FIREFANGED

Chapter 1 (Storm on the horizon)

My traps were empty again, and the mid-spring forest was unseasonably still. I'd always worked the area far and wide to minimize my impact on the local populations. There should have been growing animal activity this close to summer. Instead, it was the complete opposite.

It was on nights like this that I felt abandoned. Being alone or out of luck wasn't the point of the dagger that pricked me. I'd always hunted and trapped the bounds of Lockrun's long valley by myself, knowing that another would merely split my hard-earned take and distract my senses when I needed them most.

I followed a familiar game-trail under the light of a waning moon, wishing to find a sign of life, a sound, a track, or a fresh scent to follow. Those distractions were welcome. Farms in the area always had problems with wolves roaming down from the foothills, and the logging camps to the east were often set upon by mountain lions. The local streams hosted moon crabs as well as beavers and drew plenty of critters into my snares.

The night's utter stillness was a void to be filled with memories that simply didn't exist. Lacking enough of those, I was vulnerable to the month-long run of nightmares that continued to gnaw through my head. More than anything, they'd become the motivation for working nights while the rest of the frontier town remained safe behind its rough-hewn timber walls.

My string of dark dreams had arrived out of nowhere with the beginning of spring. The vivid images felt like taunts more than omens: Walls didn't matter. Sanctuary was an illusion. Disease would take us all. You get the picture.

No, I wasn't a seer or a witch. I was merely an orphan, almost a man, with a heightened set of senses for the world around me. Pastor Riley once said that I had an eye for hunting, though in truth, more of a nose. While my eyesight was uncanny at night, my sense of smell could detect and discern predators and prey better than any hound.

This wasn't the first time I had picked up something rotten on the wind, but the nightmares were more than that. Like the smell of a corpse rotting right outside your bedroom window, a dreadful stench rolled through our valley where there should be nothing but fresh streams, flowering trees, and the musky scent of animals in heat. Only I seemed to have noticed the difference.

Forgotten at the age of seven, I'd spent the past eleven years living under the care and tutelage of the local Church of Saint Madge. Pastor Riley and Sister Kay had done their best to pound a solid education into my skull and an appreciation for hard work into the rest of me. Combined with my innate skills for hunting, my future survival was almost a sure thing. Winters in the northeast region of Colivar were tough on everyone.

Pastor Riley has always kept a close eye on me. He often marveled at my ability to read the moods and feelings of those around me and labeled me as empathic. That said, it was my newly rotten mood that had him most concerned. He pegged my nightmares as an overwrought sense of intuition or an unease at the season's slim pickings, but I think we both knew it was something more.

Maybe it was the world, or maybe it was me losing my grip on reality. I felt a storm brewing to the northeast where only clear skies and impassable mountains filled our view. The dark clouds were creeping closer, more so at night than during the day, and I sought to outfox the nightmare.

Lacking a better idea, I ignored the town's curfew bell and began living the life of a purely nocturnal hunter. With a recurring slew of empty traps, I decided it was time to stalk the distant black cloud that visited whenever I slept. The change in the local fauna told me that it was something more real than my imagination. It was more than a string of bad dreams. It had to be, or I might never sleep soundly again. I figured it couldn't hurt to prove out my sanity, one way or the other, and in that, I was dead wrong.