Blackthorne (The Brotherhood of the Gate Book 1) (26 page)

“God no. I’d get irritated again about that damned museum not selling me back my Edison phonograph. God, I loved that contraption. It was the first thing I bought when I decorated the place. It’s bad enough I’m going as your escort to the Saint Nicholas hotel. I’ve managed to never visit the damned place in the present yet here I go.”

“Why?” Rhi queried.

“The Sisters of Mercy who ran the hospital when it was the St. Nicholas hospital knew me well. I lost count of the trips there with my clients and girls. Plus, I let my ‘dead’ body be carted there to be pretend embalmed.” Pearl looked sharply at Rhi’s pale profile. “Doesn’t the St. Nicholas bother
you
, Rhi? Is that why do you look so pasty? God, you need a bronzer. Have a rough night?”

Rhi tried to look innocent. “What do
you
think? And why would the Saint Nicholas bother me?”

The other woman shook her head knowingly and Pam’s eyes widened. “She thinks it would bother you to be there, Rhi…because you died there. Didn’t she?” she asked Pearl.

The madam looked grim. “Yes, she died there. The place worked up a staggering body count in those days. You might keep that in mind, Rhi. This isn’t a game of chance.”

“I would have to disagree with that statement. This sounds to me to be one big craps game and I seem to be the dice,” Rhi sniped, dismissing Pearl’s words as they rounded up the drive toward the pitched roof of the Victorian hospital turned hotel. Damn them all. She wasn’t fragile. And she didn’t need to become dependent on these people. She’d made her choice to involve herself and she was the one who would live with it. “Warning me off is rather asinine, don’t you think? After all it’s not like I have a choice in the matter.”

She swallowed the urge to look back at the lonely hillside and wonder where her past self lay in the ground, cold and rotted under a lichen covered gravestone
.

Should I order another spot? Can I get a cut rate since a part of my being is already parked there?
She shook her head to dispel this train of thought and swore she would
never
ask where Raven’s remains lay. There were some things she didn’t need to know.

The whitewashed two-story front porch of the hotel appeared ahead at the end of the road, framed like a postcard in snowy trees. She sighed. All she wanted to do was go home and take a bath.

Her friend in the passenger’s seat grinned at her in sympathy. “Hey, we saw a dragon and watched a hot dude fly last night. Plus, you got laid.”

The Blazer was parked and Rhi wearily climbed out as Pearl pointed out in a cheery voice, “She got laid? Well, maybe Jack will be in better mood now, thank God. Saving the world with a crab-ass is no fun at all. I’ll bet he hasn’t had a date since the fifties.”

Rhi looked back at her in surprise.

“What? Do you honestly think a guy who looks like that has been celibate for this long, pining for you? He has, according to some of my buddies in the Brotherhood, even gone out to dinner with a fine piece of tail once in a while. Of course they always had an uncanny resemblance to you,” Pearl commented heartlessly while busily rewrapping her head in silk scarves while her eyes carefully gauged Rhi’s reaction to her cool words.

Rhi shrugged, pretending to be unaffected by the other woman’s statement. “That would be a bit ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Expecting a man to be true to a dead woman. No love is that strong.”

“No love except maybe a true one,” Pearl replied with a knowing look.

“True love doesn’t exist, Pearl,” Rhi said sarcastically. “Of all of the people I have met in my life, I would figure you as the one who would know that for a fact.”

“For a girl who has faced demons, vampires, changelings, and dragons…you are awfully sure of what does and doesn’t exist.” Pearl replaced the Dior sunglasses over her unearthly eyes as she descended from the Blazer.

Rhi chose not to answer, instead concentrating on the graceful building ahead.

The madam inclined her head toward the steps of the hotel. “Shall we go in?”

Rhi was silent again, wondering why she was jealous about women Blackthorne might have slept with before she was born.

Pam addressed Pearl. “I thought you couldn’t go out in the daylight.”

“I can tolerate the sun, but I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it. It ages the skin.”

Rhi snickered. She was feeling nasty toward Pearl after finding out that her soul mate had not been pining after her, celibately, for over a hundred years. “What? You’re 140 years old and worried about sun damage?”

“I’m 129, little girl,” Pearl said automatically. She tossed one length of the huge scarf over her shoulder and sashayed toward the hotel, leaving the other two women to trail like obedient attendants in her wake.

