Blackthorne (The Brotherhood of the Gate Book 1) (13 page)

“Met Betty, have you Blackthorne? Bit of a trip, isn’t she?” Pam shot back as she trotted through the room, seemingly assuming Blackthorne was coming with them. Rhi gritted her teeth and followed with him in tow. If she didn’t stop gritting her teeth soon she was going wear them down to the gum in frustration. The faux adobe on the walls of Casa de Oro
,
along with the obligatory roaring fireplace, heavy darkened pine furniture, and carefully placed beams overhead gave the restaurant the feel of a pueblo out of the 1600s. All it needed was an Indian attack. Blackthorne moved forward to hold her chair as she slid into it. His hand brushed through her hair as she sat, making her shiver, then he took his own seat beside her. He was irritating, arrogant, and touchy-feely. The problem was, Rhi wanted his touch more than chocolate. This was going to be a problem.

Houston grinned at everyone over his Corona and soggy nachos. He hefted an untidy stack of papers and old photos out of his lap onto the table. “Howdy, Mr. Blackthorne. I figured you might be with these ladies this evening,” he said, greeting and accepting the stranger immediately. Rhi grimaced, wondering how the little man already knew of her “friend.” Blackthorne nodded and began to study the menu.

“How do you two know each other, Houston?” Rhi said as she removed her coat and reached for the El Patron margarita, which Houston had obviously ordered in preparation for her arrival. At the mention of her new companion’s name, an alarm bell rang in her head. What was she forgetting? There was something important…right on the edges of her thoughts, waving at her frantically with tiny little arms.

“Mr. Blackthorne spoke with me last night after you girls left and voiced an interest in the goings on our little group will be discussing this evening. In spite of my suspicions involving his relatives, my feeling was good about him so I agreed to let him attend our summit.” Houston spoke around the edges of the giant nacho chip encrusted with jalapenos he was stuffing in his mouth.

Pam’s eyebrows rose along with Rhi’s at the mention of relatives. Houston ignored them both and plowed along.

“Besides, it’s high time you came out of that hole you have dug yourself into up on that mountain, young lady. Someone as pretty as you shouldn’t be alone.”

Her face flaming, Rhi busily held up a menu to examine it.

Pam decided to chime in. “I told her earlier it was gonna rust shut.” She then leaned over and whispered loudly to Rhi, “but you should
date only
like I do, nothing serious. Why buy when you can lease?”

Blackthorne burst out laughing behind his menu as Rhi came close to snorting half her drink up her nose. She glared at her friend, who grinned back at her broadly. Helpless against this onslaught and relieved at the notion that the thunderous looking Blackthorne could laugh so heartily, she started laughing as well. His eyes sparkled with humor and the crinkles that appeared when he laughed made him more ruggedly alive to her than ever.

Don’t want him. Don’t want him. Don’t want him.
She silently repeated the words over and over.
Maybe I should take Pam’s advice of a few weeks ago and buy some, ahem, machinery to get rid of my urges
.
Who am I kidding…there is no machine that has hands or a butt like that man. Argh.

Blackthorne began to laugh harder than ever.

The waiter arrived to take their orders and Rhi was relieved to hear him order an enchilada plate and a Corona, like a normal being. She had a sneaking suspicion he was not quite human. His taste for hot enchiladas and cold beer gave her some reassurance and she resolved to try to be civil to him…if she could quit thinking of him with his shirt off.

Pam kept up the chatter, gossiping about the town and various residents until the waiter returned with their orders. Blackthorne and Rhi remained silent while Houston listened to Pam with an amused smile hovering around his lips.

Pam plowed into her food and the conversation, directly addressing Houston with her mouth full to the brim. “Houston, I have waited patiently all day and we can all safely say that I’m not the most patient of souls.
What
has happened in Cripple Creek before and why is a ghost trying to strangle Rhi?”

Once again, Rhi tried to be a voice of reason in the wilderness. “Why do you guys talk of ghosts in this town so cavalierly? You seem to think of them in the same vein as an annoying relative who shows up to borrow money occasionally.”

