Demon Hunt by A. W. Hart

destroy all by destroying the balance of life and death, good and evil. The powers of Heaven shook the earth and ripped the fabric of the sky.
    Then the Lord of Hell stretched forth his sword and sent forth his minions to destroy many of the survivors and the knowledge of the great kingdom. Their cities were drowned and destroyed, the many tributary lands destroyed in the cataclysm. The gates were scattered throughout the globe, hidden from the greed of mankind, as were the indestructible crystal skulls that were the keys to each gate.
    Among the survivors, a lord of great valor and wisdom decided, along with his loyal servants and warriors, to set a guard upon Hell’s Gates against the day when men would come forth to open the gates again, for their own purposes or for the purposes of the Lord of Hell himself. The lord bound himself and those of his blood to the fate of the gates. The lord’s kin and followers were given the secrets of their people, wielding great power against the darkness. They were also given the dark secrets of longevity.
    Down through the endless years, the mighty heroes of the world have been recruited into this Brotherhood to safeguard the gates and battle the evils the presence of the gates engenders in the hearts of men. The Brotherhood of the Gate has stood by for millennia to defend the gates until the Last Days when the gates will fly open and the Final Battle begins.”
    The storyteller’s eyes glowed with blue light in the darkness as he told us we stood on the brink of one of the gates of Hell and could not live to tell of the portal. The knight stood and drew forth a mighty sword to slay the men of my company, who stood, transfixed, except for myself.
    Like wheat before the scythe they fell beside their booty gathered from the dust before the gate. He wept as he killed, even as he showed no mercy. I fell to my knees and prayed for our deliverance with my eyes shut against the slaughter of my companions. Sudden silence forced my attention and I opened my eyes to see the knight standing before me with his sword lowered.
    “ You, my brother, I will spare,” he told me in his ancient Spanish. “In honor of the service I once gave your church, go forth and tell none where the gate lies.”
    I fled the field of death, glancing back once at the stricken figure of the lone knight kneeling among the dead, his sword thrust into the ground to form a cross.
    I traveled many months, some of them lost to me in my madness, until I was found by another group of my countrymen. From there, I gathered my strength and made my way to the settlements of our people. And although I told the story of the treasure, the gate, and the slaughter, I never revealed the location of the battlefield, claiming madness.”

Chapter Eleven
     
    “ Lost civilizations, knights – and I thought I had lost my mind.” Rhi spoke out loud. She knocked the book in her hand against the chair arm to make a mental image disappear. Blackthorne, arrayed in the robes of a Crusader.
    “ A knight! He’d be kind of hot in armor. What a shame I gave up on the knight in shining armor fantasy when I was ten.”
    To get her mind off of helping Blackthorne out of his armor, Rhi rested her eyes for a moment and imagined what she would do with untold riches. Buy a nice place here in her new homeland as a base with maybe a few horses and a lot of acreage for Ellie Mae to run in. Travel the world. She sighed. The Pikes Peak region was a big area to search for a mythical treasure. She hadn’t had time to explore the mountains outside her front door. The other few thousand bumps in the skin of the world would have to wait.
    She picked up another heavy book, a compilation of the Cripple Creek Crusher, one of the first newspapers in the town.
    She flipped through the pages, grimacing at a front-page article detailing the death of an unfortunate woman from a crib, one of the cell-like rooms that lined the alleys of Meyers Avenue’s Red Light