Blackthorne (The Brotherhood of the Gate Book 1) (6 page)

The close proximity of the legendary military command center located in the hollowed out confines of Cheyenne Mountain above both Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs had always been an uncomfortable itch in the locals’ psyche, Rhi discovered a few weeks after her arrival. Rumors of government conspiracies and experiments were interspersed with the grim knowledge that in a nuclear confrontation, NORAD was ground zero…a gigantic target for a multi megaton blast that would reduce the surrounding populations to dust. This fact made the surrounding populations nervous. And a bit batty.

Pam rolled her eyes and broke in before Bobby Wayne could pontificate on what conspiracy the government and the local military bases had unleashed on them this week. “It would be good to have someone to point out who is real and who is
otherworldly
in this town to me, if you know what I mean.”

They all looked toward the rail of the loft bedroom, where the television belched the inane colorful noise of cartoons and where Ellie Mae lay stretched out beside Katie.

“If Ellie had ESP of some kind, it’s probably been burned out by all of the exposure to TV she gets.” Rhi sighed. “She looks intimidating, but I suspect Ellie is under the delusion that she’s a lap dog.”

“Well, just remember. If that dog has something to say, listen to her. And I’ll leave you my card as well, Miss Rhiannon. If you need anything, please feel free to give me a call but not on my cell unless it’s an emergency—call my landline. You don’t know who’s listening.”

Behind his back, Pam pointed her index finger at her head and swirled it around.

Yes, Pam, he’s nutty as my Aunt Roxy’s Alabama Rum Fruitcake.

Thanking Rhi profusely for the hospitality and admonishing both women to not do any exploring in the woods until he checked out what left the blood in the yard, Bobby Wayne took his leave, marching out through the snow in Alec Guinness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” style. He no doubt approved thoroughly of the movie, given the creases in his pants.

Rhi looked at Pam in askance and raised an eyebrow in the direction of their latest visitor. “I’m starting to feel like I’m living in a train station with all of the company I’ve had this morning. How close does that guy live to me?”

“Over the hill. He’s harmless and if the revolution comes tomorrow we’ll have a place to hide and food to eat. But I don’t think I want to know what he will want in exchange.”

The two women began what was a long morning of unpacking various boxes of belongings that seemed, to Rhi, to belong to another woman. She held up an ebony evening gown covering in bugle beads. “Where can I wear this thing up here?” she said, tossing it in the pile for Goodwill.

Gasping, Pam snatched the dress back up. “Honey, if I could look like you probably look in this thing, I would
find
a place to wear it.” She looked over the pile of discards. “This stuff is beautiful. What could possibly make you want to throw it away?”

“It always looked beautiful on the rack, but once it was on me it was, according to my grandmother, too long, too tight, too short, too colorful, and too dull.” She held the dress out to examine it. The social scene her grandmother demanded she partake in once she reached marriageable age had left a foul taste in her mouth after several years of hanging with the woman’s country club set. While on the surface the eligible young men she was introduced to at various charity and social events had looked like young gods, her “other” sense gave her insight into what they truly were deep inside. After years of disappointing the older woman by not scoring a rich husband, Rhi was ready to leave it behind. Her grandmother had passed away the year before, after spending all of Rhi’s inheritance on keeping up with the Joneses and weekly spa visits. After Rhi’s shock at her grandmother’s perfidy wore off, she sold everything she had left and moved to Mississippi, attended a casino sponsored blackjack academy, and became a blackjack dealer. And then one day…she decided to move to Colorado. After a dream.

She shook her head and dropped the dress back in the “keeper” pile. It slithered, snakelike, into the mound. “I once heard someone say they would rather live for ten minutes as a tiger than one hundred years as a sheep. I have been a sheep way too long…and a tigress might need this dress.”

Pam put a comforting arm around her new friend. “Atta girl. Be a bitch in the dress the old hag bought for you…probably with your inheritance.” She sniffed and sucked down her cold coffee. Pam was well acquainted with Rhi’s past, having laboriously wormed the whole story out of the newest dealer in Cripple Creek by judicious applications of sympathy and beer.

Rhi looked sadly down at the pile of clothes. “I didn’t pick out a damn thing in here, she did. And I’ll never make myself into something I’m not for anyone ever again.”

Pam dove into another pile of boxes, noting over her shoulder, “At least you are at the point you will consider trying to have a life…and maybe a man. When I met you a few months ago, the only ambition you had was to be the old lady down the street with cats.”

