Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Hinterland Series:
Book 1: The Wolf’s Bounty
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 1
Raleigh Douglas tightened her grip on her curved throwing blade and peeped around the corner of the barn. When she saw the kataract munching half a sheep beyond the water trough, she let her hand fall. Her blade wouldn’t make a dent in that thing. Its massive bulk dwarfed the barn. She couldn’t see its eyes behind the two horns curved thick and gnarled in front of its face, but that was a good thing. If she couldn’t see its eyes, it couldn’t see her, either.
Blood and gore covered its face. The sheep’s tattered body muffled the most disgusting grunting and rooting noises. She wrinkled her nose, but she didn’t turn away. If the blade wouldn’t work, she needed some other weapon to take this thing down. The kataracts robbed the farm of too many sheep and cows to tolerate any longer.
Raleigh spent enough of her time hunting monsters and creatures around the farm to know how to deal with kataracts. They lumbered out of the forest to raid the pastures and gardens. They considered humans too puny to threaten them. They were too stupid to recognize when someone developed a method to combat them.
Raleigh eased back behind the barn so the thing wouldn’t see her move her arms in slow arcs to her shoulders. She unslung her crossbow off her back and shouldered it before she took another look. The kataract hadn’t moved except to fling the carcass into the air and catch it in its jaws. It shook the sheep’s body to crack the spine. It pinned the bloody remains to the ground with one foot and set to work ripping the muscle from the bones.
That’s right. Nice kataract. Stupid kataract. That tastes good, doesn’t it? Raleigh sang to the beast in her mind. That’s right. Nice, good, rich, warm blood. Tastes good sliding along your tongue, doesn’t it? Nothing to bother you. Nothing to slink out of the mist to disturb your morning meal.
Raleigh jammed her crossbow against her shoulder. It fit her perfectly. She whittled it herself by the fire every night for six months after she discovered shop-made crossbows didn’t fit her. They were all too big. The makers made them for men, not country girls.
Her other hand inched to her belt and withdrew a single bolt from the wallet at her belt. She fitted it into place without taking her eyes off the monster in the mist. Its great rounded shoulders humped and seethed as it ate. Its shorter hind quarters braced against the damp sod to give its bulging forelimbs purchase to hold down its prey.
Its lower jaw jutted farther from its face than its upper jaw, and the lower fangs pointed almost as high as its slit eyes. The upper fangs didn’t extend much past the lower lip. The kataracts must truly be the ugliest beasts in the world. That made killing them so much easier.
As soon as she got the first bolt fitted, she pulled out three more. She held them between the fingers of her left hand where she supported the crossbow in front of her. She took a firm handhold on the trigger grip and took a deep breath. She would have one chance at this. If she screwed it up, the kataract would have her for lunch after it finished with the sheep.
Once she blew that breath out between her pursed lips, she never gave herself a second chance to hesitate. She stepped out into the open and marched straight across the pasture toward the kataract. It kept eating for a minute. It didn’t see her take aim. It didn’t notice anything until the first bolt struck it behind the horn closest to Raleigh.
Its huge head swung up, and it grunted in surprise, but it never got a chance to attack. The moment she fired the first bolt, she slotted in another from between her index and middle fingers. She fired that one in a split second. Before the kataract got over its surprise, she fired all four bolts in rapid succession.
The first buried its point in the soft place where the horn entered the creature’s skull. The second two penetrated the monster’s eyes and blinded it. The third embedded itself up the creature’s nose.
In the pause when Raleigh had to retrieve more bolts from her wallet, the kataract exploded in rage. It charged at her in all its pounding fury. Its giant form shook the ground, but it couldn’t see where it was going.
Raleigh never stopped walking. She strode straight at it. With a flick of her fingers, she got out another three bolts. They stuck up between her fingers, but she didn’t bother to hold the crossbow with her hand. She fired too fast for that. She fixed one bolt into its place, fired, and moved the next bolt into position so fast the eye couldn’t follow her. She peppered the creature all over the face with bolts.
The third batch of bolts she aimed for its neck. The first severed its windpipe. The second ripped through the hole left by the first to cut off the brainstem behind the kataract’s neck, and the third finished the job.
The kataract bounded over the grass to tear her to pieces. When she fired the tenth bolt, Raleigh stopped still. Her crossbow hung at her side, and she awaited the inevitable conclusion. If she didn’t kill the creature with ten bolts, she wouldn’t kill it at all.
The kataract’s thundering footfalls vibrated the ground under her feet. It took one great leap into the air to pounce on her and kill her in one crunch of its mighty jaws. At the last possible second, it collapsed in a mountain of muscle and steam in front of her. Its bead eyes stared at her in dead surprise. It gave one shuddering heave and lay still.
