Blackthorne (The Brotherhood of the Gate Book 1) (30 page)

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Beyond the gathered group, Blackthorne and Pearl stood unnoticed by design on a nearby hillock. Blackthorne’s hands twitched helplessly as the wind carried each of Rhi’s screams their way.

“Jack, you can’t go to her,” cautioned Pearl, one small, gloved hand on his arm. “This has to be something to do with the return of the key. Let her call us.”

Mutely, the large man nodded and turned to the madam, his best friend and confidant. Any other time he would have smiled at the fierce look on Pearl’s face.

“Knights be damned, my sister, I’ll take you as a sidekick over any of my brothers any day of the week,” Blackthorne remarked as he reached back to release his sword. The call would come soon.

Pearl’s sword was already in one of her hands, the other filled with the familiar shape of her Colt. “Screw you, Jack. You can be
my
sidekick, though, if you want.”

»»•««

Hyperventilating, I can’t breathe.
Rhi tried to slowly take breaths and concentrate on each spoonful of air. She clawed herself into a sitting position and pushed Pam away. Her companions stood frozen to one side of the early morning deserted road, silently watching her struggle.

She rose to her feet, knee deep in the filthy snow. They were here. They were close. She raised a trembling hand to point at a sliver of smoke rising in the air from behind several of the barren hills. Her mind reached out to find what force had formed the ominous black ribbon in the sky.

God. How could I not have guessed this? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She screamed at them to move, blistering her throat with the words. “He’s at the ranch, Pam. He’s going after Katie.”

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•
∙

When the call finally came, it wasn’t what either of them expected.

“Katie.” Rhi had screamed from the side of the road where she kneeled. The name hit the warrior and warrior woman like blows to the chest. They both looked at each other in dawning horror before taking to the air, discarding the spell that concealed them from prying eyes. The pair blazed past the group on the side of the road, straight toward the Douglas Ranch, a mile to the east where Katie Douglas waited for her mother.

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•
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Pam stared back at her in stupefied silence, listening to her daughter’s name echo as Rhi forced herself to her feet.

The vision was fading for Rhi and by sheer willpower, she forced her body to move and began to drag her frozen friend to the Blazer. She wiped at the blood on her chin and barked at Houston, who was already sprinting for his truck. “Get your asses in the truck and get your gear on. They’re at the Douglas’s ranch.”

White-faced with anger, the man jumped in the cab of his truck. Bobby Wayne stayed in the truck’s bed, frantically digging through packs and boxes.

The trucks tore down the worn asphalt road, spaying snow and gravel in their wake. Rhi gritted her teeth against the headache and prayed that she didn’t roll the Blazer because she was doing over ninety miles an hour. She managed a quick glance at Pam, who sat in silence, staring at her hands.

Calm. I can talk calmly right now, covered in blood and mud after inhaling another life and the fact that I might have killed my best friend’s child.

“Pam, get some weapons out, everything you can get your hands on that you know how to use, okay?” There was no time to blame herself. Or Blackthorne. There was only time to gun the engine again, chase the horizon and pray they were not too late.

The other woman looked up dazedly. “We’re going to get my baby?”

The tires on the big vehicle squealed in protest as Rhi swung through a curve at high speed in a turn a sports car would have had a hard time cornering.

“Yes.”
I’m not running, Manius. I’m going to kill you now.
Rhi flung the thought out of her head into the sky.
Listen to me, jackass. I am going to kill you.

A familiar voice filled with innuendo and false promise entered her thoughts, laughing merrily.
What good’s power if it doesn’t warn you of things like what’s happening right now, princess? You’ll get here too late and it’ll be your fault, won’t it? Like my brother. You’re a matched set…a couple of martyrs or a couple of monsters, which to choose?

Pam had obediently climbed into the back of the truck and was hauling out various armaments as she mumbled to herself. In the backseat, Ellie Mae paced frantically. The fur on the dog’s back stood on end.

Rhi fumbled for the window controls, rolling down all four windows on the truck and the window on the cargo area.

“Be ready to jump out whenever I stop,” she screamed back at her friend.

Pam looked up from her work to meet Rhi’s eyes. “I’ll kill them all for this Rhi.”

