Silver Sight (Completed)

Chapter 1

Cooper Booth was the golden boy of Silver Pines. A small town in Montana, so aptly named for the silver trees that grew there, the only kind of forest with this combination. White barked birch trees, dripping willows with greyed leaves, proud silver pines with intermingling ashy yews.

He was a sturdy boy, fleet of foot, strong of body, with an agile mind. His disposition was sunny with a mix of rainclouds on those stormy days when the wind howled or when his friends were hurting. He was a football captain, an avid swimmer, the boy everyone wanted to be friends with, which every girl wanted to date. He was to follow after his father's footsteps. Sherriff in their small town. A woman to love and marry. Children to play father to. A golden boy to a golden man

But he was none of that after the accident. The accident that stole from him his football glory, his sunny disposition, his friends and most of all the girl he loved with all his heart.

The boy grew, with whispers about the blame. About what happened on that stormy night up in the Beartooth Mountains. About whether or not he was to blame for what happened, why he couldn't remember, and what had happened to the body of the girl he mourned so deeply. The boy grew yearning for a love that had been taken from him, with a desperate desire to hold it in his arms one more time, or to join it where ever it had gone. He grew and blamed himself for surviving when she didn't, for forgetting when he should have remembered. He grew while he was angry.

A sudden rage had filled him from the moment of his wakening, deepening as the situation became clearer. A deep burning longing to avenge what had been lost. The boy grew away from the carefully set path that used to lie in front of him and twisted him down a dark spiral. Until eventually he grew into a dark man who left the safety of his Forest to search for a way to quell the burning. Only to find that the burning doesn't leave you if you leave the source of the pain. But instead follows and haunts you, no matter where you go.

The boy, now man, found himself in Washington, with an important job with the FBI, an expensive condo and a string of unhappy women not content with living up to a ghost he clung to. Very rarely did he return to Silver Pines, a place that only brought back bad memories and fanned the lingering anger he felt over what had happened there.

Until now.

--

There was a madman running around Silver Pines. A second one, maybe the original one. Cooper wasn't sure. It's wasn't a very well known fact that the attack on Cooper that horrible stormy night in his youth had been done by what they assumed to be the Silver Pines Serial Killer. A someone, or group of someones, that were taking girls, every two to three years, and murdering them. This was a theory, not proven, because a lot of the girls that went missing wanted to be missing, or wanted to get out, or were in bad circumstances. Most of the time bodies weren't found and the ones that were were mutilated by the forest, too far gone to see what had really happened to them before they were found.

This new madman was called Silver Sight. Appearing in the woods 8 years ago dressed in stolen Ceremonial Chieftain Wolf robes terrorizing poachers and saving lost hikers. They called him Silver Sight for they said he had the sight of the forest, could see all that was going on inside. The Aboriginal Tribe still settled there called him a guardian, the voice of the forest, sent to protect their woods from encroachers such as the greedy business men who came up every year to stay at the lodge with grand plans of leveling most of the forest for new houses, casinos and the like.

No one had been able to catch Silver Sight. He was as fast as he was strong. Not that he had really done much damage. So this new attack had been shocking to say the least. The second time he was suspected of breaking and entering. The first time leaving a bloody cryptic message on someone's wall.