“If I had known we were escorting Marlene Dietrich, I would have worn more bling,” Pam muttered as they trudged through the slush of the parking lot. “The high drama is getting on my nerves.”

“Oh, Marlene was a lovely woman but didn’t like a lot of jewelry, sweetheart. Had bigger balls than most men, however, and could always get the good seats in all the best restaurants.”

“And you didn’t sleep with
her
?”

“Naw. Not that she didn’t ask.”

A shadow fell over them and Jack was there, looking every bit the hero. He was wearing a long black leather duster, designed for horseback riding in rough weather, and useful to sexy immortal knights who needed to carry a broadsword in public. Rhi suddenly felt better about her husband’s lack of celibacy in her “absence.” Houston stood nearby, attired in his best black Stetson, a new Carhart jacket and jeans starched so heavily that they could have easily stood up on their own without the help of Houston’s spindly legs. His face was close to splitting from the grin plastered beneath his handlebar mustache.

Her knight stepped forward and placed his tall form behind the figure of his once-wife, resting a hand on each of her shoulders.

Rhi craned her head up to meet his eyes and he winked. Then casually, in a movement that looked as if he had done so a thousand times, he leaned down to cover her mouth with his in a lingering kiss that told everyone within range exactly who belonged with whom. Maybe she just needed to live in the now and resist the urge to hit the man at her side.

Jack nodded and they turned to walk in the double doors of the hotel together, where Batty Betty, wearing several tie-dye scarves over her coat, stood digging in her purse.

“Want to kill your husband, girlie?” She cackled. “Do it. I killed mine years ago, best thing I ever did for myself.” The old lady teetered down the steps toward the parking lot. Her jewelry rattled with each of her wobbly strides.

Rhi looked back at Pam with a questioning eyebrow raised. “Is everyone in this town mental? Is that what the prolonged exposure to high altitude does to your psyche?”

“Oh, that’s Betty. She always says that.”

“Has Sheriff Nick thought about checking into her story?”

Pam shrugged as she pushed past the ornate doors of the hotel. Stopping in the lobby to drop off her heavy purse into the keeping of the clerk, she adjusted her hair in the faded mirror behind the desk as Rhi watched her impatiently. “Nope…Earl blew himself up trying to get rid of some big stumps on his property with dynamite. Even if she did it…well Earl
was
kind of a jerk. Can we go make small talk with Marie’s friends and family and raid the food table now? Her dad’s a rancher and I heard there’s fresh meat.”

Blackthorne looked at Rhi with narrowed eyes. “I think that woman might be a bad influence on you. She seems a bit…feministic. By the way, I’m very hard to kill.”

Rhi wiggled her eyebrows at him. “Don’t worry, darling. If I decide to off you, you won’t see it coming. Besides, we aren’t married in
this
life. We’re just fooling around.” She took his larger hand in her small one. “Now, did someone promise me fresh meat?”

Inside the hotel, the boards were fat with the ghosts of the past. Pearl examined the strangely cheerful sounding gathering in the bar and wrinkled her nose. “Can they not bury
anyone
in this town without throwing a party? Oh look. Martinis.” And off she went after the waiter.

Pam and Houston excused themselves to go express their sympathy to Marie’s family. Rhi stayed in the double doorway, turning about to examine the hotel’s environs as she never had before. Jack stood menacingly nearby, carefully examining the crowd and then, satisfied, he turned to watch Rhi as she walked in slow circles examining every bit of plaster and molding.

The Saint Nicholas Hotel had never bothered Rhi—she had stayed in the establishment during her first days in Cripple Creek while she searched for a rental. But as she stood in the hallway that afternoon, Rhi felt a shiver of fear run up her spine. It was the kind of fear that lives in a child’s heart in the black darkness of night after a parent has finally closed the bedroom door. Raven had been left alone in the dark and this was the place where she had finally escaped.

“Are you all right?” Blackthorne hovered over her. He took her hand and she followed him blindly to the crowded bar. The bar patrons parted like the Red Sea for the couple, who took possession of two strangely empty barstools.