“And I’ll hold them down for you, honey. Get ready.”

The Blazer caught air as it flew over the last hill before the ranch. A lazy ribbon of smoke floated on the morning wind above the ancestral home of Pam Douglas’s pioneer ancestors. The nightmare scene of flames and scurrying creatures in among the outbuildings, barns, fences, and battered main house brought another lightning bolt of pain to Rhi. She bit her lip hard, breaking the skin to keep from screaming again.

From the hillside, a gigantic black shape was clearly visible on the roof of the main house. The outstretched wings of the dragon stretched twenty feet in either direction. The beast’s black scales twinkled in the dim morning light, even as the demons in the yard seemed to cling to the shadows of the buildings. Katie’s shiny golden ringlets and pink sweater could be clearly seen from several hundred yards away, as the child hung limply from the one of the dragon’s claws, hopefully unconscious.

Two human figures with shotguns shielded themselves underneath an old Farmall tractor and other equipment, wounding but not managing to kill demons as they scampered by.

In the air above the dragon, small forms glowed with a blue, shielding light. They had to be Blackthorne and Pearl DeVere, who swooped and dived at the creature, slashing at it with their swords and dodging streams of liquid fire the monster spit at the pair. The dragon cradled the tiny girl in his arms like a treasured stuffed animal and took to the sky.

“She’s unconscious, Blackthorne will get her back,” Rhi muttered to herself as she tried to push the gas pedal through the floorboards. “I’d be unconscious too if I got picked up by a dragon. Pam. Toss that sword here where I can get to it and brace yourself.”

She could hear Pam moving around behind her. A quick glance in the mirror revealed that Pam was now wearing the bulletproof vest and carrying an M-16 rifle. The single mother bristled with several other types of weapons and her face was stone. The hilt of the sword appeared on the console next to her and a loaded 9-millimeter landed in the passenger’s seat nearby.

“Don’t forget to turn off the safety,” Pam said gruffly in a voice that was as hard as her face. Rhi didn’t bother to answer as she blasted the Blazer through the closed wrought-iron front gate of the ranch in a shower of sparks.

A recently burned out SUV was parked near the front door of the house with what looked to be a pile of human remains beside it. The biblical version of an actual devil stood on the front porch, bellowing orders and brandishing a huge sword.

The creature was five times as large as its brethren who scampered about the yard, gorging on cattle that had been released from the pens. The new devil stood at least eight feet tall. It had the shape of a body builder but there all human similarity ended. Two foot-long horns resembling those of a longhorn steer jutted from his forehead and his scarlet skin glistened and smoked. He was completely naked down to his cloven hooves. The obvious proof of the creature’s sex jutted in front of him obscenely.

“Hang on.” Rhi screamed and tore a wide swath through the yard, mutilating at least twenty demons with her truck in a shower of blue sparks. Behind her, Houston had pulled up to the trapped pair under the tractor and thrown open the passenger door to let them crawl in. Bobby Wayne stood in the back of the pickup, strapped to the roll bar and raining heavenly fire upon the demons on the ground with an AK-47. The concussion of the grenades he had thrown didn’t bring so much as a flinch to Rhi’s shoulders as she manhandled the truck through the yard.

It’s good to know that the hoodoo Pearl put on my truck still works,
she thought. Another shower of blue sparks exploded upward against the side of the Blazer where she crushed one of the larger demons under her wheels.

Rhi swung the blazer around again, slowing enough for Ellie Mae and Pam to make the leap out of the back window.

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•
∙

Pam hit the ground hard and instinctively rolled her lean form into a ball, cradling and protecting her weapon. She leaped to her feet instantly, the familiar bark of the AK that Bobby Wayne fired from the back of Houston’s pickup already popping in her ears. She added the music of her own weapon to the chaos.

The blessed and holy water-dipped ammunition had a stunning effect on the creatures that swarmed toward her. The smaller of the white, slug-like demons burst opened like air popped popcorn. The larger ones hit were alive but horribly mutilated, crawling on the ground toward her, legs missing and intestines spilling out. She coldly cleaned out two dozen of them, absently watching the bullets tear through several of the monsters at once. She yanked out the clip and replaced it, not acknowledging the crowd that surged toward her until she looked up to begin firing again.

