PRAISE FOR J. TODD SCOTT

  The Flock

  “It’s all here: doomsday cults, innocents and grifters, unexplainable phenomena. Heartache and regret. A chance at redemption. What sets The Flock above your average thriller is the absolute ring of authenticity from this twenty-plus-year career DEA agent. You got the real deal right here.”

  —Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor and The Hunger

  “Scott lays out his short, propulsive chapters like a trail of breadcrumbs you can’t help but follow. This one will keep you up late turning the pages.”

  —Brian Freeman, bestselling author of Thief River Falls

  Other Works

  “Mr. Scott, as it happens, has been a federal agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration for more than twenty years, which surely contributes to the authenticity of this convincing saga.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Scott’s twenty-year career as a DEA agent infuses his work with realism, and his writing chops will make readers wonder why he waited so long to launch his literary career.”

  —Associated Press

  “The author exploits his decades of experience as a federal agent to create a powerful, realistic picture of crime.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Scott writes beautifully, dreaming up intriguing action scenes, which those who are focused only on thrills will wish kept going and going. But patient readers will recognize and appreciate Scott’s end game: showing us a world where thieves, murderers, and sadists are everyday folk.”

  —Booklist

  “J. Todd Scott’s series reads like equal parts Don Winslow and Ace Atkins. Having spent twenty years working with the DEA, Scott knows his stuff, adding instant credibility to his stories, which are well written and hopelessly addictive.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “As addictive as the best crime show.”

  —Newsweek

  “The poetic and bloody ground of [the west] has given birth to a powerful new voice in contemporary western crime fiction.”

  —Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire series

  “J. Todd Scott is the real deal.”

  —Michael McGarrity, New York Times bestselling author

  OTHER TITLES BY J. TODD SCOTT

  The Flock

  Lost River

  This Side of Night

  High White Sun

  The Far Empty

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Todd Scott

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781662500411 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 9781662500428 (digital)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  Cover image: © rsooll, tuulijumala, Sergei Mishchenko / Shutterstock

  For Lucy Catherine . . .

  Take wing . . .

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  BLACK MOUNTAIN

  She talks to . . .

  It’s not full . . .

  When Hudson Landry . . .

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  In the years . . .

  TWO

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  As they waited . . .

  THREE

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  When Cooper entered . . .

  FOUR

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  BLACK MOUNTAIN

  Nineteen months later—

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Little one, come to my knee!

  Hark, how the rain is pouring

  Over the roof, in the pitch-black night,

  And the wind in the woods a-roaring!

  Hush, my darling, and listen,

  Then pay for the story with kisses.

  Father was lost in the pitch-black night,

  In just such a storm as this is!

  High up on the lonely mountains,

  Where the wild men watched and waited

  Wolves in the forest, and bears in the bush,

  And I on my path belated.

  The rain and the night together

  Came down, and the wind came after,

  Bending the props of the pine-tree roof,

  And snapping many a rafter.

  I crept along in the darkness,

  Stunned, and bruised, and blinded,—

  Crept to a fir with thick-set boughs,

  And a sheltering rock behind it.

  There, from the blowing and raining

  Crouching, I sought to hide me:

  Something rustled, two green eyes shone,

  And a wolf lay down beside me . . .

  “A NIGHT WITH A WOLF”

  By Bayard Taylor

  (1825–1878)

  BLACK MOUNTAIN

  She talks to him all the time now without saying anything at all.

  He hears her deep inside his skull, that dark hole behind his eyes.

  She calls out for him, whispering his name, by the sound of a thousand feathered wings.

  But right now, she’s sitting two rows up, not even looking at him. He’s been staring at her from the moment they went wheels up, even as she pretends to be too engrossed with the iPad in her lap, or her phone, or the glossy magazine with all the photoshopped pictures of surf, sand, and sun and impossibly blue skies far from here.

  These indulgences are allowed only because they mean so much and so little. The iPad is restricted and constantly monitored, the phones contain no actual contacts—no friends to call or text—and the magazine is months old. The world changes so fast now that those out-of-date stories might as well be ancient history, little more than myths for a fairy princess trapped in a forest tower or deep asleep in a crystal coffin.

  It could be argued that he is her only link to the outside world, her one true friend.

