He settled into the seat, thankful that it was softer than his saddle. He glanced in the direction of the kitchen and thought better of trying to navigate the trails of teetering junk piled up along the way. Instead he tipped his hat down over his eyes and relaxed for the first time in days.
Marley sauntered in about ten minutes later looking far too pleased with himself. “That horse is a marvel of mechanical engineering, if I do say so myself. I’ve been working on a new version that would remove the leather covering and allow the copper to act like a chemically powered boiler for steam. Make the beast move faster and more smoothly ...” He trailed off, as he frequently did when he was distracted. Which was always.
Colt pushed his Stetson back. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I don’t know how stable sitting on a steam boiler is going to be, especially if I’m getting shot at,” he pointed out, his voice dry.
Marley’s dark eyebrows bent down in a deep V, disappearing behind the edge of his goggles. He worried his lip with his finger. “True. You do tend to draw a lot of fire. Perhaps that method of locomotion would better serve the horseless carriage I’m working on.”
A horseless carriage? Last time, Marley had been working on an improved steam flyer. “In the meantime, you might want to see what you can do about this.” Colt pulled the sting shooter out of its holster and tossed it to Marley.
Marley caught it, then pushed the button. A high keening sound split the air a second before a vivid blue wiggling arc of electricity shot out, launching a marble bust of President Lincoln off a nearby table and scattering a stack of papers. They instantly burst into flame. “Nothing’s the matter with it. The Tesla coil is active. Seems to be working properly to me,” he said as he stomped out the flames.
Colt tipped up the edge of his Stetson a little farther with his finger. “It blew two holes clean through the last person I used it on and nearly got me lynched.”
Marley peered at the sting shooter more closely. “I see. Perhaps it requires an adjustment. It’s still in prototype stage for the Tesla Rangers.” He set it amid the flotsam and jetsam on his desk. “In the meantime, I’ve got something else for you.”
Colt stood up and held out a hand. “After you, Professor.” He followed Marley to what would have been the kitchen in any normal home. It was a damn good thing Marley wasn’t married. Colt seriously doubted any woman could stomach the kind of chaos that Marley lived in. It smelled faintly of ammonia, and the counters overflowed with copper pots and various brown and green glass bottles, all marked with little white labels written in nearly indecipherable handwriting.
Marley pulled off his goggle thingies, handing them off to Colt. “Hold my spectro-photometric oglifiers. I don’t want them too near the oven. Might change the chemistry in the lenses.” Marley pulled on an oven mitt and opened the door to his large six-burner cast-iron stove and pulled out a cast-iron mold with little holes in it at regular intervals. He tipped the mold upside down over a tray, and out came a pile of bullets that looked like little, narrow, shiny cookies. “New silver bullets. Filled them with an improved mixture of powdered bone, lead, salt, and gunpowder. Should kill just about anything, natural or supernatural.”
Colt grinned and clapped Marley on the shoulder. “I always said you were a good cook.”
From the depths of Marley’s laboratory came the clanging of a bell. “Incoming message.” Marley handed the tray of bullets to Colt, then skittered into the other room, the bell still clanging. He dug through a heap on a sideboard table until he’d unburied a teletypingwriter, then flipped a switch that shut off the bell as the machine began typing out a message from Morse code. Marley waited until the typebars had stopped clacking, then rotated a few knobs and pulled the paper from the machine. He took the brass and leather goggles from Colt and snapped them back into place, flipping an extended lens over his eye as he scanned the note.
“It’s from Remington. He’s gone to retrieve China McGee from jail.”
The bullets rattled on the tray. Colt set the tray down and ripped the paper out of Marley’s hand, reading it for himself. “Damn fool,” he muttered. “She’s a shape-shifter. I’m lucky she got caught and not me when that bank blew to hell in the fight. What’s he think he’s doing?”
“Maybe he thought you two were together.”
Colt grunted as he crumpled the page into a ball. “She might be easy on the eyes, but I’d be as likely to shack up with a mountain lion as that little blond hellcat. She’s a good thief, but you can’t trust a shifter.”
“Then why didn’t you just shoot her?”
“There wasn’t time,” he hedged. The fact was he’d been too damn busy trying to locate the deposit box of a deceased Hunter named Diego. It was rumored to hold a clue to a map revealing the location of one of the pieces of the Book. He hadn’t been paying attention to how short China had cut the fuse. The damn explosives to get out of the jail had blown too soon. He suspected it was a double-crossing gone wrong.
In the end he’d climbed from the rubble before the authorities arrived and had to leave both China and the deposit box behind and move on to his next lead in finding his pa’s part of the Book. He’d had no doubt she could fend for herself, and frankly she was Darkin, so he wasn’t all that concerned in the first place. One less Darkin in the world wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “Do you think you can get him a message?”
