Free The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock

up a long slope. Kilo snapped at the snowshoes, at first, then fell back.
    Were birds following him, leaping and darting from branch to branch? Were elk drifting in a silent herd just on the other side of this line of trees, slipping back whenever Colville turned to look at them straight on? How many animals were around him right now? Elk, bears, wolves and coyotes; raccoons, rabbits, squirrels and mice. Traveling in herds and packs, hibernating in caves and underground. Birds slicing through the air—closer, farther away.
    And then there were all the Elementals and Entities thick in the air, as invisible in daylight as in the darkness of night. Was he feeling them now, close around him? And how could he know? He’d never known how to be certain which was which. Elementals, the nature spirits, had to be here, invisible—yet so were the Entities, who were more likely to lead his thoughts astray. Entities were caught between, disembodied beings that hadn’t balanced their Light and couldn’t ascend to the higher planes, that wished to attach themselves to the magnet of his heart. He shivered, squinted up into the trees’ dark branches; he thought of Forcefields, made up of mankind’s wrong thought and feeling, some as small as a person’s hand, others drifting like vast clouds, casting shadows that suddenly changed his emotions, his energy. Archangel Michael had a special branch of his legion that broke up these fields, into smaller pieces.
    Under his breath, Colville rattled through an Archangel Michael, a Tube of Light. That helped. He followed Kilo as they crested the ridge, descended along a canyon to another creek. Taking out the map, he switched on the headlamp. Lion Creek, it had to be. He felt more confident with each step, a vibration that grew, that pulled him along with a certainty beyond any map. This was the back way, a route he had never taken—that no one had ever taken, as far as he knew. He had no choice. If he’d tried to go straight up the canyon, to the Heart—through Corwin Springs, past King Arthur’s Court and the rest of the buildings—he’d have been seen by the members of the Activity, whoever they were now. They would question him, turn him away, or worse.
    The headlamp’s yellow circle slid along the snow in front of him, Kilo’s hind legs and tail cutting into the beam. They climbed a gentle slope, silent now, the only sound their breathing. At the top of the ridge, Colville looked down and saw faint lights, the windows of ranch houses a mile away. Cinnabar Basin.
    He stayed in the trees, backtracked out of sight of the valley and houses below. The temperature was falling, the cold on him quick; he jogged, slapping his mittens together, snapping branches from deadfalls, dragging wood together for a fire. At first Kilo followed, back and forth; then he settled down near the pack and simply watched as the wood was piled higher.
    The ridge hid the flames of the fire from the houses below, and also hid the beam of his headlamp as he unpacked his sleeping bag, set up his tent. He scooped pine needles, softened the space beneath the tarp, then hooked the two curved poles into the tent—a bivy sack, really, a long tube big enough for just one person—and attached the fly, pegged it down, added more wood to the fire. Sparks crackled, shot upward toward the dark branches. Kilo sat close to the warmth of the flames.
    â€œHungry?” Colville poured some dog food into the bowl, then headed out of the trees with his collapsible bucket and scooped up some snow to melt for water. He returned to the glow of the fire, the dog happily eating, the camp all set up.
    â€œSo far, so good,” he said. “We have to be happy about how it’s gone so far.”
    He readied everything, eating half a sandwich from lunch as he walked in tight circles around the fire. One way, then the other, to warm his left side, his right. He pulled his