The air in Beatrice’s rented room above the Redemption saloon was a stagnant soup of stale beer, dust, and regret—none of it her own. She wrinkled her nose and focused on the task at hand, the familiar ritual a balm against the town’s oppressive crudeness.
On the small, scarred table, her instruments were laid out with surgical precision: a polished brass trowel, a leather-bound field press, her journal with its creamy, unblemished pages, and a tin vasculum, its green paint already scoured by the journey west.
Each item was a testament to order, to the civilized pursuit of knowledge. They were extensions of her mind, tools to dissect and classify the chaotic wilderness that began where Redemption’s dusty main street simply gave up.
Outside, the town baked under a relentless sun. The men who had stared at her yesterday, their gazes a mixture of crude appraisal and open scorn, had offered unsolicited advice.
“Best not go wanderin’, miss. This ain’t Boston.”
“That sun’ll cook the sense right outta ya.”
“Snakes out there big as a man’s arm.”
Beatrice had offered them a tight, polite smile, the kind one reserves for well-meaning but ignorant children. They saw her walking skirt and high-collared blouse and saw a damsel.
They couldn’t possibly comprehend the years of study, the meticulous memorization of genera and species, the deep understanding of ecosystems she possessed. They spoke of the land with the superstitious fear of peasants, while she saw it as a living library, its secrets waiting to be read by a discerning eye.
Her father’s life depended on her ability to read it correctly.
Today was merely a preliminary survey. A short expedition into the scrubland just beyond the town’s edge.
She would collect common specimens, acclimate herself to the climate, and begin her systematic documentation. It was a simple, logical first step, and the idea that she would require a rough-hewn local to guide her on such a pedestrian task was insulting.
Pride, a familiar and fortifying companion, straightened her spine. She would prove, if only to herself, that knowledge was a far more reliable guide than brute experience.
Pinning her hat firmly in place, she slung the vasculum over her shoulder and descended the rickety stairs, ignoring the saloon keeper who watched her go with a pitying shake of his head.
The initial walk was deceptively pleasant. A dry, steady breeze rustled the grey-green leaves of the mesquite trees, carrying the resinous scent of creosote.
Beatrice felt a familiar thrill, the quiet joy of discovery that always bloomed within her when she was in the field. She paused to examine a prickly pear cactus, its fleshy pads studded with formidable spines.
Opuntia engelmannii, she murmured to herself, her fingers tracing the name in her mind as if it were a talisman. She noted its condition in her journal, the precise cursive a small island of order in the sprawling landscape.
Specimen appears robust, thriving in the arid, alkaline soil. A testament to nature’s tenacity.
She walked on, her confidence swelling with each identified plant.
Prosopis glandulosa. Larrea tridentata. Yucca elata.
It was all so wonderfully, predictably classifiable. The locals saw a threatening wasteland; she saw a complex, interwoven system governed by rules she had spent years mastering.
The canyons, she knew, would hold the true prize, the elusive Ghost Lily her father’s physicians believed could be the basis for a new cardiac tonic. But this, this was a necessary and reassuring overture.
She wandered farther than intended, drawn by a patch of unfamiliar desert marigolds, their yellow heads a cheerful defiance against the dun-colored earth. As she knelt to take a cutting, a subtle shift in the atmosphere made her pause.
The constant breeze had died, leaving the air unnaturally still and heavy. The relentless drone of insects abruptly ceased.
A strange, yellowish-brown haze was gathering on the western horizon, not the soft grey of a raincloud, but something thicker, more sinister. Beatrice frowned.
Her meteorological studies in Boston had prepared her for nor’easters and summer thunderstorms, storms that announced themselves with decorum. This felt different.
Savage.
Before she could fully process the change, the horizon vanished. A solid wall of dust, the color of dried blood, was racing toward her, consuming the landscape with astonishing speed.
The wind returned not as a breeze, but as a physical blow, a howling banshee that tore at her hat and stung her eyes with sand.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced her academic composure. She fumbled to secure her hat, her journal pages flapping wildly.
The sun, a moment ago a white-hot furnace, was snuffed out. The world dissolved into a maelstrom of roaring wind and suffocating grit.
She stumbled toward a small rock outcropping she’d passed minutes before, her mental map now a useless fiction. The dust was everywhere—in her mouth, her nose, her eyes, abrading her skin like sandpaper.
