Page 1 of Property of Prophet

Chapter One

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Lily

The axe bites deep into the frozen spruce, splitting winter’s silence with a crack sharp enough to wake the dead. I don’t mind the noise. Out here, forty miles from the nearest human, sound means nothing. No one hears it. No one to answer to. Just me, the woods, and the work that keeps my hands busy and my thoughts buried.

Early November has already stripped Alaska down to cold, snow, and a few hours of bruised twilight. I’ve survived five winters out here by respecting what can kill me and staying the hell away from everything else.

That’s the arrangement.

Alaska leaves me alone, and I return the favor.

Bear, my husky-shepherd mix, lifts his head from where he has been lying near the cabin’s woodpile. His ears go forward to something I cannot hear yet, and a low whine rumbles in his chest.

I lower the axe, wood forgotten. Bear’s instincts run deeper than mine ever could. Whatever caught his attention must be bad.

“What is it?”

He stares north.

The sky splits open.

White fire tears across the northern ridge, so bright I throw an arm over my eyes. Bear loses his fucking mind. Something comes through it, and it is not a meteor.

Meteors don’t scream.

It drops fast enough to leave fire behind it, a black shape at the center of the light, falling straight toward the mountain.

“Jesus Christ.”

It hits.

The ground punches upward beneath my boots. I go down hard.

Snow dumps from the spruce. Somewhere to my left, a tree creaks. Bear bolts three strides toward the ridge, changes his mind, and comes straight back, barking at whatever hit my mountain. The sound reaches us. Not thunder or an explosion, something worse.

Something that makes every primitive part of me say ‘run.’

I should go inside. Lock the door, and load my rifle. I should pretend whatever just fell out of the sky is none of my business.

But I am also a surgeon. I was a surgeon before everything fell apart. And doctors don’t hide when something falls from the sky with enough force to shake mountains.

“Goddammit.”

I grab the medical pack and rifle. Bea looks at me as if I’m an idiot.

“You can stay.”

He follows me. I knew he would.

The climb takes twenty minutes through snow that reaches my thighs in places where drifts have accumulated. My breath comes in harsh gasps, freezing on the scarf I have wrapped across my face. Bear bounds ahead, his thick coat and four-paw drive better suited to these conditions than my two-legged struggle. Above us, that impossible light has faded, leaving behind an afterimage that pulses against my retinas whenever I blink.

The smell hits first. Ozone and burning, the acrid stench of scorched earth and something else, something that reminds me of hot metal, electricity, and thunder condensed into solid form. Then the crater comes into view, and my steps falter.

“What the fuck?”

Forty feet across, maybe more. The impact has melted snow, scorched earth, and sent debris radiating outward in a perfect circle. And burned into the ground, preserved in char, ash, and melted ice, are the outlines of wings. Not bird wings, because they are too large, too symmetrical. Wings that might have stretched thirty feet tip to tip, imprinted in the earth as if something had landed or thrown down with enough force to leave its shadow permanently seared into Alaska’s frozen skin.