Devil's Gate_A Novella of the Elder Races Read online

  She glanced at the open balcony doors that led out to a wide patio. Not only did she and Duncan stand well away from them, but it was still dark outside and raining hard. Even though her apartment faced the east, there wasn’t any danger of sunshine streaming in the windows until the storm blew away.

  No doubt Duncan had already calculated all of that even as he stepped inside her apartment. For him, any contact with the sun would be excruciating and would turn lethal within a matter of seconds. He must be aware of the sun’s position every moment of his life.

  She turned back to him and met his gaze. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m butting in where I haven’t been invited, Seremela,” he said bluntly. “And I hope you forgive me for it. I happened to be in a meeting with Carling when she received your email. I know you have a family emergency, and I wanted to stop by to make sure you were okay.”

  Her lips parted and her eyes widened. She had left her medical examiner position in Illinois and moved to Miami to focus on private medical research for Carling and Rune. Ever since then she had enjoyed getting to know Duncan.

  Duncan was Carling’s youngest progeny, and as Carling and Rune’s lawyer, he was working closely with them on setting up their new agency. Seremela was one of the agency’s first employees.

  Duncan wasn’t Seremela’s boss, by any means, but he would be aware of any administrative decisions Carling and Rune made, and they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to mention confidential matters to him.

  As their group was small and most were new to the area, they tended to socialize together as well as work together. Seremela and Duncan had shared good conversations at group events, and she had hoped they might have begun to develop a friendship, but coming in person to check on her wellbeing went beyond anything she could have expected.

  He cocked his head. “Are you okay?” he asked gently. “You haven’t had a death in the family, have you?”

  “No!” she blurted out. “No, I haven’t. Duncan, I—this was so thoughtful of you. Thank you.”

  “Oh, good,” he said. The set of his shoulders eased, and he gave her that crooked smile of his that was so damn charming. “Nobody has died, and you aren’t angry with me for intruding. I count both those things as wins. Do you mind me asking what has happened? We’re all transplants to Miami, and it’s all too possible to feel cut-off and alone. Carling and I were both concerned you might need help but not feel comfortable enough to ask for it.”

  She groaned and gestured. “I just found out my niece ran away from home a few months ago. My sister has kept it under wraps all this time. She hired a detective to find Vetta—that’s my niece—and now that he has tracked her down, we need to bring her home.”

  Duncan’s gaze had grown intent as she talked. “I take it your niece is all right?”

  “Yes, as far as I understand, she is,” Seremela said. “That girl’s got a talent for finding trouble though, and if she can’t find trouble, often she’ll create it. I’m afraid I can’t talk with you long. I’m on standby, and I’m getting ready to leave for the airport so I can take the first available flight out.”

  “Your sister must be grateful you’re going with her to get Vetta.”

  Seremela shook her head. “Oh, my sister’s not going to get Vetta.”

  Duncan’s sleek dark brows lowered. “Excuse me?”

  Seremela gave him a dry look. “Camilla can’t face conflict,” she explained. “I’m going to get Vetta by myself.”

  His frown deepened. “Forgive me again,” he said. “I’m well aware of how intrusive this might seem, but I do not like the sound of that.”

  “Well, it is what it is.” She twitched a shoulder. “Although I know how irritating that statement is to a lot of people too. Right now the most important thing is to get Vetta home safely, and that means moving as quickly as possible now that we know where she is. Everything else can be dealt with later.”

  As she talked, Duncan turned to look out the open balcony door. She didn’t mind in the slightest. It gave her the opportunity to study his profile.

  Slight lines carved the corners of his eyes and his expressive, well formed mouth. He must have been around thirty when Carling turned him at the height of the California Gold Rush in the mid nineteenth century.

  While he would forever wear a young man’s face, there were subtle telltale signs that spoke otherwise. He carried a certain gravitas in his presence that simply didn’t exist in younger men. Somehow it held the weight of years and experience without seeming too heavy.

  Oh, she did like him, so much. She twisted her fingers together and offered, “I also thought about asking the detective if he would go with me when I went to get her.”

  Duncan pursed his mouth. The small, thoughtful expression hollowed already lean cheeks and accentuated the strong line of his cheekbones. “Most detectives won’t get physically involved, especially if it involves a family matter,” he said. “The majority of detectives work on divorce documentation, do background checks and that sort of thing.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. She had also thought about hiring someone who specialized in extracting people from cults, drugs and other subversive cultures. She just wasn’t sure any professional interventionist would agree to handle something as trivial as Vetta’s sheer bloody mindedness.

  Vetta wasn’t addicted or brain washed. She was just contrary to the bone. She was also twenty, which was especially unfortunate since that was well past the age of consent in most jurisdictions. Medusae aged so much more slowly than humans, and Vetta’s emotional maturity was more like a young human teenager’s than a grown adult.

  “Where is your niece now?” he asked, glancing at her.

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “She’s at Devil’s Gate.”

  “Devil’s Gate?” He pivoted sharply to face her.

  “I see you know of it,” she said, her voice flat.

  “Of course I know of it,” he said. “Bloody hell.”