“I realized I didn’t like cats,” Rhi said, looking pointedly at Pam, who tried to foist one off on her at least once a day. Pam ignored her and walked to the window. “I don’t dislike the thought of a man, Pam. I just intend to be extremely choosy about the one I allow to be a part of my life…somewhere there is a man who will look at me with kind, loving eyes. I’m waiting for him.”

“I think it’s going to snow again, I can smell it.” Pam’s pale gray eyes blinked in the sunlight as she spoke. For a moment, she looked haunted. “I think they’re going to need an icebreaker to plant Marie up in the cemetery. Do you think you could go with me to the funeral? I think I need some company.”

It was Rhi’s turn to stand next to her friend and put a comforting arm around the bony shoulders. “I think that can be arranged and I think we both need hot cocoa with fresh whipped cream and nutmeg.”

“Fresh whipped cream and nutmeg? Have you been watching Emeril again?”

∙
•
∙

Outside, several presences that watched the house turned from the view of the window and vanished into the brush of the mountain.

Upstairs, Ellie Mae hauled her large golden torso off the bed and nosed the cold window. Hunks of snow blew off the roof into the glass, making the pane rattle. The dog silently took up her watch again, waiting for whatever made her senses tingle with apprehension to appear.

∙
•
∙

A few miles away, Nick barreled down the ice-covered road with the typical lack of concern shown by most of the experienced locals when confronted with deadly patches of ice underneath their 6000-pound SUV sleds. He had been watching the area surrounding Horse Thief Gulch for weeks, as ordered. The poor girl had no idea what was going on and it wasn’t his job to tell her. He allowed himself a moment of pity before a flash of movement in the sun-dappled snowy woods caught his eye. He skidded to a stop in the center of the desolate stretch of dirt road. After a long pause, he reached behind him for one of the rifles in the gun rack on the side window of the Bronco. He alighted from the truck, every sense on fire. A smoldering patch of what looked like raw meat lay several feet beyond the road, looking as if it had burned a hole through the crust of snow. He cautiously poked it with a booted foot once before the barrel of an old-fashioned Colt pressed against his neck.

He dropped his rifle and took a step back. A whiff of the exotic perfume in the air told him exactly who had gotten the drop on him. “I should have known you would be up to your armpits in this mess. I don’t suppose when you kill these things, you could manage to hide the carcasses a bit better? They do tend to gross people out.”

The silk-smooth voice behind him wove its way into the whistle of the ice wind that roared through the morning. “And get that muck on my hands? Are you serious? So…how is our girl today?”

Nick swore to himself and wondered what he had done to deserve the return of this particular Cripple Creek curse in his lifetime. He turned to face the owner of the voice with a sigh.

The blackjack table had been an effective buffer that evening against the rehearsed lines of a group of young soldiers up for a day of gambling and fun from Fort Carson. Rhi deftly dealt hand after hand, slowly deflating both their wallets and their pride.

“They play like kids at Go Fish,” Stephen the pit boss said in her ear at one point. “Are they drinking strawberry daiquiris? There’s ten inches of snow on the ground outside.” He started to stalk off shaking his head, muttering to himself about the dubious alcoholic tastes of the US military.

“I think they’re cute,” Rhi whispered back as she cleared her hands and tucked a length of her black hair behind one ear. She then smiled as sweetly as she could manage at the freshly scrubbed recruit seated directly in front of her. “Care to place a bet, sir?”

He shook his shaved head at her, giving her a pained but poor smile as he tried to shove himself back from the table with two startlingly muscular arms, almost falling over in the process. His companions roared with laughter at his antics and each anted up another five bucks for the next hand.

Stephen sidled over to again speak into Rhi’s ear. “Cute like basset hound puppies. Want to take one home? I have heard if you get them young…you can train them easier.”

“All bets set? Okay then,” Rhi said, ignoring her supervisor. She began to deal the cards. Her eyes caught the stare of a tall aristocratic man who occupied a seat at the next table. Her heart jumped and lodged itself in her throat as she recognized the animal stare of the man from her dreams the night before. The planes of his face were weathered and harsh, yet youthful in spite of his black and silver hair. He looked at her angrily out of hard blue eyes that made her want to hide.

Her hand faltered as her mind struggled to comprehend how the man who had held her in the night, in more ways than one, had walked out to take a seat in reality to play a few hands of blackjack. Drops of sweat slid down her neck as she concentrated on the cards, willing the man to disappear. King, jack, ace, deuce, double, split. The next hand was over in seconds. She looked up again and caught his eyes, the color of the spring Colorado sky, bearing down upon her.

