Blackthorne (The Brotherhood of the Gate Book 1) (20 page)

Pam heaved her purse over her shoulder, pulled out her pistol to check the chamber, and then began to reload it as if she stood in the living room of the undead on a daily basis. “Rhi, if there’s a battle over the fate of this world…I want to be there to fight for my and Katie’s slice of the pie instead of sitting at my mother’s on my butt waiting for the end. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it right, plus who else will believe enough of this to back you up? Fate is the true goddess of this town and she has picked me to play a part.” Pam’s eyes turned hard for a moment. “And the next time a boogie man tries to climb in a window and take a swipe at me, I’ll be ready.”

Blackthorne again towered menacingly over Rhi, who had been trying to slide out past him. “Rhi can go to her house and care for her pet, Pamela. Because I’m going with her. And I am going to
stay
with her.” His tone brooked no argument, although Rhi did spend several moments imitating a beached carp, opening and shutting her mouth to protest, but no words could squeak their way out. She squashed down the impulse to flip him off.

Pam lit up like the neon billboard on a new casino property and gave Rhi a covert thumbs-up sign. Rhi sighed. Trust Pam to be thrilled about the possibility of fornication. It hadn’t occurred to her friend that they might not make it home through the ebony curtain of the mountain night alive and uneaten. And the whole
feeding on
aura
story might be a load of fertilizer.

The trip back to their parked vehicles was disappointing. No one came at them as they trundled through the streets, no hideous slug white faces peeped over the snowy hedges that lined the brick paved streets of Cripple Creek. The stern look on her protector’s face kept Rhi from protesting. As much as she hated to admit it to herself, the thought of him in the same house with her overnight made her bones melt. She did resent someone attempting to
take care
of her helpless female personage. People who took care of her inevitably betrayed her, she had discovered through long and bitter experience.

Pam told Rhi to follow her and Houston as closely as possible and Rhi nodded wearily, breaking her way through the crusted snow to her Blazer, her protector following close behind. It was her turn to glare when he made as if to walk to the driver’s side. For a second she saw a twinkle of amusement in his eyes then he went to the passenger side and waited patiently for her to get her keys out. They sat in silence in the truck, giving it a few moments to warm up before heading to Rhi’s home. She took a second to worry about Ellie Mae and to wonder if the protections her new best friend Pearl had placed on the mountain included Ellie’s kennel. She didn’t think she could take it if her dog wasn’t there to greet her upon her return. It would be the final blow to her soul.

The wail of several sirens woke her from her daze as she guided the truck over the washboard gravel of a side road to gain access to Teller 1. Pam slid her truck to a stop in front of them to allow what seemed like every fire truck and emergency vehicle in Cripple Creek to fly by at top speed in the opposite direction leading out to the other end of town, toward Gillette Flats.

“I would’ve thought they would have left some of them at that disaster we snuck out of at the restaurant. What could be bad enough for them to drop that mess and run off like that?” she asked thoughtfully.

Blackthorne had been lounging in the passenger seat, sans seatbelt, taking in the details of her clean but cluttered vehicle carefully, as if it could tell him something about what kind of person she was in
this
lifetime. The fading sirens had brought yet more trouble to his expression. “I’m not sure that we
want
to know at this point. Let’s get you home, and then we’ll find out what else Manius is up to.”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, still concentrating on the road ahead. He had brought his sword with him and laid it on the floor of the backseat, the hilt toward his side of the car. “Why aren’t you out beating the bushes for the skull at this moment? Why all of this patience?”

He hesitated. “The spell I suspect Raven used to hide the skull is called the spell of Speldin’s Tower. A Bible holding the original spell Raven used, which forced the spirit of the skull to remain in bondage, was concealed somewhere, while the skull was hidden somewhere else in town. I had feared several times that my baby brother had figured out a way to break the spell in the last few years, but Pearl kept telling me that he was screwing with us. It’s one of her favorite expressions. She was right. You’re bound to it. It will come to you and no other. We’ve all been waiting around for a hundred years for you or whatever you did to the skull to pop back up.”

“Then why hasn’t your brother taken me and waited for the skull to ‘come forth?’”

