Somewhere beyond the ridge stood the sealed mouth of the Kestrel Mine, though from the house he could see only trees and the pale cut of the old haul road.
Marcus had no interest in ghosts. Houses made noises because wood shrank, pipes expanded, animals nested, and foundations settled. People made more trouble than the dead ever could.
He finished his coffee and went inside to measure the front room for trim.
Behind him, the cellar door remained shut.
Chapter 2 — The Woman at the Gate
The storm came over Kestrel Hill an hour after dark, not as rain first but as wind.
It struck the maples hard enough to bend their crowns toward the house. Shutters banged. A loose sheet of tin on the barn roof lifted and slammed, lifted and slammed, until Marcus pulled on his boots and went out with a flashlight and a length of wire to secure it.
Rain followed in a sudden black sheet. By the time he had the tin tied down, water ran from his hat brim and both sleeves were soaked to the elbow. He was crossing the yard, head down, when lightning split the sky open and showed him something at the gate.
At first he thought it was a deer tangled in the fence.
Then the shape moved.
Marcus ran.
The woman lay half in the gravel and half in the mud where the drive met the county road. One hand was caught in the lower rung of the gate, as if she had been trying to pull herself upright when her strength gave out. Her dark hair was plastered across her face. She wore a man's rain jacket several sizes too large, jeans soaked black, and one boot. The other foot was bare except for a muddy sock.
"Hey," Marcus said, kneeling beside her. "Can you hear me?"
Her eyelids fluttered. Heat came off her in waves despite the rain.
He put two fingers against the side of her neck and found a pulse, too fast and thin. There was something hard beneath his fingers, no larger than a marble, hanging against her throat on a leather cord.
Lightning flashed again. This time he saw blood washed thin across her left side.
Marcus didn't ask another question. He worked her hand free of the gate, slid one arm under her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, and lifted. She was lighter than she should have been, all bone and fever, and her head fell against his shoulder as he carried her through the rain.
She made one sound on the porch, a word or a name he couldn't catch. Then she went limp.
Inside, he laid her on the old couch in the front room and stripped off his wet jacket. The house had no proper first-aid kit, only the plastic box he kept for job-site injuries: gauze, tape, antiseptic, a pair of blunt scissors, and a thermometer he used mostly to keep clients from claiming he had no regard for safety.
"I'm going to look," he told her, though she wasn't conscious enough to consent. "You've got blood on your side."
The jacket was stiff with mud. Under it she wore a flannel shirt and a gray undershirt soaked through at the left ribs. Marcus cut the undershirt only as much as he needed. The wound beneath was four inches long, a knife cut that had begun to heal and then been torn partly open again. Its edges were red and angry. Dark bruising spread beneath the skin.
He cleaned it as gently as he could. Her body jerked once when the antiseptic touched the cut, but she didn't wake.
The thermometer read 103.1.
Marcus swore softly, then aloud. His phone had one bar and dropped even that when he carried it from the kitchen to the front room. Outside, rain hammered the windows and water poured from the broken gutter in a bright curtain. The road down the hill would be running like a creek in three places. He could try it, but if the truck slid into the ditch, she'd be worse off than she was here.
He got towels, a basin of cool water, and the acetaminophen from his bathroom cabinet. When she surfaced enough to swallow, he lifted her head and coaxed two tablets down with a spoonful of water. She choked, then drank greedily before he pulled the glass back.
"Easy," he said. "There's more."
Her eyes opened. They were gray, fever-bright, and for a moment entirely lucid.
"Don't," she whispered.
"Don't what?"
Her hand rose, clumsy with weakness, and closed around the object at her throat.
It was a sphere of black iron, about the size of a shooter marble. An old crack divided one side, fine as a hair. The leather cord that held it was dark with age and rain, the knot worn almost smooth. It looked like nothing: no jewel, no carving, no inscription he could see. Yet she held it the way a drowning person holds a rope.
"Don't take it," she said.
"I'm not taking anything. You're hurt. You have a fever."
"Promise."
"All right. I promise."
That seemed to cost her the last of her strength. Her fingers loosened, though they stayed curled around the sphere, and her eyes closed.
Marcus covered her with the dry blanket from his bed. He found her other boot caught outside beside the gate when he went back for his flashlight. There was no bag, no purse, no car. Only a torn strip of cloth in the road, already dissolving into the mud, and one set of footprints where she had come down the center of the gravel, staggering from side to side.
He stood in the rain looking toward the dark tree line.
There was no sign of whoever or whatever she had been running from.