Chapter 2

The parcels belonged to the Redfern Timber & Pulp Corporation. They had belonged to them since the Reconstruction land grabs.

It was three in the afternoon, the sky already bruised purple with the front edge of the current storm, when my prism rod dropped through the crusted snow into an empty pocket along the old skidder track.

It hadn't felt like a sinkhole. The earth gave way with the brittle snap of rotted pine pallets.

When I knelt to clear the drift with the head of my brush axe, expecting an abandoned grease pit or an old bootlegger's cache, the smell had hit me first. Even through twelve degrees of ambient frost, the odor was unmistakable—the greasy, metallic sweetness of slaked lime mixed with diesel oil and decomposing organic matter.

Beneath the crushed pallets lay an eight-foot trench cut directly into the shale bed.

Three fifty-five-gallon steel drums, their lids sheared open with an acetylene torch, lay half-submerged in a pool of blackened slush. The lye had done its work on the flesh, but it hadn’t dissolved the bone. It hadn't dissolved the stainless-steel belt buckle still caught in the pelvic frame of the topmost skeleton.

A buckle stamped with the emblem of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

David Vance. The state inspector who had red-flagged Silas Redfern’s clear-cutting permits along the headwaters six years ago and was supposed to have abandoned his wife and three kids to start a new life in Mexico.

There were two more bodies beneath Vance. One was reduced to a tangle of ribs and a pair of steel-toed boots; the other still wore the remnants of a high-visibility highway crew parka.

I hadn't stopped to take field measurements. I hadn't even packed the theodolite back into its padded case. I threw my field book into the cab of my Chevy, threw the transfer case into four-wheel drive, and dropped down the logging road toward the main valley floor.

I hadn't made it three miles before Caleb’s heavy-duty F-350 appeared in my rear-view mirror, tailgating my bumper through the hairpin turns without headlights, his bull-bar five inches from my tailgate.

He didn't try to pass me. He just nudged me. A systematic, rhythmic tap every time my tires hit a patch of black ice, waiting for the mountain to do the executioner's work for him.

At the second switchback, the rear axle of my truck snapped against a buried boulder. The Chevy had pitched sideways, rolling twice through the laurel brush before coming to rest upside down in the creek bed, thirty feet below the grade.

I had crawled out through the shattered rear cab window, my coat soaked in transmission fluid, my brush axe lost in the creek. I didn't have a phone. The ridge blocked the towers even on clear days, and the radio in my dash was crackling with nothing but white static.

There was only one house within four miles of the lower culvert: the old Redfern homestead at the base of the pass. Faith's house.

I had believed—with the stupid, desperate naivety of an adopted stray who wanted to believe he finally had a mother—that she was different. She had refused to sign the clan proxy papers when her husband died. She didn't attend the clan assemblies at the grange hall. When Silas’s men came down the road, she stayed inside and pulled the blinds.

I thought she was a hostage to the family name.

I didn't understand that she was just the family's rear guard.

A sharp, wet snarl cut through the shriek of the gale, dragging me back to the pasture.

Thirty yards.

The lead hound, a scarred blue-tick bitch named Bell, cleared the second terrace in a flat, muscular leap. Her paws barely touched the surface of the crust; she was light enough to ride the drift, her nostrils flared wide, spewing twin plumes of gray steam into the driving snow.

Behind her came the two cross-bred Plott hounds, shoulder to shoulder, their heavy dewlaps swinging as they bayed, driving straight toward the fence line where I had slipped.

“Take him, girls!” Caleb’s voice was faint now, muffled by the wall of falling white, but the metallic clatter of an engine turning over followed it.

A snowmobile. The twin-cylinder growl of an old Ski-Doo, its muffler cracked, spitting blue exhaust into the gale as its tracks churned through the drift near the barn. Silas wasn't going to let Caleb hike after me. They were bringing the iron.

My lungs were on fire. The pain in my knee had settled into a dull, thumping ache that threatened to give way every time I planted my boot into an unseen rut. The tree line was sixty yards away—forty yards of open pasture, then a ten-foot drainage ditch choked with blackberry brambles, then the first dense shelter of the black hemlocks.

If they caught me in the open pasture, Silas wouldn't even waste a shell. Caleb would run the skis of that thirty-horsepower sled across my spine and let the hounds have what was left before the drift covered the tracks.

*Move, you idiot. Move!*

I lowered my head, driving my shoulders forward, pumping my arms against the resistance of the wind.

The snow was up to my hips now, a wind-sculpted wave piled along the leeward side of the pasture terrace. With every two steps forward, the crust collapsed beneath my weight, dropping me back into the powder. My fingers were losing sensation inside my wet gloves; the tips felt swollen and thick, like wood plugs.

Ten yards behind me, the blue-tick hound lunged.

I heard the dry hiss of her pads across the snow crust half a second before her muzzle slammed into the back of my thigh. The impact didn't break the skin through the heavy duck canvas, but the momentum spun me sideways.

I went down on my back, throwing my left arm up instinctively as sixty pounds of lean, snarling hound crashed onto my chest.

Bell’s jaws snapped shut inches from my chin, her yellowed incisors clicking against the brass zipper of my collar. Her breath smelled of raw tallow and sour mash. Her front paws were planted on my collarbones, pinning me into the drift, her throat vibrating with a guttural, vibrating growl that vibrated directly into my ribs.

I didn't have a knife. I didn't have an axe.

My right hand, buried in the snow beneath my hip, struck something hard and cold.

A cedar fence stake, rotted off at the soil line by twenty years of damp mountain rot, but still pointed at the tip where old wire had held it against the frost heave.

I didn't think. The animal instinct that lives beneath civilization took over before my brain could process the violence.

I hauled the stake from the drift and drove the splintered end upward into the hound’s flank.

The cedar didn't penetrate deep—the wood was too punky—but it struck the dog's rear hip socket with enough blunt force to split the tendon. Bell let out a sharp, yelping screech, her jaws snapping wild into the empty air as her hind legs buckled. She tumbled off my chest, rolling twice into the powder, snapping viciously at her own rear leg.

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