The Hunter

by Theresa Meyers

  “How long do we have to ride this thing?”

  He chuckled. “What’s wrong, demon? Afraid?”

  Her cheek brushed against his back as she shook her head. “Of your horse? No. Don’t like it—it’s souless—but it doesn’t scare me.”

  “Then why do I detect a little fear in your voice?”

  She lifted up a little and leaned into him, putting her lips close enough to his ear that he could feel the heated brush of them as she spoke. “If you had any idea of what’s truly waiting for us in that mine, you’d be scared too.”

  Chapter 6

  The dark monolith of the mountain, rising in jagged peaks above them, appeared ominous in the cool, pale wash of moonlight. Lilly shuddered against Colt’s back, the circle of her arms tightening around his waist.

  “Sure this is the place?” The warm puff of each word she breathed into his ear was counterpoint to the chill biting into his exposed skin. Hell no. He wasn’t sure at all. He’d been told the entrance could be found here, but that didn’t mean it’d be easy.

  Milky moonlight illuminated the roughly milled wooden boards crisscrossed over the stygian darkness of the entrance. Distinctly uninviting, it shouted KEEP OUT.

  “Can’t you feel the evil in there?” she persisted, as if that were going to change his plans one whit.

  “That’s just a draft of cold air from the shafts down below.” His reply sounded calm enough, but jitters worked away on the inside of him as the darkness seethed in front of him. What was that sayin’? Abandon all hope ye who enter ... Stop that. There was no use thinking that way. He hadn’t even got off his damn horse yet. What was he going to do? Scream like a girl? Run because his belly squirmed and his nerves stretched tight told him to? Hell no.

  Lilly shifted behind him, her small soft breasts rubbing against him in an unconsciously seductive slide that caused his groin to swell. “That’s what you think,” she muttered.

  No, that’s what he had to make himself believe. Didn’t matter how it felt. There was no choice. A cold slip of air slithered unnaturally around Colt’s legs and his hands tightened reflexively on Tempus’s reins. It wasn’t just icy mine air, and he knew it. The palm of his gun hand was itching and the rotten egg odor was noticeably stronger the closer they came to the opening. Something dark and unnatural waited down in the depths of Dark Rim. Okay, likely there were a lot of somethings just waiting.

  Unfortunately, they were between him and his pa’s portion of the Book. “Don’t matter anyhow. Winn confirmed that this is the place.”

  “What exactly are you looking for that you’d risk coming up against the Darkin in their own backyard?”

  Colt hesitated. He wished he could tell her. But he didn’t dare. He didn’t trust the demon enough to confide in her. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “You’ll find out when we get there.”

  He twisted, lifting her slightly so she could hitch her leg over Tempus’s hard metal rump and slide down to the ground. He flipped the GGD switch backward and dismounted. The rhythmic metallic clicks and whirring of Tempus’s inner workings came to an abrupt halt, leaving the night in stifling silence.

  “Well I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.” Colt glanced at her. The moonlight picked out the overlarge whites of her eyes, the telltale greenish glow at the center, like a wolf or mountain lion, marking her as a demon. She’d woven her arms together over her chest, her body rigid, closing in upon itself. She was scared. Damn scared. And she was a demon.

  Ah, hell. This was going to be bad. The palm of his left hand began to burn from the powerful itching there. “Let’s go.”

  Colt grabbed his saddlebags off Tempus, dumping them at his feet, then turned to pry at the boards, grunting as the splinters dug into the calloused skin of his hands.

  Directly behind him came the soft feminine clearing of a throat. Colt glanced back at her. Lilly’s legs encased in a fine mesh of fishnet stocking were visible up to just above the knee.

  “Allow me. I might as well be of some use.”

  In that getup? He stifled a chuckle. Might as well let the little lady try. He backed up one step, removing himself from the temptation to look further at her.

  She leveled her chin in determination. “You might want to stand back.”