Suddenly the cards in her hands leaped into the air as if someone had grabbed and thrown them. Stephen lurched from behind the podium to catch Rhi as she fell. She felt like a giant invisible hand had swatted her out of the way. Winded, she lay on the thick red carpet of the casino floor, gasping for breath as security swarmed the pit to secure the table. The dream man arose and made his way to the edge of the blackjack pit, his hands reaching toward her. Rhi started to choke, feeling an unseen pair of hands around her throat. She felt the veins in her eyeballs began to swell as eerie laughter filled the air of the casino. She felt calluses on the invisible male-sized fingers, the rough hide abrading her skin. The smell of burned flesh filled her nostrils, making her eyes roll back in her head. The tall stranger ignored the velvet rope that sectioned off the blackjack pit, stepping over it to walk past a suddenly dazed Stephen. The pit boss released her and stumbled back as if he too had been hit by some kind of spirit hand, and the oblivious security guard did not seem to see the newcomer walk to the place on the floor where she struggled with her invisible attacker.

The tall man chanted under his breath as he kneeled down and lifted her into an iron embrace. Her hands tore at the suede of the jacket covering his broad shoulders, desperate for relief. Touching his jacket sent electric currents through her body, and the touch of his hand on her arm jolted the invisible hands away from her throat.

The moment she felt herself freed, she pushed herself away from the warm, spicy scent of him as hard as she could. She almost knocked Pam down, who had leaped into the pit herself, fresh from a break. Pam kneeled beside her, the thin planes of the woman’s face marked with concern.

Gasping, she lay on the floor trying to tell Pam what had happened.

“Calm down, sweetheart,” Pam said soothingly and then turned on Stephen, who stood in shock nearby, and snapped, “Call 911, you twit.”

The strange intruder, whose clear energy reached out for Rhi’s senses in a way that shook her to the bone, coldly spoke up. “I think we all have a case of altitude sickness, right miss?” He looked into her eyes inquiringly, his own gaze holding a wealth of emotions, including what appeared to possibly be rage.

Not knowing why, Rhi nodded and tried to stand as a concerned crowd gathered. The thought that there might be dark finger mark-like bruises or maybe even burns on the delicate skin of her throat was as terrifying as the fact that a man she had made love to in a dream the night before was standing in front of her. All six foot three of him. She had the insane urge to jerk up the back of his jacket and shirt to see if the ridged muscles of his back were marked and pocked with the scars of a hundred battles. Scars that she had run her fingertips over the night before in her dream.

Pam gave him the once over appraisingly and then her eyes narrowed. “Thank you for your help, mister…”

“Blackthorne.”

The noise of sirens filled the cavernous casino as the emergency crew arrived out front. Rhi’s rescuer turned and walked smoothly out of the pit, gliding over the plush red paisley carpet. The gathered crowd then obscured the view. When they dispersed, he was gone.

But Rhi already knew he had vanished, just as she had known he was there in the first place. She realized she would know if Jack Blackthorne was near her for the rest of her life, but she didn’t know why. Then she realized he hadn’t mentioned his first name—and she knew it anyway. The slight scent of sulfur drifted past her face. Pam took her hands as she began to tremble again.

»»•««

Manius Black leaned on a pillar supporting one of the many porches that hung off the side of the granite monstrosity known by locals in Cripple Creek as “The Castle.” He gazed up at the magnificent night sky. Located on a hillside outside of town, the house had been occupied in the late 1800s by one of the instant millionaires of the gold rush. The gothic pile had been empty for decades. Manius picked it and the surrounding land up for a paltry amount, months before he had arrived. It irritated him slightly to have to pay anything for the house at all. After all, it had been
his
home in the first place. He spilled buckets of blood to predict the date of Rhiannon’s arrival in Cripple Creek. He saw no reason to await the inevitable recovery of his treasure in one of the shacks dotting the countryside. Instead, he completely transformed “The Castle” into the modern type of palace he preferred in record time. A decorator from Denver had taken the interior and reformed it into an eclectic mix that resembled the height of current fashion and price. Manius, of course, had only recently arrived, preferring to bide his time in Denver in the penthouse of one of the more luxurious hotels until he felt the swell of power begin in the mountains. The city was where some of his more intriguing habits could be more easily hidden. Soon it wouldn’t matter, though.