Page 11 of Close By (Kari Blackhorse #1)

The desert held its secrets best before dawn.

Rachel Delgado had learned this over twelve years of environmental activism across the Southwest. The early morning hours revealed what daylight obscured—tire tracks not yet swept away by wind, equipment moved under cover of darkness, the subtle scars of human intervention on supposedly protected land.

And this cause mattered more than most.

She checked her GPS coordinates against the hand-drawn map tucked in her vest pocket.

According to her source—a former Bright Sky Mining employee with an awakened conscience—the company had been conducting exploratory drilling on protected Navajo land for months, operating in darkness and camouflaging their access points during daylight hours.

If true, it would violate not only the tribe’s sovereignty but at least six federal regulations.

The class-action lawsuit she was building needed hard evidence, however, not just a whistleblower’s testimony.

Today’s mission: document the illegal access road and collect soil samples for heavy metal contamination.

Rachel adjusted the straps of her pack, feeling the reassuring weight of her camera, collection vials, and the small soil sampling kit.

At forty-three, she’d spent more than half her life fighting corporations that treated the land as disposable.

The victories were rare, the defeats frequent, but she’d long ago abandoned measuring success by conventional metrics.

“Some fights you pick because they’re winnable,” her mentor had told her during her first Sierra Club internship. “Others you pick because not fighting would be unbearable.”

This particular fight had become personal last year, when elevated arsenic levels appeared in her uncle’s well water near the reservation border.

Three neighbors with similar contamination.

Two cases of rare cancer. Too many “coincidences” near a mining operation that supposedly maintained strict environmental standards.

The eastern sky had lightened enough now that Rachel could switch off her headlamp.

She paused, listening to the desert’s awakening—the soft rustling of nocturnal creatures returning to their burrows, the distant call of a cactus wren.

The tranquility felt almost sacred, though Rachel’s relationship with spirituality had always been complicated.

Born to two environmental science professors—her father from Mexico City and her mother from Barcelona—Rachel had grown up in academic circles where ecological activism was simply part of daily life.

While her parents approached environmentalism through rigorous scientific methodology, Rachel had developed a more spiritual connection to the land during a college internship with Diné activists.

She’d found something in the Navajo relationship with the earth that her parents’ well-intentioned but clinical approach had never offered.

Twenty years later, she straddled both worlds—wielding scientific evidence in courtrooms while honoring the deeper, sacred connections that had transformed her understanding of environmental stewardship.

Yet something about the desert at dawn always evoked a feeling close to reverence.

She checked her GPS again. Half a mile to the coordinates where her informant claimed Bright Sky had established their hidden access point. Rachel picked up her pace.

As she crested a small rise, she noticed something odd about the landscape ahead.

A section of scrub brush looked slightly too uniform, too deliberately placed.

She smiled grimly. Camouflage netting, just as her source had described.

Amateur hour, really—effective against satellite imagery but obvious to anyone on the ground who knew what to look for.

Rachel unzipped her pack, withdrawing her DSLR camera with its GPS-tagging feature. She photographed the disguised area from multiple angles, capturing the surrounding landscape for context. Then she approached cautiously, documenting each step of her discovery.

Up close, the deception became obvious. The “brush” concealed a graded dirt road, wide enough for heavy equipment. Tire tracks led toward the heart of the protected area. Rachel followed the tracks, capturing images of soil disturbance, taking samples where petroleum residue stained the ground.

When she reached a clearing about a quarter-mile from the entrance, her suspicions were confirmed.

Though the drill rig had been removed, the concrete drilling pad remained, hastily covered with local soil and rocks but unmistakable to trained eyes.

Several core sample containers had been left behind, either forgotten or deemed unimportant.

“Sloppy,” Rachel muttered, photographing everything. “Arrogant and sloppy.”

She collected the core samples, securing them in evidence bags with location data. These would prove not only trespassing but active resource extraction. The lawsuit was looking stronger by the minute.

As Rachel knelt to collect soil samples from the drilling pad perimeter, a sound caught her attention—a cautious footstep. She froze, ears straining. It came again, closer this time.

She wasn’t alone.

She straightened, sliding the sample vials into her pack while scanning the terrain. Security patrols from mining companies weren’t uncommon, though they typically traveled by ATV, not on foot. This felt different.