  He took another two steps back just to humor her. Her eyes narrowed as she focused and held out her small hand, palm facing the door, then created a fist in midair. With a crackling pop of splintering wood, the boards collapsed as if grasped at the center by some giant invisible hand. She pulled her fist back, the nails groaning as the boards peeled away from the wooden beams. The boards dropped into a pile of kindling beside the entrance amid a cloud of dust.

  Colt blinked back the swirl of particles in the air. “Impressive.” Her responding smile made his heart skip a beat. Damn but she was gorgeous.

  She broke eye contact with him, staring at the dark, gaping entrance to the mine. “Are we in the right place?”

  He pointed to the two-foot-thick beam that formed the lintel holding up the weight of the mountain over the entrance. Gouged into it were the roughly lettered words Dark Rim. “Yes, ma’am. Welcome to the edge of Hell.”

  Colt picked up his saddlebags and dug out a long brass tube Marley called a self-contained coil illuminator. A lens was secured in one end and it rattled a lot when shaken, but Marley had assured him that shaking it would produce enough stored energy to produce a fire-safe torch. Something about copper coils and magnets that Colt didn’t completely understand.

  He’d never tried it before. New inventions from Marley always were a gamble. Colt knew he had a fifty-fifty chance of either getting a great source of light, or of having his eyebrows singed off. But bringing an oil lamp in his saddle pack hadn’t been practical and using a pitch-soaked torch would give them light enough for an hour, maybe two.

  He held the tube out as far away from him as he dared and shook it hard. The rattling was loud enough that it stirred a few bats out of the mine shaft and they streaked off into the dark night sky. He flipped the switch and a soft blue glow grew in an ever-widening circle at his feet. He swung the saddlebags over his shoulder and moved forward. They left Tempus outside the entrance and ventured into the dark recesses of the mine.

  The rocky dust beneath their feet became damp about fifty feet inside. Colt flashed the illuminator on the walls and saw only a small, dark trickle of moisture seeping like tears from the rocks.

  Deep down his gut twisted. He hoped the reason these mines had been abandoned had nothing to do with flooding. From the map he’d sketched based on Winn’s poor description, the hiding place of his pa’s piece of the Book of Legend was down deeper in the shafts. If the shafts were flooded, there’d be no hope for getting it. He had a distinct dislike for water. Since he’d been fourteen he didn’t get any deeper than his waist in it, and that was only in a washtub.

  “You don’t look so well, Mr. Jackson.”

  Leave it to the demon to state the obvious. “I’m not the kind that likes to be confined.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark.” There was humor in her voice.

  He gave her a cocky grin. “Not of the dark, darlin’, just don’t like our odds down here. The sooner we get what we’re looking for and get out, the better.”

  “And what are we looking for?”

  “A door.”

  “To what?”

  “A door. That’s all you need to know.” They had come to a series of three shafts branching off from the main tunnel.

  “Which way do we go?”

  He pulled the coil illuminator closer, using it to cast a pool of bluish light on the crudely drawn map in his hand as he balanced his saddle packs over his shoulder. “If I understood my brother, it should be down the shaft to the left.”

  She shivered.

  “Cold?”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Even though the sulfur scent in the air hadn’t grown any stronger, Colt’s gun han
d began to itch worse the farther they traveled down the left tunnel. A hushed, rasping sound, like the whisper of a hundred voices, began to grow the deeper they moved into the earth. Colt pulled the demon closer. “Whatever it is, I don’t like the sound of it. Stick close to me.” He pulled his gun from his hip holster.

  She nodded, and glanced behind them. Her eyes widened and Colt spun around to see what had caused her reaction. In the light of the illuminator the walls of the passage itself seemed to be shivering, moving as if the rock were a blanket and something crawled along beneath it.

  Then it transmogrified, the rock pulling away from the walls of the tunnel-like living, breathing things, built like men, but so broad and so tall they hunched in the tunnel. Their flat, featureless faces only looked like faces because of the twin glowing red eyes and gaping dark maw. Small puffs of dust, almost like spurts of steam, issued from the creatures’ joints as they lumbered toward him and Miss Arliss.

