horse Farm, a facility that assists patients with mental and physical recovery; her specialty is animal therapy. She’s always loved her job, always felt safe…until now.

People are dying, starting with the facility’s founder, whose body is discovered in a ravine on the property—site of a massacre in 1862. And before every death, Liv sees a horse and rider, wearing a soldier’s garb, in the night sky…. Warning? Omen? Or clue?

Liv calls in her cousin Malachi and his Krewe, an FBI unit of paranormal investigators, to discover the truth. New Krewe member Dustin Blake knows they need Liv’s involvement in the case, yet he’s worried about her safety. Because he and Liv quickly become more than colleagues…and he doesn’t want to lose her to the endless night.

Praise for the novels of

New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham

“Graham deftly weaves elements of mystery, the paranormal and romance into a tight plot that will keep the reader guessing at the true nature of the killer’s evil.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Unseen

“Suspenseful and dark.…The transitions between past and present flow seamlessly, and the main characters are interesting.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Unseen

“A fast-paced story, involving history and ghost stories. Graham is skilled at creating intriguing, mature characters involved in challenging situations.”

—Lesa’s Book Critiques on The Unseen

“I am amazed at Graham’s ability to create a magical story that works so well in the present when part of the facts lie in the past. The Uninvited is a saucy romantic murder mystery with ghosts taking center stage.”

—Joyfully Reviewed

“The paranormal romantic mystery is exhilarating and fast-paced.”

—Genre Go Round on The Unspoken

“If you like mixing a bit of the creepy with a dash of sinister and spine-chilling reading with your romance, be sure to read Heather Graham’s latest.… Graham does a great job of blending just a bit of paranormal with real, human evil.”

—Miami Herald on Unhallowed Ground

“The paranormal elements are integral to the unrelentingly suspenseful plot, the characters are likable, the romance convincing.”

—Booklist on Ghost Walk

“Graham’s rich, balanced thriller sizzles with equal parts suspense, romance and the paranormal—all of it nail-biting.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Vision

“This book captivates its reader. [It’s] one the reader will not want to put down until finished.”

—Paranormal Haven on Let the Dead Sleep

The Night is Forever

Heather Graham

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dedicated with love to Al Perry—

for his patience—no matter what

we drag him into!

And especially for

Bryee-Annon Victoria Pozzessere,

my daughter, who first showed

me the wonders of Nashville

and Tennessee and introduced

me to something equally

wonderful—horse therapy.

Love you so much, baby!

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Excerpt

Prologue

There he was, Marcus Danby, dead in the ravine.

His eyes were open and he stared up at heaven. His limbs were twisted at odd angles, making him look like an image created by a mad artist.

“Marcus!” Olivia Gordon cried his name as she dismounted and swiftly scampered down the rocks to his side. Like an idiot, she hunkered down by him, touching him, speaking, praying that somehow he was still alive as he lay there.

But, of course, he wasn’t. She studied his face—weathered, worn, beautiful with character—and silent tears slid down her cheeks.

“Marcus,” she whispered, closing his eyes. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do—maybe the medical examiner needed to see him exactly as he’d been found. But she wasn’t leaving him now and she couldn’t bear to see his eyes open. He’d been staring up at the heavens, she thought. Staring up at the sky above him.

Ironically, the sky was exceptionally beautiful tonight. It was one of those twilights when the moon rose before the sun set completely, and as the sun continued its fall, sinking lower and lower into the horizon, a soft, opaque glow seemed to settle over the landscape. The hills here, just outside Nashville, Tennessee, appeared to be part of some kind of fairy-tale kingdom. Their rich shades of autumn—the gold, orange and crimson leaves on the trees—highlighted the emerald-green grasses. A slight coolness touched the air, making it clear and comfortable to breathe.

The sky and the landscape were what Marcus had seen as he died, Olivia reminded herself. It was why Marcus had loved this area so much, this place where he’d been born. Maybe there was something fitting in that, something poetic.

