CLOSE TO MADNESS, page 1
CLOSE TO MADNESS
(A Kari Blackhorse Suspense Thriller—Book Six)
B L A K E P I E R C E
Blake Pierce
USA Today and #1 bestselling author Blake Pierce is the author of numerous series in the mystery and thriller genres, spanning 10 years of work, including the Jessie Hunt, Ella Dark, Rylie Page, Faith Bold and Rachel Gift series. Blake's most recent latest releases are the Alison Payne, Isla Rivers Kari Blackhorse, and Kate Valentine series.
Please visit blakepierceauthor.com to learn more, join the email list, receive free books, and stay in touch.
Copyright © 2025 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SERIES BY BLAKE PIERCE
KATE VALENTINE
KARI BLACKHORSE
ISLA RIVERS
ALISON PAYNE
JENNA GRAVES
THE GOVERNESS
RACHEL BLACKWOOD
SHEILA STONE
FINN WRIGHT
MORGAN CROSS
JULIETTE HART
FAITH BOLD
FIONA RED
DAISY FORTUNE
AMBER YOUNG
CAMI LARK
NICKY LYONS
CORA SHIELDS
MAY MOORE
PAIGE KING
VALERIE LAW
RACHEL GIFT
AVA GOLD
A YEAR IN EUROPE
ELLA DARK
LAURA FROST
EUROPEAN VOYAGE
ADELE SHARP
THE AU PAIR
ZOE PRIME
JESSIE HUNT
CHLOE FINE
KATE WISE
THE MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE
RILEY PAIGE
MACKENZIE WHITE
AVERY BLACK
KERI LOCKE
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
The fire popped. A sharp report split the river of sound flowing through the tipi. Sparks danced upward into the smoke, brief orange stars aspiring to join the real ones visible through the open flap above.
Maria Sandoval drew the coarse wool blanket tighter around her shoulders. The scent of cedar and sage clung to the fibers, a fragrance of protection and peace. Here, inside the circle, the world was simplified. There was the fire. There was the steady heartbeat of the water drum. And there was the voice of the roadman, weaving prayers into the fabric of the night.
She had come seeking balance. For months, a fire had smoldered in the joints of her hands, a deep and persistent ache that stole the dexterity from her fingers. It was a cruel thief. It took not just her livelihood, but her identity.
Weaving was more than a craft to her; it was a conversation with her ancestors, a language of color and pattern her grandmother had taught her under the shade of a gnarled juniper. Now, the simple act of passing the shuttle through the warp had become a slow, painful chore.
The doctors in Gallup gave her pills. They dulled the pain but left a fog in her mind, silencing the very creativity she sought to preserve. She needed more than relief. She needed to remember the path, to feel the spirit move through her again, unhindered.
This was her fourth ceremony in as many years. Each was a necessary pilgrimage to the heart of things. She looked across the fire at the other participants, their faces softened by the flickering light. She recognized a few from the community. Most were strangers, each carrying their own invisible burdens into the circle.
The roadman motioned. His assistant began to move. Maria had seen the assistant earlier in the evening, standing by a university truck, meticulously arranging equipment in a silver case. He'd seemed to exist in a bubble of intense focus, separate from the casual conversations and preparations around him. Now, inside the tipi, he moved with that same quiet efficiency, offering small, sliced buttons of peyote from a simple wooden bowl.
When he knelt before her, Maria met his eyes for a moment. They were a pale, washed-out blue, clear and intelligent, but holding a kind of academic distance that she found unsettling. He was not a participant. He was an observer. He offered the bowl without a word, his expression neutral.
She took a piece. Its fuzzy green skin felt familiar against her palm. She murmured her thanks. He gave a short, almost imperceptible nod and moved on. Maria placed the button in her mouth. Her teeth broke through the tough exterior to the bitter flesh within. The taste was profoundly earthy, a flavor she had come to associate with clarity and pain, the two sides of any meaningful journey.
She settled back against her folded blanket, letting the roadman’s song wash over her as the medicine began its slow work.
The fire’s warmth seeped into her bones. The edges of her vision softened. The intricate diamond patterns of the blankets around her seemed to breathe, the threads shifting in a slow, rhythmic dance.
This was the beginning. This was the gentle loosening of the world’s grip.
She closed her eyes and focused on her hands, picturing the pain as a knot of dark, tangled yarn. She prayed for the medicine to help her unspool it.
An hour passed. Maybe it was more. Time flowed differently here. The drum was a second heart beating in her chest. The songs opened doors inside her mind. She walked through them and saw colors she had no names for. She felt a connection to her grandmother, long gone, who stood beside her again, her hands guiding Maria’s on a spectral loom.