“My old friend Jack,” a high-pitched, whiny voice caught Rhi’s attention. Manius Blackthorne’s weaselly assistant swiveled to face them. He was dressed in pressed khakis, a button down shirt, and a cashmere sweater but still conveyed a sense of trashiness in the insolent stare he fixated on her body. “Why, I haven’t seen you since that night a couple of years ago when you bought me a few drinks right here at this very bar. Remember?”

Blackthorne stared at the interloper but said nothing as Pam muscled her way through the crowd to the group. A muscle twitched in his cheek and he ground Rhi’s fingers in his grip.

“What do you want?” Rhi asked him bluntly once she found her breath. “Since I am pretty sure your master is responsible for this shindig in the first place, I think it is wildly inappropriate for you to be here, don’t you think?”

Troy’s smile widened. His lips stretched hideously over his teeth, which she suddenly noticed were as sharp and as vicious as a rodent’s. “My master? Oh no, princess. I think you need to talk to
your
master about the responsibility here. After all, he’s the one who talked me into digging up that grave three years ago. I had enough vodka in me to kill Stalin that night and I needed some cash, bad. So why not dig up an old grave and steal the dead guy’s jewels, your buddy here suggested. After all, it’s not like he will sit up in the coffin and ask what you are doing. But he did sit up.” Remembered horror flashed across the man’s face before the rodent took back over. “I lost the best lay I ever had that night. After all, Cassie did look delicious. Oh yes, and my soul. Your boyfriend let a monster loose, not me.”

His voice lowered to a hiss as Rhi felt the muscles contract in her head.
No, no, no, no….

“I’ve seen things and done things that’ll damn me forever, princess, but who told me not to take out the stake in Manius’ heart, knowing that is the first thing I would do? Just to be a brat? Who let
him
out in the first place…
who
killed Marie? I went to school with her you know. A few years ago I could probably have felt enough to cry over her. Now I wonder why all of that meat was wasted…the master’s pets would have enjoyed chewing on that piece of ass, literally.”

Rhi whirled on Blackthorne as Pam, who heard everything, yanked Troy out of his seat and threw him to the floor. She placed a booted foot on his neck.

“You wouldn’t tell stories, would you Troy? God, I didn’t even recognize you in the Elk the other night,” Pam snarled. “It must be all of that Dippity Doo in your hair.”

Ignoring the observant gathered crowd, Pam kicked the smaller man in the stomach. A satisfying crunch was audible, telling observers she had managed to hit a few ribs as well as most of his digestive system. He curled up into a ball, moaning, as she watched him clinically. He began to crawl away. Pam ground one heel deep into his calf muscle before allowing him to slip into the crowd.

Pearl and Houston had joined the observers, who chattered among themselves as they waited for the next part of the entertainment.

“You let him out,” Rhi said, having found her voice.

Blackthorne’s eyes were cold. “Yes.”

“And people are dead because you let him out.”

“Yes.”

She pushed herself up from her barstool as Pam came to stand behind her. “I am trying to think of a nice Victorian-type way to tell you to kiss my ass, Blackthorne, but I got nothing. You going to explain yourself at all?”

“Would it matter?” His face was still stony. “If I explain myself or apologize, will it make a difference to you?”

“Nope.” Her nails bit into her palm. “You need to leave.”

Without another word, Blackthorne turned and easily walked through the crowd. Those gathered at the bar had instantly returned to socializing amongst themselves, the weird subject matter of the fight already forgotten.

Pearl appeared beside the women to lean against the worn edge of the bar. She casually drained her glass and began to nibble on the olive. “Dumping him, Rhi?”

Pam’s face showed that she was struggling with the thought of grabbing the madam as Houston stood by, his weathered features torn.

Rhi slid back into her seat and grabbed the bartender by the hand. “A bottle of tequila. And you don’t have to bring a glass.”

She took a deep gulp of the shot the bartender sat in front of her before speaking. She didn’t meet Pearl’s eyes.

“Did you know?”

The beautiful face of the woman she addressed did not as much as twitch. “No. I knew Manius was loose. And these days there are so many monsters loose. I tried to focus on the ones nearest to me. There’s too much of a past with Manius. I knew those bastards wouldn’t let me kill him until they were ready.”

“He let him out,” Rhi said hoarsely. “
They
let him out. That’s why Blackthorne was running all over the world cleaning up his brother’s messes. He let him out.”