  She once complained about this—no, she very much complained about you, he thinks—and although that betrayal should have infuriated him, would have once upon a time sent him into an oh-so-familiar frenzy, he bore it without complaint. Bore it with a smile.

  Now he can better grasp subterfuge and subtlety, how to present one face while hiding another.

  We both wear masks, he knows, because our true faces are so terrible . . .

  He catches her stealing a look and grins amiably for her—another well-practiced gesture—only for her to turn away again just as quickly, staring lost and worried out the small window at the winter darkness all around and the scudding clouds and rolling mountains far below.

  He keeps this safe distance for both their sakes, but that’s getting harder by the day, even harder than ruling his emotions, keeping his placid mask on straight, his true intentions and temperament veiled.

  From where he sits, he can still hear that incessant whispering, the beating of invisible wings: smell the tang of hospital soap on her skin, count every ticktock beat of her heart, feel the rising heat of each breath. Although they’re not alone here, high above the winter clouds, they might as well be.

  He o

nly has eyes for her.

  He checks his expensive watch and smooths out the odd crease in his shark-gray slacks. He stands, stretches, holding his gangly arms and switchblade elbows and big-knuckled hands in tight and close. He’s too tall for this plane. Too thin, too pale, too awkward for polite company. He’s all right angles and sharp edges, always folding himself smaller and smaller just to fit in, so as not to cut anyone in passing. A foolish man once joked that he looked like he’d been stitched together from spare parts, and although he’d laughed along at the time, making light of it like you’re supposed to do, a month later he tracked the man down and left only spare parts behind—a few beneath the bed, some in the freezer, a handful arrayed in the bathtub like a pagan sundial—and he still wonders if anyone got that joke.

  He’s not so much at the mercy of those animallike rages anymore; his mask of calmness fits tighter now. But he learned long ago he can’t change his fundamental nature either. Best he can do is keep it in check, control it when he can, and hide it long as possible.

  Like her . . .

  She doesn’t fully comprehend that yet. He alone feels that sable energy radiating from her like dark feathers, like a dark and dying star. She swallows the light, and is slowly, surely, driving him mad.

  The plane suddenly shudders, jostled hard by the unseen hand of the coming winter storm, and he senses her fear. Not of him, but of the storm itself. Ice and snow glaze the windows, gleaming cold as a knife edge, as the plane fights the weight and the wind. The squall’s fury doesn’t frighten him, but most scary things don’t. If he checked his own heart rate now, it’d barely register above sixty.

  He knows he shouldn’t . . . don’t touch her, don’t ever, ever, touch her . . . but he bends himself into the seat beside her anyway and grabs one of her hands, trying to calm her, trying to reassure her. Although her skin crawls at his touch, he’s glad she doesn’t pull back.

  It’s okay, you’re safe with me . . .

  But she isn’t, not truly . . . and neither is he.

  When the plane lurches again, cabin lights flickering like fleeing shadows, he reaches for the gun he always carries as she suddenly grips his hand tight and gifts him with a tiny, terrible smile of her own.

  . . . i’ll never hurt you . . .

  And the last thing he hears is the rustle of a thousand black wings . . .

  It’s not full dark yet when Maggie sees the burning plane crash.

  A private jet, small and mostly white, one long dark stripe on the side, canted sharply to the left as it drops from the snowy heavens, leaving one wing higher than the other, like it’s waving goodbye.

  Light in its rounded windows, bright enough for her to count them, and still picking up speed even as it augers in toward the ground, falling from some unimaginable height.

  Moments before, the sky was purple, dusted with snow and first flickering stars, the whole world cold and still and quiet, but more importantly empty. Just raw wilderness . . . wildness . . . in every direction.

  Now alive with the ugly roar of this sudden falling plane and its one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . windows on a side, arrowing at the earth, toward her.

  Maggie imagines faces staring down, wonders what they see.

  The lowered wing clips a red spruce, shearing the top off the big tree in an explosion of fiery sparks and conifer needles, balling up metal like paper. The impact shakes the whole plane, nearly tipping it back the other way, the growl of revving engines finally hitting her full in the face. Turbines desperately spin as high as they can, fighting to keep the small plane aloft, even as the mountain’s pines and sycamores and elms reach for it, grasp at it, pulling it mercilessly toward the deep, dark heart of the wood.

