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Jaxson

At the back of the long-abandoned Angelsong Orphanage, I squatted to study the tiny yellow skull I’d just unearthed in the overgrown back paddock.

Another unmarked grave. Another child victim.

"Easy, girl," I murmured, resting my hand on her neck. "This place gets to me, too."

Three skeletons already this morning; fifteen since we began searching these cursed grounds a year ago.

Behind me, the decrepit orphanage lay shrouded in overgrown vegetation, its crumbling remains nearly concealed by the sprawling twenty hectares on which it stood.

The orphanage’s remote location near the North Queensland coastline had served as both a refuge and a prison for hundreds of innocent kids, and for decades, the predators who ruled this hellhole had been shielded by isolation.

Back in the seventies and eighties, authorities had rarely made the arduous trek to check on the well-being of the poor kids housed here, and when they did, advance notice gave the monsters enough time to bury their horrors. Literally .

Decades later, this remote slice of land was finally giving up those secrets.

Sweat trickled down my back as the tropical sun mercilessly beat down on me, and the air was so still that even the gum trees dominating the perimeter of the property seemed to be melting in the heat haze.

I wiped my brow, questioning my decision to work here at the height of summer.

But these poor victims needed someone to find them.

The forensics team had been forced to pause the search for these unmarked graves last year when more recent cases pulled us away. These children had waited over forty years for someone to find them. A few more months wouldn’t matter.

But it mattered to me.

The orphanage’s crumbling facade stood as a ghost of its former grandeur, and its once-proud architecture was now an ugly monument to cruelty.

The Edwardian monstrosity was a rare find in these parts of Australia, and under different circumstances, it might have commanded a small fortune.

But the vile atrocities committed here had rendered the asset virtually worthless.

The long-dead owner had willed the estate to his only sister, a woman who had suffered the last two decades in the fog of dementia. She would have been about fifty years old when the orphanage was shut down. Did she know what happened here?

Onyx jumped to all fours and barked, drawing my attention to a mob of kangaroos grazing between two towering gum trees. The alpha male rose to his full height, muscles rippling beneath his red fur.

I whistled. He’s a big bastard.

Onyx would come out second best if she took on that beast.

"Steady, girl." I pressed my hand to her shoulder, feeling her muscles coil with the restraint of her youth. Three years of intensive training couldn't completely override her puppy instincts. She wasn’t always on her best behavior, but I saw her potential and had no doubt that she would become one of the best dogs I’d ever trained.

She barked once more, and the mob of kangaroos melted into the bush like morning mist. Might as well have been ghosts out here; not that I believed in that superstitious crap.

My triplet brother Whitney did, though. My brother could talk an ear off about ghosts and spirits, especially after a few beers during our Thursday night dinners at Mom and Dad’s place.

The skeleton drew my attention again. The skull was tiny. This child had never reached their teens.

Whitney was Rosebud's coroner, and he shouldered the grim task of identifying these lost souls. Of the twelve skeletons we'd first unearthed, only three had reclaimed their names and received proper burials.

I checked my watch: nearly eleven. Whitney had planned to head up to the orphanage to help me after finishing an autopsy this morning.

I snapped a photo of the skull and texted him: Got some more work for you.

His reply dinged back. Already? Just one, I hope.

3!

My phone rang immediately. "Tell me you're joking about three bodies."

"I wish I was, brother. This place is a fucking nightmare."

He huffed.

"How far away are you?"

"About halfway,” he said. “Should be there around one."

I squinted at the blazing sun. "Grab some snacks. We'll be here a while."

"Snacks! It was your turn."

"I'll pay you back."

Whitney groaned, his default response to everything. Then again, spending his days with corpses probably dulled his conversation skills. I never could understand why he chose to be a coroner. He was damn good at it though.

"Is Parker coming?" I asked.

"Nah, he can’t make it today."

"Damn. We could use the help."

"Just try not to dig up any more bodies before I get there."

"No promises."

He groaned again, then hung up.

Parker, my other triplet, breathed life into cold cases for a living, but even he'd hit walls with this place. Evidence was as scarce as rain out here, and the orphanage predated computers. All records had been handwritten in ledgers, most of which were conveniently missing.

My brothers and I were convinced those documents hadn't just vanished. They'd been destroyed by the very authorities who should have protected these kids. Finding any of their bodies was a miracle.

Forty-four years ago, the discovery of tattooed serial numbers on the orphans' wrists, which bore a chilling similarity to Nazi death camps, had finally shut down this hellhole.

The survivors had been scattered to foster homes across the country.

Sadly, their scars, both visible and invisible, had faded in silence.

Then one of those tattoos had surfaced again; a faded serial number on the wrist of a dead would-be assassin who'd tried to kill Australia’s Prime Minister, Cameron MacBride.

That shocking revelation had reignited interest in Angelsong Orphanage, yanking its dark history back into the light and leading Aria, head of Wolf Security, and her team to these cursed grounds, decades after it was abandoned, to dig up more buried secrets.

I’d already unearthed three graves this morning, and I’d only been here six hours. The other cops at Rosebud Police Station, where I was stationed, and Aria and her team had been right . . . there were more unmarked graves here. Likely many, many more.

