Riders on the Storm Read online

  Books by Rob Blackwell

  The Jules Castle Series

  Riders on the Storm

  The Soren Chase Series

  Closed at Dark (A Novella)

  Carnival of Stone (A Novella)

  The Forest of Forever

  The Pretender

  The Woman in the White Mask

  The Sanheim Chronicles:

  A Soul to Steal

  Band of Demons

  Give the Devil His Due

  Complete Box Set

  Audiobooks

  A Soul to Steal

  Band of Demons

  Give the Devil His Due

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  www.robblackwellbooks.com

  For Finn and Pippin, who love a good adventure

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Afterward

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “You don’t live in the world you think you do. Our understanding of the planet we live on would be fundamentally altered if certain events came to light. Such things have been carefully and systemically sanitized in our histories.”

  — Terry Jacobsen, “A History of the Supernatural,” 2013

  May 7, 1883

  Longstone, Dakota Territory

  Jules Castle eased the Colt revolver from a pocket of her dress. She aimed the gun at the bank teller without him noticing.

  She was careful to obscure the view of those behind her in line. She waited for the young man with pale skin and fashionable rounded spectacles to recognize his danger.

  “Will you be making a deposit or a withdrawal?” he asked, still smiling at her.

  “Listen to me carefully,” she replied, her tone light so that she wouldn’t draw anyone’s attention. “I need you to go into your back room, open the safe, and bring me the blue pouch inside it.”

  His smile faltered a bit, replaced by a look of confusion. “Are you the owner of the pouch?”

  “Look down,” she replied.

  He glanced at his own feet. It was all Jules could do not to laugh out loud. When he looked up again, even more flummoxed, she nodded her head slightly in the direction of the gun. His eyes widened.

  “Don’t shout, or you’ll be taking deposits from the devil before you know it,” she said calmly. “Don’t talk to anyone. Just go to the safe and retrieve what I asked.”

  She met his gaze, peering into his blue eyes. This was the most important part of any job, the moment when a good bank robber—the kind that lives to rob again—separated themselves from the bad.

  “You can see everything you need to know in most men by looking into their eyes,” her father had told her. “If you know what to look for, you can see if he’s a coward or a cowboy. Look hard enough and you’ll know exactly how he’ll react. Don’t forget this step, Jules. If you do, you might manage to miss how dangerous a man can be.”

  She saw no heroism in the teller’s eyes, or even a spark of anger that would make him fight back. Instead, she saw exactly what she’d hoped to see: fear.

  “Is this a joke?” he sputtered.

  She smiled at him. She got that question a lot. As far as bank robbers went, she didn’t look the part.

  She was twenty-two, a young woman with long, blond hair and a sunny smile, though if the teller looked close enough, he might see her nose was slightly out of joint from where she’d broken it in a bar fight. That had been a rough night, and she was just grateful she’d managed to keep all her teeth.

  Her maroon dress and large bustle behind covered up a fit and trim figure, one used to sleeping outdoors and riding a dozen miles or more a day. It did at least help accentuate her breasts. She’d never had much of a bosom, but in this outfit, they could distract a man easily enough.

  By all rights, a woman like her should be strolling through town, carrying a parasol and complaining about the hot sun to her bevy of suitors trailing behind. Yet here she was, a gun in her hand, her flinty gray eyes on the teller, wearing a smile as fake as her jewelry.

  She didn’t immediately respond to him, but waited. She was sure he’d get there. She’d robbed her fair share of banks and though she never wanted to grow complacent—her father’s first warning of survival was to never make assumptions—she knew a coward when she saw one. Already, the teller’s hands were shaking.

  “I’m going to say this one more time,” she said, “and then I’m going to start shooting. Turn around, go to the safe and bring me back the blue pouch. If you take too long, I’ll start killing folk. If you warn anyone, I’ll shoot them and then you. If you do anything—anything at all—that I find vexing or troublesome, the last thing you’re liable to see is a bullet from this gun. Do you understand?”

  She held his gaze through her entire speech, which by now was well rehearsed and perfected. It didn’t always work. But she’d honed her skill, keeping that light tone with just the right undercurrent of menace to her voice. By now, most men, particularly those of the teller’s constitution, would do exactly what she asked.

  “Daylight’s wasting,” she said, nodding in the direction of the vault.

  She was pleased when he obediently turned away and did as she asked. She watched him carefully, but his nervous air and quick pace told her this might be an easy job.

  That was no excuse for carelessness. She scanned the room, glancing back as casually as she could to ensure no one had raised the alarm. There were two other teller windows, one occupied by an older woman who was thin as a reed, and another by a corpulent older man who seemed in danger of collapsing the floorboards beneath him.

