Beyond the Pale: Book One of The Last Rune - Softcover

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From a brilliant and versatile new fantasy talent comes the first book in a breathtaking saga of dark magic and shining redemption.

Reality is unraveling in the dusty Colorado town of Castle City. Strange symbols are carved into storefronts, and ancient legends come to life. Saloonkeeper Travis Wilder is handed an ornate iron box and a mysterious mission. And in Denver, where dead men walk, ER doctor Grace Beckett is witness to a terrifying and inhuman scene of carnage. Theirs is a destiny shrouded in a coming darkness, a destiny that draws them into the otherworld of Eldh....

Eldh is a land of gods and monsters, myths and runecraft, conspiracy and blood. It is a world that has secretly coexisted beside ours for millennia. But now the boundary between worlds is crumbling in the face of a monstrous evil. And if Travis and Grace cannot save this strange land, then both worlds may pay the price.

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A COMING DARKNESS

1.
Sometimes the wind blowing down from the mountains made Travis Wilder  feel like anything could happen.

He could always hear it coming, long before the first telltale wisps of  snow-clean air touched his face. It would begin as a distant roar far up  the canyon, nearly and yet not at all like the ancient voice of a  stormswept ocean. Before long he could see it, rushing in wave after wave  through the forest that mantled the granite-boned ranges that encircled  the valley. Lodgepole pines swayed in graceful rhythm, while cloudlike  aspen shivered green, then silver, then green again. Moments later, in  abandoned fields just outside of town, he could hear the witchgrass  rattle a final portent as it whirled around in wild pagan circles.

Then the wind would strike.

It would race down Elk Street--Castle City's broad main avenue--like an  invisible ghost-herd of Indian ponies. Past McKay's General Store. Past  the Mosquito Café. Past the abandoned assay office, the Mine Shaft  Saloon, the Blue Summit Earth Shop, and the faded Victorian opera house.  Dogs would bark and snap at passing newspaper tumbleweeds. Strolling  tourists would turn their backs and shut their eyes to dust devils that  glittered with gum wrappers and cigarette-pack cellophane. Dude-ranch  cowboys would hold on to black hats with turquoise-ringed hands while  their dusters flew out behind them like rawhide wings.

Maybe he was the only one in town crazy enough, but Travis loved the  wind. He always had. He would step outside the buckshot-speckled door of  the Mine Shaft Saloon, which he had the dubious distinction of owning  these days, and lean over the boardwalk rail to face the gale full-on.  There was no way to know from where the wind had journeyed, he reasoned,  or just what it might blow his way. He would breathe the quickening air,  sharp with the scents of cold mountain stone and sun-warmed pine, and  wonder whose lungs it had filled last--where they lived, what language  they spoke, what gods they courted, if they courted any at all, and what  dreams they dared dream behind eyes of a hundred different shapes and  hues.

It was a feeling that had first struck him the day he stepped off a  mud-spattered bus--a flatland kid raised between the straight and hazy  horizons of Illinois--and drank in his virgin sight of Castle City. In  the seven years since, the sensation had come to him with surprising and  comforting regularity, never lessening in potency with time. Facing into  the wind always left him with an ache of wordless longing in his chest,  and a feeling that he didn't have to choose between anything, because  everything was possible.

Still, despite his many musings, there was no way Travis could have  imagined, on a chill evening caught in the gray time between the  gold-and-azure days of fall and the frozen purple of winter night, just  exactly what the wind would blow into Castle City, and into his life.  Later, looking back with the empty clarity of hindsight, he would sift  through all the strange and unexpected events to pinpoint the precise  moment when things began to change. It had been a small happening, so  small that he might not have remembered it had it not been for the fact  that afterward things would never--could never--be the same again.

It was when he heard bells.


2.
Afternoon sunlight fell as heavy as gold into the mountain valley as  Travis Wilder piloted his battered pickup truck toward town. Faint music  crackled on the AM radio in time to the squawking dashboard. A paper air  freshener shaped like a pine tree bobbed on a string beneath the rearview  mirror, all the fake pine smell long since baked out of it by years of  the high-altitude sun. The engine growled as he downshifted and swung  around a curve at precisely twice the speed recommended by a nearby road  sign: a yellow diamond so full of shotgun holes it looked like a chunk of  Swiss cheese.

"You're late, Travis," he said to himself.

He had spent most of the afternoon on the roof of the ramshackle hunting  lodge he called home, nailing on tar paper and replacing shingles torn  off by last night's windstorm. It was past time to be getting ready for  the snow that the fat, red-furred marmots foreshadowed. When he finally  thought to look up, the sun had been sinking toward the wall of mountains  that ringed the valley. Travis never had been good with time. But then,  he never had been good with a lot of things. That was why he had come  here, to Castle City.

The regulars would start straggling into the Mine Shaft Saloon by  sundown, and there were usually a few hapless tourists who had taken a  wrong turn off the highway and had ended up in Castle City by accident.  Legions of them cruised the twisting two-lanes this time of year, to ogle  the gold splendor of the mountain autumn from the heated comfort of their  rental cars. To make matters worse, Moira Larson's book club was meeting  in the back room of the saloon that evening. The topic:  Nineteenth-Century French Novels of Adultery. Travis shuddered at the  thought of facing a dozen book lovers thwarted in their hell-bent desire  to discuss implications of class structure in Flaubert's Madame  Bovary.

A nervous whistle escaped his lips. "You are really, really  late."

Of course, Max would be at the saloon.

Max Bayfield was Travis's one and only employee. Max was supposed to be  working the day shift today, although more likely he was poring over the  saloon's books, trying to find money between the lines. Travis supposed  that was what he got for hiring a refugee accountant from New York, but  at least there would be someone there to pour a drink if a customer  asked. Then again, it wasn't really a great idea to let Max wrangle the  bar on his own during busy hours. Travis could only hope Max wasn't  hovering around the jukebox again, telling customers that while listening  to classical music temporarily raised one's IQ, country-western  songs--with their simplistic melodic structure and repetitive rhythmic  schemes--did just the opposite.

His sense of urgency redoubled, Travis punched the accelerator, and the  truck flew out of the curve like a rock out of a slingshot.

He was about a mile from town when a dilapidated shape flashed past the  truck's cracked windshield. Hulking beside the road were the remains of a  house. Although he had passed it countless times, like always, Travis  found his gaze drawn toward the ruin. The old place had burned years ago,  long before he had come to Castle City, yet somehow he knew that even  before it caught fire, this had been an ugly building. It was squat and  sprawling, with rows of small windows that stared like hateful eyes at  the beauty of the mountains. Now the structure was nothing more than a  shell, the husk of some gigantic beetle that had died next to the  road.

According to the stories Travis had...