Evanescent Ink (Copperline #4) (13 page)

“He was going on about crashing some bachelorette party,” I smiled wryly. “I think he was hoping to be the entertainment.”

I finally looked up at Raven to see her staring down at me with pursed lips.

“What?” I asked.

“Come on,” she said as she straightened and reached out her hand. “I want you to come with me someplace.”

“Where?”

“It’s a surprise.”

I narrowed my eyes at her.

“What kind of surprise?”

She rolled her eyes and huffed out a long breath. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

I still felt kinda petulant. “I thought you had plans.”

“I’m including you in them,” she shrugged, “but you have to promise not to make fun of me over this.”

We climbed in Raven’s Jeep and she headed towards Butte, down out of the mountains into the lights of the city. On through the city we went, uptown to a large brick house. There were a ton of cars parked along the street, some typical for Butte, but some were old. Like really, really fucking old. Like Packards and Model Ts and shit. She drove up the hill about a block to a dark parking lot where she backed into a corner space.

A bizarre type of music emanated from the house. Reminiscent of an Irish folk tune, which wasn’t really that weird for Butte with its massive Irish population, it also most definitely pulsed with a techno beat. It was both strange and somewhat intriguing.

I got out of the Jeep and followed Raven where she stood behind it with the back opened up, digging through some clothes. I almost swallowed my tongue when she slipped off her knee-length skirt right there in the lot. Through the shadows, I could just make out her curvy ass wearing only some skimpy underwear when she bent over to reach inside, pulling out a mass of dark ruffles. In another minute, she had slipped on the garment which was apparently another skirt.

But not just any skirt, even for Raven with her almost theatrical style of dress.

Damn
, it was sexy.

The front was super short, gathered on either side of her hips to drape the satiny fabric high on her thighs. Just low enough to almost be decent, but high enough to reveal the lacy stocking tats. Just tantalizing enough to make my hands itch to touch her. The back fell in a cascade of crisp ruffles, trailing all the way to the ground.

Kicking off the platform pin-up pumps she’d worn during the day, she grabbed a pair of tall, heeled boots and tugged them on, lacing them up to above her knees. Next came a black brocade corset that she tucked around her waist over the dark purple blouse she already wore. She deftly laced up the front and tightened the strings, cinching it around her slender curves and pushing her tits up in a way that made my mouth water. She slipped on some clunky brass jewelry loosely decorated with gears and chains, tucked a long violet plume into her pinned up hair, and pulled out some round purple wire-rim glasses that she perched onto her face.

She looked back at me, striking a pose with her arms fanned out to frame her figure. “How do I look?”

My first thought was
fucking delicious
.

“Pretty damn hot,” I chuckled, trying to tamp down the ache developing in my jeans, “but also kinda like an 1800s dance hall girl in John Lennon glasses.”

With a laugh, she started rifling through the clothes again.

“Okay, now it’s your turn.”

Oh shit…

“My turn?”

When she turned around, she held an old-fashioned suit jacket in her hands. Dark gray tweed with a single button in front and long tails hanging down in back.

“What the fuck?”

“I got this at a thrift shop a while ago to cut down for myself, but it might almost fit you.” She stepped around behind me. “Hold out your arm,” she said.

I looked over my shoulder at her, not at all understanding why she was dressing me in this wacked out jacket. But she slipped it over one arm, then essentially moved me around to get it on the other. Smoothing her hands over my shoulders, she murmured to herself.

“Hmm, it’s a tiny bit snug across your shoulders, but it looks kind of dashing.”

“Dashing?” I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.

She walked around the front of me and buttoned the single button down over my abs. Her fingers grazed my hips which sent a quick stab of lust through me, then moved to my arms, gliding down to my bare wrists. “It looks awesome with your jeans and work boots. The arms are a little short, but I’ve got something that will take care of that.”

The next thing I knew, she was buttoning some wide cuffs just underneath the sleeves, leaving the loose, flowing ends to drape out of the thick tweed.

“What are you doing to me, Rave?”

She only smiled in response as she reached into the Jeep and pulled out a billowy purple silk scarf that she wrapped loosely around my neck a few times.

“You know,” I reminded her, “Halloween was last month.”

“Funny,” she sarcastically commented, turning back to the treasure trove of bizarre clothing. She reached into a box and pulled out a top hat.

No shit.

A fucking top hat.