  “What in the hell are those?”

  “Scoria soldiers. Guardians to the Darkin. Don’t just stand there, shoot them!”

  The gritty, grinding sound of rock against rock as they moved caused the hairs on Colt’s arms to prickle. “Hold this.” He tossed the coil illuminator to the demon and held the gun out in front of him, trying to take aim. But at what? All he could see were mounds of massive rock limbs and glowing red eyes headed straight for them.

  Each step the rock monsters made created more dust and grit in the air, obscuring their vision and making it harder to breathe. Colt coughed and shoved the demon behind him, then fired off one of Marley’s special rounds right between a pair of glowing, ember-like eyes. Then another. Chips of rock flew in all directions from the hole blasted clean through the rock. A fragment grazed his cheek. Colt lifted his hand to the stinging spot and found his fingers red with his blood. The Scoria soldiers just kept coming, oblivious to the gouges in their rock forms.

  “Damn supernaturals. Bullets aren’t going to do it,” Colt muttered. He pulled her with him as he ducked behind an outcropping of rock forming the edge of a smaller side tunnel.

  “Got any dynamite?”

  “Yeah, sure, in my back pocket,” he smarted off. “Hell no. How was I supposed to anticipate these things?”

  “I told you—”

  As if he needed the reminder. “Move!” He shoved her ahead of him down the smaller passage. The rock monster closest to them roared and swung down hard with a massive boulder of a fist, causing the rock ledge above them to shatter and rain fragments down on them.

  “But they’ll only follow us.”

  “Not if I can help it.” Colt wished like hell he still had the sting shooter of Marley’s. He’d be glad to blow a few bigger holes in those rock monsters, maybe shatter them completely apart. Instead he did the next best thing. He pulled a tin of lucifers and the bottle of whiskey Marley had given him out of his saddle pack. Marley had been right about needing the whiskey, but wrong about the application. He didn’t need it for Winn. Colt pulled the cork out with his teeth as he handed the packs off to the demon.

  She glared at him. “Do you really think now’s an appropriate time for a drink?”

  “None better.” Colt kicked back a slug of the whiskey, already regretting what he was about to do next. He pulled the tail of his light blue cotton shirt out of his denim pants and ripped off the bottom edge. He stuffed the strip of fabric into the open bottle, then lit it off with a lucifer he struck against the rocks. The fire hissed to life, brilliant in the darkness. He kissed the bottle good-bye, knowing it was a damn waste of fine whiskey, and chucked it back against one of the support beams.

  He yanked the demon close and put his back to the opening of the passage. The sound of shattering glass was followed by an explosion that knocked both him and Lilly forward. Colt twisted, trying to spare her the worst of the slam to the dirt and rock-strewn floor of the cavern, but purposely ended up on top of her to protect her from the flying debris. A river of flame licked along the rock and exposed wooden beams. The beams creaked, followed by a loud crack that echoed off the walls like a gunshot. An avalanche of rock rained down on the dismantled monsters, sending a plume of dust over the top of Lilly and Colt.

  Beneath him she wriggled, her soft and distinctly feminine curves pressed distractingly against him. “What did you do?” she sputtered, her tone indignant.

  “I just blew our little rock friends back to the Stone Age.” Colt was proud of his display of ingenuity.

  Miss Arliss wriggled harder and Colt leveraged himself off of her before she could tell how all that movement had got his attention. Her green eyes glinted with inhuman color in the low light of the coil illuminator. “What you did was collapsed our only exit.”

  Colt glanced back at the tumbled wall of rock behind them. Damn. She was right. He peered down into the blackness ahead of them, took the coil illuminator from her and shook it hard, hoping like hell it would still work. It threw a beam of blue light in the dusty darkness, but the illumination didn’t extend more than a few feet.

  The dust swirled and eddied back toward them when it should have been billowing away from the explosion, not toward it. “There’s got to be another shaft that connects to this one.” He pointed at the shifting dust clouds. “There’s still air flowing this way.”