  Behind them, there were a little over a dozen people waiting in neat lines. Nobody seemed upset or interested in her. The only one who looked like a potential problem was a black man with short gray hair, who met her eyes briefly and then looked down. There were enough black cowboys in the Dakota Territory that they weren’t exactly rare, but something in his bearing told her to pay careful attention to him.

  Behind him, an elderly guard with a long mustache idled by the door. He held a rifle in his hands, but he clearly hadn’t noticed her yet. He was leaning against the door frame, the gun pointed safely at the dusty floor.

  She breathed out a sigh of relief, unaware until that moment she had been holding it. She turned her attention back to the teller, who was h
urriedly returning from the back room with a small blue pouch in his hands. This time, her smile was genuine.

  After all that anxiety, the robbery was going fine. She’d had a last-minute worry that the bank had installed a time lock on the safe which would have prevented the teller from accessing it, but that invention, so common now in Chicago, apparently hadn’t made it to the Dakota Territory yet. And so much for Miranda’s warning and prophetic dreams to stay away. She let herself relax, although her father would have disapproved.

  So of course that was the exact moment that everything went to hell.

  She heard a gunshot behind her, and she turned to see the elderly guard by the door clutch his stomach and go down in a heap. A few seconds later, two men wearing dusty clothes and dirty bandannas around their mouths came bursting through.

  One, a tall man sporting a white Stetson hat, waved his revolver in the air and fired twice into the ceiling.

  “Everybody put their hands up!” he yelled. “This is a robbery!”

  The second man, who was at least a head shorter than his companion and wore a red bandanna around his face, spared a glance at the guard now bleeding on the floor and hesitated, before also firing a shot into the ceiling. There were gasps and shouts, and the corpulent man began fumbling with a holster by his side.

  “Don’t,” Jules hissed at him, though she wasn’t sure why. It was no concern of hers if he got shot. The fat man looked up at her, and seemed to realize the futility of what he was doing. He couldn’t even get the gun off his belt, much less take out two men with it.

  Fortunately for him, the robbers hadn’t noticed. They were busy herding the customers to the side of the bank. All of them went willingly, but the look the black man gave them suggested he did so reluctantly.

  She gave him an appraising look. He was roughly five feet, ten inches tall, dressed in brown trousers and a white denim shirt. He wore brown Coffeyville-styled cowboy boots with the drawing of a rattlesnake pressed into the black graft.

  He didn’t look scared. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the robbers, as if he were sizing them up. If so, he was likely to see what she had—that they were young and inexperienced, a dangerous combination for everyone.

  Jules turned back to her bespectacled teller, who had returned to his window with the blue pouch in his hand. She gestured with her gun, which she still held so that only the teller could see, gesturing for him to hand over the pouch. He gave her a confused look.

  She couldn’t fathom why until she realized he probably thought the robbers were with her. Not a terrible assumption, but she frowned just the same. As if she’d be caught dead working with these amateurs. She’d been about to rob the place of the most valuable thing it had and walk out with only one lone teller knowing what she’d done.

  Without saying a word, she gestured more urgently and the teller handed over the pouch, his eyes flicking from her to the other robbers. She grabbed it and made to stuff it into her bosom when she heard the telltale click of a gun’s hammer being drawn back.

  A moment later she felt the cold metal of a pistol at the back of her skull.

  “No ma’am,” said one of the robbers behind her. He’d only spoken once, but she had already identified him as the one in the white hat. “Now just where do you think you’re going with my property?”

  She frowned, knowing she was in a predicament. She’d hoped to grab her valuables and skedaddle when the robbers were distracted. That was clearly no longer going to work.

  Her father had taught her many things, but she couldn’t remember him outlining a plan for how to handle a bank robbery when you yourself were already stealing from said bank. It probably didn’t come up much.

  She raced through her options. She could play the weeping damsel—it was a part she knew well—and maybe find a way out of this. It was the first role her father had taught her, insisting that men were stupid around the fairer sex.

  “They’ll always underestimate you, but if you play the part they expect, they’re apt to disregard you entirely,” he’d said.

  It was undoubtedly the safer play. But truth be told, she hated the role. Instead, she dropped the blue pouch to the floor, and immediately bent down as if about to pick it up.

  “Now wait just a min—” White Hat said, before she jutted her leg out behind her, and swept his legs out from underneath him, simultaneously twisting herself in midair. They both ended up on the ground, him toppling over awkwardly, while she landed on her back with her gun already trained at its next target.

