Grave Omen (Raina Kirkland Book 3) Read online

  GRAVE

  OMEN

  A RAINA KIRKLAND NOVEL

  Book 3

  By Diana Graves

  Copyright © 2013 Diana Graves

  All rights reserved.

  Kindle Edition

  ♦

  License Statement

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Disclaimer

  This book is a work of pure fiction. Characters, places and incidents are creations of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to people, living or dead, businesses, events or places is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledges

  To my family and friends. Thank You.

  ♦

  Other Works

  Fatal Retribution

  Mortal Sentry

  Deadly Encounters

  Toxic (Coming Fall 2015)

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SHE’S BACK

  LIKE ANY OTHER

  A BAD CALL

  MOMMY ISSUES

  CAGED

  IT WAS JUST A DREAM

  MOM’S REQUESTS

  EVERETT

  HOTEL POLICY

  TALKING SHOP

  BROTHER COUSIN

  TRIVIA

  SHOT

  I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS…

  DREAMING OF HIM

  DEMONS COME AT NIGHT

  HE’S BACK

  LEAH

  A DEATH FOR A LIFE

  BLUE MOON CAFÉ

  TAKING SHAPE

  DRAKE’S BANE

  DAMN DEMON

  KILLING RAINA KIRKLAND

  UNWANTED COMPANY

  SHE’S COMING

  BREATHE

  LOOPY

  CHANGING PLANS

  ABOUT BARGUESTS

  A LONG DAY

  ONLY GABRIEL

  HOLIDAY IN DARKNESS

  A STROLL WITH MELVERN

  WITH HIM

  A MEETING OF MINDS

  ALL FOR NAUGHT

  COMING TO TERMS

  HER WEDDING

  MY TRAP

  PLANET HELL

  DEADLY ENCOUNTERS: CHAPTER ONE

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  SHE’S BACK

  RAPHAEL WAS AN angel once, but not anymore. He was a demon from hell or Tartarus, or whatever the hell you call it. He came from the place dead people go when they’ve been very naughty. He wasn’t as scary looking as when I’d first met him. Hell, he was almost attractive, but that old familiar terror ran up my back and filled my belly with lead all the same. On the outside he looked like any other man. But he wasn’t. He was alien. The air was thin and electric. He was an otherworldly being of power and malice. Standing in his presence was the most frightening thing I’d ever experienced in my life, and I’d been through some scary shit. He pursed his pouty lips on his oh-so-serious face as I climbed out of the hotel bed naked. Damon slept soundly, and I could guess that the demon had something to do with that.

  I had a heavy gun in my hand, for what good it did me. I’d already shot him once and he just pulled the deformed bullet out of his chest and laughed at me. The damn gun was just a useless paperweight. I set it on the nightstand and made my way to the luggage at the foot of the bed.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I asked. I gave the demon my back as I pulled a dark blue night gown out of my bag and slid it on over my head. I was trying to be brave. It was a personal rule of mine to never let anyone know just how scared I was of them. Anyway, if he was going to kill me he could do it easily enough no matter which way I was facing.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your dreams, Raina. I wouldn’t have come, but I don’t have time enough to waste on sleep.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He waved away my question with a graceful hand. “I’ve been unfair to you,” he said, and he took a seat at the little table in the far corner of the hotel room. Crap. I didn’t want him getting all comfy and whatnot. “I said things out of anger.”

  I leaned my back against the wall with my arms crossed under my breasts. “You mean, when you told me you were going to kill me if I didn’t save your wife?”

  He smiled, and I had to admit that it was a nice one. “Yup,” he said, and then his face was serious again, but not serious-serious, sad-serious. “I knew she was going to die. You couldn’t have saved her, no matter what. If she wasn’t dead already she was nearly there, but I threatened you anyway. It was the actions of a desperate man.”

  “So, why the deal?” I wanted to be brave again and take a seat at the table. If this was going to be a long conversation I wanted to sit, but I couldn’t make myself budge from the wall. It was cool and solid and a reminder that this wasn’t a nightmare. “You said you’d kill me if I didn’t adopt your grandson to make us even-steven, even though he’d already been adopted by Damon.”

  Raphael blinked slowly and took a deep breath. “Please sit.”

  Well, now that he wanted me to sit, I didn’t want to. “No, thanks. Please answer the question. If your threat was hollow, why the deal?”

  “Sit, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me, and I’ll sit,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

  He smiled again. “You do like to play games, don’t you?”

  “A bit.”

  He looked down at his hands resting on the table. “Angels and demons can’t tell the future, but we can see all the pieces on the board. We can guess at outcomes and place our pieces accordingly.”

  I scoffed out loud at that. “So, all the world is one big game of chess to you and I’m just another pawn?”

  He stood up and came to me. I would have backed up, but I was already against the wall. Damn it.

