Dragon Gate Read online

“Does it matter? You said you had a job for me.”

  “I do.” He looked at me then at Kelly. “For both of you and your friend back at the studio.”

  “Will we get to kill anyone?” Kelly asked.

  “Definitely.”

  “I’m in,” she said. “I’m off to the ladies’ room.”

  When she left, I said, “What’s the job?”

  “Have you heard of Graham Noble?”

  “Sounds familiar but I can’t place him.”

  “His family owns The Steam Room and a few other businesses in Boulder.”

  “That weird spa I see advertised on TV all the time? What’s their slogan? No Pain, Still Gain or some shit?”

  “Yes, and Let Off a Little Steam.”

  “The girl in the commercials is cute,” I said.

  “That would be Rayna, Graham’s sister. Their father was murdered this morning outside his office building.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “The killers will be after their entire family. Stephen Noble’s brother is part owner of the spa, and Stephen’s wife runs a hospice.”

  “You want me to find the killers? Shouldn’t that be a job for the Boulder Police Department?”

  “I want to hire you and your team to protect the family. Graham and Rayna in particular, but the rest if they’ll cooperate. Graham and Rayna do a lot of charity work and public appearances. They’re wealthy and popular and they’ll need a protective team.”

  “Why are you doing the hiring, Mike? Shouldn’t they hire a firm?”

  “Stephen was a friend. He asked me to provide protection for his children.”

  “So they don’t even know about this?”

  The waitress returned with Mike’s credit card and thanked us, so Mike didn’t answer until she wandered off to another table.

  “They know.” He signed the check and added a less-than-generous tip—typical. “They don’t think they need protection, and they don’t trust wizards, so they won’t allow us to send anyone who’s part of the magical community. In order to serve Stephen’s wishes, I need you.”

  “You knew this was coming when I hired that skinny girl last year.” I pretended not to know her name was Darla or that I’d gotten her killed that day before I found a way to set things right. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she died, but I try instead to remember her relief when she didn’t have to do much beyond a simple summoning spell on the reset.

  “I suspected you’d be the right person for the job if it came up.”

  “So this is for you and not for DGI?”

  “Stephen was on the board for DGI.”

  “He was a wizard?”

  “No.”

  “I thought only wizards could serve on the board.”

  Mike shrugged. “We make exceptions in certain instances.”

  “He paid you.”

  “What?”

  “The only thing that matters more to you guys than a magical pedigree is cold, hard cash.”

  I wasn’t a big fan of the folks at Dragon Gate Industries. They charged for their services when they make plenty of money from their legitimate, nonmagical engineering firm, not to mention their real estate holdings and investments. However, I did owe them for loaning Darla to me and for a few other little things.

  “Graham and Rayna need your help, Jonathan. And we’ll pay you a nice fee for your protection services.”

  “We’re not normally in the protection business.”

  “Nonsense. Our files indicate that you’ve had training as an executive protector through a well-respected firm and that you occasionally provide these services for visiting celebrities.”

  “Protecting a TV star making a convention appearance is a lot different than protecting someone who has active death threats from a credible enemy who’s already proven their abilities by killing someone close to the target. The Nobles should hire a firm that specializes in this sort of thing.”

  “Are you saying you think you, Kelly, and Brand can’t protect two people from a few bad guys?”

  “What I’m saying is that counting Esther, there are only four of us. To provide a proper protective detail would require a larger team.”

  “They won’t go for that.”

  “Do they realize that in many cases, simply having a team visible will make an assassin give up? Most assassins don’t want to get caught.”

  “These assassins may or may not have magical abilities.”

  “I’m sorry, may or may not?”

  Mike adjusted his collar, which looked perfect to me. “We don’t know for certain. Shouldn’t Kelly be back by now?”

  “She’s waiting in the car.”

  “She said she was—”

  I shook my head. “She hates business meetings.”

  “So why did she come along?”

  “Free food. What can you tell me about the killers?”

  “Alas, not much. You should talk to Graham Noble this evening. I told him to expect you.” Mike pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket and slid it across the table to me. “This is his address. He said he could see you at six but that he has only a few minutes, so don’t be late. He has a banquet to attend tonight.”

  Great. We’d have to drive through rush-hour traffic all the way to Boulder.

  “All right, Mike. I’ll talk to the guy.”

  Mike slid an envelope across the table. “This should cover your retainer.”

  I opened the envelope and looked at a sizable check. It was more than twice what I’d normally charge. I frowned.

  “Problem?” Mike asked.

  Mike knew my rates, so the large check told me he knew this was extremely dangerous. I shook my head. “We’re cool.”

  oOo

  We took Mike back to his car and returned to the dojo. I saw Brand leaning against the wall, clenching and unclenching his fist. His wrist was already healing.

  Kelly had a class to teach in half an hour. I nodded toward her office. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” she said as she followed me through the door.

  I took the check out of my pocket and handed it to her. “What do you make of this?”

  Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You’re one hell of a negotiator.”

  “No, that check was made out before Mike came out here.”

  “What’s the job?” she asked.

  I filled her in.