And yet... No question, Marcus had loved this countryside. He’d known it intimately. For that very reason, it seemed impossible that he’d fallen into this rocky ravine when he’d followed these same paths, on foot or on horseback, almost every day of his life.

Olivia heard Shiloh paw the ground. She looked up at her horse; he was obviously sensing her emotions, the change in her energy.

“Easy, boy, easy,” Olivia said softly. “We have to wait here.” Fresh tears stung her eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. She wanted to rise up and throw her arms around Shiloh’s neck, feel the warmth of this living creature.

That, she knew, would be life-affirming.

Like all the animals at the Horse Farm—the therapy center Marcus Danby had founded and where Olivia worked—Shiloh was a rescue horse. Near starvation, he’d been found in the Florida Redlands. Animal activists from the state had arranged his transport to the Nashville area and there was something about him that had made him special to Olivia from the first time she’d seen him. He’d been a pile of bones, wild and terrified of people; he’d tried, more than once, to run her into a building to get her off his back. While the focus of the Horse Farm was teaching people to trust again—through their relationships with animals—Shiloh was, to Olivia, one of her best success stories.

Marcus had always told her that what she’d done with Shiloh was impressive, but what she managed with people was equally beautiful.

“Oh, Marcus, what did you do?” she whispered. He’d probably been missing long before any of them realized he was gone, because Marcus kept no set hours, didn’t see patients and came and went as he chose. He’d founded the Horse Farm; it was his passion and his life. But while he loved to make sudden appearances and engage with patients, he did so in his own time and on his own terms. He’d been a wreck of a man himself—bipolar, an addict, homeless and an ex-con—when he’d found a horse on the small farm he’d, for some reason, been left through a family inheritance. Like Shiloh, the animal had been starved and beaten by a cruel master and was terrified. In earning the horse’s trust and love, Marcus had learned to care about himself. He’d told Olivia once that he’d been so afraid something horrible would happen to the horse without him, he’d become determined to live.

In saving that horse, Marcus had saved himself. It wasn’t that he hadn’t grown up around animals; he had. His father had raised some of the finest racing horses in Tennessee. Maybe because he’d had money as a child, Marcus had known that happiness had nothing to do with wealth. When he inherited the family land, he had no interest in racehorses. He cared about people—damaged people. He’d been miraculously fixed by a horse and he went on to find out how to help others in the same way.

Olivia adored Marcus.

Had adored him, she told herself. No, she did adore him. All that he’d been and all that he’d taught her would stay with her forever.

He’d lived in a small house on the property, about a quarter mile from the stables, and the staff at the Horse Farm only knew he was gone because Sammy, his golden retriever—another rescue animal—had come to the stables, wet, tail between his legs, anxious. He’d been limping because he’d managed to gash his left leg quite badly.

Aaron Bentley, managing director of the Horse Farm, had tried to believe that Marcus had driven somewhere and Sammy had hurt himself trying to catch up with him.

But Marcus hadn’t driven anywhere—not on his own, anyway. His old Ford pickup was still in the driveway. And Olivia knew Marcus would’ve died before allowing any harm to come to his beloved Sammy.

So they’d all become extremely worried. Aaron had called in the local authorities and they’d set up a search; Olivia had the backwoods acreage, while others had been assigned the pond area, the pastures and the adjoining farms, businesses and residences.

They had now been out searching for hours in their designated areas. She and Aaron, plus the other two therapists from the Horse Farm—Mason Garlano and Mariah Naughton. As well, the stable bosses, Drew Dicksen and Sydney Roux, had joined the search. And so had Deputy Sheriff Vine and his partner, Jimmy Callahan. Only Sandra Cheever—known as Mama Cheever—the house manager for the offices, had remained behind. There were miles of pastureland and forest out there—enough to keep them riding and searching for many more hours. But dusk seemed to be coming on fast.

