Chapter 8
I kept low, bent nearly double, driving the heavy iron survey pin into the snow crust like an ice axe with every forward lurch.
*Step. Plant. Drag.*
The mountain was erasing itself. Twenty yards ahead, the world vanished into a churning, milky void where the gray rock shelves melted into the whiteout. The only landmarks left were the ones my father had drilled into my memory before the clan put him under the clay: the sharp, west-leaning spurs of red spruce that survived the gale by growing flat against the rock, their needles frozen into bristling wire mats.
To my left, the mountain dropped into the gorge—a sheer, vertical black wall where the frozen roar of Black Creek rose up through the storm like the hum of an underground turbine. To my right, the old timber flume ran along the bench, a rotted trough of heart-pine timbers half-buried beneath twenty-foot wind drifts.
Somewhere in that timber flume, Caleb was driving his machine uphill.
The two-stroke whine of the Ski-Doo was swallowed by the gale, but every few hundred yards the wind would drop into a momentary pocket of dead pressure, and through the lull I caught the low, metallic buzz of a snowmobile track chewing through packed ice. He was below me, using the old grade to bypass the limestone ledges, climbing hard to reach the gorge overlook before I could find the splash dam.
I checked the radio clipped inside my collar. The green screen was dead, dark glass fogged with condensation, but the channel-lock toggle was still seated on channel seven.
A sudden burst of static hissed in my ear, harsh and wet.
*“—at the three-mile culvert,”* Caleb’s voice cut in, ragged, torn by engine vibration. *“Drift took out my left ski cowl, Silas. The flume’s choked with blowdown. I’m having to winch the machine past the trestle.”*
I dropped behind a slab of exposed sandstone, pulling my coat tight around my chin, pressing the handheld to my ear with both mittens.
Silas answered immediately. His voice wasn’t loud, but it had the hollow, heavy resonance of a man speaking inside a room with sixteen-foot ceilings and heart-pine paneling.
*“Leave the sled if the timber’s fouled,”* Silas said. The crackle of burning oak wood popped in the background—Faith’s parlor hearth. *“You have the Winchester in the scabbard. Take the iron and hike the flume trail. Lyle says the timber bridge is locked down. The boy has nowhere to go but the shelf.”*
*“The wind’s blowing sixty on the ridge, Silas,”* Caleb panted, his breath hard against his mic. *“If he’s out on that shelf without snowshoes, he’s already stiff. We don’t need to track him. Let the drift cover him till the thaw.”*
A sharp, brittle clink sounded over the speaker. Glass against porcelain. Silas taking a drink from the whiskey decanter that had sat on Faith’s sideboard for forty years.
*“We track him because of the paper, Caleb,”* Silas said, his voice dropping into that chilling, measured cadence he used at the clan grange when property lines were redrawn and men lost their timber shares. *“He didn't just look in the trench. He took the township parcel log from the county surveyor’s truck before he ditched it. That log has the state seals. If a single page of that book reaches the troopers in Charleston, the pulp mill doesn't just shut down. The whole mountain goes under receivership.”*
*“The woman has the second book,”* Caleb barked over the squall. *“You said you found it.”*
*“I found the shell of it,”* Silas replied.
A heavy floorboard groaned beneath his boots. Then came another sound—a sharp, wet slap of leather against meat, followed by the dull thud of someone’s head striking the wainscoting.
A woman’s low, ragged intake of breath. Faith.
*“She burned the survey plates,”* Silas said, without a trace of heat in his words. *“Ten years she sat in this valley, Caleb. Ten years we let her keep the homestead clear of the mill taxes because she was Donald’s widow. We gave her the orphan boy to keep her quiet, let her play schoolteacher while the clan took the hemlock stands off the north crest. And the whole time, she was keeping the surveyor’s ledger under the hearth.”*
*“Silas—”* Faith’s voice broke through the channel, muffled, raspy, as if her face was pressed down against the polished cherry table. *“You touch that stove... you won’t leave this valley before the troopers hit the state road. The wire’s already out.”*
*“There is no wire, Faith,”* Silas said softly. The sound of his thumb cocking a rifle hammer clicked through the speaker like dry bone snapping. *“The towers are on our generators. The county line is dead. You know how the covenant reads for an apostate. You took blood money from the state inspector before we put him in the trench. You harbored Donald’s bastard surveyor. When Caleb finishes with the boy at the gorge, the hearth goes over. The house goes down with the family name on it.”*
*“He isn't Donald’s bastard,”* she whispered, her voice shaking with something that wasn't fear, something that sounded terrifyingly like a sneer. *“He’s Thomas Vance’s boy. And he knows every stone your grandfather buried on this mountain.”*
*“Then he’ll die on Thomas Vance’s stones,”* Silas said.
The radio dropped into a blanket of white static as the transmission cut out.
I sat in the snow behind the sandstone slab, the plastic casing of the Motorola biting into my palm through the damp wool of my glove.
*Apostate covenant.*
The old Redfern law. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was the century-old code the mountain families had written into their private bibles during the timber wars of the 1890s: if a widow or daughter of the bloodline aided an outside surveyor or state agent against the clan's timber holdings, her house was declared vacant, her name struck from the family cemetery register, and her property consolidated into the corporate ledger by fire.
They hadn't come to her house tonight to search for me.
They were already there when I knocked.
When I crawled up her porch steps thirty minutes ago, half-dead from the switchback wreck, Silas and his killers were already inside. They had been in her parlor since dusk, tearing up the floorboards, looking for the survey books my father had left behind before he died.
She hadn't brought Silas to me.
I had walked directly into her execution.
And when she saw me standing in the doorway—bloody, stupid, holding out my hands for truck keys that didn't exist—she had seen the only survivor of Thomas Vance’s bloodline walking straight into the slaughterhouse.
*“Five... four... Don't look back, Jesse. Run until your lungs freeze.”*
She had pushed the iron chain into the frame, jammed the cut link into the brass track, and cursed me like a stray dog so Silas would believe she was protecting the clan’s border—buying herself sixty seconds of life, and buying me the only head start I would ever get.
The wind screamed across the rock rim, tearing a sheet of crust from the drift beside my knees and flinging it into the black abyss of the canyon.