Not like an Abe Lincoln top hat, though. More like a Mad Hatter one. Wider at the very top, narrowing a bit at the brim. It was black, but decorated with a decorative metal band, some laces, netting that spilled over the brim, and a strange pair of goggles.

She gently pulled the lacy netting off and threw it in the Jeep, then placed the hat on my head.

I hoped like hell I didn’t run into anyone I knew because,
holy fuck
, being seen in this kind of outfit would be mortifying. I could almost hear Justin losing his shit over it.

She reached for a little velvety purse that she opened and pulled out what looked like a…

“Monocle?” she offered.

“Are you for real?”

She tucked it into the pocket of my dress coat, leaving the chain to drape over to where she fastened the other end to the button. “I'll just pop it in there in case you decide you want it.” With a snap of the little purse, she slammed the door to her Jeep shut, curled her arm around mine, and started to move towards the entrance.

“Raven, I don’t know about this,” I began. It was one thing to have her do this to me out where nobody could see, but to go into public like this. I was going to wind up in a fight, I just knew it.

“Trust me, Drew.”

“Where the fuck are we?”

“You don’t recognize this place? Have you never been here?”

“No, what is it?”

She shot me a blinding smile that practically lit up the night around her. “It’s the Copper King Mansion.”

As strangely as we were dressed, we were at the mild end of the spectrum. I’d never seen anything like it. I halfway expected to see Will Smith come out guns blazing like in the
Wild Wild West
. Or Doogie Houser all dressed up in a bowler hat like in
A Million Ways to Die in the West
. Everything around me looked like a movie set.

The house was simply amazing inside. I’d heard of the Butte copper kings, men that were forces of nature during the Industrial Age when copper prices skyrocketed with the birth of Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Guys like Marcus Daly, who was more or less the father of Butte.

The gilded decor with rich carved wood spoke of incredible wealth and tenacity. Sumptuous fabrics draped along windows and doorways, and some kind of finish on the walls that glimmered in the warm, welcoming light. Each door frame and piece of molding seemed like a piece of art in its own right. A massive, intricately carved-wood staircase swept up across from the entrance, the steps covered in a bold red carpeting. Looking up revealed detailed fresco ceilings. Old photos and paintings hung on the walls. Vases, figurines, and fine ceramics perched on tables, shelves, and mantles.

It felt almost like stepping back in time.

But it was the crowd of people that shocked me the most.

Everyone in the place was steampunked out, top-to-toe. There were guys with long twisty mustaches. Half the women wore bustles of some sort. Some had weird, cage-like hoops that peeked out from their skirts. A waitress walked by with a hunk of metal on her back that made her look like an animatronic wind-up toy.

In a room off to the right, the band loudly rocked out to some odd-sounding song, if you could call it rockin’ considering one guy had a violin. It was an electric violin, though, and he was doing some really wild shit with it. Another dude had an accordion. The lead singer wore a mining hat with an old-fashioned tweed suit. One of the other guys wore a hat similar to mine, but it was bright red and had a long black feather emerging from a mechanized seahorse brooch on the brim. In fact, there were quite a few hats of that general shape, along with more bowler hats and a few fellas with their hair slicked down in a part with a heavy curl at each temple.

“What the fuck is this place?”

“It’s a steampunk ball.”

“In Montana?”

Raven laughed. “I told you it was a surprise.”

“Jesus, I feel like I just walked on the set of Doctor Who.”

“Yeah, well don’t diss Doctor Who here or you liable to start a riot. There’s even steampunk bands named things like TARDIS and shit.”

“Holy hell, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Isn’t it great?” she grinned up at me. “I love weird. It’s so weird, it almost makes me feel normal.”

She had a point there. Before we came in, I totally had my doubts, but now… I felt a curious sense of belonging. And looking down at Raven, her eyes sparkling with a vibrant excitement, I realized that I didn’t want to be anywhere else at that moment.

Even more frightening, I didn’t want to be with anyone else but her.

“How did you hear about this?” I asked as I sipped some odd concoction. Raven had handed it to me saying it was absinthe. It tasted a bit like black licorice, but the color was green. It was strange, just like everything and everyone here, but I was actually enjoying it.

“I got into steampunk before I came to Montana, mostly because I thought the clothes were amazing and sexy. That led me to look for more. It led me to the music and this whole subsection of society.”