Forged by Fire (Angels at the Edge Book 1) Read online

  Forged By Fire

  Angels at the Edge: Book One

  By Michael Arches

  Copyright by Pyrenees Publishing 2017

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Book 2 Excerpt—Infernal Justice

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  Chapter 1

  If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it,

  he is sinking downwards to be a devil—Samuel Coleridge

  Saturday, June 10th

  I STOOD ATOP Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, and spun in a circle to take in the view. On three sides, forests and jagged ridgelines surrounded us. To the east beyond the trees, the parched plains spread out as far as I could see. A dozen other people shared the summit with me. All stared off into the distance, grinning and snapping pictures.

  My heart swelled in awe, and I sung to myself the first few lines of America the Beautiful. Pikes Peak, the Colorado Fourteener that’d inspired the song, rose about a hundred miles south from where I stood.

  On a whim, I held my arms out from my sides like wings and wondered what it would be like to soar away. I’d be as free as an eagle. Anything seemed possible up this high.

  As if on cue, a gray and white mourning dove floated up the sheer cliff in front of me, carried by a strong updraft. The bird drew closer, and I thought it might land on me.

  Instead, it held its wings partway open, hovering in the air in front of me. Maybe it thought it recognized me. Sorry, I don’t know any birds.

  The dove stayed in front of me. After a minute, I turned to a twenty-something blonde next to me who was staring in the same general direction I had been. “Can you believe that?”

  She sighed. “Yeah, the views here are so great.”

  “I mean the dove.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Where?”

  I looked around and noticed three other people looking right past me but not pointing at the oddly behaving bird whose wings were glistening in the bright sunshine. Are they all as blind as bats?

  Then the damned thing landed on my shoulder. I wasn’t imagining it. I could feel the bird’s weight on me, its claws digging into my jacket.

  My best friend, Kevin Winsted, stood five feet away, staring right past me at the snowy Continental Divide. We’d started before dawn and slogged for eight hours to reach this cold and windy place. I stood a foot shorter than him and had struggled to keep up. Maybe my tiredness had scrambled my mind.

  “Bro, do you see anything odd?” I asked him.

  “Only you, Gabe. I’ll never understand how anybody as scrawny as you qualified to be a cop.”

  My face warmed. I had worked for the Boise Police Department, but they’d laid me off because of budget cuts. I couldn’t find another cop job in Colorado. I pushed my embarrassment aside. “Seen any birds acting weird lately?”

  He snickered, “Like I said, only you.”

  I took that to mean the idiot hadn’t noticed the dove roosting on me at that very minute!

  A female voice with a Middle Eastern accent sounded in my head. They can’t see me, Gabriel.

  That gave me a jolt. Nobody had ever talked in my head before. I twisted around to see who was speaking to me, but no women were close anymore.

  I tried to brush the dove away, but it dug its claws in deeper.

  Good Lord! I’d seen plenty of weird stuff on the force before I got laid off, but nothing like this. The steep hike and a lack of oxygen had addled my brains.

  The dove rubbed its head against my cheek. I’m Cleopatra. Pleased to meet you.

  This was too much. I had to sit down, so I planted my butt on a flat rock nearby.

  You won’t believe how much fun flying is, Gabriel. The bird lifted off and circled the summit…twice. No matter which direction the others were looking, they couldn’t have missed this dove as it gracefully executed flips and barrel rolls in front of everybody. Showoff.

  I closed my eyes. You pushed yourself too hard to get up here, Dude. Kevin proved you aren’t as tough as you think. You scrambled your head.

  Whatever the explanation was, the bird seemed real. It landed on my knee this time. Our work is dangerous, but we’re humanity’s only hope. I hope you will join us.

  Then the dove soared up higher until it vanished in a cloud.

  I grabbed an energy bar and drank some water from my pack. Maybe my blood sugar was too low.

  Over my twenty-six years, I’d hiked thousands of miles outdoors in the Rockies, and I’d never seen or heard anything as weird as that. Why the hell didn’t anybody else notice?

  I stood and walked around trying to clear my head. Then a sudden gust of wind pushed me toward the sheer cliff less than ten feet away. I caught myself and stepped farther back from the edge. This was no place to lose my mind, not if I wanted to survive to get my beer.

  Had I been hallucinating? Long ago, after my mom had died of cancer, I suffered from severe depression. But even during that dark time, I’d never heard voices or experienced visions.

  No, fool, that dove was tamed by someone, and it just got lost. I said a quick prayer that it would find its master again. Nothing got to me like animals in trouble.

  As for the woman’s voice, that was probably a trick. Kevin talked some woman into playing me. He was always pulling pranks.

  Once I’d come up with a reasonable explanation, I relaxed and tried to enjoy my time on top of the world. It was an amazing spot, and the views were breathtaking.

  -o-o-o-

  IT TOOK KEVIN and me five hours to reach the trailhead again. Several times during the hike down, I spotted a dove high above us, but it didn’t get close.