  She aimed at the second robber in the red bandanna and fired once. He flinched as if wounded, staggering backward and looking at his hand like it had been shot off. Only then did he notice his weapon was missing. She’d blown the gun right out of his hand.

  He scrambled forward toward where it lay on the ground, while she jumped to her feet. It was trickier than she would have liked in the dress and its stupid bustle, but she was considerably faster than either of her competitors. She kicked the gun out of White Hat’s hand just as he was grabbing it and aimed her weapon at his head. She whistled to Red Bandanna, who was reaching out for his revolver.

  “You touch that thing and your brother gets a bullet in his brain,” she said calmly.

  His eyes were like large saucers, and the bandanna slipped a little, showing a boy with barely enough hair to form a mustache.

  “How did you know he was my brother?” he asked, looking from her to his sibling on the ground.

  “Really? That’s your first question?” she asked.

  Truthfully, she hadn’t known they were related. It was just instinct. She couldn’t properly see their faces to assess a family connection, but something about the way they each moved was similar to one another.

  “Who are you?” she asked White Hat, who stared up at her from the ground. He looked furious, while his brother just appeared confused.

  “We’re the sons of the Kid!” he yelled.

  There were a few gasps from the customers of the bank, who despite the sudden defeat of their captors hadn’t moved. Jules burst out laughing, the first time in days.

  White Hat grew even more furious, his face twisting up into an ugly expression. “It’s true! You best let me up, missy, or when my father finds out—”

  She cocked the hammer of the gun and White Hat wisely stopped talking.

  “You’re in no position to make demands,” she replied. “And you’re not the sons of the Kid. I know at least three bandits who’ve claimed the same. One of them looked to be a full-blooded Indian.”

  “It’s true!” White Hat said.

  She briefly looked into his eyes. He believed it. The Kid had been a legendary outlaw, even more infamous than Jules’ father. The Kid had been hounded by the law for years, but he’d up and disappeared two decades ago, probably killed while hiding out or in a deal gone wrong. Since then, there had been at least a half dozen outlaws who added “the Kid” to their names, from Billy the Kid to the California Kid. They were pale imitations of the original. It didn’t matter to Jules. If these were the sons of the Kid, Jules would eat her hat.

  “Now, listen,” Jules said, her tone sliding from one of amusement to frustration. “I don’t know what your mama said, but you made about two dozen mistakes when you tried to rob this fine establishment. You shot one guard, but you walked in blind, for God’s sake. There could have been three other guards in here ready to shoot you dead. That was your third or fourth error, by the way, not your first, but I’m not in a mood to train you right now.”

  “We—”

  “Shush,” Jules said. “Shooting that guard was a mistake too, for the record. In general, you want to avoid shooting people. If you steal from a bank, they’ll send a few lawmen after you. If you kill a man, they’re apt to send a whole damn posse. You tell me which is easier to escape.”

  Jules looked over at the elderly guard, who still lay on the ground, blood pooling on the floor around him. She felt a stab of pity for him, but pushe
d it down. Pity had no place in this world.

  “So here’s what’s going to happen next,” she said. “I was robbing this place quietly and nicely before you walked in. I just wanted this bag here—” she reached down and scooped it up, stuffing it into a pocket on her dress— “but now I’d like more. A lot more. Your brother is going to kindly collect the rest of the money, and you’re going to give me half of it. In return, I’ll let you up off the floor.”

  “You crazy bi—”

  “Watch it,” Jules said. “I have a gun pointed at your dour, ugly face, and it’d be a shame if I accidentally pulled the trigger. You know how us women are, don’t you? We have such frail and excitable dispositions.”

  “I’m not giving you half!” White Hat said.

  “That’s right, you’re not,” Jules replied. “You’re giving me sixty percent. Every time you open your mouth and say something I don’t like, I take more. How do you like that?”

  White Hat’s face grew beet-red and she waited for him to explode.

  “You can’t just—”

  “Seventy percent,” Jules replied. “I can do this all day.”

  “Shut up, Jacob!” Red Bandanna said from across the room. “Can’t you see she’s a professional? Just do what she says!”

  Jules looked in his direction. She already knew Red Bandanna was the smart one in the family, even though White Hat—Jacob—was apparently the one in charge.

  “For calling me a professional, I will graciously lower my cut to sixty percent again. But that’s as good as it gets, boys. You work for me now. Understood?”

  Red Bandanna nodded eagerly.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Seth,” he replied.

  Jules gestured for him to take his gun. She wasn’t worried he would turn it on her. He wasn’t the hothead in the duo.