Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this G.o.dforsaken town, and the muleskinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer's mine, the G.o.dsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the rock-crushers pulverizing ore. The sound of the stamps in operation is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop them-Christmas and tragedy.

He dismounts his albino steed, the horse's pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice. The single-rig saddle is snow-crusted as well, its leather and cloth components-the mochila and shabrack-frozen stiff. He rubs George the horse's neck, speaking in soft, low tones he knows will calm the animal, telling him he did a good day's work and that a warm stable awaits with feed and fresh water.

The muleskinner opens his wallet, collects the pint of busthead he bought at a bodega in Silverton, and swallows the remaining mouthful, whiskey crashing into his empty stomach like iced fire.

He wades through waist-deep snow to the mercantile, bangs his shop-mades on the doorframe. Inside, the lamps have been extinguished and the big stove squats dormant in the corner, unattended by the usual constellation of miners jawboning over coffee and tobacco. He calls for the owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour.

"Jessup? It's Brady! You in back?"

The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year.

"What the h.e.l.l?" he whispers.

When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see.

The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean.

Brady is a man at home in solitude, often days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong-a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each pa.s.sing moment, more certain that something has happened here.

A wall of dark clouds sc.r.a.pes over the peaks and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker. Here comes the wind. Chimes clang together over the doorway of the merc. It will be night soon.

He makes his way up the street into the saloon, still half-expecting Joss Maddox, the beautiful barkeep, to a.s.sault him with some gloriously profane greeting. No one's there. Not the mute piano player, not a single customer, and again, no light from the kerosene lamps, no warmth from the potbellied stove, just a half-filled gla.s.s on the pine bar, the beer frozen through.

The path to the nearest cabin lies beneath untrodden snow, and without webs, it takes five minutes to cover a hundred yards.

He pounds his gloved fist against the door, counts to sixty. The latch string hasn't been pulled in, and despite the circ.u.mstance, he still feels like a trespa.s.ser as he steps inside uninvited.

In the dark, his eyes strain to adjust.

Around the base of a potted spruce tree, crumpled pages of newspaper clutters the dirt floor-remnants of Christmas.

Food sits untouched on a rustic table, far too lavish to be any ordinary meal for the occupants of this cramped, one-room cabin. This was Christmas dinner.

He removes a glove, touches the ham-cold and hard as ore. A pot of beans have frozen in their broth. The cake feels more like pumice than sponge, and two jagged gla.s.s stems still stand upright, the wine having frozen and shattered the crystal cups.

Outside again, back with his pack train, he shouts, turning slowly in the middle of the street so the words carry in all directions.

"Anyone here?"

His voice and the fading echo of it sound so small rising against the vast, indifferent sweep of wilderness. The sky dims. Snow falls harder. The church at the north end of town disappears in the storm.

It's twenty miles back to Silverton, and the pack train has been on the trail since before first light. They need rest. Having skinned mules the last sixteen hours, he needs it, too, though the prospect of spending the night in Abandon, in this awful silence, unnerves him.

As he slips a boot into the stirrup, ready to drive the burros down to the stables, he notices something beyond the cribs at the south end of town. He puts George forward, trots through deep powder between the false-fronted buildings, and when he sees what caught his eye, whispers, "You old fool."

Just a snowman scowling at him, spindly arms made of spruce branches. Pinecones for teeth and eyes. Garland for a crown.

He tugs the reins, turning George back toward town, and the jolt of seeing her provokes, "Lord G.o.d Amighty."

He drops his head, tries to allay the thumping of his heart in the thin air. When he looks up again, the young girl is still there, perhaps six or seven, apparition-pale and just ten feet away, with locomotive-black curls and coal eyes to match-so dark and with such scant delineation between iris and pupil, they more resemble wet stones.

"You put a fright in me," he says. "What are you doin out here all alone?"

She backpedals.

"Don't be scart. I ain't the bogeyman." Brady alights, wades toward her through the snow. With the young girl in webs sunk only a foot in powder, and the muleskinner to his waist, he thinks it odd to stand eye to eye with a child.

"You all right?" he asks. "I didn't think there was n.o.body here."

The snowflakes stand out like white confetti in the child's hair.

"They're all gone," she says, no emotion, no tears, just an unaffected statement of fact.

"Even your Ma and Pa?"

She nods.

"Where'd they all go to? Can you show me?"

She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak. The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child's hand so she holds it like a rifle, Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.

"Okay, I'll show you," she says, the hammer locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the trigger guard.

"Now hold on, wait just a-"

"Stay still."

"That ain't no toy to point in someone's direction. It's for-"

"Killin. I know. You'll feel better directly."

As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by a wall of snow.

In the oval of gray winter sky, the child's face appears, looking down at him.

What in G.o.d's- "It made a hole in your neck."

He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they're fed and watered. After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.

She points the Army at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.

He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders, Is the day really fading that fast, or am I? Is the day really fading that fast, or am I?

s...o...b..UND Forthcoming June 2010 from Minotaur Books

DESCRIPTION: For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is-Will's wife, Devlin's mother-because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.

Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.

When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn't come to arrest Will. "I know you're innocent," she tells him, "because Rachael wasn't the first...or the last." Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska , heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.

Excerpt from s...o...b..und...

1 In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding gla.s.s door and stepped through onto the back porch.

"Daddy?"

Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the sh.e.l.l of a child in his arms.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

"Working up a closing for my trial in the morning."

"Is your client the bad guy again?"

Will smiled. "You and your mother. I'm not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart."

"What'd he do?" His little girl's face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

"He allegedly-"

"What's that mean?"

"Allegedly?"

"Yeah."

"Means it's not been proven. He's suspected of selling drugs."

"Like what I take?"

"No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people."

"Why are they bad?"

"Because they make you lose control."

"Why do people take them?"

"They like how it makes them feel."

"How does it make them feel?"

He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch. "It's after eight, Devi. Let's go bang on those lungs."

She sighed but she didn't argue. She never tried to get out of it.

He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.

They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the SonoranDesert for a backyard.

"Look," he said. "See them?" A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

"What are they?" she asked.

"Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?"

After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time. They'd been working their way through the penultimate chapter, "Aunt Beast," but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.

He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor's yard. Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, "Mom?"

"She's working late at the clinic, sweetheart."

"When's she coming back?"

"Few hours."

"Tell her to come in and kiss me?"

"I will."

He was nowhere near ready for court in the morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin's hair until she'd fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong coffee would help.