Claimed (The Flash Gold Chronicles, #4) by Lindsay Buroker Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t someone there...
    The rocky ground dropped away almost as soon as he passed through the crack, and he had to pick a careful route down a slope almost as steep as the one outside. Moisture made the cold jagged stones slick beneath his boots and hands, and he slipped, bumping his backpack against the wall. His rifle clunked, and he grimaced at the noise. Leaving his gear outside probably would have been a better idea, especially with Kali out there to watch it.
    He descended ten or twelve feet with the light seeping through the crack illuminating less and less as he dropped. Having anticipated a night away from town, he did have a lantern and tinder in his pack, but he wanted to reach a flat spot before trying to extricate the items. His foot slipped again, with tiny shards of rocks bouncing free. Yes, definitely a flat spot.
    It would have been wiser to climb down facing the wall, but he wasn’t ready to put his back to the interior yet. Musty dampness permeated the air, and the scents of sweat and urine lingered as well. A hint of rotting meat reached his nose too. He sensed it was farther away than the other scents, but had a feeling he would find one of the missing prospectors the girl had mentioned. His lip curled at the notion that the men she had seen might be using the front half of the cave as their hideout... and storing corpses in the back.
    The slope flattened out fifteen feet below the crack. He fancied he could knock on the wall and Kali, only a few feet lower on the other side, might hear it. First thing’s first—he wanted to get that light out and have a look around.
    As he wiggled to pull off his rucksack, his boot landed on something loose. It shifted beneath his weight, but he caught his balance. He nudged it to the side, finding it lighter than a rock. He decided not to investigate until he had his lantern out, though an uneasy inkling of what it might be nestled in the pit of his stomach.
    Cedar didn’t carry anything so fancy—and likely to get wet—as matches, so it took him a minute to light tinder with his flint and knife, but he soon had the lantern wick burning. The first thing he noticed was gnawed bones littering the stone floor. Human bones. Femurs, tibias, scapulas, and he spotted a skull with a bullet hole in it too. All of the bones had been chewed clean of every strip of meat, so he doubted they accounted for the rotting smell, but there might be more remains farther back. He was glad Kali wasn’t with him. She had never proven to be the squeamish sort—the time she had screamed when she stumbled across his sack of severed heads had been perfectly understandable—but there were some places one just didn’t take a woman courting.
    As he had suspected, the cave did stretch back into the hillside, though it didn’t appear natural down here the way it had up there. The walls had been chiseled with pickaxes, and sagging timbers supported a rough ceiling approximately five feet high. Cedar would have to stoop low to advance down the passage.
    He shrugged his backpack on again and walked forward with the lantern in one hand and his katana in the other. He wanted a weapon close at hand, and it would make more sense to use a blade than to shoot in a confined space where the shells might ricochet off rock walls.
    A few more bones littered the floor as he ducked his head to continue deeper, but they tapered off. The scents of rotting meat and urine grew stronger as he walked. More and more, he doubted that anyone would choose this as a hideout. Perhaps the girl had seen men using the hole but had not realized they were dumping bodies instead of camping in it.
    Cedar passed a broken pickaxe and a rusty shovel. The tools and the support timbers seemed older than anything being used out on the creek claims. People had been exploring out here longer than the year since the Yukon made the newspapers back East, he reminded himself.
    He stepped around a bend, and his light bounced off a