“It doesn’t work that way…fate will bring it to you. If you’re in a cell, chance could be cut off from you. You have to have interaction with others to receive it by fate. Then Manius will move to take it and you. He wasn’t trying to kill you, you know. Hurt you, yes. Terrorize you, yes. He likes to mess with me…it’s all a game to him.”

Rhi clenched the wheel with her gloved hands. This was more painful by the second.

At that second a shadow fell before the moon and a monstrous ebony wing was outlined in the partially cloud filled night air. It ended in a reptilian head that had to be at least five feet long. Red, glowing eyes the size of dinner plates could be seen as the creature raced through the air. Reacting more to the appearance of Pam’s brake lights than to the horror in the sky, Rhi slammed on the brakes to avoid running into her friend’s truck. They slid to a stop, skewed across the road, inches from Pam’s well-used truck. Houston was already out of the passenger side of the pickup with a rifle in his hand.

Rhi started to get out as well, but Blackthorne grabbed her arm at the last moment.
I am getting thoroughly sick of being grabbed by the arm.

“Stay in the truck,” he commanded and jumped out with his sword in hand. Pam had gotten out of her truck and was scanning the sky, with her own gun aimed upward. Rhi dazedly wondered if Pam knew how many people had died in Cripple Creek’s heyday from being hit by falling bullets during celebrations before she realized she had followed Blackthorne’s orders, and angrily got out of the truck. The others had gathered in the trail of light emitted by her headlights and Blackthorne was speaking. He sounded disgusted.

“Now
that
is just showing off. What a jackass.” He waved off Houston and the rifle. “Don’t shoot at it…I don’t know if that’ll make it explode or what. They’re volatile creatures. I haven’t seen one in a few hundred years.”

“I have news for you, oh ancient one. I’m a native of Cripple Creek, Colorado, and I know my jackasses.
That
is
not
a donkey…shouldn’t we be running right about now?” Houston broke off as Rhi approached.

“What do you mean, showing off?” she asked as she neared, warily looking at the sky. The distinct smell of sulfur replaced the usually fresh scent of a night-filled forest.

Blackthorne looked up at the sky as he answered. “A dragon. He called up a dragon. What an idiot. To think that
I
trained him. He knows better.”

Rhi’s mouth hung open for a moment as Pam excitedly began to scan the skies again.

“God…how could I not get a picture of this?” She exclaimed, still holding tightly to her gun and trying to juggle her cell.

Rhi was about to start babbling but the sight of Blackthorne floating up into the air to stand in the crown of a tree near the road made her stop and stare. He scanned the area from his perch for the offending magical reptile. “He can fly, Pam. He’s floating for you. Now if he would glow a little.”

Pam didn’t bother to look startled. “He’s a good vampire…of course he can fly. He was dancing on the ceiling earlier with his brother…why are you surprised? I wonder if he’s like Tinkerbell?”

Houston also had a look of wonder on his face. “Tinkerbell?”

“Yeah…we hold him upside down and sprinkle his dust on us and we can fly too? That would be
so
cool.”

A dragon is flying around town and Pam wants some fairy dust.
I wonder where I can get a bottle of tequila at this time of the night? I think I’m out.
She addressed her friend, “Do you think we can turn a guy I’ll bet weighs a solid 210 pounds upside down and sprinkle him on someone?”

Blackthorne had alighted beside her. Hearing her words, he looked baffled. “Sprinkle? Never mind…I don’t want to know. It’s gone, probably to hide in whatever cave or mine shaft Manius has found for it. My brother is trying to freak you out, Rhi.”

“He’s succeeding. Where’d he get a dragon?”

Blackthorne shrugged. “He raised it from one of the planes of Hell I’m sure. The ones in this dimension don’t like to show themselves to modern man…too many weapons have been developed that can kill them easier than in the old days. They now usually sleep the eons away in a cave on top of their treasure. And besides, it didn’t look like a
good
or even a neutral dragon. Dammit. The evil ones are the hardest to control. Manius might not have meant for us to see it. Let’s get to your homes…now.”

“Good dragons?” Pam was calling as he led Rhi back to the truck. “There are good ones? Can I have one?”