  “Raina, I do believe you have esteem issues. You’re a demigod vampire hybrid. You are the first of your kind. You’re no one’s pawn…A knight maybe,” he said as an afterthought.

  He was three feet from me, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep my cool if he took another step. The air was so electrified that it was warm when it entered my lungs, making the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  Still, I couldn’t keep my smart comments to myself. “You sure know how to butter a girl up,” I said after I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “So, what do you want from me now, a kidney?”

  “Want from you? Nothing, nothing more.” He paused for a moment, long enough for me to think I should fill the silence with something. But before I could get another smart comment out he interrupted me, “You asked me why I forced you to take in little Thomas, even though I was in the wrong, even though he already had a new adoring father. The answer is simple. I had a demigoddess in one hand and a small boy in the other. People may want to hurt Thomas in the future. Damon is a capable enough beast, but I think you might be a more effective threat against those people.”

  “Who would want to hurt him?” He shrugged; a simple gesture for a demon. It didn’t mean that he didn’t know. It meant that he wasn’t going to tell me. I dropped the issue. I was pretty sure I could come up with a list of likely suspects anyhow. Anyone his late-malevolent grandfather, Admetus, might have slighted (that was a lot of people) and anyone who
hunts werewolves for sport (also, a fairly long list). “Why are you here?”

  “To make us even-steven,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “So, what, I get a wish?”

  He chuckled. “You’re fun. We should hang out more often.”

  My eyes went wide and my pulse quickened. The thought of seeing more of him was not a comforting one. “Sorry, I’m booked up for this lifetime,” I said with a cheesy please-don’t-kill-me sort of grin.

  He smiled again and moved closer. I made some small involuntary noise of protest. He was inches from me, looking down at me from an impressive height. “Your next life then…” The look in his eyes was serious for a moment, and then he smiled wide. He was playing with me. I wasn’t having fun. “No wishes. I’m not a fucking genie. I’m going to tell you something important, and then I’m going to go. I’ll answer no questions and I won’t repeat myself, so listen closely.” I gave him a silent nod. “You’ll want to come closer.” I leaned in a bit, away from the wall. “Closer,” he whispered.

  I looked at him with a raised eye brow. “What is it?”

  He raised his hand and slid the back of it against the front of my gown, caressing the curve of my large breasts, my stomach and to lower parts. I was going to be sick. “Adia,” he said with his hand firmly against my lower abdomen. “She’s not dead anymore.”

  LIKE ANY OTHER

  IT WAS A night like any other before it for months. My half-sister and my adopted son were setting the dining table for dinner as I sat hunched over a keyboard with my face glued to the monitor. I was hunting for yet another specialist in vampire lore. The clanking sound of dishes was a slight distraction from the article I was reading. A man named Kyle Ricco had himself a fancy doctoral degree in comparative religions and vampirism. I wasn’t impressed. I’d spoken to more than four dozen professors, doctors, high priests, occult enthusiasts and so many other sorts of people, and none of them could tell me how a dead-dead vampire, a vampire that had no body left and possessed none of her subjects, could still be alive…or come back to life.

  They all agreed that vampires had no living soul, and thus one could not live on after its body was gone unless it was feeding off of one of its vampire children, and Adia wasn’t, not anymore. Not after she drove her brother mad, causing him to murder, rape and torture indiscriminately for years until she finally released him and died truly. But, Raphael said she was alive, somehow, somewhere. At first, finding her was an all-consuming obsession for me. She was my maker, my vampire mommy, and I had to find her. Be it through our biological or psychic connection or simply because she was there for me when most weren’t, I loved her too much to stop looking. But I had a life, too. I had a family to take care of and a job to do. Adia wasn’t the only person I hunted. I also hunted monsters on occasion. So, I dedicated an hour before dinner to Adia and nothing else. Almost every night at five I had a date with my computer and the World Wide Web. But after looking for so long, about eight months, I was beginning to think Raphael had lied to me.

  I’d read so many articles on vampires from around the world that the information was beginning to sound like a broken record in my mind. Sure every culture had a different perspective, but it was like listening to the same song over and over again being played by different instruments or sung by different people. They all had similar origin stories based on blasphemy or betrayal to one god or another. To some people they were seen as monsters that were more animal than man, with grotesque animal parts and all. To others they were merely bloated corpses prowling the night and spreading disease. It was actually only recently that vampires were seen as sex symbols in America and some European countries…seducing women with their vampire wiles. The information was colorful and entertaining enough, but I was growing tired of reading such obvious myths. Every story held in it small nuggets of truth, but nothing useful. And as I just said, tonight was no different from any other. Doctor Ricco’s article on the impact vampirism had on cultural development in the Middle East sounded like an interesting topic, but it wasn’t, not in the way the doctor presented it. The article wasn’t written in layman terms, making it too laborious and boring to keep my attention. I got the impression that he was trying very hard to find the most unusual way to make the simplest of points. Oh goody, I was craving a headache…

  “Mom! Dinner!” shouted Thomas from the dining room.

