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- Herausgeber: King's Crier
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
This is more than a hunt for a killer.
It's a war.
Sheriff Sam Bridges has seen plenty of darkness, but when a woman is found brutally mauled in Amity’s gold mine, Sam finds himself facing an enemy unlike any he’s ever known. Some say it’s a wolf. Others call it a demon. Sam isn’t sure what to believe—until the creature takes the one person he can’t bear to lose.
This is the stunning conclusion to The Way of the Spirit trilogy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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WOLFWALKER
The Way Of The Spirit
Book Three
L.M. Helm
Contents
Prologue
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 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
About the Author
Notes
For my children, remember:
Spiritwalkers never ride alone.
Prologue
An iron rail, black, hard, and cold, lay bolted to rocky ground.
A thin, barely visible vein of gold sparkled in the iron — a golden hairline fracture. In fact, it was a hair. A golden hair. A mass of the stuff lay on the black rail, like filament poured from Rumpelstiltskin’s spinning wheel.
Under the tousled golden hair, there were a pair of closed feminine eyes.
Beneath them, a button nose.
Beneath it, a mouth cruelly cut by a gag — a dirty old cloth tied too tight at the back of the neck — there was hair in the knot — biting into the cheeks and forcing the jaw down, the mouth open.
The lungs drew in a shuddering breath. The heavy exhale disturbed the dust.
The beautiful eyes rolled, opened, took in their surroundings — there was no sky, only an impenetrable black vault above. But there was the iron rail, cold at her temple — and another digging into her hip. At the point on the horizon where the two streaks of metal converged, there was faint moonlight.
A tunnel.
The young woman writhed but found herself bound — hands behind her back, wrists tied flesh-white tight, even a rope around her biceps, twisting her elbows together cruelly. Her strong thighs were bound too, as were her ankles.
She moved like a maggot on the rails, trying to get free, but it was useless. So, she stopped and concentrated on her wrists, moving them slowly, trying to get a feel for the ropes, feeling like a blind person for the knots. Could they be undone?
A chain clinked behind her.
Just once.
She rolled over, a difficult and painful proposition under the circumstances, and squinted into the darkness.
Silence…
Clink — there it was again!
‘Hurrow?’ The gag turned her question to mush.
Clink
This time she saw it move — in the faint moonlight from the distant tunnel entrance, she could see the chain as it swung toward her out of the darkness. It was mounted to the tunnel ceiling. There were hundreds of chains hanging from the ceiling, used by the miners for she didn’t know what.
She turned and tried to crawl away, pushing with her bare toes against the wooden ties, scraping her chest against the gravel.
Clink
She looked over her shoulder and saw… she didn’t know what she saw. It was low to the ground, an area of darkness deeper than the darkness around it, stalking its way toward her.
An animal?
She crawled faster then, heedless of the scraping gravel and pinching ropes, sucking the dusty air around the damp gag, filling her lungs to bursting.
Clink
She crawled. The gag sucked up her tears as they came and smeared mucus around her button nose.
Clink
The front of her white shift turned red with blood as she scraped through the gravel.
Clink
Her toenails broke on the ties.
Clink
Suddenly, she stopped, turned, and kicked into the darkness — the thing had touched her!
She shouted uselessly at it as she kicked, helped for the first time by the ropes which bound both her legs together into a piston.
It went away! Or at least there wasn’t anything there for her to kick anymore.
She crawled again, more desperately than before.
Then, the pain came.
She arched high and screamed, but the gag ensured her scream was never heard.
Something hairy slammed her face into the gravel.
She tried crawling, but the animal was on her, and it was heavy. Very heavy. She couldn’t breathe. Pain came again, biting and brutal.
Finally, there was only darkness…
WOLFWALKER
One
Sam sat alone at his kitchen table, which was set for two. He could tell by looking at the whitening bacon and soggy eggs that breakfast was cold.
He tried the coffee and winced.
His leg bounced.
He looked at the empty plate across from him.
And the empty chair…
He stopped his leg bouncing.
He straightened his knife, making it line up with the blue gingham tablecloth.
He looked at the clock. Just past 8.
He stood, passed the three empty jail cells, took his coat off the nail by the door, and pulled it on as he went outside.
Sniffing in the cold, he locked the jailhouse door then hopped off the porch. He paid no attention to the fog or the noise of his boots crunching on the gravel. His eyes were on the ground, his thoughts on himself and the cold, uneaten breakfast, and most of all, the empty chair…
‘Samuel.’
Sam looked up, and around, but he was alone.
He trudged on…
‘Samuel.’
‘Hello?’
There was no one, but the voice had sounded close, in his ear. It had been smoky, like Redskin’s, but that was impossible.
‘Samuel.’
‘Who’s there?’ Sam spun, putting his hand on Pap’s Pistol, but there was no one behind him. Wait… he saw a figure coming out of the fog. ‘Who’s there?’ he repeated.
‘Creepy, this fog,’ a bow-legged old-timer muttered as he trundled out of the mist. ‘Gives me liver shivers.’ And he shivered from head to toe to prove it.
‘Yeah,’ Sam said, taking his hand off his pistol. He shook his head and trudged on.
He stepped over the train tracks, casting a sidelong glance at The Powder Keg, where a light glowed yellow in an upstairs window.
Ahead of him, lights glowed in the windows of The Mission. He could even hear voices and laughter inside.
