Chimera (Blackwood Security Book 16), page 1
CHIMERA
ELISE NOBLE
Published by Undercover Publishing Limited
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Copyright © 2022 Elise Noble
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v2
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ISBN: 978-1-912888-51-1
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
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Edited by Nikki Mentges, NAM Editorial
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Cover design by Abigail Sins
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www.undercover-publishing.com
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www.elise-noble.com
Monsters are the darkness inside us.
EMMY BLACK
CONTENTS
1. Emmy
2. Emmy
3. Emmy
4. Hallie
5. Emmy
6. Emmy
7. Hallie
8. Emmy
9. Emmy
10. Emmy
11. Paige
12. Emmy
13. Paige
14. Emmy
15. Hallie
16. Emmy
17. Paige
18. Emmy
19. Emmy
20. Emmy
21. Hallie
22. Hallie
23. Hallie
24. Hallie
25. Hallie
Bonus Story - Girls’ Night
What’s Next?
Want to Stalk Me?
End-of-Book Stuff
Also by Elise Noble
1
EMMY
“You eat it.”
“No, you eat it.” I shoved the plate of haggis back across the table to Sky. “You ordered it.”
“I thought it would be a little less gross.”
“It’s offal, onion, and oatmeal cooked in a sheep’s stomach. The description on the menu didn’t give you a clue?”
“Yeah, but it’s Scotland’s national dish—I figured it must have at least one redeeming feature.”
“Perhaps if you tasted it…”
Sky poked at the lump with her fork and wrinkled her nose. “Or maybe I’ll stick with the potatoes.”
“Tatties.”
“Whatever.”
This year, Newcastle had been selected to host the New Dawn Film Festival, but one of the featured documentaries turned out to be a tad controversial, and death threats had left the organisers understandably twitchy. Blackwood, the security firm I co-owned along with my husband and two others, had been hired to provide security, and since this was a new, high-profile client, I’d flown to the UK with Sky to carry out additional checks before the event.
And from Newcastle, it had only been a short hop up to Edinburgh to make one last attempt to solve a cold case that had been bugging me for ages.
Seven-year-old Mila Carmody had disappeared five years ago, snatched from her bed in the middle of the night in every parent’s worst nightmare. No witnesses, no ransom demands, and no sign of the little girl despite a manhunt involving half the cops in Virginia plus the FBI. The only physical clue had been a tiny speck of blood on the latch of Mila’s window, a speck that didn’t belong to her or anybody else in the various DNA databases the authorities maintained.
When the cops failed to find her kidnapper, Mila’s wealthy family had hired us to do a case review. Then they’d fired us when we suggested a family member might have been involved. There’d been signs of an inside job—no evidence of a break-in, a lack of a struggle, and not one peep from the family’s dog. But when we’d asked questions about Mila’s uncle, her father—his brother—hadn’t been impressed.
And now it seemed we might have been barking up the wrong tree entirely.
A trail of breadcrumbs had led us to Scotland, and if the genetic genealogist advising us was right, the owner of the blood speck found in Mila’s bedroom had relatives living on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Our job this week was to collect a few DNA samples to see if she was right. Coffee cups, cigarette butts, used tissues… People tossed their DNA away every day. All we had to do was follow them around and pick it up. Blackwood’s London forensics lab was on standby to process the samples, and in between waiting for results and strategising, we had time to kill. So far, Scotland was living up to my expectations—this afternoon, we’d climbed a bloody great hill in the rain because it was “scenic,” and then we’d got stuck in a traffic jam caused by cows.
Oh, and Sky was absolutely right about the haggis—it was gross.
But I couldn’t admit that.
“How are you gonna survive jungle training if you can’t even eat pub food?”
“Do they have oatmeal in the jungle?”
“So you’re saying it’s the oatmeal that’s the problem?”
“Shut up.”
Hallie sat beside her, looking oh-so smug with her fish and chips. She’d tagged along because the Carmody file had landed on her desk several months ago, and she’d grown as curious about it as I had. Now she opened the guidebook.
“We could do a ghost tour tomorrow? Walk around the underground vaults and the graveyards?”
“What, you think we haven’t seen enough dead people recently?”
Surprisingly, Hallie’s body count was higher than mine for the past month. I’d been slacking.
“Okay, then how about a trip to Loch Ness?”
“How far is that?”
“The app says three and a half hours, so with you driving, it’s around two hours away.”
“A four-hour round trip to see a giant pond? The monster can rest easy. We still have samples to collect, and that’ll take up most of tomorrow.”