Each breath was a struggle, a painful inhalation of the very earth itself. She pressed her face against the rough stone of the outcropping, coughing, her body trembling with a fear she hadn’t felt since she was a small child lost in a crowd.
This was not a phenomenon to be observed and recorded. It was a primal force, indifferent and immense, and she was nothing but a fragile speck in its path.
The storm raged for what felt like an eternity, the sound a deafening, soul-scouring roar. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the wind’s fury lessened.
The roar subsided to a mournful whine, and the suffocating curtain of dust began to thin.
Beatrice pushed herself away from the rock, her limbs shaking. A fine layer of silt covered everything, transforming the landscape into a monochromatic, alien world.
The sun was a pale, sickly disc behind the haze. Every direction looked identical—a desolate expanse of silt-dusted rock and scrub.
The town of Redemption was gone. Her tracks were gone.
She was utterly, terrifyingly lost.
A wave of nausea washed over her. Her canteen was half-empty, and the heat, trapped by the dust-filled air, was more oppressive than before.
She took a tentative step, her practical walking boots sinking into the soft new layer of earth. Her mind, her greatest asset, raced uselessly, finding no data points, no familiar references.
It was then that she heard it.
Through the mournful sigh of the wind, a sound cut through the air—dry, crisp, and electric. A sound that bypassed her intellect and spoke directly to the most ancient, primitive part of her brain.
The rattle.
She froze, her heart seizing in her chest. Her gaze dropped.
Not five feet away, coiled beside a clump of dust-caked sagebrush, was the source. A western diamondback.
It was thicker than her arm, its patterned scales a perfect camouflage against the disturbed ground. Its spade-shaped head was raised, its black forked tongue tasting the air, its tail a blur of vibrating keratin.
Crotalus atrox, her mind supplied, a useless, academic ghost. The textbook illustration had not conveyed the sheer menace of its presence, the cold, reptilian certainty in its unblinking eyes.
This was not a specimen. It was death, coiled and patient.
Time seemed to slow. The creature’s rattle was the only sound in the universe, a frantic, furious pulse that echoed the hammering of her own blood.
All her knowledge, all her years of careful study, evaporated, leaving behind only a raw, animal terror. She was prey.
Without conscious thought, she scrambled backward, her foot catching on an unseen root. She fell hard, landing with a cry of pain and shock, her hands scraping against the gritty ground.
The impact sent a jolt of terror through her, a certainty that the snake would strike.
But when she looked up, her breath hitched in a sob, the space where the snake had been was empty. It had vanished back into the landscape it belonged to, leaving her alone with the violent, trembling aftermath of her fear.
She lay there for a long moment, the dust clinging to her sweat-dampened skin, her tailored blouse stained and torn. The rattle still echoed in her ears, a phantom warning.
Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself to a sitting position. Her ankle throbbed where she had twisted it in her fall.
Her hat was gone. Her carefully arranged hair was a tangled, gritty mess.
Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t have held a pen steady enough to write her own name.
She looked at her vasculum, its shiny surface now dull with grime. It seemed absurd, a child’s toy brought into a war zone.
Her precious journal lay a few feet away, its pages filled with a fine red dust, her neat cursive rendered foolish and irrelevant.
The pride that had carried her out of Redemption lay in shattered pieces around her. Her knowledge hadn’t protected her from the storm.
Her intellect had been useless against the primal fear of the snake. She had come to this land believing she could conquer it with her mind, and in less than an hour, it had stripped her of every pretension, leaving her humbled, terrified, and hopelessly lost.
The warnings of the townsmen were no longer the ramblings of the ignorant. They were the wisdom of survivors.
A profound and terrible clarity washed over her. She could not do this.
Not alone. To try again would be suicide, a fool’s errand born of an arrogance she could no longer afford.
She needed more than books and theories. She needed someone who could read this savage library not for its Latin names, but for its hidden language of survival.
Her gaze swept the bleak, featureless horizon. Somewhere out there was the one man everyone in town had warned her about.
A man they called dangerous, half-wild, and contemptuous of outsiders. A man named Wes Callahan.
And as the pale sun began its descent toward the hazy horizon, Beatrice Kincaid knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that he was her only hope.