  Once we reached his beat-up red Rubicon, we drove to Estes Park to pick up his border collie, Lacey, and we ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. Then we headed to his cabin for the night. It’d been built in a quiet part of the forest southeast of the park. Just as we walked inside the door, though, he remembered we didn’t have anything for breakfast. So, he left me and Lacey, and he drove back to the nearest store, about twenty minutes away.

  When he returned, we cracked open a couple of beers and sat on the deck to watch the sun go down. My legs and feet were throbbing, but three ibuprofens and the suds started to work their magic—as long as I didn’t move below the waist.

  Then I noticed a mourning dove perched on the roof of Kevin’s cabin, but this one didn’t try to approach us or show off its flying ability. I did my best to ignore it.

  Darkness settled over us, we headed inside. Kevin went to bed, but I wasn’t tired. My mind dredged up memories I thought I’d locked away. Pictures of Mom lying in a hospice bed, nothing but skin and bones, haunted me again.

  To distract myself, I picked up a copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire from the coffee table.

  I was enjoying the book when the female voice came back. Sorry to bother you
, Gabriel, but I’ve just received word of a forest fire southwest of here that could be dangerous to you and your friend.

  This was too much. I glanced up, and the dove was perched on the TV. “I’m losing my mind.”

  She shook her head. You’re sane, and you really want to look for that fire now.

  I stood, and my legs screamed for mercy. Instead of sitting again, I limped to the back door and out onto the deck. A gust of wind blew from the south. My fingers tapped against my leg to calm me down. One-two-three-four-five.

  I stared southwest. Oh my Lord!

  Every nerve inside me tingled with fear. The skyline glowed red and yellow in one spot. Forty minutes ago, when I’d last let Lacey out, that part of the horizon had been completely black.

  A forest fire!

  The south wind gusted stronger against my face, and the acrid smoke made me cough. That wind would push the flames across the only road out of this remote valley. Oh, Jesus, we can be trapped here!

  I ignored the aching in my legs and ran back into the cabin. Then I opened Kevin’s bedroom door without knocking. He was sprawled across his bed in the far corner of the room. Lacey barked in her kennel, but Kevin didn’t flinch.

  I shook him awake.

  “Wha-what?” He wiped his face with his hands.

  “Forest fire! Southwest!”

  He bolted upright. “You sure?”

  “A big one. We gotta go. Now!”

  Kevin yanked on his pants, a t-shirt, and his boots. Then the three of us ran outside.

  “Son of a bitch!” He held the sides of his head with his hands. “Why didn’t the county call—never mind.”

  We raced back into the cabin.

  “Grab whatever you can in ten seconds,” he said. “Put it and the dog in the Jeep. I’ll be right behind you.”

  I dashed to my room. I’d planned to get an early start to Denver in the morning, so I’d already packed most of my things in a duffel bag. The rest I left behind as I called to Lacey. “Follow me, girl.”

  We ran for the Rubicon.

  Once we reached it, I loaded my bag in the cargo area and lifted her into the travel kennel and closed it. Then I ran back to the house to help Kevin.

  He met me on the front porch, his arms full of clothes and a small safe. “Grab this.”

  I did, and it was heavy. We hurried for his rig and dumped his stuff into the back near the kennel.

  As I got in the Jeep, I heard a phone ring inside the house. Probably the reverse 911 call, but no time to check. Kevin roared down his driveway to the dirt road that led out.

  I checked my watch. It was ten-fifty-two in the evening. To the southwest, the sky remained mostly dark, but the red and yellow glow from the fire seemed brighter. The fingers of my left hand tapped my thigh. If that dove hadn’t warned me, we would’ve lost precious time. What the hell is going on?

  -o-o-o-

  AFTER WE’D TRAVELED a mile, I turned to check on the dog. She sat alert in her kennel, looking like she was heading to a lake for a swim. Maybe it was better that she didn’t know what was up ahead. She couldn’t do anything about it, no more than I could.

  But before I turned my head forward again, the Jeep hit something hard and bounced into the air. Even though I was belted in, my rear end lifted off the seat. The dog yelped but stayed upright. I didn’t complain to Kevin because we needed to hurry. This road could get cut off at any time.

  “I should’ve known you’d get us into trouble,” Kevin said. “You’ve been jinxed since the day you were born.”

  What a bunch of B.S. I grabbed the support handle over the front passenger door to avoid bouncing around too much. “Me? How could this possibly be my fault?”

  “You have the worst luck,” he said, “and it threatens everybody around you. Remember how I grabbed your arm this morning and saved you from tumbling down the cliff?”

  A chill shot through me. That’d been a close one. “I’m just clumsy.”

  He had a point about my bad luck, though, so I tried to change the subject. “Any other road out of here?” My fingers on my left hand tapped my thigh harder.

  “No, but we could try to run cross-country that way.” He pointed to the northeast. “We could head across a two-mile-wide stretch of open ground. There’s a small community in Big Meadow. A road there leads north to Highway 36.”

  That’s Plan B? Dear Lord, we need Your help.

  “No offense, bro,” I said, “but I just hate running in front of forest fires. Plus, my legs are shot. I couldn’t run a hundred yards tonight.”