Twilight. Twilight in these hills.

A dangerous time up here—if you didn’t know your way.

But Marcus hadn’t fallen in the twilight. He’d had his accident, if accident it was, in the brightness of day....

He was cold now, stone cold. Olivia didn’t have many skills in forensics, but she was certain that he’d been here for some time. He hadn’t fallen in the dusk—a time when a tourist might become disoriented among the rolling hills, forested slopes and rocky dips.

This time of day frightened many people here. Kids told scary tales over campfires about the Civil War soldiers who continued to haunt the rugged terrain. Marcus had loved the legends; he’d once told her with a wink that the soldiers were his friends. In fact, he’d confided that Brigadier General Rufus Cunningham had been a big help when he’d decided to clean up—but he’d hoped his conversations with the long-dead man might cease once he was off the rum and heroin.

She was down in a ravine with a dead man who’d been a mentor to her, and it was getting dark. This wasn’t the time to mourn him. Only a few minutes had ticked by since she’d found him. There was no point in wishing him alive. Death was unmistakable.

She dug into her pocket for her cell phone, praying it would work. Satellite communication here wasn’t always the best.

But she called Aaron and he answered on the second ring. She got the words out, hard as they were, and told him she’d found Marcus, explaining that he appeared to have fallen.

“CPR. Do artificial respiration,” Aaron said urgently.

Olivia looked at Marcus. She had truly loved the man.

He was dead. He was cold; he was gone.

There was no way she was attempting artificial respiration.

“He’s dead, Aaron.”

“You can’t be sure!”

“Aaron, I’m sure. I am not trying artificial respiration. Get the officers to this location. Please.”

She hung up. And then she waited.

Full darkness was coming, and coming soon. She felt that she had to keep her hand on Marcus’s shoulder, that she had to be there with him. She hated that he’d been alone when he died.

She hated that she was alone now and that the last mauve of twilight was turning to gray and would soon become black.

She always rode with a flashlight, but it was at the top of the ravine in the bag she’d attached to her saddle.

She looked up as Shiloh whinnied. The horse pranced nervously.

“Don’t you leave me, boy!” she called to him. “It’s all right—”

She broke off in midsentence.

She hadn’t actually grown up here—not right here, about twenty miles west of Nashville off I-40—but she’d grown up in the city. She’d often come out to her uncle’s small ranch during her lifetime. She knew the legends of the area.

Many times, on foggy nights, she’d imagined that she’d seen them and seen him. In the mists that covered the hills, she’d seen the Rebel soldiers, cast from Nashville in 1862, trying to fight their way back, retreating in the darkness of night. She’d imagined the bloodstained battlefields; she’d heard the cries of wounded and dying soldiers.

She’d imagined seeing Brigadier General Rufus Cunningham, tall and straight and ever sorrowful at the death toll of the war as he watched his threadbare and beaten men ride by.

But she’d never seen him so damned clearly.

There, just above her, his white warhorse, Loki, stood feet from her own nervous Shiloh. The general stared down at her with sorrow and concern. He looked around as if he’d appointed himself her guardian.

For a moment, she almost felt there was something malignant nearby, some evil that crept toward her in the night.... Was that why the general was there? To protect her?

Then she felt as if a cold wind settled near her. She felt something...like a touch on her shoulder.

She turned.

There was Marcus Danby. Watching her.

She blinked; she looked down.

Marcus was dead on the ground before her.

Ghosts.

Her family was known for eccentricity, for seeing things, for knowing when it was going to rain, for a sense of foreboding when there was danger.

Her family!

Not her!

And she was looking up at a Civil War general and turning to see that the dead man before her was touching her shoulder from behind....

She’d never thought of herself as a coward.

But she was!

“Liv,” Marcus said. “Liv...I’m dead. Help me. I didn’t slide back into drugs—I didn’t! And it wasn’t an accident. I was killed, Liv. It was murder. Help me!”