Not so long ago, I’d have said we didn’t have time for any sightseeing at all, but I’d come to realise the importance of R&R. Ditto for my husband. A wake-up call involving a mental breakdown and a near-death experience respectively had led us to re-evaluate our priorities. Now we tried to spread the load and also take the occasional vacation, although those didn’t always work out as intended.
“So, the ghost tour?” Hallie asked.
Which would be a waste of time. “Ghosts don’t exist.”
“How do you know?” Sky stole a forkful of my lasagne. “You snooze, you lose.”
“Hey, eat your haggis.” I moved my plate farther out of reach. “There’s no evidence ghosts are real, and plenty of evidence of people faking them. Pretty sure the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist either.”
“There are photos.”
“And most of them have been discredited.”
“Most of them.”
“Okay, fine, we’ll go on the ‘ghost’ tour. Happy now?”
Sky glanced at the mess on her plate. “Partially.”
Out of curiosity, I forked up a piece of haggis. I’d once eaten a raw bat—albeit out of necessity rather than by choice—and lived to tell the tale, so I figured I could do this. Hmm. It wasn’t quite as bad as I’d anticipated.
“Well?” Sky asked.
“If sausage and porridge had a love child and sprinkled it with pepper, this would be it. Did you ever go to that dodgy kebab place on Mile End Road?”
“Maybe.”
“Then you’ve survived worse. Woman up and try the haggis.”
“Or I could skip straight to dessert.”
“That’s against the—”
My phone rang, and Sky sat back, grinning. Dammit, what did Nick want?
“Did anyone ever tell you what an impeccable sense of timing you have?” I asked him.
Nick was a former Navy SEAL, an ex-lover, a current colleague, and one of my oldest friends. But like me, he rarely called someone to shoot the shit, which meant he had either a question or a problem.
“Are you still in Scotland? What did I interrupt?”
“Yes, and Sky’s attempt to eat haggis.”
“Sorry I missed that.”
“Just don’t mention it to Bradley, or we’ll be having a ceilidh before you know it.” My darling assistant would use any excuse for a party. If I blinked, my entire house would be covered in tartan. “And then we’ll all be eating haggis.”
An added bonus of treating the trip as a semi-vacation? If we wasted enough time, we’d miss the Thanksgiving nightmare Bradley had planned for next week.
“Does haggis really taste that bad? Bet we’ve both eaten worse in the jungle.”
“You’d also have to wear a kilt.”
“Right.”
“And, as tradition dictates, no underwear.”
“Guess I’ll keep quiet about the haggis,” Nick said.
“Glad we’re on the same page.”
“How’s the DNA collecting going?”
“Two samples down, four more to go at this stage. But you didn’t call to discuss haggis and DNA, did you?”
“I need a favour.”
See? “What sort of favour?”
“Kind of a… I guess you could call it a welfare check.”
“On who?”
“You remember Fletcher?”
“Your half-brother?” Who could forget him? He was a younger, cuter version of Nick, except because his father wasn’t a callous arsehole the way Nick’s had been, Fletcher hadn’t built up the same hard shields. His sweetness ran closer to the surface. “Isn’t he counting puffins in the Arctic?”
“The Antarctic, and it’s penguins, not puffins.”
“Tell me you don’t want me to take a trip to the Antarctic.”
Antarctica was thousands of bloody miles away, and I hadn’t set foot there in years. I was far closer to the Arctic. A quick hop over to Iceland or Norway…
“No, Glendoon.”
“Glen-what?”
“The map suggests it’s roughly an hour north-west of Edinburgh.”
I was lost. The waitress came back and began clearing away the remains of Sky’s haggis, which was something of a disappointment because she still hadn’t taken a bite, but I conjured up a smile and pointed at the sticky toffee pudding on the dessert menu. If Nick was about to ruin my evening, I at least wanted cake first.
“You’re gonna have to start at the beginning. What does this have to do with Fletcher?”
“Last year, he spent the summer in Thailand, volunteering at a turtle sanctuary, and he got to know a girl there. Not in that way—she had a boyfriend, and Fletch wouldn’t muscle in—but they stayed in touch.”
“She’s Scottish?”
“No, the boyfriend was Scottish. Paige—that’s the girl—is from Wyoming, but she was studying at Berkeley.”
“Still not seeing how this gets us to Glendoon? Is it the girl that you want me to check up on? Paige?”
“Fletch is worried about her. They emailed back and forth for months, and then suddenly…nothing. He figured she was just busy moving—she’d planned to study abroad for a year at Edinburgh University—but after a bunch of emails went unanswered, he called me for advice. So I suggested sending one last message asking her for a single sentence if she was okay, the same if she wanted him to leave her alone. If he didn’t get a response, then I’d dig into things.”
