He took her hand in his. “We’ll follow the road into the pass. Be ready to take cover.” He glanced down at their hands. “Can you keep us warm?”
She nodded, and a moment later he felt the now-familiar twining sensation spreading up from their hands. All around them the icy ground began to thaw.
He led her around the bloodied remains of the battle and around the curve, stopping briefly to study the road ahead. It lay empty and covered in a thick layer of fresh snow, with no tire marks to indicate any traffic had passed through recently.
The bitter wind buffeted them, but Lilah kept a firm hold on his hand, and through him steadily generated enough heat to keep their bodies from chilling. The storm seemed to be clearing, which helped, but by the time they had walked a mile, their clothes were dripping wet from the melting snow, and Lilah’s face had grown pinched with strain.
He stopped and turned her toward him. “What is it?”
Her shoulders slumped, and the heat retreated for several seconds before she straightened and looked up at him, exhaustion clouding her eyes. “I don’t think I can keep this up much longer.”
The settlers who had originally built the town of Frenchman’s Pass had been a group of eleven families from the East who had been drawn together by unwavering faith and new purpose. After some years of planning, saving, and preparing, they had left their comfortable homes in rural Pennsylvania and traveled to the remote mountains of Colorado. They chose the more remote, unpopulated region specifically to avoid the lawlessness and vice of the established mining camps and boomtowns.
Like so many faithful of their time, the settlers had staked their future on the dream of building the kind of community that reflected their beliefs and values. Led by a master carpenter named Josiah Jemmet, his wife, Anna, and their six sturdy children, the forty-nine settlers had set out on the arduous journey from their homes in the East in late winter, before the Mississippi could thaw.
“This is our great exodus,” Josiah was fond of saying whenever a minor squabble erupted. “Let us not disappoint the Lord with how we conduct ourselves along the way.”
Although they were determined to isolate themselves from the evils of the world, the settlers knew that in order to survive they would have to trade with others who did not share their values. That spring they began clearing land in the pass between the peaks and measuring out lots for a proper town, one that unlike their mountain homes would welcome strangers. While the women stayed up in the peaks to plant vegetable gardens and tend to the younger children and the livestock they had brought from back East, Josiah and a group of men and older boys spent the short summer months erecting a general store, stables, a boardinghouse, and a trading post.
When their first visitor, a trapper who lived twenty miles west, rode in, he was shocked to discover that the settlers had not brought a drop of liquor with them, nor did they have any plans to build a saloon.
“Why, a town without a saloon is like one without a jail,” the old-timer had protested.
“We’re not building a jail, either,” Josiah assured him. “If we don’t have one, we surely won’t have need of the other.”
The settlers continued to thrive and build until the first hard freeze arrived and sent them back up the mountain to their comfortable log cabins to weather the upcoming storms until spring. As they had during their first winter, they planned to look out for one another and gather as often as they could to discuss naming their new town. Unaware of what else had come to the pass that winter, Josiah consulted his Bible to find names for both the town and his seventh child. By March he expected to welcome Daniel or Ruth into the world, and perhaps carve a sign that read MOUNT DAVID or ABRAHAMVILLE near the entrance to the pass.
Josiah, who believed that hard work, prayer, and clean living earned a man the right to a good, long life, didn’t know he would never come down from the mountain again.
There still were no saloons in the mountain town the first families had built, but 130 years had added another dozen business establishments, including two diners, a Victorian bed-and-breakfast, a local crafters’ co-op, and a jail, the latter presided over by Larimer County sheriff Ethan Jemmet.
Ethan, who was finishing out his first shift since returning from Denver, had spent most of the afternoon trying not to think about runaway Lori or her bracelet, which lay curled like a tiny sleeping snake in his shirt pocket. Working the crossword puzzle from the Sunday Times he had picked up in Denver wasn’t helping, but it kept him from issuing an all-points bulletin.
“Evening, Sheriff.”
“Shem.” Ethan nodded toward the cardboard boxes stacked neatly along the wall. “You’re welcome to whatever you want as long as you pass it on when you’re done.”
“ ’Preciate it.”
Because the winter months cut off most regular deliveries to the town, and Internet and satellite service was spotty at best, Ethan had also brought back from Denver a hefty stock of the latest newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, and CDs to pass around. The townspeople would share them through the dark cold months, and by spring be caught up on most of what they needed to know had changed with the outside world.