A strangled-sounding scream escaped her lips; she heard that much.

Then she keeled over on top of Marcus Danby’s body in a dead faint.

1

The meeting Dustin Blake had been asked to attend was being held at the General Bixby Tavern, just off the I-95 South exit in northern Virginia.

Dustin knew it well. He’d often stopped there when he was a kid and his parents had taken him to D.C.—a place they’d both loved. Being historians, they would have lived at the Smithsonian if they could. At the time, he’d thought that the tavern’s owners had hired an actor to portray General Bixby. Bixby had been kind to him and full of information.

Dustin remembered being humiliated and hurt, as only a kid could be, when he’d discovered that there was no actor and his parents were concerned about his invention of imaginary friends. Then, of course, he’d disturbed them both by knowing things only the general—or a much older person, and an expert on the Civil War—would know.

That had led to a number of sessions with a psychiatrist.

Dustin had then made the sage decision to agree that General Bixby was an imaginary friend. That had brought about deep thought on the part of his parents—and it had also brought about his sister. His extremely academic parents had worried that an only child might be given to such flights of fancy because he was lonely. So they’d set forth to add to their family.

That was all right. He loved his sister.

He pulled off the interstate and took an exit that led nowhere except Old Tavern Road. Soon he pulled his black SUV into the lot at the tavern and parked. For a moment, he sat and stared at the building.

What was now the General Bixby Tavern had actually been built during the American Revolution and been called the Wayfarer’s Inn. During the Civil War, it had been renamed for the gallant Union general—the kind “imaginary friend” who had, while he was alive, braved heavy artillery to save both Union and Confederate soldiers. This was when a fire had broken out in the nearby forest. While many a leader might have sat atop his horse far from the carnage, Bixby had ridden right into the inferno. Wounded after dragging at least twenty injured men from the disaster, he’d been brought to the tavern where he’d died, pleading that the nation settle its differences and find peace.

He really was a fine old gentleman. Dustin knew that well.

He exited the car and headed up the old wooden steps to the broad porch that wrapped around the tavern. This many years later, the tavern was still basically in the wilderness—the closest town being Fredericksburg. Winter was approaching and there was a little coolness in the air, heightened by the thickness of the woods around them. Only its historic importance, and the plethora of “ghost hunters,” kept it from falling into ruin.

When Dustin stepped inside the dim tavern, he blinked at the change of light. He wondered instantly if the meeting had been planned so he’d have a few seconds of disorientation—a time during which he might be observed and not observe in return.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw General Bixby seated at the bar. The general nodded gravely at Dustin, indicating a group across the room.

Dustin nodded in return, then moved toward the others. He saw David Caswell stand; he’d been sitting at a corner booth. Caswell wasn’t alone. There were two other men with him. One was dark-haired with Native American ancestry apparent in a strong face. The other was light-skinned and light-haired. When they, too, stood to meet him, he saw that they were both tall and fit. And both were wearing casual suits. Not the usual feds—if that was what they were.

“Dustin!” David Caswell said. The pleasure of his greeting seemed sincere.

“Good to see you,” Dustin greeted David, shaking his hand. He glanced at the other two men and waited.

“I’d like you to meet Jackson Crow and Malachi Gordon,” David turned. “Jackson, Malachi, Special Agent Dustin Blake. When I first started with the police force in Savannah, Dustin and I were partners. He’s the best—and rare in his abilities.”

“Thank you for coming,” Jackson said.

The men took their seats again. They studied him, and he returned their stare.

So the dark-haired man was the famous—or infamous—Jackson Crow.

“How do you like being with the feds, Mr. Blake?” Crow asked him.

“How do I like it? Just fine,” Dustin said. And it was fine. He wasn’t sure what he felt about being there today, however. There’d been a time when he’d wanted nothing more than to be assigned to one of Crow’s “special” units. Now...he wasn’t so sure.

