The Hunter

Book 1: Legend Chronicles

by Theresa Meyers

Genres: Steampunk; Time Travel

Synopsis

They're the Chosen--Winchester, Remington and Colt--brothers trained to hunt down supernatural beings using the latest steam-powered gadgetry. It's a hard legacy to shoulder, and it's about to get a lot more dangerous. . .

A Devil Of A Job

Colt Jackson has gotten his name on many a wanted poster with success in the family business: hunting supernaturals across the frontier. Lately, though, there's a sulfur stink in the wind and the Darkin population is exploding. A rift in the worlds is appearing. To close it, Colt will have to do the unthinkable and work with a demon to pass arcane boundaries no human alone can cross.

Except when he summons his demon, he doesn't get some horned monstrosity: he gets a curvy redheaded succubus named Lilly, who's willing to make a bargain to become human again. He also gets Lilly's secret expertise on the machinations on the dark side of the rift. And her charm and cleverness help to get them out of what his silver-loaded pistol and mechanical horse can't. Of course, when all hell breaks loose, he might have to sacrifice his soul. But what's adventure without a little risk?

"Meyers puts the steam in steampunk." --Cherry Adair

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

He’d finally managed to wash the dark, sticky, tar-like blood off his hands. There’d been no hope for his clothes.

He’d had to burn them.

A man couldn’t be too careful. For the likes of Colt Jackson, a Hunter born and bred, danger lurked everywhere, even in a place as innocuous as a worn-out bar that reeked of old tobacco smoke laced with the eye-watering fumes of rotgut whiskey. But neither of those blotted out the telltale stink of sulfur. Something supernatural lurked close by. He’d bet his gun hand on it.

Everything in the little mining town turned ice hub in Arizona Territory seemed coated with a ghostly layer of grit, even the chipped crystal chandeliers overhead. He felt the grit in his lungs and in his nostrils. It stank of putrid eggs and worse, probably from the smokestacks billowing white outside against an endless cerulean sky. He picked up his smeared, nearly empty glass of ice water, leaving behind a dark ring in the pale dust on the scarred, liquor-sticky table.

Hell, the only reason he’d stopped in Wickenburg in the first place was for the ice. Ever since the mines deep in the desert had flooded out and ingenious businessmen replaced the old rock crushers with steam-powered freeze machines, ice had become one of the most profitable commodities next to copper, gold, and silver in this special little sizzling corner of Hell on earth. He glared at his glass. The ice water had cost him almost as much as a good whiskey.

The lithe blond saloon girl he’d been eyeing since he walked in strolled toward him across the warped wooden floorboards worn smooth from the sand of so many boots. Her hips swayed to the sound of the out-of-tune piano plunking away near the stairs that led up to the rented rooms on the second floor. The cheap glass beading on her dark blue off-the-shoulder dance-hall dress flashed in the illumination of the gaslights overhead, creating sparkles to dance along the curves of her pale cleavage.

“Would you like some company, sugar?” Her smile didn’t reach her heavily kohled eyes. She was anywhere between sixteen and thirty. How many men had she had? Worse, did he really care? He wanted the comfort of someone who smelled sweet and womanly. Someone in whose arms he could forget, if only for a few hours, who and what he was.

Colt smiled wide. Enough women had told him his smile was dead gorgeous that he’d learned when to use it to his advantage. He’d dressed with more care than usual tonight, in clean black trousers, a starched white shirt, and a black brocade vest threaded with a pattern of silver and blue he’d been told matched the blue in his eyes. Seemed the effort had been worth it. “Yes, ma’am.”

She cuddled up beside him, throwing a long, smooth leg, bare to the thigh, over his. “So what brings you to Wickenburg, cowboy?”

He slid a hand over her smooth thigh. “Hunting.”

She let out a husky laugh, full red lips tilting up in a come-hither pout. “Most men here are lookin’ to strike it rich in ice. But I knew you was different the moment I saw you. In fact, I’ve seen your face before. What’s your name?”

Colt tensed. He worked fairly hard at keeping a low profile, but every now and then a completely unwarranted wanted poster tended to circulate with his likeness. “Colt Jackson.”

“Relax, handsome,” she said, rubbing her hand over his chest, delving beneath the edge of his vest. He felt the heat of her hand through his shirt as her soft fingers stroked right over his heart. “We get outlaws in here all the time.”

