Claimed by the Mountain Vampire (BLACK PINE GUARDIANS #1)

1. Chosen Second

Chapter one

Chosen Second

The bourbon was Jace Warren’s third, which was the precise number required to convince himself that spending four thousand dollars on a credit card he had absolutely no plan to pay off on a wilderness retreat he didn’t want was a reasonable response to his wife saying I don’t know who you are anymore and meaning it.

She’d said it in the kitchen of the house she’d already retained a lawyer to take from him, her voice carrying the exhausted kindness of someone delivering a diagnosis. Not angry. Just done.

He’d spent his life being chosen second. Second to his father’s work, second to his mother’s expectations, second to his wife’s career. He’d made peace with it the way prisoners make peace with cells, not through acceptance but through forgetting that anything else exists.

The retreat brochure materialized on his laptop at 2:14 AM. Four weeks, no phones, no contact. The price was obscene. The promise was vague. And Jace, with bourbon number three burning in his chest, typed his credit card number with the reckless certainty of a man who had nothing left to lose.

The bus rattled to a stop where the road ended and the mountain began.

Jace Warren pressed his forehead against the window and stared at the wall of pines rising before them like the ribcage of something immense and sleeping, dark boughs laced tight enough to blot the late-afternoon sun into scattered coins of light on the gravel.

The air brakes hissed. The engine shuddered silent.

And for the first time in the six months since his divorce papers had landed on the kitchen counter of an apartment he could barely afford, the gravity of the silence settled into him, real silence, the kind that swallowed cell signals and small talk and the low-grade hum of a life that had stopped meaning anything at all.

He shouldered his pack and stepped off the bus behind three other men, boots crunching on packed earth that smelled of pine resin and something older, mineral-deep, like the mountain itself was breathing through the ground.

A transformative wilderness experience for men seeking renewal, the brochure had promised.

By the time sobriety arrived, the card had been charged, and his pride wouldn't let him cancel.

Renewal. He wasn't sure what that meant anymore.

His ex-wife had taken the house, the dog, and his confidence that he understood anything about himself.

At thirty-four, Jace Warren was a hollow man in hiking boots, standing at the edge of a wilderness that looked like it could swallow him without chewing.

The clearing where the bus had deposited them was a rough circle of trampled earth bordered by a timber-frame lodge on one side and a half-circle of small cabins on the other, each one built from logs so dark they looked charred.

Smoke threaded from the lodge chimney even though it was August, curling upward into still air.

A hand-carved sign above the lodge door read BLACK PINE MOUNTAIN RETREAT in letters that had been burned into the wood with deliberate, almost aggressive precision.

The other men milled around their packs, sizing each other up with the cautious eyes of strangers forced into proximity.

Jace counted them quickly. Theo, gym-built, late twenties, already complaining about the lack of Wi-Fi in a voice pitched to make sure everyone heard him, was yanking designer hiking boots from a duffel bag that cost more than Jace's monthly rent.

Reed stood apart, arms folded across a broad chest gone soft with comfortable age, his salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed, eyes calm and assessing beneath heavy brows.

He had the look of a man who'd done hard things before and found them educational.

And Milo, nervous, soft-bodied, clutching his pack straps like he expected the mountain to reach out and smack him, was studying the treeline the way a rabbit studies open ground.

Jace was still cataloguing them when the lodge door opened and the man who would ruin him walked out.

***

Canyon Thibodeaux did not walk so much as arrive.

He came through the doorway with the economy of something that had learned long ago that wasted motion was wasted energy, and every line of his body communicated a stillness so controlled it registered as threat.

He was tall, six-three at least, with a lean, corded build that suggested not gym work but something earned by harder means: hauling timber, climbing rock faces, moving through terrain that punished anything soft.

His hair was dark, almost black, cut close on the sides and longer on top where it fell in a careless sweep across his forehead.

