PROLOGUE

Ethan Holloway loved long weekends. He didn't really do anything different on a long weekend than on a short weekend. Just like every other weekend, he was camping this weekend. The difference is that on a long weekend, he could hike to his destination, while on a short weekend, he would have to take his truck.

Not that he didn't like his truck. It was just that everyone had a truck in Alaska, so if you took a truck camping, you'd be camping near other people.

Not that Ethan didn't like people either. It was just nice to have some time to himself. And he had to admit it felt cool to trek twelve miles through the Alaskan wilderness over terrain that would stymie almost everyone else to arrive at a cabin that, as far as he knew, was the only manmade structure in the area.

He could breathe out here. He could get away from everything. All of the stress, all of the defeat, the bad memories… none of it mattered.

He crested the final ridge and came to the small alpine plateau where his cabin rested. The structure was a simple wood-plank lean that rested against the rock face of the mountain. It was waterproofed with clay and pitch, carefully treated and dried so it formed a hard protective shell over the cracks in the roof and walls. The interior was packed earth, and the bed was a raised wooden platform with a bearskin for a mattress and a pillow stuffed with moss.

It was home.

"More of a home than I ever had with Carol," he muttered.

But he wasn't here to think about his ex-wife. He was here specifically not to think about his ex-wife. So he pushed the thoughts from his mind and got to work. He set his pack next to the bed and gathered firewood. Night would fall in two hours, and he wanted a fire going and dinner caught before the sun went down.

This particular part of Alaska's Nelchina Public Use Area was located in the Talkeetna Mountains, a range of peaks of medium height that for the most part represented fairly mild challenges to seasoned hikers. His cabin was located in one of the very few places that was reachable only by very experienced outdoorsmen.

Getting here was the hardest part, however. Once he was here, everything else almost literally fell into his lap. Firewood was ubiquitous. The mountains were covered in dense forests of spruce and hemlock. Water was just as easy. The plateau on which the cabin sat also contained a mountain spring fed by an underground river. It was as clean and pure as any water Ethan had ever tasted, and the natural minerals in the water made it healthier than the imported crap they sold for three dollars a bottle at the general store.

Food was marginally more difficult, but not especially so. He'd brought his crossbow, and due to the spring, the place was frequently visited by deer and smaller prey like squirrels and rabbits. What made food more difficult was the fact that brown bears also knew about the prey animals that came here. He had seen bears eight times and twice had to drive them off with bear spray. Fortunately, he hadn't had to kill one since the animal that contributed the bearskin for his mattress. That animal attacked him when he and Carol were climbing Denali ten years ago.

Back when she still loved him.

He sighed and stacked his firewood next to the house, then picked up his crossbow and trekked out to hunt. There were no animals in front of the spring at the moment, but there were a couple of acres of land that were easy to access where he could look for game.

It was too bad that Carol was on his mind so much. Probably because tomorrow would have been their twelfth anniversary. They had enjoyed six wonderful years together and four shitty years before they finally admitted that they weren't working out and went their separate ways. It wasn't until a year ago that Ethan learned that Carol had been having an affair the entirety of their four shitty years and that the only reason she stayed with him was his money.

"I don't even have that much money," he groused.

He was worth just about one million dollars, a quarter of which was liquid. Everything else was just the property value of his land, all of which he'd gotten to keep in the divorce since Carol's new husband had received a windfall from a deceased uncle and was now far wealthier than Ethan was. That wasn't chump change, but in a place like Alaska, it wasn't much. Not for a woman of Carol's tastes.

"Should have known," he muttered. "Should have known."

He lifted his crossbow and fired. A snowshoe hare leapt into the air, beating its feet ineffectually as its last living instinct told it to flee. It fell to the ground dead, and Ethan retrieved it a moment later. It was a good-sized hare, probably three and a half pounds. Once he cleaned it, he'd have just less than a pound of good meat. Enough for supper.

He gathered some wild blueberries from a nearby bush and placed them in a small basket he'd brought for the purpose. He would eat well tonight.

He grinned as he thought of Carol and her husband spending two thousand dollars on some fancy prepared meal of food shipped and processed and mashed and spiced all to hell. Carol would imagine herself a princess, but she was only a fool.

"Enough of that," he said as he walked into the cabin. "Time for my delicious solo dinner."

He set the hare on the rough-hewn spruce counter and was about to clean the animal when it hit him. He frowned. He wasn't sure why, but something seemed very off to him. The smell… it was…

Hell, he didn't know. But he needed to find out. If it was a bear, he could be in real trouble.

He took a step toward the kitchen window and felt something twang under his feet. He registered the twang a split second before the pickaxe swung down from the ceiling and severed his brainstem.