Houston took a swig of beer before answering. His eyes would not meet Rhi’s. Instead he looked directly at Blackthorne, who sat in a relaxed pose and sipped on his own beer. “Ghosts?” Houston asked. “You can’t swing a dead cat by its tail in this town and not hit one. Hell, I can’t walk into my bathroom without discovering Mary, my poltergeist, has turned all of the shampoo and medicine bottles upside down and balanced them perfectly along the edge of the bathtub. I think she’s showing off. But recently there seems to be some presences in this town that aren’t as benevolent as my Irish lass.” He looked meaningfully at the newcomer again, who seemed to be in love with his plate of enchiladas. Houston continued his lecture. “This was once holy ground to the Indians. The gold rush hit and Cripple Creek was founded. It became one of the wildest, most violent towns in the country. We attracted all sorts to the area. The wealthy lived in Colorado Springs and didn’t dirty their hands by making the journey up to the Creek—they just spent the gold from the mines. Manitou Springs, on the way up the Ute Pass, became a spa resort town, a refuge for those suffering from tuberculosis. The mortality rate of the citizens of Manitou Springs made the spirituality movement of the 1800s pretty popular and the town attracted mystics and witches of all shapes and sizes, as it still does today…”

“But what does that have to do with us right now, here in Cripple Creek?” Rhi interrupted him, breaking his spell.

“I’ll get to it, give a man a second. I’m working here. In 1896 strange happenings plagued this town. It seemed like a run of bad luck for everybody. Rabid animals roamed the woods and it wasn’t the right time of the year for it. Plus rabies usually burns itself out, but in this case the animals weren’t dying off. They were attacking livestock and people everywhere. Then the Old Testament stuff started. The weather went insane with a hailstorm showing up accompanied by what the old timers claimed was a meteor shower, because balls of flame were mixed with the hail. Then there was the ever-popular rain of snakes…that still cannot be explained away…after all, snakes should have been in hibernation when it rained them. It was midwinter. Some people showed signs of demon possession, which historians have tried to explain as epileptic fits, but in reading about it and after hearing about what happened to Rhi at work, I tend to think it was something darker than a chemical imbalance, especially in that many people. Folks were saying that the miners had dug too deep, that they had woken up the Tommyknockers, demons that live in the deepest part of the mine and are usually awoken by human greed. Then the first girl was found.”

Rhi had been trying to concentrate on what Houston had been saying, eating at the same time,
and
controlling her urge to sit and stare at Blackthorne. But her skin prickled at Houston’s last statement. “The first girl?” she queried, although she had a good idea of what he was talking about.

Houston looked back at her grimly. “You have got to understand that in those days they did not
have
serial killers, people were not as used to the idea as we are. That is why there was so much fascination with Jack the Ripper in that era. He was something new. And this town had its own Ripper, but they tried to keep it quiet. A crib girl was one of the cheapest hookers on Meyers Avenue, usually some used up child making her living out of a side room off the street that was the size of a closet. They found one of those poor creatures with her heart cut out in a ditch on Shelf Road. Then a few days later they found one sprawled right behind the tent that held the offices of
The Daily Miner
, one of the newspapers of the era. It was ignored a bit at first because not much value was put on those poor girls anyway, but after a few weeks and seven more girls, things started to heat up. The killer had a penchant for leaving his victims on display in public places. He could have easily gone out and buried them in the woods to hide his deeds—he wanted everyone to see what he had done. Then Pearl DeVere, the madam, got fed up with the authorities half-assing the investigation and hired some psychics—they called them witches in those days—from Manitou Springs to look into the void for the answers.”

The table had gone silent. Rhi noticed Blackthorne was not as mesmerized by Houston as she was. Instead, the tall stranger was gazing at her. He seemed to be examining her reactions to the story. She resisted the urge to sneer at him and took a quick swig of margarita. There shouldn’t have been enough tequila in Cripple Creek to make her sit here and seriously listen to this hogwash except for one thing. She had seen and felt too much to not believe something wicked was coming their way.