The knot of pain in her joints began to loosen. It did not disappear, but it became something she could work with, something she could understand. Hope, warm and bright, bloomed in her chest.
Later, the assistant came around again. This time he carried a tray with small gourd cups, each containing a dark, ground preparation mixed with water. The roadman had mentioned it earlier. He spoke of the ethnobotanist's federally funded research, her interest in different preparations, and their potential to enhance the plant's healing properties.
Maria felt a flicker of hesitation. The old way was with the buttons, whole and pure. But her pain was deep, her need great. Perhaps this new method, this blend of tradition and science, held a new kind of power.
Suddenly the assistant was kneeling before her once more.
"For your intention," he said.
She took the small cup. The paste was gritty and intensely bitter, far more so than the raw button. It had an unfamiliar, faintly acidic undertone that caught at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down, then took the metal canteen he offered and washed the clinging taste away with a long drink of water. He waited until she was finished, his pale eyes watching her. He gave her that same small, clinical nod and moved on to the next chosen person.
The shift was not immediate. It began as a subtle dissonance, a single sour note in a beautiful chord. The drumbeat, which had been a steady anchor, seemed to stumble. The beautiful colors behind her eyelids curdled, turning harsh and jagged. The roadman’s voice, once a comforting guide, now splintered into echoes that seemed to mock her.
Then the physical sensations began. The burning in her stomach was no longer a metaphor for spiritual work. It was a sharp, biting heat, as if she had swallowed hot coals. A wave of nausea crested, so intense it stole her breath and made her gasp.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced the medicinal haze. This was wrong. This was not the spirit. This was a sickness.
The tipi, which had felt like a protective womb just moments before, now seemed to be closing in on her. The air grew thick and heavy, impossible to draw into her lungs. The faces of the other participants across the fire appeared distorted. Their features melted and ran like hot wax. A desperate, animal need to escape clawed at her, to get outside into the clean, cold desert air.
This was not a spiritual urge to wander. It was the frantic impulse of a trapped creature.
She pushed herself to her feet. Her legs were unsteady. She swayed, a hand flying to her head as the world tilted violently around her. A few people looked her way, their expressions placid, lost in their own journeys. No one seemed to see her distress. She was alone in her terror.
She fumbled with the heavy canvas flap of the tipi. Her fingers felt like clumsy sticks, disobedient and slow. Finally, she shoved the flap aside and stumbled out into the night.
The cold air was a shock. It did nothing to clear her head. The vast, silent desert she loved was gone. In its place was a landscape from a nightmare.
The ground seemed to swell and breathe beneath her feet. The familiar, comforting shapes of sagebrush twisted into menacing, grasping figures. She looked up at the sky, hoping the steadfast stars would anchor her. But they offered no comfort. They swirled in a dizzying vortex, a great cosmic drain pulling her down into its black center.
A thought fought its way through the chaos, a single, coherent question. What was in the medicine?
It felt tainted. It felt corrupted. It was not guiding her; it was attacking her, dismantling her mind and body with a terrifying, systematic efficiency.
She tried to walk, to put distance between herself and the ceremony, as if she could outrun the poison now coursing through her veins. Her legs felt like they were made of sand. Her balance was a forgotten memory. She took a few lurching steps toward the dark outline of a mesa, its shape wavering against the spinning sky.
Her legs buckled. She fell to her knees in the coarse sand and sharp gravel. The small pains of the fall barely registered against the overwhelming internal assault. She could no longer tell up from down. The horizon tilted and dissolved completely.
Her last coherent thought was not of the spirits, or of her ancestors, or of the healing she had so desperately sought. It was a simple, stark recognition of a truth her body had understood long before her mind could grasp it.
She was not on a vision quest.
She had been poisoned.
The whirling stars dissolved into a final, suffocating blackness. The sound of the distant drum faded into the immense, indifferent silence of the desert
CHAPTER ONE
The frozen air bit at Kari Blackhorse’s cheeks. Each inhalation was a sharp, crystalline pain in her lungs, a feeling she welcomed.
It was real. Physical. A useful distraction from the other, less manageable ache that had settled deep in her chest.
Her feet pounded a steady rhythm against the hard-packed dirt of the shoulder, the sound muffled by a thin layer of frost that crunched under her running shoes. Five miles. Every morning. The discipline of it was an anchor in the shifting sands of her life.
This morning was different, though. The air was colder, the light a more brittle shade of gray. Or maybe it just felt that way.
Today was the day. A year. A full three hundred and sixty-five days since they had found her.