  Chapter Two

  Law

  Devil’s Gate. Yes, Duncan knew of it.

  That period of his life was etched indelibly in his mind. He had lived his last days as a human and his first nights as a Vampyre during the riotous Gold Rush in San Francisco. He would wake in the evenings, starving for fresh blood and newspapers. Gods, he had loved that time. It had been wild, greedy and anarchistic, and everyone had been a sculptor, carving out their futures and fortunes the best way they knew how.

  He had followed the original news about Devil’s Gate in the Pacific Courier. In June of 1850, a gold nugget had been discovered at Devil’s Gate, which lay just north of Silver City in western Nevada. For ten years the entire area became the scene of frenetic mining. The gold rush in Nevada had been even wilder than the California Gold Rush, fueled by a thread of land magic that ran like liquid mercury throughout the desert mountains and rock.

  Formed out of lava rock, Devil’s Gate itself had been blasted wider to create a toll road on the route to Virginia City. The narrow opening soon became notorious as a popular hideout for highwayman, and anyone who wanted to pass along the route safely had to travel armed.

  Even with the last hundred and sixty years of searching and with modern surveying techniques, it was still possible today to stumble upon a vein of magic-rich metal. In eastern Nevada, the Nirvana Silver Mining Company had done just that when they had accidentally blasted open a passageway to a small pocket of Other land that held a magic-rich silver node.

  A few months ago, in March, the news of the discovery had slammed through the media. The law was very clear about mining rights and ownership in Other lands. Even though the passageway was on the Nirvana company grounds, and even though there were no indigenous people living in the Other land, the mining company had no legal right to harvest the newfound vein of silver.

  Succumbing to greed, the company owner had imported undocumented workers and held them against their will, forcing them to work in such inhumane circumstances
that several had died. An Elder tribunal Peacekeeper on a routine mission had uncovered the crimes.

  The magic that ran through the rock in Devil’s Gate had never led to a full crossover passageway—at least not one that had ever been discovered or documented. But after what happened in Nirvana, that slight spark of land magic had been enough to ignite the imaginations of a great many people.

  After all, if a crossover passageway leading to a magic-rich silver node could be uncovered so recently in Nirvana, who knows what one could discover in the witchy land at Devil’s Gate? Perhaps there were slivers of previously undiscovered gold, or there might be more magic-rich silver, or even more buried passageways that led to Other lands.

  Thousands of people, both Elder Races and humankind, converged upon the place. They chased gold and silver, magic and fool’s dreams of sudden wealth.

  Almost overnight a sprawling city of tents and RVs sprang up in Gold Canyon. By mid-April, nearly sixty thousand people had struck camp. At the end of May, the tent city had grown to over twice that size. Desperate for opportunity and a fresh start, illegal immigrants poured north from Mexico, while charlatans and schemers, sightseers, prostitutes, drug dealers and thieves poured in from all over the globe, creating a brawling mess that grew messier and more violent as the summer solstice came closer and the desert temperatures escalated accordingly.

  The State of Nevada was caught completely off guard. Lawmakers struggled to come up with an effective way to deal with the situation, their resources already severely overburdened from a long economic downturn. They didn’t have the manpower to police an entirely new city that had sprung up overnight.

  The last Duncan had heard, the state had filed several appeals for help, with the Nightkind demesne in California, with the Demonkind demesne in Texas, and with the human Federal government.

  The process had stalled under one essential question: under whose jurisdiction did the very expensive problem fall? If more than fifty percent of the population in the tent city were creatures of the Elder Races, then the jurisdiction—and responsibility for policing it—fell to the Elder Races demesnes. But nobody could answer the question, because nobody had conducted a Census. There hadn’t been time.

  And Seremela intended to walk all alone into that cesspool?

  Duncan’s jaw tightened as he looked down into her face. “This won’t do, Seremela,” he said, and this time he didn’t even bother with an apology for intruding. Determination hardened his face and body. “It won’t do at all.”

  A spark of amusement had entered her colorful, intelligent gaze. “If by ‘it won’t do,’ you mean that Vetta can’t be allowed to wreak havoc on the thousands of unsuspecting people at Devil’s Gate, you would be right,” she said. “That girl is like water running downhill. She can find the lowest common denominator in just about any situation.”

  “I think you know very well that’s not what I meant,” he said.

  He had not met many medusae before her. They were rare, comprising only a small fraction of the Demonkind population, and they also tended to be rather clannish.

  Seremela was strange to him, and lovely, with fine-boned, feminine features and blue-green eyes that had vertical slits for pupils. She seemed on the small side for a medusa, which was around average height for a human woman, with a trim waist and rounded breasts and hips. Her skin was a pale creamy green that had a faint iridescent pattern that resembled the pattern on snakeskin, but he had touched her hand before on other occasions, and her warm soft skin felt entirely human. He loved her exotic beauty. Her snakes were frankly mischievous, and he loved them as well.

  Most of all what drew him to her was her intelligence and her gentle nature. She was a medical doctor, a pathologist and an academician. Her snakes were poisonous, which did give her beauty a certain edge, but many creatures, like himself, were immune to their poison.