“Even though the head witch girl was a sickly woman and probably dying of tuberculosis, she made the trip up the mountain to Cripple Creek to stay and help out. She performed some séances to find out what the evil was that was growing in the roots of the town, over the objections of her husband, who accompanied her as a protector along with some of his men. I was not able to find out what the guy did for a living. Anyways, the little psychic supposedly got some images of the home of one of the more respectable young millionaires in town.” Everyone at the table stopped to look directly at Blackthorne as Houston blithely continued. “The millionaire’s name was Manius Blackthorne. Pearl went half crazy trying to get the mansion checked out but no one would touch the guy. Then the girl-witch from Manitou went missing one night. She and her husband were staying at the Imperial while they helped Pearl. Her husband went berserk when he discovered his wife was missing and went to storm the house with his men. Pearl got some of her better customers to take her seriously and they decided to get up a lynch mob, which was considered a kind of party in those days. Everyone joined in and a group of men headed out from several bars on Meyers Avenue in the idle hours of the night for the opportunity to hang someone. The house is still standing today. You know the big-ass stone house that caps that hill off Teller One outside of town—the one that idiot from England remodeled? ‘The Castle’ was stormed and they caught Manius at an altar in the house with the half-dead witch, Raven, stretched out on the altar stone. He was holding the sacrificial knife above her, babbling about a crystal skull.” Houston paused for effect. Pam was spellbound, leaning forward to catch every word while Rhi and Blackthorne kept eating. Then Rhi decided enough was enough. It was time to speak up before someone else got to it.

“Did you say his name was Manius
Blackthorne
? As in Jack Blackthorne?” She looked accusingly at the man beside her. “Is this a coincidence? Or a relative?” A bell then went off in her mind and she clearly saw the page of the tattered book she had been reading earlier that day. A crystal skull? Was the treasure she had been reading about earlier closer than she had thought? Of course if the treasure was near, so were the gates of Hell. Yeek. Rhi knew she had quite an imagination but this was stretching it to the limits of credibility.
But you floated in midair this morning,
a wicked little whisper told her,
and invisible people are choking you.

Pam was excitedly asking Houston if he was sure it was a crystal skull and not a diamond one.

Blackthorne sat sprawled in his chair next to Rhi with that infuriating “deeply troubled but still sexy” look on his features. His leg was too close to Rhi’s and she repressed the urge to kick him. “Blackthorne was a relative. Let’s allow Houston to continue and then I’ll explain everything.”

Taking his cue, Houston geared up again. “The conventional reports say the nut job had an army in residence at the Castle, hidden in tunnels underneath it. An open battle broke out. The local lore says though that it was not an army at all, but a horde of demons from the depths of the mines, called by Blackthorne. Whether it was men or demons, a chase was on through the tunnels, which seemed to connect to every mine in Cripple Creek. No one ever said who was chasing whom, but some of the tunnels opened up out of secret doors into the brothels and bars on Meyers Avenue. Then all hell broke loose. The fighting broke out of the tunnels into the streets of the town. Of course with all of the mayhem a fire somehow started and the town went up in flames like the pile of dried out kindling it was. Many died but the evidence of whatever strange occurrences had gone on was burned to a crisp. Nobody could clearly recall what all had happened or at least they wouldn’t admit to what had happened. Manius was never seen again.”

“So the crystal skull is still here,” said Pam triumphantly, “and someone’s using it to cause the freaky things that are happening in town.”

Houston nodded. “That’s what I believe.”

“Wait. What happened to Raven and Pearl?” Rhi asked in an anxious tone, still not mentioning her own suspicions. “Did they live?”

“Well, you know what happened to Pearl…everyone in town knows she died of a laudanum overdose later that year. And Raven supposedly died in her husband’s arms in the meadows of Mt. Pisgah that day, where crowds of refugees had gone to flee the fire. And no one knows where the husband
went. I thought this was a load of horse pucky until lately,” Houston replied. “Now, Mr. Blackthorne, why don’t you tell us where you fit in this scenario? How’d you get so adept at showing up in the nick of time? And while you’re at it, why not explain how you happen to be the spitting image of the husband of the little witch from down the hill, buddy? Are you related to the Manius Black…who’s now living in that damned house? Even better—why don’t you explain the coincidence of you having the same name as Raven Blackthorne’s husband…Jack Blackthorne, the older brother of Manius Blackthorne? I have a lovely daguerreotype photo of you…and a young woman who…maybe I should show you.” Houston started digging through his stack of papers.