The Serpent's Cipher

RED COAT BOOK 2
The Serpent's Cipher

The mountains were only the beginning. The real wilderness is a city of secrets, and the only thing more dangerous than the truth is the men who will kill to keep it buried.

Jedediah "Red Coat" Stone survived the collapsing mountain, a battle against a ghost, and the obsessive hatred of Silas "The Vulture" Kane. He walked away from a fortune in cursed French gold, but he now carries something far more valuable, and infinitely more dangerous: the journal and astrolabe of a doomed Spanish expedition from a century before. The artifacts are not a map to treasure, but a key to a conspiracy that has festered in the shadows of the American West for generations. The gold was a lie. The real prize is the truth, and it could rewrite the history of a continent.

Their quest for answers forces Red Coat and his uneasy ally, the fierce Ute warrior Tala, south into a new kind of hell. Santa Fe. A sun-scorched city of adobe and intrigue, where every whisper in the marketplace can be a death sentence and every shadow hides a new enemy. Here, they are hunted by two relentless forces. From one direction comes the Vulture, his greed having curdled into a psychopathic, personal vendetta against the man who humiliated him. From the other comes a far more sinister threat: a secret society of wealthy landowners descended from the conquistadors, known only as The Order of the Hidden Serpent. They are not interested in gold; they are the protectors of an empire built on secrets, and they will eradicate anyone who threatens to expose their bloody legacy.

With the help of a disgraced priest, a man whose own obsessive search for the truth has already cost him everything, Red Coat and Tala begin to unlock the Serpent's Cipher. They discover the journal is a guide to a network of lost silver mines and abandoned missions that have been the true source of the Order's immense power. Their search for a dead man's secrets becomes a desperate, high-stakes race through a labyrinth of political corruption and ancient hatreds.

The hunt culminates at the haunted, sand-swept ruins of a forgotten desert mission, a place of ghosts and immense sorrow. Here, in the crumbling cradle of the conspiracy, the Vulture's brutal ambition, the Serpent's cold-blooded efficiency, and Red Coat's desperate will to survive will collide in a final, explosive three-way battle for the ultimate prize. To escape with their lives, they must not only outfight their enemies but outwit them, turning the hunters against each other in a deadly game where the only prize is tomorrow.

They may have survived the mountain's grave, but in Red Coat: The Serpent's Cipher, they will discover that some secrets are buried for a reason, and that the greatest treasures are the ones that demand a price in blood. The story is far from over. It is only just beginning.