The Rifters by M. Pax

Chapter 1

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CHAPTER 1

Earl Blacke exhaled a mist that didn’t originate from the chill of night. His lungs burned. The obsidian pillars on either side of the twisted juniper hissed, smoke pouring off their chiseled faces. The energy streaming out of the rift tasted different, overcooked sugar with a strong hint of rotting fish. Whatever beast traveled the portal, it would not pass. It would not sully his lands.

Over a century ago, Earl wore a different name, one synonymous with notorious and robbing stagecoaches. He’d need that grit tonight. He’d need it to save his girl. No longer perplexed by technology that enabled him to talk to people a long way away without hollering or using the telegraph office, he fiddled with the buttons on his cell phone.

“It’s me,” he whispered. “The gate is opening.”

“The message said the rift would activate three nights before the summer solstice, ushering in a new dark age. It didn’t lie. The darkness must be stopped. Nothing will come through while you’re there. You and the portal don’t mix.” Her bright voice pierced through the overcharged air. “I need three more minutes to finish the device, then I’m on my way.” It would take her an added ten minutes to hike out to the portal from her place, less if she ran.

The power emanating from the stone columns pushed at Earl, flattening his lungs, slowing his blood. “It’s not the usual visitor, Charming.” Rarely did something tame roll through the gate, but this was something much more vicious and heavy. Why did his girl insist on grappling with such things? She should stick to her fossils.

He had spent three years searching for Charming Moon Knight. He found her when she was about to finish graduate school. The perfect time. Like they were meant to have these moments. She meant the world, and whatever it took, he’d keep her in this one.

Inching toward the blue light fizzing between the pillars, Earl squared his shoulders. “I won’t let it through until you get here, darling.”

“You’re the best—” She started to say his name, but the opening to another place cut her off as effectively as a knife across her tongue.

For once his struggles with the gate paid off. It refused to let him enter, refused to open when it sensed him, like he tasted wrong, for he had been its guest once then never again.

The blue light sparking between the pillars hadn’t been so fickle in 1888. The flickers had grabbed onto his curiosity out in the shadow of an old volcano in the middle of Oregon, a new town dubbed Settler. The rift had clutched onto his mind and swallowed him up. Almost as quickly, it spat him out in a time that wasn’t his. In the same place, however, still Settler, Oregon.

Since that day, the gate wouldn’t let him through again. He’d been branded an outcast, as if this world knew of his past sins. The horrid twist in fate hadn’t been all bad. The gold coins he had buried in the 1880s hadn’t been found by anyone else and were worth a fortune in this century. They bought him the dream that had egged him on in older times, plus the trip had shaved forty years off his age. Forty years to live over again, to become a better man. If he held true to Charming, he’d be that man.

Everything about her resembled light: a wan complexion as pale as they came, fiery hair, long and fine, that showed off her cold blue eyes to their best advantage. The exact shade and shape of his. Her spirit shone brightest, always tugging her lips into a smile and her wit into fascinating words. Two years out of graduate school, her zest for life hadn’t cooled.