Each fragile skeleton revealed unspeakable cruelty. In my fifteen years as a cop, my K9s and I had uncovered enough bodies in different cases to build a tolerance to the sight of death. Or so I’d thought. But this was different. These kids weren't just missing. They'd been forgotten.

Just like my sister.

Twenty years had passed since she’d vanished, and her case file had been buried beneath mountains of unsolved disappearances. The cops had moved on, but my brothers and I hadn't forgotten about Charlotte. We never would.

A gust swept through the towering trees, sending dead leaves swirling across the brittle grass and into the fresh pit before us. It was as if nature was trying to protect the little body in the dirt.

Onyx's gaze snapped toward the orphanage, and her nose twitched as she sampled the air. I followed her line of sight, squinting against the blazing sunshine to study the crumbling structure. Angelsong. The name itself felt like a sick joke. The monsters who worked here were no angels.

Onyx’s ears pricked forward, and she shifted onto her forequarters.

"You okay, girl?" I ran my hand over her back.

She responded with another twitch of her nose, sampling the air. She stiffened, and her powerful body tensed.

"What've you got, girl?"

A low growl rumbled in her throat, and I scanned the area, searching for kangaroos or other wildlife that might’ve caught her attention. But as I brushed over her back, the tension in her muscles wasn't playful; it was primal.

She meant business.

"You got a scent, girl?"

Onyx dropped her gaze to the ground and pawed at the freshly dug dirt. Her claws scraped through the loose soil, scattering crumbs onto the exposed skull below.

Damn it. She’s detected another body.

Adrenaline spiked through me as I stepped to her side. "Onyx, show me."

She bolted away with her focus locked on something only she could smell.

I didn't expect her to go far because every grave we'd uncovered to date had been clustered in the same area, but Onyx charged past the flags marking the burial sites, heading toward the crumbling shack at the far edge of the main building.

I grabbed the shovel and sprinted after her with my pulse hammering in my ears.

While Onyx bounded effortlessly over the sea of shrubs and weeds, following some scent invisible to me, I stumbled after her, forced to either dodge around or bulldoze through the dense bushes.

It was like running through a field of steel wool.

The shovel wobbled over my head like a clumsy baton in an endless army drill.

At the back of the building, near a cluster of crumbling remains I couldn’t make out from this distance, Onyx froze.

By the time I caught up, her lip was quivering and drool dripped from her muzzle. She stood rigid beside what was left of a fountain, her hackles raised and a low, guttural growl vibrating in her throat.

My pulse spiked. She’d found something.

I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Good girl. Show me.”

She pawed at the ground near the cracked edge of the fountain, scraping her claws at the soil.

I frowned. Most of the dirt around the fountain and nearby area was choked with knee-high weeds or dried into cracked, brittle patches from the long drought.

Where she was pawing, though, the ground was smooth, and the weeds were conspicuously absent.

I drove the shovel into the ground and the blade sunk easily into the soft earth. This soil wasn’t compacted from forty years of weather and sun beating down on it. If there was a body here. which Onyx was certain there was, then the remains hadn’t been buried as long as those kids.

The stifling heat gnawed at the back of my neck and sweat carved a slow path down my spine as I dug deeper into the earth. The mound of dirt grew steadily around me, while Onyx hovered at the edge of the pit with drool sliding from her jowls like a predator savoring the hunt.

She lived for this moment, or more precisely, the treat at the end for her successful find.

For me, it was the opposite. Each shovelful of dirt unearthed memories I’d tried to bury for the last twenty years. Memories of my sister. Of the endless, aching search for her.

I didn’t want it to end like these poor victims, with a body in a shallow grave, but at least it would end. At least I would finally know, and my brothers and my parents.

But the truth wouldn’t bring peace. It never did. It would rip open wounds we’d spent decades trying to close, dragging us into another spiral of questions, pain, and the gnawing need to make sense of what happened to her.

The shovel hit something solid. Not dirt. Not stone.

I froze. Only two feet down. If this was another body, someone had gotten sloppy with their burial.

Setting the shovel aside, I dropped to my knees and clawed at the earth with my hands. Two scoops of soil revealed a glint of silver beneath the dirt.

Well, hello.

This was new. Every skeleton we’d uncovered on this cursed property so far had been dumped into the ground like garbage, their tiny bodies exposed to the dirt without even a shred of covering.

Whatever, or whoever, was buried here, someone had taken the time to wrap them in a tarp. A small gesture of decency perhaps, or maybe guilt.

I scraped at the dirt with growing urgency. My breath hitched as the outline beneath the tarp came into focus. This wasn’t a child.

The body was an adult.

“Holy shit!”

My pulse thundered in my ears. Onyx had found a relatively fresh grave. Here. At the orphanage.

The remains of the children we’d uncovered were decades old, tied to the orphanage’s long history of horrors. But this told a different story. The body in the tarp had been buried recently . . . a few weeks, a month or two tops.

I would bet my balls that whoever buried them had ties to this place.

As the stench of decay seeped through the tarp, a chilling realization hit me: whoever buried this body here, they were going to be seriously pissed at me for digging up their secret.