  The plane grazes a handful of dusky treetops, like fingers caressing skin, before the whole craft corkscrews over and over and both wings crumple and those four tiny, shiny, bright windows blow out and the plane comes apart in so much smoke and flame and so many jagged jigsaw pieces that Maggie can’t tell anymore where the jet ends and the trees begin.

  The following explosion, a crushing reverberation, lands like a second slap, knocking her to her knees.

  It’s the sound of trains colliding, a building falling over, a tidal wave crashing into that Outer Banks beach house she and Vann once owned. Almost immediately, that awful noise is followed by a fiery glow, blooming and blossoming like a garish flower in the wake of that final descent and impact. A staccato flash of light harshly illuminating the woods all around Maggie.

  Illuminating her . . . reminding her too forcefully of swirling police lights.

  The flash doesn’t disappear altogether, fading instead to a silent, ghostly shimmering that turns the trees monstrous and menacing, that creates crawling shadows and eerie fractal patterns. A liminal faerie fire burning along the folding shovel now forgotten in her gloved hand. Glimmering, too, over the rifle she left against a tree while digging at the hard earth.

  No . . . no . . . this can’t be happening.

  Not here. Not now.

  Maggie once made a living off numbers but doesn’t need to run any now to know the odds are near astronomical—maybe one in a million, even a billion—that a plane would crash down at the very same moment and over the one stretch of isolated West Virginia winter wilderness she is standing in, so close it nearly fell on her head, so close she can still feel the friction of its passage, the heat of its burning, beyond the trees.

  But if there’s any saving grace to this unthinkable, horrible moment or one thing she can count on, it’s likely there’s no way anyone survived that crash.

  No way at all.

  People will still come looking, though—sooner or later—scouring for wreckage and survivors, the inevitable bodies. But Maggie hopes to be long gone before then. She’s gotten good at turning into a ghost, slipping through the shadows, fading out of sight. But it’s still hard to completely vanish nowadays, even with serious planning and preparation.

  And Maggie is nothing if not a serious planner. She’s been planning this for 483 days.

  But she never planned for a plane falling from the sky, and as with any similarly unexpected crash or tragedy, people on the run often leave plenty of telltale wreckage behind too.

  Someone always, always, comes looking.

  Sooner or later.

  Maggie abandons the shovel and, using her dad’s old nickel Wittnauer compass, searches for true north, deeper in the woods, higher up this mountain. A path through the oldest hollers where monsters still lurk, according to that book she left behind in Pullens, just before they cornered her.

  There’s still blood on her hands, gone black beneath her nails, that she didn’t have time to scrub clean.

  Now she does run a quick mental calculation, figuring she can still stay ahead of the fallout from Pullens, even outrun the search for the fallen plane. But safely escaping the coming Christmas nor’easter is getting too close to call, a dire winter storm predicted to blast the Monongahela over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

  At least if she’s caught dead above the snow line, trapped up there in the dark and cold, she won’t have to worry about running and hiding anymore. It might be months, years, before her body is found, if ever. And given all that’s happened, all that she’s done, a part of her is at peace with that. Finally, the lies, the chase . . . the hunt . . . will be over.

  I’ll just fade away, she thinks, let the snow cover me.

  Safe. Peaceful.

  No more memories . . . no more nightmares . . . just a black and welcoming silence.

  And that’s when Maggie hears a scream from the wreckage beyond the trees . . .

  When Hudson Landry first heard that mysterious, unearthly scream, it terrified his sorrel, and all he could think of was the old stories of the White Thing of Randolph County, a creature once known and feared in times even further past.

  It was long whispered that the White Thing was a cold-blooded killer, a monstrous wolflike beast, a pale vengeful ghost as large as a horse, unafraid of humans or any other living creature.

  But in the cold, driving mountain rain, Hudson could make out no such monster, living or dead. Just the old trees crowding the path to the church, darkening his way. He told himself it was only the sudden October storm that made the night so black, that made the wind so fearsome, that made the air so cold. And as he fought to bring his scared mount under control, he laughed at his own folly.

  When he would be found, days later, his own mother would not recognize him.

  The White Thing roared from the woods on all fours, mouth agape, flashing jagged teeth the size of knives. It howled and snarled and bawled like a young girl in pain, like a dying child.

 

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