Yeah, but Colt seriously doubted they were anything like him. Her constant kneading touch began to drain the tension out of his shoulders, but only a little. His gun hand had started itching the moment he’d stepped into the bar, and his instincts had never steered him wrong before. Something in this little town wasn’t right.

“So, are you famous? Are you dangerous?” she asked, her fingers threading through his shock of nearly black hair as she wriggled on his lap. Her perfume was way too strong, and verging on unpleasant. Her skin under all that makeup looked dirty. Her blond hair felt stiff and brittle beneath his fingers and he dropped his hand to her waist, feeling whalebone and crisp satin, not silky skin.

“Not exactly,” Colt muttered, finding her less appealing by the moment. “Really more like a modern Robin Hood.”

Glossy ruby lips pouted. “It’s so much more fun when you’re dangerous.” He realized that it didn’t matter how much he wanted or needed a woman right now, a tumble wasn’t going to give him what he truly wanted and could never have—a home, a place where he belonged. No matter how delectable she looked, she wouldn’t satisfy the deeper craving.

These days nothing could. There wasn’t a way to feed the hunger that gnawed deep down, belly-deep. It bit into his bones and wouldn’t let go. Hunting was a like a drug. Once a man knew supernaturals existed, he saw the Darkin everywhere. Once a Hunter knew that those creatures were the cause behind deaths no one else could explain, duty lay heavy on his shoulders.

Once a Hunter started hunting, he couldn’t just stop.

Evil didn’t take a holiday. Hunting wasn’t a profession, it was a way of life.

For an instant he wished he could be like his older brothers, Winchester and Remington, upstanding citizens who didn’t run from place to place even if they too were named after his pa’s favorite guns. While the Jackson brothers looked a lot alike on the outside, with their pa’s jet hair and wide shoulders and their ma’s blue eyes and winning smile, they were different as could be on the inside.

Winn was a solid, steady, ordinary man. Remy straddled the line, looking respectable but hunting on the side. But being like Winn and Remy wasn’t Colt’s destiny. No, Colt had every intention of living up to the family legend his pa Cyrus “Black Jack” Jackson had started as one of the most notorious outlaws of the western territories, rather than living it down like his brothers. That was the life of a Hunter. Tracking down supernatural monsters one at a time and killing them to make the world a safer place.

Winn and Remy might have shirked their responsibilities to the Legion of Hunters, but he never would. Because once Pa had trained him, he’d revealed something to Colt he hadn’t to Winn or Remy.

There would come a time when the far-flung pieces of the Book of Legend would have to be brought together or humanity would perish. This grimy ice hub was just one more stop in his three-year search to uncover the hiding place of his pa’s portion of the Book to prepare for the showdown with the Darkin, if and when it happened.

“So tell me somthin’, mister. If you’re a gunslinger, where’s your gun?” She snaked a hand down to wrap around the inside of his thigh, rubbing suggestively at his groin and wriggling her bottom into his lap. That got his attention. It’d been a long time since he’d rested long enough to find a woman. If he’d been a less focused man, all the blood would have drained out of his brain right then and there regardless of how she’d looked.

With practiced ease she slipped one leg over the far side so she straddled him. The damp heat of her seeped right through his britches. He let out a ragged breath and she pressed forward, her soft breasts pushing against his chest as she skimmed the tip of her soft, slick tongue along his neck.

Then he heard it. Right next to his ear. The distinct sudden flick of a vampire’s fangs being extended. He caught a sudden whiff of sulfur so strong it burned.

Colt reared up from the chair, but the vampire clung to him, her smooth legs firmly gripping his middle with the strength of a metal handcuff. Knowing he had only seconds to act, he shoved an arm between them, pushing her away from the blood pumping hard and fast in his neck.

Her face was warped beyond recognition, the brows protruded and bent, the eyes red, feral and hungry, her fangs twin white daggers bracketed by stretched ruby red lips. “Now, Hunter, you will die.”

He looked her straight in those red eyes and didn’t flinch. “Ladies first.”

With his free hand he pulled the sting shooter from the holster at his hip. A high-pitched keening sound split the air an instant before he shot her point-blank in the stomach.

Zzzot.

The arc of bright blue electricity catapulted her to the floor with a thick thud. She writhed and bucked on the floor like a beached fish, smoke curling in a black wisp from between her red lips.

The piano abruptly stopped. Half a dozen screams echoed in the bar as people came up from their crouch on the floor and stared at the barmaid, then at Colt with accusing eyes. Her face had already returned to its human shape. Her fangs retracted as she lay on the floor in a spreading, glistening black pool that leaked from two charred and smoking holes seared straight through her.