“You pick up any new Tony Bennett?” Shem asked.
“Nope, sorry. I think he’s retired.” Ethan frowned at the clue for fourteen across. “What’s a seven-letter word for ‘bootless cries to a deaf heaven’? Starts with a T.”
“Trouble. Kinda like what we got.”
He glanced up at the old man. Shem Warner had come down to Frenchman’s Pass at the end of October in order to move into the boardinghouse. A loner by nature, he resented having to give up his cabin and closely guarded solitude for four months out of the year, but he knew better than to stay alone on the mountain during the winter. Even in town he kept to himself, unless he had one of his spells.
Ethan set down his clipboard and swung his worn work boots off from where he’d propped them on the edge of his desk. “You going to tell me about this trouble?”
“What I can.” Shem rasped a hand over his cheek and sighed. “Outsiders, four of ’em. Coming up in a truck from the flatlands. Saw it last night in a spell I had afore I hit the sack.”
Paul Jemmet considered Old Shem’s spells to be nothing more than manifestations of his many, deeply ingrained paranoid fantasies. Ethan was inclined to agree, but he had never embraced science as closely as his father had, and preferred to reserve judgment until he had evidence either way.
He reined in a sigh. “When will they get here?” Shem shrugged. Of course, his spells never came with a calendar or a clock. But Ethan caught the way he shifted his eyes. “What else did you see?”
Dislike hardened the old man’s voice. “Something’s wrong with ’em. Two of ’em, they ain’t regular folks.”
He almost laughed. “Not a lot of regular around here, Shem. Maybe you got your signals crossed.”
“It ain’t funny,” the old man flared. “I don’t just see ’em, Sheriff. I feel ’em.” He thumped his chest with one gnarled fist. “These two, they liked to burn a hole through me.”
“All right, then. What did you feel about them?”
“Can’t say. Ain’t no words for it.” His mouth moved as if he were sucking on something sour. “They was there with the other pair one minute, and then the next they wasn’t. Like they was never there in the first place.” His mouth hitched. “But Nate was. He saw ’em.”
The mention of his brother brought Ethan to his feet. “Nathan never comes down off the mountain.”
“He did this time. He knows all about ’em.” The old man stuffed his hands in his trousers and rocked back on his heels. “Mebbe if you two weren’t feuding allatime, he’d have brought ’em in.”
He ignored the sarcasm. “They’re still here?” When Shem nodded, he swore. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Just them two that ain’t right.” Dislike flickered in the old man’s faded blue eyes as he lifted his head. “Other ones, they got et.”
Ethan grabbed the mike to the radio. “Elroy, this is base.”
His deputy answered a moment later. “Copy, Sheriff.”
“We’ve got strangers on foot in the pass. I’m heading out to collect them.” He set down the mike to pull on his jacket.
“Flatlanders.” Elroy sounded scathing. “You want me to return to base?”
“I need you to go up to my father’s place and get him.” He took the gun from his desk drawer, checked the rounds, and holstered it at his side. “I’ll meet you two back here.”
“Don’t you want to take them to the B&B and let Annie see to them?” his deputy asked.
He glanced at Shem, who shook his head. “We’ll have a look at them first here.”
“Copy that.”
Ethan’s Escalade had been outfitted for operation during the worst conditions, and as he drove down toward the entrance to the pass, he expected to feel the buffeting of the wind. But a break in the storm had apparently come along, and aside from the light powdery flakes drifting down, there was hardly a breeze stirring the snow-encrusted trees.
Twilight had already painted most of the sky deep purple, and he switched on his headlights as he peered through the icy windshield. With only one road in and five-foot drifts on either side, there was no place for two people to conceal themselves—but all he saw ahead was snow and empty road.
Unless they missed the road to town and went up the slope.
Ethan’s jaw set as he reached for the radio and switched it to a frequency he hadn’t used since joining the sheriff’s office. “Nathan, do you copy?”
Static answered him for a long minute, but just as he was going to repeat the call, it crackled.
“What do you want?” His brother’s voice sounded garbled, but not enough to disguise the anger.
“Shem stopped in to see me. Said you came down to the pass tonight.” He clamped down on his own temper. “That true?”