  “Maybe Stephen Noble told them to pay you more when he set this up.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, the assholes at DGI aren’t this generous, so maybe they’re saying this job is more dangerous than we think and we need to take it seriously.”

  “Yeah. For DGI to pay this much without any hesitation, there’s more to this than what Mike told us.”

  She grinned. “Isn’t there always?”

  GRAHAM NOBLE

  Graham looked at the body of his father, which had been released to the mortuary at Graham’s insistence. Normally a homicide victim would automatically be autopsied within forty-eight hours, but while Colorado law dictated that the coroner did not need permission to perform an autopsy, the Noble family had a team of lawyers on speed dial. Graham was able to have a court order in a matter of a few hours to secure the release of the body. Stephen Noble died just after eight in the morning, and the body was delivered to the funeral home before two. The police weren’t happy about it, but Graham didn’t care. After all, the cause of death was obvious.

  His father’s head was positioned on the steel table to appear as if it were still attached to the body, but it wasn’t convincing. Graham placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. The skin was room temperature.

  “I’ll watch out for Rayna and Mother,” he said. He bowed his head for a moment then turned and left the room.

  The attendant, a middle-aged balding man who wanted to sell him a “dignity package,” waited for him just outside the door. The man followed Graham up the stairs to the main greeting area.r />
  The room had dark paneling, and floral arrangements stood on nearly every surface. Comfortable chairs and a sofa lined one section where mourners could sit. The place was empty at the moment.

  “Did your father want a burial or cremation?”

  Graham wasn’t listening because through the glass doors, he saw Rayna pull into the parking lot and get out of her opal blue Lexus. She grabbed a bag and her purse then raced to the building. As soon as she entered, he met her gaze and found it impossible to keep his tears in check. Rayna blinked and tears streamed down her cheeks too. They embraced and he kept holding her while she cried. He stared at the tiled ceiling, focused on a water stain and how the tile warped around it. His father was dead, and that was awful, but worse was seeing how it affected his sister. She practically worshipped their father.

  He glanced at his watch: 3:15. Their mother should have been here already. She’d been at the hospice, which was only five minutes away, while Rayna had been hiking. Graham pulled out his phone and, still holding his sister, placed a call to his mother.

  The phone rang.

  And rang.

  Then went to voice mail.

  Graham didn’t leave a message. Could the Marshall Clan have already found his mother too? Why were they starting with his parents when they should have gone after his uncle Lucas first? All of this began with Lucas.

  Rayna pulled back and looked up at Graham. “Did Father suffer?”

  Graham shook his head. “It was a clean death. An honorable death.”

  Rayna nodded. “I’ll attend to him.”

  “Very well.”

  She hugged him again then turned to the attendant. “I’m Rayna Noble. Please take me to my father. I must prepare his body.”

  “We have people to do all that. He’s in good hands. We’re very sorry for your loss.”

  “You’ll be sorrier if you don’t take me to my father.”

  Graham loved his sister more than ever at that moment. In spite of her own pain, she remained focused on the important rituals. It didn’t matter so much here. The attendant was right. They had people who would take care of the body. However, he knew Rayna saw it as her duty. Graham turned to the attendant.

  “Our religion requires the female relatives to prepare the body for its journey to the afterlife,” he lied. They had no religion, but the attendant would honor religious beliefs without question while pragmatic family customs that let children understand that all life ends in death and that bodies must be cleaned and either burned or buried to avoid disease would be a bit harder to sell. The ritual helped daughters, wives, and mothers get closure. If the women weren’t there, the men would simply burn the bodies and move on.

  The attendant nodded.

  Graham knew they dealt with various religions, all of which seemed strange and rather silly to him, but he didn’t mind using it to make things easier for Rayna. She needed the ritual, and this was the fastest way to guarantee that. His mother would need it too. Where was she?

  “While my sister attends to our father, perhaps you and I can go over the . . . what did you call it? A dignity package?”

  “Yes, sir. We have a variety of options. Please wait in my office. I’ll take your sister downstairs, and I’ll be right back”

  “We want the best for our father,” Graham said, and the attendant’s eyes lit up a bit at the prospect of a high-dollar sale. To his credit, he quickly reined it in and remained respectful and professional.

  “We have a variety of options that will reflect the depth of your love for your father.”

  The price would reflect it, Graham thought, but as money didn’t matter, he would let the attendant make the expensive sale. The paperwork would keep him busy and would give Rayna time. For now, that was all he cared about. His sister needed closure, and he would buy her the time to get it. Then they could move on.

  RAYNA NOBLE

  Rayna wasn’t used to death. She’d seen plenty of it back home, but she’d been a mere child at the time. Sure, she’d helped prepare her younger brother’s body when a sudden illness stole him away, and she’d helped Vanessa Marshall when her parents were killed, but those events seemed like two lifetimes ago. She hadn’t thought about Vanessa since Uncle Lucas killed her. Pushing the thought aside, she set down her purse and bag then approached the body.

  “We’ll be all right, Dad,” she whispered, wishing she could believe it.

