Page 24 of Keeper of Talon Mountain
The figure at the tree line is gone when I start up the trail. But I can feel eyes on me—professional eyes, tracking my movements, making sure I'm alone. My body moves with unconscious efficiency through the snow, taking the steepest route toward the overlook because faster is better than careful right now.
The first hundred yards are deceptively easy, following a game trail that winds through dense evergreens. Snow weighs down the branches, creating a tunnel of white and green that muffles sound. My breathing evens out, finds a rhythm my body knows even if my mind doesn't. This is familiar territory—not these specific trees or this particular mountain, but the act itself. Moving through hostile terrain toward an objective. Every sense alert for threats.
A branch snaps somewhere to my left. I freeze, hand moving automatically toward the gun at my back. But it's just a clump of snow falling from an overladen pine, the branch springing up with a soft whoosh. I force myself to keep moving. They're watching, making sure I'm alone, but they won't interfere. Not yet.
As I climb higher, the trail deteriorates into barely more than a suggestion through the snow. The terrain steepens, forcing me to use my hands as much as my feet, grabbing exposed roots and rock faces for purchase. Ice makes everything treacherous—what looks like solid snow might be a thin crust over air, ready to give way and send me tumbling back down the slope.
The mountain is quiet except for the muffled sound of my boots in the snow and my own controlled breathing. As I climb, fragmented memories surface—not complete scenes, just flashes. Training exercises in terrain just like this. An instructor's voice:Move with purpose, not speed. Speed gets you killed.My hands know how to test handholds, how to distribute my weight, how to read the slope for avalanche risk. Skills drilled into muscle and bone until they become automatic.
I pause at a narrow shelf to catch my breath, my ribs protesting the exertion. The lodge is visible far below, smoke rising from the chimney into the darkening sky. From up here, it looks peaceful. Safe. A haven carved from the wilderness.
Mara is down there. Zara. People willing to risk their lives because they've decided I'm worth protecting, even though they barely know me. The weight of that responsibility sits heavy in my chest, making it hard to breathe in the thin mountain air.
A raven calls from somewhere above, harsh and mocking. I look up to see it circling, black wings stark against the gray sky. Watching. Always watching.
The climb gets harder. What little trail existed disappears entirely, forcing me to forge my own path up increasingly steep terrain. My legs burn, my lungs ache, and the cold seeps through my jacket despite the exertion. I'm sweating underneath the layers, which will make me colder later when I stop moving. Another lesson surfaces:Always regulate your temperature on approach. Sweat is the enemy in cold weather.
Whose voice is that? I can't see a face, can't place the memory. Just disembodied instruction, rising from whatever dark well my past is buried in.
The wind picks up as I near the overlook, no longer buffered by trees. It cuts through my clothes, finds every gap and seam, steals the warmth my body is desperately trying to generate. My hands are numb despite my gloves. I flex my fingers as I climb, trying to maintain dexterity. If this goes sideways—when this goes sideways—I'll need my hands working.
Another memory surfaces, this one sharper: A different mountain, different weather, but the same sense of walking toward something dangerous. Someone beside me, their face obscured but their presence solid. A partner. Someone I trusted with my life.
The memory dissolves before I can hold onto it, leaving only the ghost of that trust and the hollow certainty that whoever it was, they're probably dead now. Or they're one of the people hunting me.
Widow's Peak Overlook would be a brutal climb even in good weather. In winter, with ice coating the rocks and wind cutting like knives, it's treacherous. The final approach requires actual climbing—pulling myself up over snow-covered boulders, finding handholds in rock that's slick with ice. My ribs scream in protest. The cut on my temple throbs in time with my heartbeat. But I push through, driven by the image of Mara's face and the certainty that hesitation will cost lives.
I haul myself over the last boulder and onto the overlook shelf, muscles shaking from exertion and cold. For a moment I just kneel there in the snow, catching my breath, letting my body recover enough to stand. The wind is fierce up here, unobstructed, strong enough to make me lean into it.
When I finally look up, I see him.
The overlook opens up suddenly—a flat shelf of rock jutting out over the valley, ancient mining equipment scattered around like the bones of dead machines. And standing at the edge, silhouetted against the darkening sky, is a man.
Not the figure from the tree line. Someone else. Someone whose posture screams military authority even from a distance.
"Gabriel." He doesn't turn around. "Right on time. I knew you wouldn't disappoint."
I stop twenty feet away, hands visible, no weapons drawn. "I'm here."
He turns slowly, deliberately. Even in the fading light I can see the gray hair, the cold eyes, the face that triggers a cascade of memories so intense I have to lock my knees to stay standing.
Commander Vex Crane.
The name surfaces with a flood of images—briefing rooms, kill orders, missions that never made it into official records. The Chimera Protocol. Three heads of the beast: Intelligence, Enforcement, Acquisition. A rogue unit that answers to no one but him.
My former CO. The man who built it all. The man I tried to destroy.
He's holding something in his right hand. Not a weapon—a photograph. Even from here, I can see auburn hair and green eyes.
"Let's talk about Mara," he says.
9
MARA
The window shows nothing but trees and darkness where Gabe disappeared.
"He's not coming back." Zara's voice comes from behind me, flat and certain.