Hallie had obviously been eavesdropping because she slid her tablet in my direction. According to the website she’d found, Glendoon—population 357 humans and twice that many cows–was famous for its whisky distillery, for hosting the local cheese festival, and for spawning the runner-up in the caber toss at last year’s Highland Games. Place sounded like a riot.
“Paige replied?” I asked Nick.
“She called. In tears. She split with the boyfriend right after they bought a house together, and now she’s stuck in Scotland.”
Ah. “In Glendoon?”
“Right.”
“And how the hell did she end up buying a house in Glendoon?”
“By accident. Fletch got that much, but then the call cut off, and now she’s not answering her phone. His research project wrapped up last week, but a storm’s stopping him from flying out himself right now.”
“So you want me to make sure she’s still breathing?”
“I’ll buy you lunch if you do.”
“Not haggis.”
“Anything but haggis,” Nick confirmed.
“And you’ll wear a kilt?”
“You know what? I’ll just head to the airport myself.”
I sighed. I wasn’t about to let a damsel stay in distress, and Nick knew it. “Fine, I’ll go. Got an address?”
“Like a house number and a zip code?”
“Postcode in Scotland, and that’s generally what an address consists of.”
“So that’s a negative, but the place is half-derelict and—I quote—creepy as all get out.”
Fantastic. “Lunch just became dinner. Three courses and wine.”
Nick blew me a kiss. “Babe, I’ll even throw in a bottle of good Scotch.”
If I’d known what we were about to get into, I’d have bought my own damn Scotch, poured it down my throat, and then hit myself over the head with the empty bottle. My husband always joked that trouble followed me around, and I was beginning to think he might be right.
2
EMMY
“Hey, it looks as if we’re going on the ghost tour a day early,” Hallie said from the back seat. “Actually, it might be more of a monster tour.”
Precisely what I didn’t need to hear at nine p.m. while driving through the Scottish countryside in the dark. The rolling hills had been quite pretty when we made the journey in daylight two days ago, but at night when we were the only vehicle on the road for miles, the overhanging trees and long shadows made the landscape eerie as fuck.
An owl came out of nowhere, a winged wraith that buzzed the car before disappearing into the gloom again. A combination of experience and willpower meant I didn’t show any outward signs of my surprise, but my heart skipped half a beat as the bird nearly plastered itself across the windscreen.
“Monsters? Dare I ask?”
“According to local legend, the forest around Glendoon is home to a beast that’s half eagle, half wolf.”
Thanks, Nick. He’d conveniently forgotten to mention that part, and I didn’t even have a gun with me.
“Which half is which?” Sky asked. “Like, is it an eagle with a wolf’s head? Or a giant dog with a beak?”
“Uh, so I think it’s a wolf with wings. And talons. Oh, and its eyes glow red.”
“So basically a flying nightmare, then?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly it. Wait, this article says it also has a snake for a tail.”
“What kind of snake? A poisonous one? Or the sort that squeezes you to death?”
Good grief. “Guys, it’s not real. I bet the local tourist board made it up to boost visitor numbers.”
Because who would want to go to a cheese festival? I mean, I liked cheese, don’t get me wrong, but if I was going to devote a day to eating it, I’d do that in France with a good bottle of red and slightly more sunshine. A pool, a lounge chair, my husband at my side…
“Reports go back as far as the seventeenth century. Was tourism a thing back then?”
“The villagers probably borrowed an old story to add a layer of authenticity. Check out the gift shop—if they’re selling little clay models of the Glendoon Monster, then you know they did it for the money.”
Sky fiddled with the radio until she found a station playing old rock songs. Soon, Bryan Adams was belting out of the speakers, and I calculated we had six more tracks until we arrived at Paige’s “creepy as all get out” home. In the end, it hadn’t been that hard to find. We’d just taken a look at one of those “How much is my property worth?” websites and zeroed in on Glendoon. Only five properties had sold nearby in the past year, and of those, two were flats, one was a rather nice detached farmhouse with equestrian facilities, and a fourth included a small shopfront that had formerly been the village post office. The fifth had been purchased at auction four months ago, and the picture painted by the now-archived online catalogue was, in a word, grim. Glendoon Hall was crumbling on its foundations. And those foundations probably had subsidence. No wonder Paige had been in tears if that was where she was living.
The darkness wrapped around us as we drove down ever-narrower lanes. Three miles to go, two, one…
“Reckon that’s the place?” Sky asked.
There was no handy sign to confirm, but there didn’t seem to be any other properties around. And the iron gates hanging askew from ivy-covered pillars were open—practically an invitation. I nosed the SUV into the pitted driveway, slowly because some of the potholes deserved postcodes in their own right.