Shit. He hadn’t intended for it to kill her, merely stun her senseless. That would teach him to use one of Marley Turlock’s inventions before it was fully cooked. Marley was a brilliant inventor, but sometimes his ambitions outpaced his execution.

Colt knew better than to wait until the townspeople could get their hands on him and string him up on the nearest tree. So he did what any sensible Hunter would do. He ran like hell.

Five days later he still hadn’t stopped running, but he knew he’d have to stop soon. His eyes were gritty from too much time awake in the saddle, and his clockwork horse, Tempus, was making funny grinding sounds. He wondered if perhaps he’d gotten a small stone or some other object accidentally lodged in the intricate workings of gears and springs that filled the copper belly of the beast, or just pushed his machine too hard across the dusty terrain without stopping to properly oil it. Marley would know.

Tempus clicked and whirred beneath him, the brass hooves kicking up small puffs of dust with every step through the main street. People glanced curiously at him and moved on their way along the wooden walkways.

To the untrained eye, Tempus looked like a black-and-white paint. The cowhide covering not only protected Colt from the copper getting too hot to touch if he rode in the sun too long, but also protecting the clockwork inside from rain and dirt. Only the horse’s brass hooves, solid shining silver eyes, and mechanical noises gave it away. Being as Marley lived in town, the locals were probably used to seeing his contraptions of one kind or another.

Colt pulled the reins, steering the horse up the narrow, winding, dusty road that led up a steep hill to Marley’s house. From a distance the house perched on the bluff overlooking the valley resembled a praying mantis more than a proper house. Various cranes and gadgets stuck out like multiple legs and antennae from the main building, and they often moved at odd intervals.

Tempus came to a rocking stop in Marley’s front yard as Colt flipped off the GGD switch by twisting the horse’s ear into a backward-facing position. Marley had dubbed it that when he’d shouted “Giddyup, God Dammit” at his seventh version of the horse, and it had actually moved. Colt wrapped the reins around the hitching post. Just for show. Tempus wouldn’t go anywhere until pressure was applied to the plate in his back beneath the saddle, compressing the springs that allowed the GGD switch to be engaged. It was what Marley called a double safe precaution against horse thieves.

Not that a thief could get close to Marley’s place. He had artificial eyes stuck here and there that were wired to an enormous lens in his laboratory. He could see who was coming or going at all hours of the day or night. Colt decided he’d hate to see which of Marley’s deterrents an unsuspecting thief might run into. He’d had a close encounter once with one of Marley’s spine-shooting mechanical cacti, and it had been enough for him.

Colt raised his fist to pound on the door, but it opened before he could knock. A man half a foot shorter than Colt peered at him from behind a pair of intricate multi-lensed brass goggles that extended six inches from his face and magnified his brown eyes to enormous proportions.

It was hard to tell exactly how old Marley was. The smooth youth of his face and dark brows competed with a cap of wild snow-white hair on his head. Marley attributed the premature color change to a lightning bolt that had struck him during an experiment. Colt wasn’t sure, but he’d bet it was the side effect of yet another harebrained experiment gone awry. Marley’s inventions, while undeniably brilliant, tended to hit big or miss horribly.

“I say, it’s about time you made it back,” Marley said, his words as clipped and undeniably British as his manner. He wiped his hands on his stained leather apron, then pushed past Colt and headed directly for Tempus, clucking and fussing over the machine like an old mother hen.

Colt grunted, glancing over his shoulder. “Good to see you too.”

Marley was too busy checking Tempus over to reply. He was already bent over double, flipping up hatches and inspecting gears and springs, poking and prodding the beast’s inner mechanics as he muttered to himself.

“I’ll just make myself at home,” Colt said under his breath.

Marley glanced up, his eyes magnified to the size of small saucers behind his goggle thingies, making gold flecks and the ring of darker brown around his irises stand out. “Don’t touch anything.”

Colt nodded. He wouldn’t have dared. Last time he’d tried to move something, he’d gotten a nasty electrical shock from it. Nearly every surface of Marley’s place was covered with a jumble of odd bits of brass and wire, heaps of gears and springs, and stacks of sketches. He’d find a chair and sit, maybe forage for something to drink while he waited for his friend to finish his inspection of Tempus. The only chair available turned out to be the one Marley sat in at his workbench.

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.”

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 chime. . .