The Pass Keepers' Secret

About this book:

High in the Alpine passes of 1603, something is hunting the Keepers who guard the mountain roads. Men vanish without tracks—boots left upright in the snow, voices mimicked from the cliffs to lure rescuers to their deaths. Veteran ranger Niklas has seen the impossible prints circling the abandoned packs: three-toed, bulbous, smelling of old lard and lye. He knows the old ledger's trembling entries by heart, and he knows the Pass keeps its dead.

Beneath the abbey at Saint Jude-in-the-Fens, Brother Thomas commits heresy at a hidden forge. He works meteoric iron—cold star-metal that rejects earthly fire—quenching the blade in his own blood and carving pre-Christian runes into its edge. The alchemist's forbidden text promises this dagger can cut what no mortal steel can touch: the thing that wears men's faces and speaks with their voices. But the abbey's cellarer grows suspicious, and the mountain storm is closing in.

As Niklas flees a horror that knows his novice's name, and Thomas hammers a weapon that may damn his soul, their paths converge on the Devil's Pass. Something ancient waits in the glacial vault beneath the peak, and the Keepers' final duty demands a price measured in blood and silence. *The Pass Keepers' Secret* is a masterwork of historical dark fantasy—visceral, atmospheric, and relentless—where faith fractures against older, hungrier powers, and the only way out is through the blade.