Chapter 1
I had less than four minutes before the blizzard swallowed the only tire tracks out of the Redfern valley, but Faith only gave me five seconds. “Five,” she whispered through the brass security chain, her jaw locked in an icy tremor. Behind her in the darkened foyer, floorboards creaked under the weight of three men stepping into position. “Four. Don't look back, Jesse. Run until your lungs freeze.” When the heavy oak door cracked shut on two, the distinct click of a safety disengaging echoed from the parlor.
The deadbolt slammed home with the concussive finality of an executioner’s axe.
One. Two. Three brass tumblers aligning in the heavy mountain spruce. Through the frosted side-lite of the door frame, the silhouettes shifted—broad-shouldered shapes draped in heavy oilskin coats, moving with the sluggish, lethal confidence of men who knew the perimeter was already theirs.
A sharp, metallic rack split the roar of the gale. Twelve-gauge. Double-aught buck.
“Get off the porch, Jesse!” Faith’s voice cut through the cross-timbered panels, shrill and devoid of blood. “Don’t make them paint the pine!”
The first blast erupted before she even finished the sentence.
The upper leaded panel of the door exploded outward in an eruption of crystalline shards and smoking splinters. Lead buckshot chewed through the storm awning above my head, raining powdered lath and severed cedar shingles into the collar of my coat.
I didn’t wait for the second shell.
I vaulted the porch railing, dropping eight feet into the drift piled against the foundation. The snow hit my chest like concrete, knocking the breath from my windpipe in a violent, wheezing gasp. Sub-zero air rushed into my throat, searing the bronchial lining with the sharpness of swallowed razor wire.
Behind me, the porch floodlights hummed to life. High-intensity halogens mounted under the eaves flared with a buzzing pop, turning the swirling blizzard into a blinding, white-hot kaleidoscope. My shadow stretched thirty yards ahead of me, pinned against the blank expanse of the lower pasture like a target on a paper range.
“He went off the south rail!” Caleb’s voice boomed above the gale, raw and gravelly, followed immediately by the harsh, dual-tone screech of a nickel-plated hound whistle.
The sound tore through the screech of the wind, high and piercing enough to ache in the back of my molars. From the kennels behind the smokehouse, forty yards upwind, three voices answered. Plott hounds. Ridge runners bred to hunt bear in the laurel hells, lean-ribbed and starved down to fighting weight, trained to trail warm meat through packed drift without breaking stride.
I scrambled to my feet, my boots fighting for purchase in the waist-deep drift. Every yard of movement felt like wading through wet wet cement. The wind came screaming off the southern crest of the Black Ridge, carrying forty knots of needle-sharp ice pellets that stripped the skin from my exposed cheekbones and turned my eyelashes into brittle crusts.
My snowshoe harness had been on the peg inside the mudroom. Faith had seen me reach for it. Her fingers, normally calloused and warm from tending the cast-iron stove, had slapped my wrist away with a stinging crack before she drove the brass chain into its slot.
*You don’t get tools, boy,* her eyes had said. *You get five seconds.*
Ten years. A decade of living under her roof, splitting her firewood, mending her pasture fencing, hauling twenty-gallon milk cans through the freeze while the rest of the Redfern clan gathered in the council house on the hill to divide up the county timber kickbacks. She had bandaged my knuckles when the Redfern cousins beat me bloody behind the grange hall for being an outsider, a charity case pulled from the county home down in Bluefield.
*You’ve got mountain blood even if your paper don’t show it,* she used to tell me, pressing a hot cloth soaked in witch hazel to my swollen eyes. *You just keep your head down and stay out of Silas’s timber stands.*
It had all been theater. A decade of quiet domesticity bought with a forged smile, discarded the exact second Silas Redfern knocked on her side door with three armed enforcers and an ultimatum.
A second shotgun blast punched through the lower parlor sash. The spray of buckshot fell short, tearing into the crust of the drift twenty feet behind my heels, sending plumes of pulverized powder into the back of my knees.
I reached the bottom of the terrace, hit a hidden fence line, and went down hard.
My knee drove into a submerged cedar fence post. Pain flared white-hot through my patella, sickening and dull, radiating up into my hip. I rolled on my shoulder, burying my face in the drift to smother the involuntary cry that tore from my throat.
*Get up.*
I dug my leather-mittened fingers into the snow, clawing for purchase against the frozen turf beneath. When I dragged myself up, my right leg dragged two beats behind the left, the joint clicking with every stride.
To the north, the tree line of the hemlock grove hovered like a jagged wall of black ink against the gray belly of the squall. Two hundred yards. In summer, over dry fescue, it was a thirty-second jog. Tonight, dragging a dead leg through knee-deep crust with fifty pounds of soaked duck canvas dragging down my shoulders, it was a mile.
Another whistle shrieked. Closer this time. The hounds had cleared the kennel run. Their baying was a rhythmic, rising chop—the eager, frantic chop of dogs that had picked up the fresh scent of wool and sweat on a cold draft.
I looked over my shoulder as I cleared the tractor path.
The front door of the homestead stood wide open now. In the blinding glare of the halogen floodlights, three figures spilled out onto the porch wrap. Silas Redfern stood in the center, unmistakable in his ankle-length wolf-skin coat, holding an old Winchester lever-action across his chest like a shepherd’s crook. To his right, Caleb Redfern was already jogging down the porch steps, swinging a twelve-gauge pump by the receiver, a coil of slip-lead trailing from his left hand.
And standing on the threshold, framed against the warm amber glow of the kerosene lamps she refused to replace with electricity, was Faith.
She didn't move. She didn't shout. She stood rigid, her wool shawl pulled tight around her frail shoulders, watching me drown in the snow. Her hands were tucked beneath her apron—the same floral calico apron she wore when she baked Sunday bread. Not a sign of grief. Not a flicker of hesitance. Just that same dead, granite stare that had greeted me when I crawled onto her porch thirty minutes ago, half-dead from the mountain road, begging for the keys to the grain truck.
*“Silas knows what you found, Jesse,”* she had said through the crack of the chain, her voice flat as an iron skillet. *“You brought his business to my doorstep. You think I’m going to let this house burn for an orphan?”*
The cruelty of it had hit harder than the frostbite setting into my thumbs.
Twenty-four hours ago, I hadn’t known what Silas’s business truly looked like.
Twenty-four hours ago, I was just a third-year field surveyor for the Bluefield County Department of Forestry, carrying a three-legged theodolite and a bundle of red surveyor laths through the logging cuts at the head of Raven Creek. The county had contracted an updated contour map of the timber parcels before the state highway department broke ground on the drainage easement.
