A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) Read Free

gliding through snow, poles breaking the surface, the sharp puff of his breath. It had snowed in the night and he was breaking fresh trail. The going was tough.
Tough was good.
Tough was what he needed.
His heart pounded a steady rhythm in his chest. Sweat gathered in a pool on his low back and underneath his arms. He’d unzipped his jacket and taken his gloves off about a kilometer back and welcomed the piercing cold.
A line of tracks, paw prints, crossed the path ahead. He slowed to check them out. Might be a large dog, but no human marks accompanied them. A wolf then. A big one too. He’d heard them in the night, calling to each other across the valley. He’d closed his eyes and listened, delighting in the primitive wildness of the sound. He had no fear of wolves. Wild animals didn’t frighten him. He’d faced the most dangerous animal of them all.
And he’d survived.
Sometimes he wished he hadn’t.
Mark Hamilton dug his poles into the snow and pushed off again. A hill loomed ahead. A steep one. It would be tough going.
Tough was good.
Tough kept the demons at bay. When his muscles ached and sweat ran in rivers down his body and his heart felt like it would burst out of his chest, the demons fell silent. They might still be there, outside his range of vision, hovering in the dark corners of his mind, but at least they were quiet.
A man couldn’t ski forever. Nor run nor bike nor lift weights. A man had to slow down; he had to do his job, to live his life. He had to talk to people, smile and be friendly. A man had to sleep sometimes.
Then the demons circled, whispering, calling. Filling his head with pictures of blood and destruction and sounds of terror and pain and the crushing feel of overwhelming loss.
He crested the hill and glided to a stop. Pulling a stainless steel bottle out of his pack, he twisted off the cap, leaned his head back, and glugged water. The drink felt cold on his lips; it dribbled down his chin and into the depths of his two-day growth of beard where it began to freeze.
A raven, black against a stark background of black and white, watched him from the skeletal branches of a dying pine.
Mark Hamilton lifted his bottle in greeting and the bird took flight. He sucked in a deep breath, felt cold air move into his lungs, fresh and invigorating.
In a couple of days he’d have to go back to town. Back to work. What if he didn’t go? If he sold the house, he’d make enough of a profit to pay off the mortgage and buy a place out here, free and clear. Maybe he could offer to buy out Jürgen. Not that Jürgen was likely to sell.
A hundred acres of mountain wilderness, a log cabin, a generator, an adequate well. Mark didn’t need much else. He could survive, grow vegetables in the summer, can and freeze them to last the winter. Jürgen told him the hunting was good out here, but Mark no longer hunted. He no longer ate meat.
He’d seen blood and brains leaking into the dust, seen creatures, human creatures, struggling to stand with half their head blown off, trying to run without understanding they no longer had legs on which to run.
He’d given up eating meat, and that seemed to appease the demons. Even if only a small bit and for a short while.
He settled into a slow steady pace as he retraced the tracks of his skis. He might want to live out here, in a cabin in the woods. Off the grid. Alone.
But not yet. One day perhaps, one day when it all got too much and it became time to check out. No, he’d head back to town when his vacation ended. Back to the classroom full of slouching teenagers who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the beauty of mathematics, the gossiping neighbors who tried to fix him up with their divorced daughters, the teachers with their pleasant middle-class lives and sexless husbands.
He didn’t like most of the people he dealt with on a day-to-day basis. He found them boring, shallow, self-obsessed. But they, with their chatter and their gossip and their mundane problems,