Page 2 of Sentinel of Talon Mountain
“Not the ten I want to spend in Anchorage,” I tell him. I needed a place without ghosts in uniform. Without the echo of sirens or the faces I couldn’t save. “There’s a job waiting in Talon Mountain. Feels like the right time to take it.”
He gives me the standard handshake, the boilerplate thank-you-for-your-service, but there’s a flicker in his eyes—he knows I’m not just walking away from a job. I’m walking toward something else.
The paperwork is done in minutes, and then it’s just me, my truck, and the road. The coastal highway south is slick with salt spray, the ocean a restless, steel-gray expanse on my right.
One of the guys from the unit leans in the doorway as I’m leaving, grinning. “Bet you’ll miss the city lights.”
Bet I won’t. City lights never showed me anything worth staying for.
By the time I reach the outskirts of Glacier Hollow, the sun’s low, bleeding gold into the choppy waves. My new place—a weathered stone cottage tucked against the trees—sits on a bluff where the gulls wheel and the surf crashes far below. It’s small, but the porch faces the sea, and the air here tastes clean.
Inside, it’s bare bones: two chairs, a table, and an antique bed I had delivered still wrapped in plastic. I drop my duffel, stand in the middle of the room, and listen to the wind batter the eaves.
“This isn’t retirement,” I tell the empty space. “It’s a reset.” Reset or reckoning—either way, something’s waiting on that mountain. I can feel it.
Tomorrow, I start with the Wildlife Protection Division. Tonight, I let the sound of the ocean fill the empty spaces and tell myself I made the right call.
Her name drifts up before I can stop it—Wren Knox. Caleb’s little sister. Formerly with Denali SAR. Avalanche survivor.
We worked a joint op last winter, when an organ poaching ring reached into Glacier Hollow. She was one of the first to spot the pattern no one else wanted to see, one of the first to say it out loud. Cold, methodical, too calm for the amount of blood we saw.
I remember thinking she moved like the mountain itself—quiet until she wasn’t, steady until she struck. Her reports regarding her last rescue on Denali had read like the map of a crime scene: clean, clinical, stripped down to the bone. But it was the silence between the lines that stuck with me. Like she’d buried something deep and didn’t want anyone digging it up.
1
WREN
The shot is so clean I don’t hear the crack until the bullet kisses the snow a foot from my boots, spitting powder up my legs. Not a hunter’s mistake. Not some tourist with a borrowed rifle. This is precision—deliberate and professional.
The air razors down my throat. Pine bites my nose. Ice dust freckles my cheeks like shrapnel.
For a beat my body forgets how to breathe, then survival slams the switch. Not a ricochet. Not luck. The snow hush swallows the world until all I hear is the small, hard sound of my heart.
“Count, Wren,” I whisper into my balaclava, voice lost to the wind. One… two… three… No tail echo. No honest report. Suppressor or long distance with fat snow soaking the sound.
Wind’s NNE, eight—maybe ten—so they’re holding low-right from here. I inventory in a blink: Krummholz ribbon to the west, drifted cornice of snow to the east, boulder spine dead ahead with a narrow sidestep cut nobody uses unless they’ve mapped this ridge by feel. I mapped it the winter I decided I didn’t owe anyone answers anymore.
My fingers flex on instinct. I don’t pray. I plan.
My heart jolts once, hard, and then instinct takes over. I drop low, scanning the tree line without lifting my head above my hood. Snow drifts hiss in the wind, masking everything except the burn in my lungs. Whoever’s out there is too far to see without glass, but the angle tells me they’re set up across the ridge.
I angle my body into the wind, narrowing my profile, knees absorbing the first shock of cold. The poles stay strapped to my pack—too much movement would give me away. Every step is a calculation: wind slab that won’t collapse, rock outcrop that won’t crumble, deadfall that won’t groan. I move like a ghost when I have to. And today, I have to.
I move. Not toward the trail, never toward the obvious exit. I cut left, skirting the drop-off, boots silent on the crust. My pack slides against my spine, and I hug the terrain I know better than my own reflection.
Out here, the wrong line means a twisted ankle or worse, but I’ve run this high-country maze since I moved to Talon Mountain. The ridges and gullies are my home turf. I’ve spent years mapping every draw and choke point by heart, but I never imagined I’d be navigating them under fire.
I zigzag upslope until a granite outcrop shields me, then angle back in a shallow arc toward the trail, using a narrow deer path buried under wind-packed snow. The game track feeds me into a thicket that spits me out fifty yards above where the main trail kinks east—far enough to make it look like I’ve been somewhere else entirely.
I drag my right glove once in a long, messy scuff—an intentional stumble to sell the lie if anyone tries to track me. Ten strides later, I stamp a small triangle into the drift with the heel of my boot—my field shorthand for danger—trail burned. If Nate ever reads this line, he’ll know to cut wide. He won’t know it’s mine unless he’s been paying closer attention than I want himto. Though after Glacier Hollow last winter, I can’t pretend he hasn’t seen how I work. We never talked about it, not really—but we moved through that case like we shared a field book.
Another shot shatters the quiet, close enough that the concussion punches my ribs. Bark explodes from a spruce at shoulder height. I bite down hard to keep from swearing out loud and push into the wind, letting the next ridge swallow me from view.
Fresh sap sweetens the air. The strike is clean—no keyhole, no yaw—round’s stable across the basin. I count beats to the faintest ghost of a report. Six to eight hundred yards if the wind and my gut agree. “Show-off,” I breathe because pettiness is a shield. He/she is good, but I'm better at not dying.
The isolation I’ve lived in for five years—my shield, my sanctuary—is suddenly a liability. No cell service up here. No one around for miles. Except him.
Silence kept me whole when the world wanted me open. Silence doesn’t call for help. Out here, quiet is just a bigger target with nicer views. I told myself I stayed for wolves, data, and distance. Truth? I stayed because it was easier to haunt a mountain than to explain why I can’t sleep when anyone says my name with pity.