Marley shook his head. “His receiver isn’t working. He can send messages, but I have to telegraph him in return. I’m going to fix it next time I travel in his direction.”
“If you telegraph him, tell him to watch his back. That China McGee is bad news and if he needs a thief, he should look elsewhere.”
“Certainly.” Marley scooped up the bullets off the tilting tray and grabbed Colt’s hand, facing it palm upward. “Don’t forget these. I do hope they make the proper impression.”
Colt grinned. “If you mean by impression a hole eight inches deep, then I’m betting they’ll be just fine.” He began putting them in the individual loops holding the ammunition on his gun belt. “Thanks, Marley.”
Marley shoved his spectro-whozee-whatsit goggles back onto his forehead. “Don’t mention it. I do my best for the cause. Where are you off to next?”
“I’m going to see a man about a mine.”
“Still looking for the lost pieces of the Book of Legend, are you?”
“Last year I took down a dozen supernaturals prowling around. Last month alone it was five. This month ten. It’s gettin’ worse.” For the last three years he’d been talking to every Hunter he could find, scouring every scrap of written information he could lay his hands on, to piece together the location of the different remnants of the Book of Legend.
The Legion had become so fractured over the centuries that none of the branches—not the Hunters in Europe, nor the ones in Asia, nor those in the Southern Hemisphere—knew the true locations of all three pieces. But his latest discovery of his mother’s diary led him to believe the clue in Diego’s box wouldn’t lead him to Pa’s part of the Book, which was his main focus.
Better to risk his neck on a sure thing than a rumor in a deposit box in the clutches of that shifter. “I don’t know how big the crack has gotten in that gate to Hell, but things are slidin’ through faster and faster. If we don’t get that Book put back together, there’s no tellin’ how long humanity’s got.”
Marley threaded his fingers up through both sides of the cotton-like fuzz on his scalp. “I say, I didn’t realize it was as bad as all that. Perhaps you ought to take this as well.” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a corked brown bottle with no label.
“Whiskey?”
“Holy water. You may find you need it.”
Colt chuckled. “You may be right. It might be pretty hard to come by in Bodie.” The saloons and houses of ill repute in Bodie outnumbered the churches by forty to one.
“Bodie?”
“According to what I found in Ma’s diary, that’s where the mine is.”
“But isn’t Winchester in Bodie?”
“Last I heard.”
Marley nibbled thoughtfully on his bottom lip. “You’re in more trouble than I thought.” He fished around in the drawer again, pulling out another bottle with a different-colored cork.
“More holy water?”
“No. Whiskey. You’ll need the water for fighting the demons and the whiskey for fighting your brother.”
Colt kissed the second bottle and tipped his hat at Marley. “You’re a good man, Marley. Don’t let no one tell you different.”
“Just do me a favor, old chap, and don’t do anything foolish.”
Colt chuckled. “You know me, Marley.”
Marley raised one dark, bushy brow. “Precisely.”
Chapter 2
The familiar stench of burnt flesh and decay woke Lilly from her deep sleep.
In the middle of her sparsely furnished boarding room, where the faded wallpaper peeled in strips from the wall, stood an enormous man. If the inhuman size of him didn’t scare any sane being senseless, the pure maliciousness that rolled off him would. It tainted the very air with a palpable darkness far heavier than the night. But her fear was born not because she didn’t know him, but rather because she did. Far too well.
Part vampire, part fallen archangel, and all demon lord, Rathe was Hell personified and put on Earth. His skin, dead-flesh pale, glowed eerily in the filtered moonlight coming through the thin cotton curtains over her window. He was dressed like a dapper Englishman, with a great black overcape, freshly pressed black pin-striped suit with matching vest, crisp white high-collar shirt, and blood-red silk tie. Ice blue eyes split by a vertical pupil froze Lilly to the core. Ironic, really, considering it was Rathe. She sincerely doubted Hell had frozen over. He was rather partial to keeping things hot in his dominion. But then, in the right conditions ice could burn too.
She brushed the fall of dark red hair out of her face and fought down the urge to cover herself from his hungry, predatory gaze.
“Lillith Marie Arliss, I have a job for you.”
She just bet. He only used all of a person or demon’s name when he wanted to bind them into service.
“Whose soul are you hungry for now, Rathe?”
Rathe laughed. The grating vile sound irritated her skin like the nagging itch of a mosquito bite multiplied by a thousand. “Someone special. A Hunter.”
Lilly sat up a little straighter, flipping her long hair over her shoulder, ignoring the persistent itch. Hunters were bad news. Especially for demons. They could permanently send a demon to Hell. No furloughs to the surface world could make for one cranky demon.
“Sounds dangerous. What’s my incentive?”
“Your incentive is I let you exist another day. Untouched.”
When Rathe said untouched, what he really meant was untortured. There wasn’t a forgiving morsel in his body.
“What exactly did you want me to do with him?”