  He offered the demon his hand to help her from the ground. She stared at it for an instant, then took it reluctantly. “So what’s behind the door we’re looking for?”

  He gave her a sly grin. “Good try.” He took off his hat and dusted it, then patted himself down coughing at the dust that billowed up from his clothes.

  Lilly huffed. While she could understand that he didn’t trust her any more than she trusted him, it galled her all the same. It was difficult at best to find something when you knew what you were looking for, but damned near impossible when you didn’t. Until they found that door she wasn’t going to get any closer to escaping Rathe.

  “You know, I have different senses you don’t. If I knew what we were looking for, I might be actually able to help you find it faster.”

  “You mean you’d find it faster with or without me.”

  “That’s not what—”

  Colt whirled, grasping her in a firm but gentle, no-nonsense grip on her upper arms. The coil illuminator still in his hand threw light up toward the ceiling, giving an eerie uplit cast to his rugged features, and exposing the dark stubble growing thicker on his jaw and chin. He pulled her close enough to him that her breasts brushed his chest. “Coy doesn’t become you. I know you’re smarter than that just by looking at you.”

  Her skin and hair were coated with a fine powdering of dust leaving them feeling gritty. Beneath the hems of her skirt, her bruised knees throbbed. They’d gotten scraped and her fishnet stockings torn on the rough floor of the cavern when the blast had propelled her forward. As succubi went, she was sure she looked like hell.

  Lilly tried to pull back from his magnetic touch. It was causing small sparks to fire just under her skin in a most distracting manner. Despite her own misgivings, she wanted him to kiss her again. Not because of some pact, but out of pure desire.

  She wet her lips, tasting the dust that lingered on them. “We have a pact. I’m going to help you find whatever it is you are looking for by opening this door you’re seeking.”

  “True. But that doesn’t mean you’ll forget the pact you’ve made with your master either, does it?”

  “You summoned me, remember?”

  The thumb of his right hand brushed over her upper arm in a slow back-and-forth skimming movement that tightened her skin in an all over body shiver.

  “Just look for the door and you’ll find out what’s behind it the same time I do. Deal?”

  Exactly how annoyed would he be when he discovered that she already knew. And how quickly would he renege on his promise to let her go free or, more importantly, help her disappear once he knew she wanted the piece of the Book of Legend as much as he did?
r />   “Fine. I’ll stop asking.”

  “Good.”

  Colt dropped his hands from her, making her feel noticeably cooler. He pulled the map out of his pocket where he’d stuffed it and shook it out.

  “Looks like there’s another branch in the shaft up ahead.”

  Lilly peered over his shoulder at the page. “How much farther?” His long, blunt-tipped finger ran along a crooked line following it across the page.

  “Another mile, maybe mile and a half. The map isn’t exactly to scale. Winn said when the temperature got warmer, we’d be getting close.”

  Not surprising. If the crudely drawn compass points in the corner were anywhere close to true, they were headed south, closer to the rim of the Darkin realm, rather than away from it. No wonder the Scoria had been waiting for them. They might as well have danced right across the welcome mat to Hell itself.

  “I suppose you’ll want these back now,” she said, holding the saddle packs out to him. Colt slung them over his shoulder, turned on his heel without a word of thanks and started walking.

  At the next turn, the trail descended steeply, and a runnel of water made the rock slippery. The demon grabbed hold of his arm, heedlessly bumping her hand against the gun in his low-slung hip holster.

  His gaze snapped to hers, his skin tightening. That had been awful close to her rubbing the precise part of him that was most interested in the demon. “Careful there, darlin’. You might set it off.”

  The sound of rushing water grew louder, filling the chamber. Colt’s chest tightened reflexively, a giant invisible fist squeezing all the air out of his lungs.

  “Sounds like a river or waterfall.” Her tone was a mixture of curiosity laced with boredom.

  Yeah, he heard it. And he prayed it was neither. “Winn didn’t mention any waterfall or river. In fact, he didn’t mention any kind of water at all.”