  Rayna had a job to do, so tears were not an option. She stared at her father’s severed head, which the mortuary attendant had tried to position correctly. It looked off. That wasn’t surprising since it was off. She thought of a bad movie where everyone kept chanting, “Off with his head.” They didn’t have movies back home. She liked movies because the stories usually worked out. The hero won, the couple got together, and the bad guys were always vanquished.

  That wasn’t how things played out in the real world. They never worked that way back home, either. Where was her mother? They should be doing this together.

  It didn’t seem appropriate to wait, so Rayna pulled a needle and thread from her purse. Graham had told her what to expect. She had prepared the needle in advance because she worried that her hands would be shaking with the corpse of her father stretched out before her. She held out her right hand and was surprised to find it steady. That shouldn’t have surprised her. Difficult times brought out her strengths.

  She adjusted her father’s head, connecting it with the rest of the body. The skin felt cold. This was not her father. This was simply the empty shell of the body he’d inhabited when he was alive. She poked the needle through the flesh and carefully stitched the neck together. In and out, around and around. It didn’t need to be perfect, and it didn’t have to hold for long. Her goal was simply to make sure the body was complete.

  Rayna wasn’t sure about an afterlife. She knew her father didn’t believe in one, but most of the people she knew in this world swore up and down there was a place called Heaven. It didn’t make sense to her. Some of the people back home believed some crazy things about the weighing of souls to gain access to a better place. She figured it was something one told children to make them feel better, but just in case, she followed the oldest customs of her people. The prevailing belief back home was that if you had any hope of moving to the next world, your body needed to be whole.

  She’d read about similar beliefs in ancient Egypt with the myth of Osiris. His brother Seth had chopped him into thirteen pieces and spread them throughout the Nile. Isis had gathered them all, except for his penis, so to make him complete for the next world, she fashioned a phallus out of wood. Of course, Isis and Osiris were the stuff of mythology and were there to simply teach a lesson without requiring a belief that the events were factual. Religion, on the other hand, expected belief.

  Rayna preferred mythology.

  When she finished connecting the head, it was time to clean the body with a damp sponge. This was a sign of respect. Her father had been dead for just longer than seven hours, and rigor mortis was beginning to set in. Once he was clean, she grabbed her bag and removed a suit of fine clothing. She dressed her father, making sure the shirt collar covered the stitching along the neck. Glancing at her watch, she realized it had been thirty minutes, and there was still no sign of her mother.

  Worry gnawed at her heart. Rayna hoped her mother was all right.

  But deep down, she knew better

  CHAPTER THREE

  JONATHAN SHADE

  Highway 36 into Boulder was a freakishly long parking lot. Good thing I’d stopped for gas before we set out on our slow-moving trek. Kelly rode shotgun and Esther sat in the backseat.

  I’d coughed up the cash to fix my Firebird, but the poor car was ready for retirement. Don’t even ask about my insurance rates. Strange how insurance companies aren’t keen on claims involving armies of skeletons or dead people smashing out windows even if you do report them as simple vandalism and leave out any hint of the supernatural.

 
Brand chose to stay at the dojo since he refused to ride in the back of my car because he wasn’t a contortionist. Esther didn’t mind how cramped it was back there, but being a ghost, her knees went right through the seat, so she didn’t have an issue with the lack of leg room.

  We arrived at Graham Noble’s house five minutes late. Not bad under the circumstances. The house sat way back from the road, and a security gate blocked access to the driveway. I rolled down my window and pressed the buzzer on the intercom.

  “May I help you?” asked a male voice with just a touch of a British accent. The words came out as if we were definitely intruders and he really didn’t want to help us. Those four words made it seem as though we’d asked the guy to prepare a five-course meal for a party of twenty with zero notice.

  “Jonathan Shade to see Graham Noble,” I said.

  “You’re late.”

  “Traffic’s a bitch. You going to let us in?”

  I expected a response, but one was not forthcoming. I wondered if the guy’s answer was a silent no, but right when I was ready to throw the car in reverse and head back to Denver, the gate buzzed and began its slow inward sweep.

  “This should be fun,” Kelly said.

  “Define ‘fun,’” I said.

  The road to the house was about a quarter of a mile through a tree-lined drive. The trees stopped and the drive spilled into a huge circular lot in front of a massive modern-day castle. It looked like something you’d see in Europe, but here it was in Boulder, Colorado.

  “Well isn’t that just the cat’s meow,” Esther said.

  I parked between a blue Lexus and a red Lamborghini Aventador J. There were a couple of Mercedes and a Rolls Royce as well. The ashtray of the Rolls probably cost more than my entire car. Evidently there was excellent money in health spas and hospices. They get you when you’re living, and they get you when you’re dying.

  In my experience, people who were self-made millionaires tended to be pretty cool and down to earth in spite of living in luxury. Those who inherited money were usually assholes. I wondered if the spa originally belonged to Graham’s father.

  I got out of the Firebird, looked at the astonishing wealth displayed by the cars around me, and tried to keep from letting Graham shoot to the top of the asshole meter before I’d even met him. Reserve judgment, I told myself. The guy might still be in touch with reality. Then again, he might be like Gwyneth Paltrow and think that all women had personal trainers and a masseuse on call to help them get back into shape after giving birth. You live in Fantasyland for too long, and you think everyone’s rich.