Read Chapter 13: The Road into the Trap

The gendarme’s lantern swung once, then died against the slope of the chapel wall, and Étienne was already moving before the flame finished smoking. He pocketed the duplicate key—its fresh scratches rough against his thumb—and walked out into the cold without a word to the others. They followed. They always followed now, even when the path led nowhere good.

The road to Forclaz Pass was a wound in the mountain’s flank, cut decades ago for timber haulers and never widened since. Loose scree spilled across the asphalt in long dirty tongues. The truck—a rusted Renault they’d borrowed from the innkeeper in Martigny—complained in low French grumbles as Giancarlo wrestled it around each blind switchback. Claire sat in the passenger seat, her shoulder freshly bandaged, watching the cliff face slide past her window with the flat attention of someone who’d learned to read terrain for ambushes. Étienne rode in the bed with François, both of them braced against the slats, breath fogging in the thin air.

No one spoke. The only sound was the engine and the occasional skitter of stones kicked loose by the tires, tumbling down into the valley below.

They’d climbed perhaps three hundred meters when Giancarlo hit the brakes hard enough to send Étienne slamming into the cab’s rear window. The truck shuddered to a stop. Ahead, a fresh rockslide had buried the road in a heap of shattered limestone and pine trunks, some of them still oozing sap. The air smelled of dust and crushed resin.

François crossed himself. “We turn back.”

“We can’t.” Étienne swung out of the bed, boots crunching on the debris. He walked to the edge of the slide and studied the shoulder above. The scar where the rock had torn loose was raw, still dripping gravel in thin streams. He’d seen enough avalanche terrain in his years as a tracker to know the difference between a natural failure and a provoked one. This one looked natural. It felt wrong.

“Giancarlo,” he said. “Come look at this.”

The Italian hopped down from the cab, his bad leg folding slightly under him before he caught his balance. Claire followed, her pistol drawn and scanning the treeline above. Giancarlo crouched at the base of the slide, running thick fingers across the exposed rock face where chunks had sheared away. He grunted and pulled something from the debris—a thin, blackened filament, no longer than his palm.

“Charred copper wire,” he said. “Fused. Someone ran a charge through it.”

“Explosives,” Claire said flatly.

Giancarlo nodded. “Set into drilled holes. They let the mountain do the rest.” He tossed the wire aside and looked up at Étienne, his dark eyes unreadable. “Someone wanted us off this road, tracker. Not dead. Just… parked.”

Étienne scanned the pass ahead. The road continued beyond the slide for another few hundred meters before it bent into the canyon mouth—a narrow, sheer-walled throat that would funnel them like livestock toward a chute. He’d never liked that pass. His brother had died on a similar stretch, decades ago, in a winter storm that had erased every landmark and left nothing but white and wind and the sound of something breathing beneath the ice.

He pulled out the duplicate key and turned it over. The scratch marks along its edge caught the pallid light, pointing east. Toward the canyon. Toward the trap.

“She’s herding us,” he said.

“Then we don’t go.” François folded his arms. “We wait for Marc’s unit. We call in the helicopter.”

“No signal in the valley,” Giancarlo said. “You know this.” He gestured at the canyon walls. “They’re metal-rich up there. Radio dies past the bend.”

François’s jaw tightened. “Then we go back to Martigny and regroup.”

Étienne shook his head slowly. “Every time we retreat, she moves the game board. She staged a monk’s death to bring us here. She blew the road to keep us from leaving. If we go back, she’ll just build another corpse, another lure. We’ll be chasing her forever from behind.” He looked at Claire. “You said it yourself back at the inn. She’s not trying to kill us.”

“Not yet,” Claire said. “She’s trying to assemble us.”

“For what?”

“For the moment she wants to perform.” She met his eyes. “She called it a completion. That means she needs all of us present. You, me, Giancarlo, François—maybe in a specific place at a specific time. The Forclaz canyon could be that place.”

Étienne turned to face the pass. The wind had picked up, moaning through the gap ahead like something forced through a narrow throat. He could feel the shape of the plan now, the geometry of it. Box canyons had one entrance and no exit. If they went in on foot, they could still turn back. If the beast appeared behind them, they’d be finished.

“We split,” he said.

Giancarlo frowned. “Split?”

“You and François stay with the truck. Try to raise Marc on the long-wave radio in the cab—sometimes it carries through the metal if you bounce it off the ridge.” Étienne pointed to a shoulder of rock that jutted above the treeline to the west. “I’ll climb that outcrop with Claire, cut across the high ground, and get a visual on the canyon mouth. If there’s an ambush, I want to see it before it sees us.”

Claire was already nodding. “You want us to be the bait.”

“I want us to be the eyes.” Étienne’s voice was level. “If Hartmann wanted us dead, she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of blowing the road. She wants us moving on her schedule, toward her ground. So we move—but we move like we know it.”

François stepped forward, his cassock catching the wind. “And if you don’t come back?”

Étienne met the priest’s gaze. “Then you drive the truck backward to Martigny and you tell Marc everything. Every letter she sent you. Every word she said. You make sure the Vatican man hears it, too. He’ll know what to do with it.”

François’s expression tightened at the mention of the anonymous man, but he didn’t argue.

Giancarlo limped to the cab and pulled out a canvas pack, tossing it to Étienne. “Water, field dressings, two flares. There’s a climbing line inside if you need to descend the far side of the ridge.”

Étienne slung the pack over one shoulder. Claire checked her pistol, slid a fresh magazine in, and chambered a round with a crisp metallic snap that echoed down the pass.

“We go fast,” Étienne said. “We don’t stop for anything we hear, anything we see moving, anything that calls to us.” He held Claire’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary. “You understand?”

“I’ve been in the field before,” she said, but her voice had a faint edge he hadn’t heard before. Almost recognition. Almost dread.

He didn’t ask.

They left the truck at the foot of the slide, Giancarlo already unfolding the long-wave antenna with the practiced efficiency of a man who’d done this many times before, in many worse places. François stood by the tailgate, rosary beads sliding through his fingers, watching them go.

Étienne led Claire up a steep game trail that switchbacked through the pines, angling toward the outcrop. Behind them, the canyon grew closer, its dark mouth yawning wider with every step.

Halfway up, Étienne stopped and looked back. From this height, he could see the full length of the pass below—the slide, the truck, the two small figures beside it. And beyond them, at the far edge of the treeline, something caught the wind.

Not a tree. Not a rock.

A pale shape, human-sized, standing perfectly still at the forest’s edge. Watching the truck. Watching Giancarlo and François.

Then the wind shifted, and it was gone.

Étienne said nothing to Claire. He simply turned and kept climbing, the copper key burning against his chest like a live coal, the duplicate weighing heavy in his pocket.

Two keys. One door. And a woman with a stag skull who had been waiting for him far longer than he’d known to run.