  Kevin yelled, “No shit. That’s why we’re driving so fast in the opposite direction.”

  The old rig was as tough as a grizzly, and we needed every bit of that toughness now. A big chuckhole loomed ahead. It would’ve ripped the front end off of most vehicles, but the Rubicon dropped down, bounced up, and kept on truckin’.

  Lacey yelped again, so I turned and motioned for her to lie down.

  She did and whimpered.

  Soon the road left the broad valley and entered the forest. The lodgepole pines here grew close together, jutting fifty feet into the sky. Except where the headlights shone, the forest was as black as the halls of Hades. The trees even leaned over the one-lane road, as though ready to pounce on us. I cringed as I realized we were surrounded by tens of thousands of giant matchsticks waiting to flare up.

  Once, I swore I saw a dove flying in front of us, but that could be completely natural. All the birds in this forest had to be agitated. Some didn’t know which way to fly to save themselves.

  The sky glowed brighter in front of us as we approached the fire. Ash piled up on the windshield, and Kevin had to turn on the wipers. Clouds of smoke rolled past us.

  My hands trembled as I realized how fast the fire was moving toward us. “Tell me again why you bought a place so deep in the woods.”

  “Because I got a helluva great deal,” Kevin said with a hysterical, high-pitched note to his voice. “Stupid, I know, but I got the cabin and sixteen acres for thirty-five grand.”

  I looked at the road ahead, which was barely visible through the smoke. We hit another large rock, and I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood. Maybe it was the previous owner who’d gotten the incredibly great deal.

  This could be what kills me. I used to be a cop, and I’d known the high risks that came with wearing a badge. But I’d mostly worked as a detective, only a patrol officer for a year. I’d never pulled my gun in the line of duty, hadn't fired it except at the gun range.

  A bullet seems a lot better way to go than roasting to death. Instead of saying so out loud, I asked, “How much farther?”

  “At least three miles.”

  Smoke began to seep into the Jeep, and it burned my throat. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Yeah, turn the heater fan off. Set the air to recirculate.”

  I adjusted the climate controls and tried to control my fast-beating heart.

  Kevin drove around a curve and slammed on the brakes. “Shit!”

  An abandoned car partially blocked the road, but Kevin snuck past it by driving into the ditch on one side.

  As he hit the gas again, my left hand’s fingers tapped on my leg. A nervous tic. One-two-three-four-five.

  Chapter 2

  SOON, THE WINDSHIELD was smeared with ash and cinders, and despite repeated squirts of washer fluid, the wipers barely worked anymore. The smoke also got thicker. The smoke might kill us before the fire gets here.

  Every so often, though, he had to dodge animals, including an elk that was weaving from side-to-side as it ran toward us and passed us on my side. Its eyes bulged, and foam surrounded its mouth.

  On the plus side, no other vehicles were in our way. Little else was going right.

  I glanced into the back. Lacey whimpered but lay still. This was the same dog that never laid still, so she had to be terrified. I knew the feeling well.

  “We might make it,” Kevin said, “but it’s going to be
too damned close.”

  I peered ahead as best I could. Burning embers were falling everywhere. The forest had looked peaceful until then, like a quiet, snowy day. Now, it glowed in places south of the road. Hell must look a lot like this.

  A moment later, Kevin pointed to the north. At least one group of trees was burning on that side of the road. “Damn! The wind’s blowing the embers ahead of the main fire. We may be crazy to keep going.”

  I shrugged. We were running out of time. “We’ve got no choice, bro.”

  He nodded. “Right. I’m not thinking clearly anymore. What if we drove back to the creek by my cabin and soaked in the water? Maybe the fire would go around us.”

  That’s suicidal. I shook my head. “That creek bed’s thick with dead willows, thanks to the drought.”

  “Well,” Kevin replied. “It was a nutty idea. The air there would be filled with smoke and poisonous gases. We wouldn’t be able to breathe, even if we submerged to our necks in the water.”

  I looked out my side window, and more trees were burning on the north side of the road. This wasn’t working. We’d started too late. “It’s been great knowing you, Dude. Can’t think of anyone I’d rather die with.”

  Kevin nodded. “Likewise, man. Crappy way to go, eh?”

  I coughed several times. The air inside the rig was barely better than the soup outside. “If we don’t get out of this soon, we’re done for.”

  The roar from the fire was loud, even with the windows rolled up. Gusts of wind whistled through the trees even louder. Every so often, the crackling of the fire was interrupted by an explosion when a tree blew apart.

  This was a war zone, and we were caught in no man’s land. One-two-three-four-five. My fingers counted out the series, over and over.

  Kevin kept the Jeep moving ahead, but the smoke was so thick, we could’ve walked faster than he drove. We soon passed a small herd of deer huddled in a wide spot next to the double-track. Only one reacted, and it barely lifted its head. Smaller lumps on the road might be squirrels and birds, but they were covered in so much ash I couldn’t tell.

  My heart pounded in my chest so much it hurt. This fire was going to kill thousands of animals, and some local residents wouldn’t get out either, like us. My tongue began to tingle from an overdose of adrenaline. We’re screwed.