His jaw was cut clean as an ax-head. His skin was pale for a man who supposedly lived in the mountains year-round, and when the light hit him at the right angle, there was something about the pallor that went beyond sunscreen, something that suggested he'd been this shade for a very long time.

His eyes were pale silver-grey, with an intensity that didn't scan as normal human attention.

When Canyon Thibodeaux looked at something, he didn't glance.

He acquired. His gaze swept the group the way a predator surveys a clearing, not with aggression, but with the calm certainty of something that already knows what it will take and when.

Jace had the strange, disorienting feeling that the man knew him. Not recognized. Known. The way you know a road you’ve driven in dreams but never visited awake.

Those eyes found Jace last. And stayed.

It was maybe two seconds. Maybe three. Long enough for Jace to feel the look land on him like a physical weight, his chest, his throat, somewhere behind his sternum where his pulse had suddenly decided to double its tempo.

The mountain air tasted different in that moment, sharper, tinged with pine and woodsmoke and something underneath both that his body recognized before his mind could: pay attention.

Canyon broke the contact first, his gaze sweeping back to the group as a whole, and Jace exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Set your packs by the lodge door," Canyon said. His voice was low and unhurried, with a resonance that carried without volume, the kind of voice that didn't need to shout because it had never had to. "I'll show you to your cabins after orientation. Right now, you stand here and you listen."

"My name is Canyon Thibodeaux. I've been running retreats on this mountain for about thirty years, longer than most of you have been making decisions at all.

" A beat. No smile. "You paid money to come here.

You signed waivers. You agreed to terms. But I'm going to make this simple, because in my experience, men who sign things at two in the morning don't always read the fine print. "

Jace felt heat crawl up his neck. He kept his face neutral.

"There are three rules at Black Pine." Canyon held up a finger.

"One. You do not go into the forest alone after dark.

Not to piss. Not to clear your head. Not because you think you heard something.

You stay inside the perimeter unless I'm with you.

" He raised a second finger. "Two. You do not question my decisions in the field.

If I tell you to stop, you stop. If I tell you to run, you run.

This is not a democracy and your opinion about what constitutes danger is worth exactly nothing up here.

" A third finger. "Three. You do not ask what happens on this mountain after midnight.

You will hear things. Sounds that don't belong to any animal you've catalogued.

You will ignore them. You will stay in your cabin. And you will not ask me to explain."

Silence settled over the group like a held breath.

Don’t go into the forest alone after dark. He’d spent six months alone in the dark. What was one more night? Don’t question his decisions. He was an expert at swallowing questions. Don’t ask what happens after midnight. He already knew what happened after midnight: nothing.

He was wrong about that.

"These rules are not guidelines," Canyon continued, and now his voice had dropped to something closer to a rumble, a frequency Jace felt in his molars.

"They are conditions of your survival. I don't use that word for drama.

I use it because every year, someone thinks they know better than the mountain, and every year, I have to make a choice about how hard I'm willing to work to bring them back. "

Theo let out a sharp laugh. "Survival? Dude, we're in Oregon, not Fallujah. What's going to get us, a pissed-off raccoon?"

Canyon's head turned toward Theo with a speed that didn't match the rest of his deliberate movements.

It was fast, too fast, the kind of motion that registered as wrong before the brain could articulate why.

His eyes locked onto Theo's face and held there, and Jace watched the color drain from Theo's expression, the smirk sliding off like grease from a hot pan.

"The raccoons up here are the least of your problems, Theodore." Canyon's voice was perfectly level. "But you're welcome to test that theory. Rule-breakers always teach the best lessons."

***

The cabins were small, built for function rather than comfort: a wooden bunk, a wool blanket, a kerosene lantern, and a woodstove the size of a bread box.

No electricity. No plumbing beyond a communal pump behind the lodge.

Jace dropped his pack on the bunk in Cabin Four and stood in the dim interior, breathing air that tasted of cedar and dust and the faintest undercurrent of something animal, like the cabin had been occupied between retreat seasons by something other than men.