Kari’s pace faltered for a half-step as she passed the spot. There was no marker, no cross, nothing but a slight depression where the desert scrub grew a little thinner. But she knew the place. She could trace its outline in her mind. Her mother, Anna Chee, a cultural anthropologist who understood the language of the land, had died of exposure.
That was the official story. A story Kari had never believed.
She pushed harder, her breath coming in ragged plumes. The ritual of the run was supposed to be a meditation, a way to clear her head before the day began. Today, however, she ran from the ghost of her mother, and she ran toward it as well, a contradiction that defined her existence on the reservation she had once been so eager to leave. The past year had been a blur of cases, of settling in, of building a partnership with Ben Tsosie that was as solid and reliable as the mesas on the horizon. She had found a rhythm, a purpose.
But beneath it all, the central question of her mother’s death remained, unanswered and festering.
Back in her small apartment near the station, the air was warm and smelled of yesterday’s coffee. She stripped off her running layers, the fabric damp with sweat, and stepped into a shower hot enough to sting her skin. She stood under the spray for a long time, letting the water wash away the morning’s chill but not the deeper cold inside her.
Dressed in her uniform of department-issue khakis and a blue button-down shirt, she made her way into the small kitchen. She ground the coffee beans, filled the machine, and waited, watching the dark liquid drip into the glass pot. Her life had become a series of these small, controllable rituals. They were a bulwark against the chaos she fought every day, both on the job and within herself.
She was pouring coffee into a thick ceramic mug when her phone buzzed on the counter. It was a text from her grandmother.
I made tea. Come before you go into work.
It was not a request. Kari sighed. A visit to Ruth Chee was never just a visit. It was a test, a lesson, and often, a gentle interrogation. She typed a quick reply. On my way.
Fifteen minutes later, she pulled her blue Jeep up to the small house on the eastern edge of the reservation. Smoke curled from the metal chimney, a thin gray ribbon against the vast, pale sky. Ruth was sitting on the worn wooden bench on the porch, a heavy blanket wrapped around her small frame, a steaming mug held in her gnarled hands.
"Grandmother," Kari said, climbing the two steps to the porch.
"Asdzą´ą´ K'os," Ruth said, her dark eyes assessing Kari from head to toe. "Cloud Woman. You look tired."
"The run was cold this morning," Kari said, a half-truth.
Ruth merely grunted, a sound that conveyed a universe of disbelief. She gestured to the empty spot on the bench beside her. "Sit. Drink." A second mug of tea was waiting on the weathered wood, sending its own plume of steam into the air. It was juniper, sharp and clean.
Kari sat, wrapping her cold hands around the mug’s warmth. They sat in silence for a few minutes, a comfortable quiet that was uniquely their own. They watched a lone hawk circle high overhead.
The silence was never empty with Ruth. It was a space for thoughts to settle.
"It is the anniversary," Ruth said finally, her voice low. She was not looking at Kari, but out toward the Chuska Mountains.
“I know,” Kari said.
“Your mother… near the end, she started coming to ceremonies again,” Ruth said. “She had not done so since she was a girl. She chose the university path, the world of books and facts. But she returned. She understood that some questions cannot be answered by digging in the dirt or reading old papers.”
Kari took a sip of the tea. It was hot and slightly bitter. She knew where this was going. Her own avoidance of traditional ceremonies was a familiar point of contention.
“My world deals with facts, Grandmother,” Kari said, a defensive edge to her voice. “Evidence. Things I can see and touch.”
“You see what you choose to see,” Ruth countered gently. “You were not always this way. When you were a girl, you would sit with me for hours while I prepared medicines. You had a quiet spirit. You listened.”
“I was a kid,” Kari said. “Things change.”
“Yes,” Ruth agreed, her gaze finally turning to meet Kari’s. “They changed when you chose your father’s path. The path of the gun and the badge. It is a necessary path, a path your grandfather walked. But it is a path of straight lines and hard rules. It has little room for the world of spirit.”
Ruth paused, letting the words sink in. “After you went to Phoenix, after you became a city cop… you stopped coming. Not just to ceremonies, but to family gatherings, to sings. You built a wall between that life and this one.”
The accusation stung. Kari looked away, out at the horizon. It was true. Her career in modern law enforcement, with its rigid procedures and demand for empirical evidence, had often put her at odds with traditional beliefs.
In Phoenix, it had been easy to compartmentalize. Her job was her identity. The reservation was a place she visited, a place of family obligation, not a place she truly inhabited. She had seen the spiritual world as a collection of "cultural factors" to be considered in a case, not a living reality. It was a liability in her line of work, a set of variables that couldn't be quantified or controlled. So she had distanced herself, creating a professional and personal buffer.
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