In all honesty—and he didn’t know if it was simply self-assurance or something less commendable—he’d expected to receive a good assignment when he’d graduated from the academy. Whatever that might be. And he’d gotten a good assignment. He worked with a group of four consultants sent on diverse cases when violent crime crossed state lines.

“You enjoy working with your team?” Crow asked. Was it just a polite question?

“Yeah, I do. My coworkers are good, savvy, personable and experienced. I work with one guy, Grant Shelby, who’s six foot seven, nearly three hundred pounds of lean, mean muscle, with almost computer-powered intelligence. He’s pretty good to have around in a hostile situation. And Cindy Greenstreet had the highest test scores in the past decade. I also work with Jerry Gunter—you might have heard the name. He used to be a mixed-martial-arts champ before entering the academy. He’s pretty good to have around in a pinch, as well. If you’ve called me here, I’m sure you’ve read up on me, so you know that when I joined the bureau, I didn’t start out as a kid but came in with a lot of experience, both in combat and law enforcement.”

Crow nodded and Dustin realized that he’d known all this. Dustin’s FBI unit was smart and tough—they’d been put together to get in and get the job done.

“Good assignment,” Crow said with a nod.

“Yeah.” As he’d told them, Dustin hadn’t come into the academy as a fresh-faced twenty-something grad. Before he’d gone to college, he’d participated as a witness in a case involving a duo of oddly matched serial killers. From there, he’d gone into the military, and after the marines he’d gone into police work. He hadn’t exactly entered the department immediately; there’d been a year when he’d been in total denial about himself and his “unusual” abilities—and about the heinous things men seemed willing to do to their fellows. He’d more or less walked into the wilderness. Actually, it hadn’t been that dramatic. He’d taken a job as a forest ranger in the Everglades—except that he’d been led to bodies in giant oilcans and he’d realized it was time to move his efforts in the best possible direction. There were certain things a man couldn’t escape—and his own nature was one of them.

So he’d decided to apply to the academy.

“You know all about me,” Dustin said. “Why are we meeting?”

David looked at Jackson Crow and shrugged.

“What do you know about the Krewes?” This time, it was Malachi Gordon who spoke. Dustin knew his name; he was a recent graduate of the academy. He’d come into the bureau after working a case in Savannah.

Dustin leaned back. “I’ve read about what happened in Savannah,” he told Malachi. “You know I worked with David so, of course, the beautiful city of Savannah is near and dear to my heart. In fact, I was somewhat surprised that my unit wasn’t assigned to that case, but apparently, things were already being taken care of. And, to the best of my knowledge, that case has been cleared, the paperwork wrapped up and the feds are long gone from Savannah. Having worked there, I thought I might be of some help, but...”

He paused and grinned sheepishly at David. “It seems like you all did just fine without me.”

“I’m sure you would’ve been an asset,” Malachi murmured.

Dustin looked curiously at the other man. “Thanks, but as I said—seems like you had it covered.”

“That was then—and we did have it covered. However, although the Krewes are growing, there are never enough of us, and we’re always looking for the right people,” Crow told him. “Would you be interested in seeing how you work out with one of our units?”

Dustin smiled. That was straightforward. “I initially asked about applying to one of your units. They told me there was no application process. You formed your own units.”

“That’s true,” Crow said. “And I wish I’d known about you earlier. David was talking to Malachi about you, and then Malachi talked to me. So, yes, I looked you up and pulled strings to get all the information I could on you. Thus far, each recruit has worked out. We’re...careful in the people we approach. We have to be.”

“Because you all have special talents, I take it?” Dustin asked. “And, of course, because all the other agents like to call the units ghost hunters and rib you all about it. But really, they’re all envious of your record.”

“Detective Caswell has told us that working with you was like—”

“Like working with me,” Malachi Gordon cut in. “David and I were together in New Orleans,” he explained.

“I see,” Dustin said.