Devil's Gate (Elder Races #4.6)(5)

“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.

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 br**sts 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.