“Eat this, you little bastards,” she screamed as she rained deadly fire on those who would have found the flames comforting at one time.

“Keep going, baby, I’ve got your back,” Bobby Wayne called from the bed of Houston’s truck as he laid down a line of fire, covering her as she rampaged. He punctuated his bursts of bullets with the periodic toss of a grenade into the farthest reaches of the crowd. Houston seemed to be busy tending whomever he had picked up a moment ago and periodically shooting whatever demon got past Bobby Wayne to try to climb into the broken window of the truck. Pam could see Rhi running the Blazer through the crowd of demons swarming on the opposite side of the barn, then bursting through the building in a cascade of splintered wood and straw, picking the most destructive path toward the front porch where the gigantic “head demon” stood.

A thin wail broke through her bloodlust. Heart breaking, Pam’s glance shot up to the tiny pink tennis shoes that kicked at the restraining claws of the dragon. The M-16 jammed and she tossed it aside to grab the machete at her side.

The first demon the blade touched sparked and flamed, as did the next one. But each blue spark was weaker than the last, and she realized the holy water was wearing down quickly on her makeshift sword.

Above, Pearl swooped in to slash at the dragon’s claw restraining the child but was rewarded instead with a slap that sent the woman head over heels into the roof of the farmhouse. She rolled down, falling two stories to hit the ground with a sickening thud. Across the yard, Houston darted out under the endless cover fire issuing from Bobby Wayne’s revolving succession of guns to get to the madam’s side before the milling demons saw her.

In the air above where Pam grimly fought with a pistol and the machete, Blackthorne slashed at the beast’s side with his gigantic sword.

If it drops her, who will catch her? Who is going to catch my baby?

Pam began to fight her way through the hellish crowd toward where she assumed her daughter might land if dropped.

Her only warning was a sudden burst of heat and she leaped aside, landing on her back in the mud. A squirt of liquid fire from the dragon circling overhead sizzled in the mud beside her head. She didn’t dare fire back at the creature holding Katie, so she jumped up again to mow down as many of its associates as she could. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ellie Mae tossing demons into the air as easily as she did the stuffed doggy toys.

The crowd of demons scattered with screams of dismay and blue sparks as Ellie Mae picked up one by the scruff of its neck and shook it like a terrier with a rat. Other demons trying to seize the huge animal were rewarded with a neon blue bolt of fire that turned them into black piles of hot ash immediately.

A ferocious roar of a challenge forced Pam to glance at the farmhouse’s front porch, where the huge man-beast stood with a smoking sword over a corpse she prayed was not that of her mother or father. He brandished the sword and stretched his bulbous lips out into a grotesque smile, his teeth at least an inch and a half long, pointed and stained. Stained with
what
was something Pam didn’t want to think about too hard right then. She roared in return and sprinted toward the monster. She probably looked like a madwoman. Beside her Ellie Mae appeared, wraithlike. The dog growled and tore at every demon that dared to stumble into their path.

They weren’t fast enough to beat the now battered Blazer. It chugged past her like a rhino on a sugar high, straight for the demon commander.

»»•««

The moment her friend and her dog bailed out of the cargo window of her truck, Rhi hit the gas
.
She only paused long enough to stuff the Bible into one of the large inner pockets of her barn jacket where it lay like a stone, humming happily against her body.

“
Why use a gun or sword when I can use a truck?” she wondered out loud as she carved herself a wide swath through the yard and burst through a nearby cattle pen to take a shortcut toward the barn. A nauseating path of bulbous, quivering death lay behind her.

Keeping one eye on the dragon and the other on Blackthorne and Pearl as they battled in the air above the ranch, she racked her brain, vainly reaching for her other self.

“What do I do? How do I fight this, Raven? Come on, I know you’re in there, damn it.” She saw Pearl fall from the sky and Houston run to her side to crouch protectively over the madam’s body. Behind him, Bobby Wayne kept firing from the bed of the truck, protecting the victims in the cab, whose identities Rhi hoped were those of Pam’s mother, Pearl and her husband, Colonel Douglas.