“Seduce him, find what his father left him, take his soul, then kill him, of course.”
Lilly shrugged. “Easy enough.”
Rathe reached out a long pale hand, his fingernails pointed and sharp like talons, and brushed a finger along the outer edge of her cheek, then down along her neck and along her sternum, flicking the nipple that was barely covered by the edge of the black silk negligee she wore. Her skin shriveled in response. “His particular weakness is women. That’s why I picked you. Who better to bring down that Hunter than an incredible succubus?”
Lilly turned away. A shiver of disgust started from where he’d touched her and wormed its way down deep into her belly. As much as she despised Rathe, he wasn’t one to be argued with. As an immortal demon, she had no choice but to obey his summons or suffer however long he chose to make her suffer. After all, it wasn’t like she’d ever die from his torture.
“What’s his name?”
“Colt Ambrose Jackson.”
For a second every sound in the room was amplified a hundredfold as her heart stopped beating. Then Lilly couldn’t hear anything as the rushing sound of her own pulse pounding fast and furious filled her ears.
“
The
Colt Jackson? As in one of the three brothers of the Chosen?”
Rathe’s gaze bored into her as if the question were complete idiocy.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Rumors of the Chosen ran rampant among the children of the night, like a scary bedtime story told to scare little demons straight. In the Darkin world, now her world, everyone believed the Jackson brothers could be the Chosen. Three brothers who were merciless, determined Hunters unlike any that had been seen in generations.
She could see now why Rathe had chosen her and not just any succubus. For the last twenty-five years she’d been studying the legend, looking for any loophole that might get her out of her ill-conceived bargain with Rathe so she could return to her sister, maybe live a normal human life. Lilly was sure there wasn’t anyone but one of the Chosen who could possibly undo what Rathe had done in capturing her soul. In her efforts to learn all she could about them, she had become somewhat of an expert on the Chosen, and on Colt in particular.
“Where can I find him?”
“Bodie.”
Lilly laughed, the sound light and musical, like chimes in the wind. “That’s easier than I thought.” Perhaps Rathe did have a sense of humor. Going after a Hunter who liked women, and who was already in Bodie, was like offering a drunk a bottle of whiskey—the chance of refusal was nil. And she already knew enough about Colt to know precisely what to offer him to gain his cooperation.
Rathe’s mouth broke into a wider reddish slash in his pale white face. Revealing two rows of pointed teeth with slightly longer canines, it was as close as he’d ever get to a smile. “You have three weeks. Good hunting, Lillith Marie Arliss.” He vanished in a cloud of dark particles. At least she was alone in her room once more.
Lilly sighed. She pushed back her thin curtains and glanced out at the moon. In three weeks it would be new with an eclipse—the darkest a night could get, and a powerful time for endings and beginnings. She let the curtain drop, then flung off the covers and got dressed. There was no point in going back to sleep. Rathe might have found a sense of humor, but he’d still be impatient.
She blew on the wick of the candle in a brass holder by her bedside and it flamed to life, casting the room in flickering light and dispelling the sulfur stench Rathe had left behind. Nothing else bore evidence of Rathe’s visit, not even the worn wooden floorboards covered by a braided rag rug where he’d stood, or the washstand with its chipped white porcelain pitcher and bowl. Capturing a Hunter’s soul was no easy matter. If he were a normal man, she could materialize in his dreams and steal away with his soul after she’d killed him with the biggest orgasm of his life. A Hunter would never give her the opportunity. No, she’d have to make him believe he wanted her, needed her, as much as any mortal woman before he’d let himself go with her completely enough to snare his soul. And that would require gaining his trust.
The way to a man’s mind was first through his eyes, then through his britches. But the way to his trust, to taking his soul if he was an experienced Hunter who knew demons, that was through his family. And in the case of Colt Jackson, specifically his older brothers.
She waved her hand, materializing three small books on the faded thin quilt on her bed. All of the books were bound in black leather that had grown shiny through wear, and each was intricately tooled with the gilded name of a Jackson brother. When she’d studied the legends about the Chosen, the three brothers prophesied to bring about the opening of the Gates of Nyx and control all Darkin, she’d never dreamed she’d ever meet one, let alone have to seduce him.
Instinctively she reached for the book with the name COLT emblazoned in gold across the black cover, caressing the familiar leather. She’d already read this book more than a hundred times from cover to cover. She knew more about him than anyone, if it was possible. Truth be told, while she had never met any of the brothers in person, she’d developed a kind of fascination with them, in particular Colt. It wasn’t hero-worship, exactly, more like looking for the best chance to escape Rathe’s grip on her soul. The Chosen looked like her best bet.
Lilly bade the book to disappear with a snap of her fingers. If Colt was indeed after his father’s third of the Book of Legend, she knew him well enough to know there was no need for her to search for him. He’d be calling for a demon soon enough.