Devil's Gate: Elder Races, Book 3 (2 page)

All Vampyres had the same liquid, inhuman grace, but not all of them affected Seremela the same way that Duncan did. She ducked her head and shut the door. When she turned around to face him, she found him studying her again. She grew even more self-conscious, too aware of the amount of bare skin exposed by the skimpy, thin material of her red tank top and her shorts. Her toenails were painted a bright, saucy lime green. She glanced down at her bare legs then back up at him.

If only she had her work clothes on, and a dissected corpse on a table between them. Then she would know what to say and how to act.

Still, she had to start somewhere. She said, “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“I hope you don’t mind that I stopped by unannounced,” he said.

His voice moved over her in an invisible caress. She shivered as her mind supplied her with images garnered from her earlier storm-washed fancy: Duncan, dressed in a Bogart suit, stroking long, clever fingers on piano keys, with his dark head bent and a melancholy gaze. Then she steps into the room and he turns to her with fierce joy—giving her a look that says they are the only two people in the world—

Heavy reality thudded into place around her. Gah. Where were they? Oh, he had said something. That meant it was her turn, right? Argh, where was a dead body when you needed one the most? She fumbled for an appropriate response. “No, of course not.”

His gaze had lingered at her head. He gave her a small, grave smile. “I’m sorry to see the little rascals are tucked away today.”

Warmed, she touched the back of her head with a self-conscious hand. Many people were afraid or repulsed by a medusa’s snakes, and at various times throughout history, medusae had been persecuted and killed because of it. The most famous example of a medusa being murdered was in ancient Greece, when Perseus had beheaded a woman who was supposedly so ugly, the sight of her could turn people into stone.

But Duncan wasn’t like most other people. He seemed to enjoy the snakes, and he had treated them with indulgent amusement when they had flirted with him at Carling and Rune’s winter solstice Masque party.

Her snakes didn’t have the slightest problem with social situations—not that they ever behaved appropriately.

Once at a work party, she grew lightheaded and extremely giddy while she talked with the woman who was her boss at that time. When she turned around, she caught several of her snakes lapping at leftover alcohol in the bottom of several glasses on a table behind her. Thankfully her boss had been amused and helped to call her a cab ride home.

“They needed a time out,” she confessed. “What a surprise to see you, Duncan, especially in the middle of the day.”

His smile widened briefly before it disappeared. He said, “I remembered the layout of your apartment building and the basement garage from when I dropped you off after the Masque party. It’s a simple matter to park in the garage and come up the elevator, and the windows at the end of the hallway are quite easy to avoid. This building is very Vampyre friendly.”

“I see,” she said.

Duncan drove a silver Aston Martin V12 Zagato with windows that had been tinted with full spectrum UV protection. The price tag on the car had to be well in excess of half a million dollars, but when you were the founding partner of one of the premiere law firms in the United States that specialized in Elder Races inter demesne law, you could afford some unusually nice perks.

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 magic-rich gold, or there might be more 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.