“Does anything intimidate her?” he muttered under his breath.

“No. When she dies her headstone will read:
She had a damned good time.
How many people will be able to say the same thing? Can you?”

He didn’t reply—he just reached out to help her into a running vehicle for the third time that night.

The caravan headed off again, this time with Blackthorne and Houston driving. Pam was hanging out the opened passenger side window, trying to get another glimpse of the dragon. Rhi had enough of being tough for the evening. Now she didn’t want to crawl into Blackthorne’s arms and cry…she wanted to curl up in a fetal position and suck her thumb. He could fly. Before the dragon she could cling to the hope that the events of the evening and the past few days were a hallucination brought on by the residual effects of altitude and second-hand smoke. That possible explanation was gone. He could fly.

Blackthorne pointedly ignored her and drove on through the night, his face harsh.

»»•««

Nick Boyd stood on the edge of the clearing off Four Mile Road. His hand was on his gun, even though he was surrounded by three fourths of the Cripple Creek Police Force, all available state troopers, the fire department and every EMT that could be gathered up on short notice. The smell of fire, gasoline, and unspeakable burned meat permeated the air and gagged him. He tried to control the urge to add to the chaos by upchucking and mentally girded himself to look around. The sheriff was standing in the middle of either a battlefield or a terrible accident and until he knew which one it was…he was keeping one hand on his gun. Of course it was connected to
her.
That
much he was sure of. His gun might be useless.

Four-wheel-drives, pieces of snowmobiles, and body parts littered the area, pieces of each even hanging in the snow-filled evergreens like some bizarre accidental parody of holiday decorations. A crater the size of a Mac truck dominated what had possibly been a bonfire at one point, and snowmobile tracks crisscrossed the site. One of his younger deputies approached the sheriff slowly, carefully stepping around patches of something Nick refused to look at too closely. The kid couldn’t have looked more shell shocked if he had been on cleanup on the beaches of Normandy after D-Day.

“Sir, it looks like they got a hold of some dynamite…maybe some of the old, unstable stuff people find sometimes cached here and there near some of the smaller old claims.”

Nick shook his head in disbelief. Damage control was going to be a bastard on this one. “They would have had to have found a crate of the stuff to make a hole this big. Did someone dump it on the fire thinking it would act like fireworks? Stupid rednecks. The stuff had to be sweating nitro if it was that old. It should have blown up being carried here. And what about the wreck on the trail?” He didn’t want to think about what it probably was and no one here would believe him anyway.
How am I going to protect my town from something no one will believe and I can’t explain anyway?

The deputy tried to answer over his gag reflex. “There was a little blood, sir, but no bodies. And it is going to take forever to sort everyone out and account for everybody. The footprints are a mess. Half covered with snow already and it’s started snowing again. We have a team coming up from the Springs to help out.”

Nick walked over to examine the ruins of Nate’s Scout. “I know this one…that brain dead kid from the gym…Nate. He’s an escaped trust fund brat on the run from Mommy and Daddy Warbucks in the Rockies. Let’s find out what happened here, guys. First the Alien Club mess downtown, which no one can seem to remember much of and in addition I can’t find the gun that went off in the middle of a restaurant. Now this.” This was all too familiar to him. The fireside tales of his grandfather had been dancing through his head for days as he made careful preparations. How could any of this insanity have happened before and then the tale disappear into the mists of time? He filed these thought in the back of his mind for later. The sheriff of Cripple Creek went and climbed into his warm Bronco to make some calls. It was turning into a hell of a night in the Centennial State.

»»•««

Manius stalked from one end of his oversized living room to the other, holding a velvet-covered ice pack over one eye. Just because he was more or less immortal did not mean he couldn’t be pounded into chopped steak. It took him less time to heal than a mortal, but it still hurt. His brother’s loss of control wasn’t a bother. It amused him that he could rattle his brother so easily…the presence of Rhi took all of Jack’s reason. And that was useful in and of itself. What had the lord of the castle in a fury was the mess of the snowmobile party had not been properly cleaned up. According to the police channels he had monitored on the ride home, there were bodies in the woods that hadn’t been turned into chunks of flesh and charcoal like the rest of the victims.