Now the really curious part of this hunt happened. It always played out the same way. The kataract lay silent and motionless for ten seconds. Raleigh counted them off in her mind. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. The mysterious phenomenon never took ten seconds to begin, never one second more or less.
When she came to ten one thousand, a whining buzz hummed out of the nearby forest. Raleigh didn’t have to look to see a huge black cloud of insects rocketing toward the fallen kataract. They covered the sky and darkened the morning mist all around.
They descended on the creature in a dense, black cloud. They were Maple Midges. Local people called them that because they flew in a spinning spiral pattern like maple seeds falling. They whirled their tiny wings in circles around their heads like miniature propellers, and they never failed to come after any kataract that bit the dust.
Within seconds, their black bodies converged on the kataract at Raleigh’s
feet. She didn’t have to stand out of the way. Maple Midges never bit people. If you stood still and didn’t inhale them, they passed you by. They never gave people a second glance. They never even came out of the forest unless they smelled dead kataract.
Before Raleigh’s eyes, they blanketed the kataract in buzzing, sizzling waves. The instant they landed, the kataract started to collapse in on itself. You couldn’t hear the Midges eating, but you could just imagine their minuscule jaws going to work.
Once it started, you couldn’t imagine the kataract ever being as big as it was when it was alive. It shrank to the size of a barn, then to the size of a loaded hay wagon, and finally down to the size of a large cow. In a matter of seconds, nothing remained of the fearsome creature. The Midges devoured everything—teeth, horns, bone—the whole kataract vanished before Raleigh’s eyes like it was never there. If the bloody dead sheep didn’t stain the grass a few yards away, she might believe it had never been.
As soon as the kataract vanished, the Midges clustered into their cloud and sailed off the forest again. They left the countryside unnaturally quiet. The mist hovered thick and ominous over the land. A few faint bird noises echoed through the forest, but the farm lay still and sleepy.
Raleigh took a step forward and gathered up the ten bolts lying scattered on the grass. She slotted them back into her wallet and slung her crossbow across her back where it belonged. She grabbed the sheep by the leg and dragged it to the offal pit before she washed her hands at the pump.
She wiped the excess water on her leather breeches and tugged her leather vest down over her chest while she scanned the surroundings. The farm house slumped to one side of the cobblestone yard. The barn loomed tall and dark beyond a curtain of mist.
Raleigh tied her unruly curly hair behind her neck, but a few stray wisps still framed her heart-shaped face. Her skin glowed tanned and toned despite the perpetual mist and cloud casting the landscape in gloom. Her shoulders filled out her shirt under her leather vest, but it hugged her curvy hips where her pants fitted snug and tight around her body.
She trained her ear to catch any sound, but nothing disturbed the stillness. What would she find out there? Did some other danger stalk her from just out of sight?
She pulled down the cuffs of her russet linen shirt to cover her wrists, but she wasn’t cold. The mist made her uncertain, not cold. She grasped the handle of her throwing blade and set off. She crossed the barn yard, went out the rickety gate hanging off its leather hinges, and wound her way down the lane skirting the forest.
She surveyed the land on either side. The forest stood dense and eerie beyond the lane. It encroached on her father’s land where the arched stone bridge led to the curve heading south.
Beyond the bridge stood the derelict remains of the village of Tunstead. Smoke billowed from a few chimneys in the slumping houses squatting at odd angles in the mist, but most lay silent and abandoned. A cock crowed out of sight, but not even that sound could infuse the place with life. Secrets and forgotten crimes lay buried in that village—secrets no one would ever uncover.
Raleigh didn’t care to uncover them. The village held no appeal for her. The last remaining villagers bordered on the insane. The ones who still retained some rationality considered Raleigh and her father insane for holding onto their farm. What could you say to people like that? Best to keep her distance and go her own way, which is what Raleigh always did.
After she crossed the bridge, Raleigh plunged into the forest. She cut through dense foliage to the other side where it opened into pasture again. Once in the open, she broke into a brisk run. She could cover as much ground and see just as much. She didn’t see anything, anyway. The mist began to lift, and the sun brightened the pasture to start another day on the farm.
She ran all the way to the stile. She hurdled it in one leap and didn’t stop running until she caught up with Hannah the milkmaid bringing the cows home. Hannah waved her switch and hailed Raleigh, but Raleigh never stopped. She beat it all the way around behind the barn to come back to the house from the other direction.
She hung up her crossbow in the low entry outside the kitchen door. She unbuckled the pistol holsters from her waist. Before she hung them up next to the bow, she checked the bullets and powder in her ammunition pouch. She double-checked the priming and powder in both pistols before she settled them with love and care on their designated nail. She did not take off the curved throwing blade stuck into a special loop in the hip of her pants. She wore that blade at all times, day and night. No one knew what dangers might jump out around this farm, and she learned her lesson to know better.