He stepped onto the porch, making the boards creak; before he could knock, the door flew open.
‘Sammy!’ A young woman named Homily hollered loudly enough to announce his arrival to all the women in The Mission and send them into a frenzy of activity. Then she leaned in, a little too close, and asked conspiratorially, ‘How was breakfast?’
Since Sam hadn’t had any, he couldn’t say.
‘You know,’ she whispered, tracing the outline of his sheriff’s badge with her index finger, ‘Unlike some people, I always make my engagements.’ She blinked her doe eyes up at him.
She was trying to be very coy.
From inside The Mission came Easter’s sharp voice: ‘You harpies leave that poor child alone. He suffers enough harassment from-’ but the rest of her admonition was cut off by the young women exploding out of The Mission and into Sam’s face.
They pawed and clawed at him, trying to get their hooks into him — in every sense of the phrase. They begged him to walk with them, to sit with them, to let them wear his badge, to let them shoot his pistol, one even volunteered to cut his hair.
He’d have run away if he hadn’t been trapped against the railing.
‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ Easter cried as she beat them off the porch with her bonnet. ‘Run along. Shoo!’
Groaning, the women walked off into the fog.
Easter counted them while Sam straightened his clothes.
In the distance, the church bell began to ring.
Easter put her head back into The Mission and called, ‘Eden, Susan, this train’s bound for glory!’ Then she pulled on her bonnet and walked off the porch.
Sam stood there alone, listening to the distant church bell...
Easter had left The Mission door open.
He leaned so he could peep inside.
Eden had her back to him. She was pulling a shawl around her shoulders. As she turned toward him, he straightened, hoping she hadn’t seen him.
The floor creaking ahead of her, she came out — she went right past him. She’d have walked right through him if she could have. She didn’t even acknowledge his holding the door open for her.
‘Susan coming?’ he asked, glancing into The Mission.
‘Easter must have missed her.’ Eden was already merging with the fog.
Sam shut the door on the empty Mission and hurried after her.
Two
Eden walked fast — trying to catch up to the others, or trying to leave Sam behind?
‘If you eat as fast as you walk, we might be able to get breakfast in before church after all,’ Sam observed as he caught up with her.
‘I was detained.’
‘I noticed.’ He puffed along beside her, trying to think of something to say. All he could come up with was, ‘Pretty foggy.’
Eden pulled her shawl tight.
Sam gave up talking and just walked — trotted, really. He put up his collar against the cold, both Eden’s and the weather’s.
Soon they encountered others coming out of their homes, including a pair of shabby little boys with unlit candles on their hats, blue jeans on their legs, and dirt on their faces.
‘Church is this way,’ Sam said, grabbing their wiry little arms.
‘We ain’t goin,’ one insisted.
‘A man’s gotta eat,’ the other cried.
Sam glanced at Eden, who had stopped, but reluctantly, and was keeping her eyes on the fog-shrouded church. The boys were mighty skinny under their baggy clothes. Sam tried to whisper so Eden wouldn’t hear, ‘There’s breakfast in the jailhouse. You can wolf it down and still make your shift on time?’
They nodded their heads eagerly.
‘Good,’ he winked at them then released their arms.
They shot into the fog.
Sam and Eden continued toward the church.
A passing woman greeted Eden warmly, ‘Good morning, Eden.’
‘Good morning,’ Eden replied, beaming.
Sam shook his head. Didn’t that beat all.
Then inspiration struck him. ‘I could heat everything up after church. We could make a brunch out of it.’
‘You just fed it to those boys,’ Eden said, going up the church steps and, again, leaving him out in the cold.
Sam blew out a breath, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and climbed the steps, trying to work out the mysteries of the female sex.
He walked right into an ambush.
‘Hey, Sheriff!’ A farmer cried, making a beeline for him. ‘I got another sinkhole — right in the middle of my pigs! Nearly swallered my sow. Now, I been tellin you these boys are too close to the surface. They gotta go down.’
Kit, in his fancy suit, materialized at the farmer’s elbow. ‘We only dig where there’s gold. We do our best to timber as we go-’
‘Yer best ain’t worth a bucket of pig spit!’
‘Accidents-’
‘Accidents! What if it’d been my kids or my wife swallered up like them sons’a Korah!’
‘The Company would make renumeration-’
‘Wut?’
‘Money,’ Sam interjected.
Kit explained, ‘We’d repay you any damages suffered.’
The farmer cogitated, then asked, ‘How much money you reckon my wife’s worth — if’n she was to fall inta one’a yer pits?’
‘Oh, no,’ Kit said, catching the farmer’s drift. ‘That’s not how it works.’
Sam extracted himself from the conversation only to find he’d turned right toward General, who was coming in with Tishie. ‘Sonny!’ General called, and put his arm around Sam’s shoulders. ‘How many deputies you hired?’
‘None.’
‘C’mon, man! You gotta git a move on, or I’ll have to bring an ord’nance gainst you — one badge ain’t enough for this town no more.’
Sam agreed, so General pushed him away playfully… right into an Old Hag who produced from her big brown bag a bottle, which she forced upon him. ‘How’d you like to make a buck or two?’ she asked.
Sam looked at the bottle. “S. Bridges’s Snake Oil Liniment” it proclaimed; beneath was a woodcut of Sam wrestling a snake. This fantastic illustration made him look stronger than Laocoon.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
