An Excerpt from Book 4
Wind Catcher
Book 4 of the Demon in Exile Series is coming soon, due out in early April, 2021.
Excerpt: The Wolves of Summer
They’d eaten Becks.
Viren Drake staggered up the steep hill toward his hideaway cabin, Dagr’s bark leading him on. The wolf trap was a bloody mess of torn clothing and shredded boots. Nothing was left of her, nothing he could carry, nothing but her hunting knife, abandoned in some low-growing yellow pines on the edge of the game trail. A black residue covered the handle and the tip of the blade.
Wolves didn’t do that. If they escaped from a trap or snare, they would be halfway across the valley before sunrise. They didn’t wait around for payback, they didn’t take the time to make their prey an unrecognizable scattering of hair and bone fragments, and they didn’t bleed black.
They’d eaten—FETH. Viren vomited bile and reheated coffee as he struggled up the trail toward home. The log house was sturdy, large, and built across the opening of an old smuggler’s cave, giving them plenty of room to work out their differences and sort out a living in between, safely tucked away in the densely wooded borderlands of northern Fugaku. Between Rebekah trapping the active game trails in the valley and Viren following his love of woodworking, the past six years had flown past, coming to a sudden stop with the howls of an unquiet dawn.
Viren stood outside, frozen at the thought of entering the abode, knowing that he’d see her everywhere with a mind that couldn’t unsee the morning’s butchery. He shut his eyes and listened, a hand on Dagr’s head to keep him quiet.
“Becks, you home?” he called out one last time.
Silence answered, further branding him with the new reality.
“She must be fishing the stream for our dinner,” he said to his wolfhound. “I bet her traps came up empty again.”
Viren tried to chuckle at the stale words but coughed up more bile instead. The harsh sound echoed back off the rocky hill above him, mocking his misery.
Dagr barked, getting his own faint echo and pulling Viren’s attention back to the present.
“Sergeant Viren Drake reporting for duty, Sir,” said the man, no longer young but not yet old.
He knew these woods before he knew Becks, having fought through them a decade before in the Short War, as it was known. The Fuga and Nantine forces had long decided that the Akio Cut was a strategic avenue for advance through the Everest Mountains into each other’s backyard, not considering the many pitfalls and ambushes that lay waiting for either side in the dense, shoulder-hugging terrain. Much like the Dungarr Basin on Fugaku’s western border, the valley, with its overwhelming growth, was a naturally deceiving landscape with little easy room to maneuver beyond the single River Road. It offered a constricted arena connecting the grassy plains of both realms.
As part of the Fuga Recon Corps, Viren had discovered the smuggler’s cave in its remote location during the Short War, and he’d returned afterward to build his one and only cabin deep in the woods. The logs were plentiful, and he hauled in tools, as needed, from the mill located in Kyserville on the south side of the valley.
Rebekah Tann had appeared a few years later, finding him at the Twin Fountains Inn in Kyserville, where Drake had been building a new set of beds and dining room tables for the owner, a former squadmate of his. After one look, Viren didn’t need to be convinced, but she’d had her story all laid out and ready for him anyway.
Drake was twenty-six at the time, Rebekah twenty-two, and both needed quiet company and a sure retreat after seeing too much of what the world had to offer. For him, it had been the War and the realization that in that darkened environment, war was Hell, and he was the Devil. For Becks, it was life in the Crown’s city of Tannoo on the Fuga east coast and the demanding hunger of its most powerful inhabitants. She had fled, hoping never to be found again. She’d gotten her wish, and in doing so, had ended Viren Drake’s retreat from life.
The sounds of a roaming wolf pack had become a growing concern over the past few weeks, resembling winter hunts in their urgency as the beasts ranged closer and closer up the side of the Akio Valley. Becks had been sure she’d snag a nice pelt or two by trapping the lanes around their cabin.
Drake took a deep breath, entered the cabin, and packed. He left this morning’s stale coffee, his tools, and the sturdy furniture in place for the next occupant, only packing a few changes of clothes. Rebekah’s Hell-stained hunting knife and her one prized possession, an amber necklace that she’d brought from her previous life, sat in the bottom of his pack. Drake wore his own more lethal war-knife, a gift from the Army, and looped a belt over his shoulder for the long-tarnished saber that hung from the wall next to the fire pit. He also packed some dried food and gave plenty to Dagr to eat before they left.
They’d had the hunting hound for four years, a birthday gift from Rebekah at a time when they were both feeling especially distant and needed a bridge. She was insightful that way, always seeming to know the right remedies for their lives before he’d even noticed that there was a problem.
Drake hadn’t needed Dagr’s sensitive hearing this morning; the unearthly howls that broke the dawn’s silence had caused them both to jump while he was working inside the cabin. They’d listened to the beastly sounds with fear until the pack finally faded into the distance to the south. Dagr had caught the kill scent first and led them to the hellish trap site where they’d found Becks’s knife and little else.
With the realization that the Akio Valley and its surrounding hills had become a tragic landscape, leaving was the easiest, if not the saddest, decision that Viren Drake would ever make, not knowing that the nightmare had only just begun.