She pushed the door open and stepped into the low-ceilinged farm kitchen where her breakfast bubbled over the fire. She swung the iron hook out of the fireplace, ladled a portion of porridge into her own bowl, and settled down in the high-backed chimney corner.
Chapter 2
Raleigh blew on the porridge and warmed her damp hands around the clay bowl. These early spring mornings left a chill in her bones, even when she went running around the farm on her sentry watches. Her father always told her to wear another layer of woolen undergarments under her rough leather pants and her shirt, but she tried it and gave it up after the first morning. They constricted her movements too much. She would rather suffer a little cold in exchange for added mobility when it came to fighting the monsters stalking out of the forest.
Almost every morning, she got into a fight with something. You couldn’t run a farm in this part of the colony without battling season after season to stop the wild creatures turning the place back to forest. They killed colonists and frightened off families until hardly any neighbors remained within forty miles.
Every new refugee who drove past in a loaded wagon urged Raleigh’s father Benjamin to get out with his life, but he wouldn’t leave. He told the same story so many times Raleigh didn’t have to ask why he stayed on. He put everything he had into this farm—every penny and thirty years of his life. He wouldn’t leave it. Besides, they fought off enough monsters to know the ropes. If they were going to die, they would have done it by now.
He was right, too. He taught Raleigh everything she needed to know from a young age. In the distant reaches of her memory, Raleigh cherished the sunny mornings when her father took her out to the forest along with her older brother Ethan. He stood as tall as their father when Raleigh could barely reach the kitchen door latch.
Ethan could fight, too. Raleigh lived in awe of her brother’s aim and his courage in confronting so many dangerous creatures. He taught her along with their father—right up until the day he vanished without a trace. Her father refused to answer her questions about Ethan’s whereabouts. Eventually, she stopped asking, but she never stopped wondering. She thought about Ethan at night. In the fragile moments before she engaged some new enemy, she asked herself, What would Ethan do right now?
She saw his face when she closed her eyes at night. She imagined him smiling down at her the way he used to when she was a little girl. He would never smile at her like that again.
A footstep on the stairs startled her out of her reverie. She snapped her eyes away from the flickering firelight to see her father enter the kitchen. He smiled down on her, too. He had Ethan’s smile—or Ethan had his father’s smile—Raleigh could never figure out which. At least she still had that smile in her life. Her father still guided and protected her, even after Ethan was gone.
He helped himself to a bowl of porridge and took the chimney corner opposite Raleigh.
“There was another kataract out there this morning, Papa,” she told him.
He nodded over his bowl. “I thought I heard it bellowing. Did you get it?”
Raleigh cocked her head. “Don’t you think it’s a little odd that they keep coming back? Don’t you find it curious that so many of them keep hanging around?”
“I’m sure they find the sheep and cattle irresistible,” he replied. “When you remove one, another takes his place. You know th
at.”
She licked the back of her spoon. “I know, but I can’t help wondering. This makes fifty I’ve killed in the last six months.”
He chuckled. “I’m sure you’re keeping the Midges well fed.”
Raleigh couldn’t enjoy the joke. “It makes me think something isn’t right. How can so many kataracts occupy such a small area? They wouldn’t have enough food. Even if they ate one sheep each in six months, that wouldn’t keep them alive.”
He stirred his porridge. “They must be attacking other farms for their food. That must be why so many people are leaving.”
“No one is leaving anymore,” she countered. “They’ve already left. There’s no one left but us and the Sullivans around the corner. That reminds me. I need six shillings from you to pay Hannah. I couldn’t stop and talk to her this morning for fear she’d ask me again. We really can’t keep putting it off.”
“Very well, my dear,” he replied. “You may get six shillings from my desk to pay Hannah Sullivan.”
“Thank you, Papa, but don’t you think this requires a little more investigation? I remember Ethan saying….” She broke off. Her head shot up, but when she saw her father inspecting the surface of his porridge at close range, she hung her head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I shouldn’t question your judgment.”
“Not at all, my dear,” he murmured. “By all means, go on with what you were about to say. You remember Ethan saying what?”
“Never mind, Papa. Forget I ever mentioned it.”
He stood up, set his bowl aside, and puttered around the kitchen. He took a copper kettle down from its hook on the rafters, placed it on the hewn wooden table in the middle of the room, and started collecting odds and ends from random corners to toss into it. He rambled to himself while he worked. “I know you miss Ethan, darling. I miss him, too, but we must concentrate on the task at hand. We have a farm to run—at least, I have.”
“You know I care as much about this farm as you do, Papa,” she returned. “That’s why the numbers of these creatures growing beyond the country’s ability to support them bothers me so much. We have to take it into account. We can’t just ignore it and hope for the best.”
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