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.
In the center of those impossible wing prints lies a man.
Bear’s barking cuts off mid-sound, replaced by a whine that raises every hair on the back of my neck.
The dog backs up three steps, then sits hard, refusing to approach any closer.
Smart. I should follow his instincts. I should turn around, head home, and pretend I haven’t seen whatever physics-defying impossibility lies bleeding in the snow.
Instead, I slide down into the crater, rifle ready.
He is huge—six-two, maybe six-three, broad through the shoulders beneath what’s left of a leather vest. Dark hair streaked with silver falls across a face, and blood, so much blood, stains the snow crimson beneath him.
Too much blood.
I drop beside him, two fingers to his carotid. He has a pulse. It’s weak, but it’s there.
“No fucking way.”
The bleeding comes from dozens of lacerations, nothing arterial but enough small wounds to add up. His airway is clear, breathing shallow, no obvious skull fracture. Broken ribs almost certainly. Internal bleeding likely. Hypothermia is already coming for him.
He should be dead.
Somehow, impossibly, he isn’t.
I check his pulse again, anyway.
My fingers brush the hair away from his eyes, and something moves beneath his lids.
Light.
I jerk my hand back. Blue-white veins of it move under his skin where no light should exist.
Bear whines behind me.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I saw it.”
His vest catches my eye. Not the leather, but something else. Something blackened and scorched that took the same impact that should have pulverized every bone in his body. Patches cover it. A skull wearing a crown. Words in a precise thread.
Kings of Anarchy MC
Alaska Chapter
Prophet
Chaplain
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
A biker. A chaplain. Who apparently just fell out of fucking heaven.
Around us, the woods have gone silent. No birds or wind, just the sound of his breathing and mine, and then, movement at the crater’s edge.
Wolves. Five of them, gray and massive, their eyes reflecting what little light remains in the dying day.
My rifle comes up, and my blood goes cold.
They don’t approach or circle. Instead, they stand there, watching and waiting.
Their attention is fixed, not on me but on the man bleeding beneath my hands.
Bear’s whine pitches higher, urgent now.
“Don’t.”
The wolves ignore him. One of them, the largest, the alpha, I realize, takes a step forward. Then another. Its eyes never leave the fallen man.
I bring up the rifle, my finger finding the trigger, and aim it at his massive chest. The movement draws the alpha’s attention. Gold eyes meet mine, and in that gaze, I see something that makes my throat close. Not hunger or even aggression, but something else. Something almost like awe.
The wolf dips its head.
I stare.
It does it again, slower this time. A bow, an acknowledgment. The damn thing is bowing to him.
“Oh, fuck off.”
The wolves turn and disappear into the trees.
I sit back on my heels, rifle forgotten in my lap, staring at the place where unlikely animals have offered respect to an impossible man.
Five years of silence have taught me to trust my instincts and recognize when something defies explanation.
This all falls so far outside normal that normal doesn’t even occupy the same universe.
Fingers lock around my wrist. I nearly shoot him. His eyes stay closed, but his grip is brutal.
“Help.” One word, barely there.
Then again. “Please, help.” And his hand goes slack.
I stare at his hand lying limp in the snow.
Five years.
Five years building a life where nobody needs me. Nobody can ask anything of me, and this bastard falls out of the fucking sky and asks for help. I close my eyes.
I look up at Bear, who is watching from the crater’s edge with ears flat and tail tucked.
People don’t fall from the sky, a voice whispers in my head. And they sure as hell don’t survive impacts that create craters. People also don’t have light in their eyes or wolves that bow to them.
But this person, this Prophet, does.
And he asked for help.
“Dammit.” I stare up at the sky. “Dammit all to hell.”
The oath didn’t come with an expiration date.
I shrug out of my coat and wrap it around him, tucking it close against his body to preserve what little heat remains. Then I dig through my medical pack for the emergency bivvy, a silver space blanket that reflects body heat.
Getting him into it took longer than it should have. Every movement was cautious to avoid worsening injuries I can’t yet assess. My hands shake from the cold, adrenaline, and the sheer impossibility of what I am doing.
Moving him will be a nightmare. He outweighs me by at least one hundred pounds, all of it deadweight and unconscious.
The cabin sits a quarter mile away, most of it downhill through thigh-deep snow.
But downhill doesn’t mean easy, not with Alaska’s terrain.
Ice waits beneath the snow in treacherous sheets.
Roots and rocks lurk to catch unwary feet. And the temperature is dropping fast.
I am going to need rope from the cabin, branches to fashion a makeshift travois.
Bear could help pull—the dog has dragged heavier loads when I hunted elk last winter.
But that would mean leaving this man alone in the crater, exposed, while I made the trek down and back.
Twenty minutes, maybe thirty if the snow has drifted badly.
Thirty minutes for shock to deepen, for hypothermia to advance past the point of no return, for whatever internal bleeding exists to finish what the fall has started.
Medical triage says to stabilize first, move second.
But out here, the rules change. Exposure kills faster than most injuries.
I have seen it during my time in emergency medicine when patients survive horrific trauma only to die from hypothermia during transport.
Alaska demands respect, and part of that respect means recognizing when the environment poses the greater threat.
My hands move automatically, checking what I can assess without moving him farther.
Pulse still weak but steady. Breathing remains shallow but regular.
With no obvious spinal damage, his fingers curl and grip my coat with purpose.
That suggests nerve function is intact despite the impossible impact.
Burns cover his hands and arms, the kind that come from touching something superheated.
The vest he wears protected his torso, but the exposed skin shows angry red marks that will blister soon.
I pull gauze from my pack and wrap his hands as gently as speed will allow.
The medical kit I keep isn’t designed for trauma this severe, and contains only antiseptic wipes, bandages, and basic wound care supplies.
Enough to handle cuts and minor injuries, but not enough to deal with someone who has fallen from the sky.
But it is what I have, and medical training has taught me to work with the resources available.
His eyes open.
I stop breathing.
Blue.
Not human blue. Light moves inside them, slow currents of lightning beneath glass.
He looks straight at me.
“You’re real.” His voice comes out rough, damaged by smoke or screaming, or both. “I thought... I thought I’d imagined you.”
Words stick in my throat. It’s been five years since I’ve had a real conversation. Oh, I speak to Bear in short commands and meaningless observations. He’s learned to read my wants from my hands.
I find my voice again. “You’re badly injured. I need to get you to shelter.” The words came out harsh and clipped. Professional distance is the last wall I have left.
Don’t engage.
Don’t connect.
Just provide medical care and figure out how to contact his people, his club, whoever would come to collect him, and return me to my solitude.
“The wolves...”
“They left.”
Something passes across his face, relief, maybe, or gratitude. His hand finds mine, gripping with strength that shouldn’t exist in someone this broken. “Thank you. For not... for staying.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You might not survive the trip down.”
“I’ll survive.” That impossible blue gaze holds mine.
“You sound very sure.”
“I have to.”
Behind me, Bear whines.
I look down at the stranger’s hand still wrapped around mine. I should pull away, but I don’t.
Five years without letting another person close enough to matter. Five years building a life where nobody could reach me, need me, or hurt me.
Then a bleeding biker falls out of the sky and takes my hand.
His thumb moves weakly against my skin.
And for the first time since I came to Alaska, I have the distinct feeling the wilderness isn’t the most dangerous thing in my life anymore.