Chapter 1
The Last Stop
June
The steering wheel fights meas my delivery truck bounces through another pothole, the chassis screeching like I’d personally insulted its mother. I grip tighter and squint through my windshield at a dirt path some optimistic cartographer once labeled a “road.”
“That’s it, girl,” I mutter to my truck. “Just a few more miles of this torture and we can both go home and pretend this never happened.”
The truck responds with an ominous rattle from somewhere beneath the hood.
Such trips are the reality for Hartwell Delivery Service, the last hope for packages heading into the backwoods of Montana where GPS signals go to die and mailmen fear to tread. In this town, the big companies get your stuff to the town post office, but for the wilderness beyond that?
That’s where we come in, charging premium rates to brave trails that would make a mountain goat reconsider its life choices.
Dad built this business on knowing every forgotten path in three counties. After his back gave out, I inherited the routes while he handles dispatch from our kitchen, living vicariously through my daily near-death experiences on these backwoods “roads,” if you could call them that.
“You sure about this run, Junebug?” he’d asked this morning, tapping the delivery address with his coffee mug. “Weather’s looking sketchy, and nobody lives that far out. Nobody normal, anyway.”
What he meant was: since the Great Unveiling five years ago, when monsters stopped hiding and started building dream homes in remote locations, these mountain deliveries had gotten a lot more interesting. And by interesting, I mean terrifying.
“It’s fine, Dad,” I had assured him, swiping the package. “The pay is ridiculous, and we need a new transmission more than I need peace of mind.”
And that’s the truth. We need the money. Ever since Dad became the paperwork guy instead of the delivery guy, Hartwell Delivery has been one broken axle away from bankruptcy.
So I’ll brave any road, deliver to any customer—human, monster, and anything in between—to keep food on our table and a roof over our heads.
I glance at the crumpled paper beside me, where Dad’s careful handwriting offers cryptic directions: “Follow old logging trace past split pine, fork left at standing stone. Bridge unsafe. Do notattempt.” Below that is the client’s name, Riven, and coordinates that Google Maps had never heard of.
The package rides shotgun, a lightweight thing about the size of a shoebox that doesn’t rattle, tick, or leak mysterious fluids, which puts it ahead of half my deliveries.
Not to mention the prepaid fee for same-day service would cover two months of the truck’s increasingly frequent repair bills.
Whatever it is this Riven guy ordered, it must be something important…
A massive Douglas fir split down the middle by lightning appears ahead, followed by what can only be described as a moss-covered boulder standing upright like a prehistoric middle finger aimed at the sky.
“Split pine: check. Standing stone: check,” I mutter, taking the left fork into a dark and overgrown road. “Creep factor: off the charts.”
I drive for another five minutes until the trees suddenly open to a clearing that makes me stomp the brakes hard enough for my seatbelt to remember its purpose in life.
“Holy shit.”
The house—no, mansion—no,architectural fever dream—rises before me like some luxury real estate magazine had a baby with National Geographic.
Dark timber and floor-to-ceiling windows stretch across the front, and the whole structure is built directly into themountainside, as though the granite cliff decided to grow a house.
“Not suspicious at all,” I whisper to no one. “Just your everyday multimillion-dollar mountain lair.”
According to our records, this property didn’t exist five years ago. Which means it was built after the Great Unveiling, when monsters who could afford it came out of hiding and built the homes they’d always wanted.
It’s almost a certainty that a monster lives here, not that it matters to me whether my clients have feet or claws. But I’ll admit the isolation factor has me curious. You don’t build something this remote unless you really, really want to be left alone…
I grab the package and step out into the crisp evening air. The property is meticulous, with native plants arranged with precision, solar lights glowing in the gathering dusk. It signals “I have both money and specific opinions about landscaping.”
“Hartwell Delivery!” I call out, marching up the stone path. The massive front door, easily ten feet tall and carved with geometric patterns, remains closed. No response except wind through the pines and the sound of my boots scuffing against loose stones.
I usually don’t like venturing too deep into a new client’s property, but this package needs to get delivered one way or another. I sigh and continue my march, moving farther along the path, closer and closer to the ominously large door…