  And in any case, she would have to be caught in a situation extreme enough that her snakes felt threatened to bite. Even the most quickly acting poisons took at least a few moments to act. In a physical struggle, those few moments could easily mean the difference between life or death.

  She could be deadly, but she was also very vulnerable.

  Unable to resist, he reached out to take her hand, and she let him. He relished the sense of her slender warm fingers resting in his grip. She kept her neat, oval fingernails trimmed close, a practical choice for a medical examiner turned researcher. “You can’t go to Devil’s Gate all by yourself. It’s too dangerous.”

  She did not protest nor did she appear to be angry at his presumptuous language. Instead, she stared at their hands as she pointed out, “My niece is there all by herself.”

  “Which, we can both agree, is not acceptable,” he said.

  The smile in her eyes dimmed, her expression tightened and she looked at the floor. “Well, there isn’t any other option,” she told him. “I spent half the night and much of this morning trying to figure out the best thing to do.”

  “There has to be some other way,” he said.

  “There isn’t,” she said, her voice turning flat again. “There’s no legal recourse. The state can’t even keep the area adequately policed. They certainly don’t have the resources to send anyone in to find one person who I can guarantee doesn’t want to be found. And frankly, I don’t want to bully my sister into going with me. She’d only wring her hands, fall apart and be useless. Trust me, that would be much more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “I understand,” he said. He raised her hand and pressed his lips against her fingers. She froze, her startled gaze flashing back up to his. “But nevertheless I still can’t let you go to Devil’s Gate by yourself.”

  This time she did pick up on his language. “You can’t let me,” she repeated with a careful lack of emphasis.

  He knew exactly what it sounded like, and he was entirely unrepentant for it. He stressed, “Not by yourself, Seremela.”

  Her shoulders drooped and she tried to pull her hand out of his. “While I understand that you mean well, I don’t have time to argue with you,” she said. “My taxi’s coming in less than a half an hour, and I’m not finished packing yet.”

  “Cancel it,” he told her, his fingers tightening on hers.

  “Duncan—”

  He pulled her closer until they stood toe to toe, and he looked deeply into her strange, beautiful eyes. “Cancel it,” he repeated. “And take your time as you finish packing. I will sort out the quickest flight to Reno then come back to pick you up.”

  He could see from her puzzled expression that she still didn’t quite get it. “I’m not sure what to say.”

  In light of the number of clues he had dropped, her confusion seemed remarkably innocent and was entirely adorable. He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “Or better yet, figure it out while you finish packing. You can tell me whatever it is on the flight, since I’m coming with you.”

  A delicious warm rose color washed intoxicatingly underneath her creamy light green skin. “You are?”

  “I am. Now, don’t argue with me,” he said as she took in a quick breath. He began to wonder just how far she would let him push her. In wondering where her boundaries might be, and what she might do should he cross them, he began to enjoy her even more than he had before. “Just do as I say.”

  She shut her mouth with an audible click. “Can’t. Won’t. Don’t. You’ve used a lot of archaic-sounding prohibitives in the last fifteen minutes.”

  He could tell she wasn’t really angry. She was, ever so gently, warning him not to go too far. It pleased him so much he ran the tip of a finger very lightly down her cheek. “You might have noticed, my dear,” he murmured. “I happen to be a nineteenth century kind of a guy.”

  He left her sputtering and rosier than ever, and he spent a pleasant ride in the elevator to the basement garage wondering what she would say to him when he picked her up. A few minutes later, he called Carling and Rune’s hou
se. Rune picked up.

  Carling was a Vampyre, but Rune wasn’t. Rune was Wyr, and just under a year ago he had been First sentinel for Dragos Cuelebre, Lord of the Wyr in New York, until he had mated with Carling. Rune and Carling had relocated to Miami, and for several months they had been gathering underutilized talent from across several different demesnes.

  Now Rune and Carling were setting up an international consulting agency so that they could put to use the talent they had gathered around them. Some parts of the agency, such as consultations with the Oracle, would be operated on a sliding scale fee, and other parts would be profit-based only. Carling must have told Rune about Seremela’s email, or perhaps Rune had read it for himself.

  “Seremela and I need to fly to Reno,” Duncan told Carling’s mate.

  “Yo-okay,” said Rune. “Duncan, you dog.”

  “You had to go there,” Duncan said. He smiled to himself as he negotiated the afternoon traffic. He liked Rune. They had learned to work well together when they had traveled to the Dark Fae Other land of Adriyel to see Niniane Lorelle safely to her coronation as the Dark Fae Queen.

  “Seriously, is everything all right?”

  “I hope so. Seremela has a runaway niece who has ended up at Devil’s Gate, of all places.” He paused briefly as he listened to Rune mutter a curse. “We’re going to extract her from the situation and escort her home to her mother.”

  “Anything we can do?”

  One of the first acquisitions their brand new consulting agency had purchased was a private jet that could seat up to twelve people and that had the capacity for international travel. They were serious about the agency and were allocating enough money to set it up with top notch resources.