“Hello?” she called, keeping her voice neutral. “I know someone’s there.”

Silence answered, but Rachel had spent too many years in wilderness not to trust her senses. Someone was watching her, moving with deliberate stealth.

She reached for her phone, opening the audio recording app before slipping it into her breast pocket. Whatever happened next, she wanted it documented.

“I’m an environmental consultant conducting legal soil sampling,” she announced to the unseen presence, the lie coming easily from years of practice. Better than identifying herself as an activist to potential mining security. “My location and activities have been logged with my office.”

A figure emerged from behind a boulder about thirty yards away.

The distance and dim light made details difficult to discern, but Rachel registered a slight build, moderate height.

The person moved with a fluid grace that seemed almost hesitant, approaching in a meandering path rather than directly.

Rachel relaxed. Perhaps it was just another early morning hiker who’d strayed from established trails, or even a Navajo resident monitoring their land.

“Good morning,” Rachel called. “Beautiful sunrise coming.”

The figure paused, head tilting in a curious manner. Something about the gesture seemed oddly birdlike, evaluative. They remained silent, which Rachel found increasingly unsettling.

“Are you from around here?” she tried again, reaching casually for her walking stick. The grip of the sturdy oak staff felt reassuring in her palm.

The figure resumed their approach, now close enough that Rachel could distinguish more details—clothing that seemed to blend with the landscape, a graceful economy of movement.

Yet something felt profoundly wrong about the encounter, triggering instincts honed through countless backcountry expeditions.

When the distance closed to about fifteen feet, Rachel’s unease crystallized into alarm. The figure’s posture had changed, the earlier hesitancy replaced by a predatory focus. Their breathing became audible—ragged, uneven, with a strange rattling quality that raised the hair on Rachel’s arms.

“I should get going,” Rachel said, securing her pack with one hand while keeping the walking stick angled between them. “My colleagues are expecting me back by seven.”

The figure stopped. For a moment, Rachel thought her implied message about others knowing her whereabouts had landed. Then came a sound that defied easy categorization—a low, guttural vocalization that seemed to originate from somewhere deeper than human vocal cords should allow.

“Are you okay?” Rachel asked reflexively, even as every instinct screamed danger.

The response was movement so explosive it seemed impossible. One moment the figure stood motionless; the next it lunged toward her with startling speed and grace, covering the remaining distance in a blur.

Rachel’s trained reflexes took over. She swung her walking stick in a defensive arc, connecting with something solid enough to vibrate through the wood.

Without waiting to see the impact’s effect, she pivoted and ran—not along the access road where she’d be exposed, but toward the rocky outcropping where the terrain would give her an advantage.

Behind her came that sound again—not a grunt of pain as expected, but that same guttural vocalization, now edged with something like fury. Footsteps followed—quick, light.

Fast.

Rachel’s breath burned in her lungs as she scrambled up the rocky slope, leveraging her knowledge of desert terrain. She risked a glance back and immediately wished she hadn’t. The figure was gaining on her swiftly.

Near the outcropping’s crest, Rachel’s boot slipped on loose shale. She stumbled, feeling the sting as her palms scraped against rough stone. Her camera, jostled from its strap, tumbled down the slope behind her with an expensive-sounding crack.

No time to retrieve it. The evidence would have to wait.

Rachel crested the rocks and spotted salvation—a narrow crevice in the stone face ahead, barely wide enough for a human but offering the first real protection she’d seen. She forced her body to surge forward despite burning muscles and the copper taste of fear in her mouth.

The crevice was closer, ten feet, five feet—

Something caught her pack from behind with such force that Rachel was yanked backward, nearly off her feet.

She slipped her arms from the straps in one practiced motion, sacrificing her equipment and samples without hesitation.

Freed from the weight, she threw herself toward the narrow opening in the rock.

The sound that followed her into the darkness held no recognizable human emotion—only a primal frustration and rage that echoed off the stone walls as Rachel pressed deeper into the earth’s protection, praying the passage didn’t narrow to a dead end before she found another way out.

Behind her, something scraped against stone, testing the crevice’s width. Rachel pushed onward into the darkness, one thought pulsing with each frantic heartbeat.

Not human. Not human. Not human.