  I kept reading, but his article was hardly comprehensible. It wasn’t written for normal people to read, and it was hurting my brain to try.

  “Mom!” Thomas called again. “We made pasta!”

  “That’s great!” I yelled back over my shoulder. “I’ll be there in a moment!”

  Against my better judgment I decided to contact the good doctor. Perhaps his tactic of using obscure words was effective, because I couldn’t help but wonder if this man was smart enough to have some real answers. But there wasn’t an email address or phone number given with the article; just a web link to the museum he worked at in Boston, and they had a page with their staff’s contact information. I typed up a quick email and sent it off just as Damon walked into the library and leaned against my desk.

  “Adia won’t become any more lost if you stop searching for her just long enough to have dinner with your family,” he said. His voice was low and masculine.

  I smiled up at him from my seat. Even in the soft light of my desk lamp and the glow from my monitor, Damon was as black as pitch minus the luster. He was a barguest, an endangered race of shape shifters from the British Isles. Every inch of his body was smooth and as black as the living night. Only his bright smile stood out against his pitch complexion.

  “I have a long night ahead of me, Hon. I want to spend as much time with you as I can,” he said with a striking smile. He worked at Bastion Fatal, Tacoma’s most powerful vampire collective. He was a teacher to new vampires and a therapist to anyone who needed someone to talk to. His working hours were odd: Monday through Friday, from ten at night to six in the morning.

  “You’re right. Let’s eat,” I said, and I stood to kiss him. He wrapped his arms around my waist and the strength in his embrace and the familiar taste of his lips made me a little light headed. We lingered there for a moment, enjoying the closeness that I just couldn’t get enough of these days. I’d always had a healthy sex drive, but for the last couple of months everything he did made me purr like a kitten. He could touch my arm and I’d be ready and willing.

  “Mom!” Thomas shouted again, and with that the kiss was over. Damon smiled—no doubt happy that he had that effect on me—and made his way to the dining room. After I bent down and closed the internet browser, I did too.

  Anyone with even a smidgen of elf blood in their lineage can hardly stomach animal products. As part elf, I was a vegan (even though I secretly craved meat in a big way). The rest of the household was not. So, when Katie first took on the responsibility of making dinner every night I refused to let her fuss over me, and I insisted on preparing my own food. However, Katie said it was fun to find vegan alternatives to traditional dishes. Nuts to that. But, I had to admit that it was a nice change from my usual, frozen bean burrito and french-fries. I did feel guilty for the extra effort she took for my sake, but she took pride in making two dinners: one with animal products and one that was one-hundred percent vegan.

  Tonight’s dinner was as lovely as ever. Katie had really outdone herself with an authentic Italian dish full of artichoke hearts, kale, olives, pasta and cheese. For my dish she replaced the cheese with veggie cheese from a local specialty store. It was pricy, but it was also the only cheese substitute that I’d found that melts well. And, Katie says it tastes like cheese. I’d have to take her word for it.

  The pasta dish sat in the center of the table, with salad to its left and bread to its right. Before we dished out the food we prayed, and our individual religious leanings were quite evident just by the look of us. Katie; all sorts of Anglo-Saxon with her long dirty blond hair, big brown eyes and peti
te frame, prayed to Yahweh, the Christian god. Thomas; looking every ounce of the Greek boy he was with dark hair, tan skin and almond shaped hazel eyes, prayed to Apollo, the god of his birth parents. I prayed to the goddess, Mother Earth, because I was a witch, a crappy witch, but a witch nonetheless. I couldn’t hide it even if I tried, not with my dark red hair with gold steaks and mahogany red eyes. Damon prayed to no god. Most faeries didn’t and barguests are fae. He sat quietly until we each finished our practiced lines of thanks and blessings. My aunt asked me once why I didn’t teach my beliefs to Thomas or Katie, or Damon for that matter. The answer was simple. They know who I am and what I believe, and if they were interested, they would have said so. They haven’t. She wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Oh well…

  “Oh my Goddess,” I said as I took in the first tantalizing, flavorful bite of Katie’s dish. The zing of the Greek olives and the texture of the pasta combined with the sharp flavor of the faux-cheese was enough to send my head back with eyes closed. It was the vampire in me that had such heightened senses. It made everything just more. It was like the difference between DVD and Blu-ray. All of my senses were so much sharper: hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, and my sixth sense, my empathic ability to read emotions became something so much more intrusive and dangerous. I could read and control living humanoid minds. It wasn’t something I advertised or used often. People didn’t react well to that tidbit of information about me.

  “Raina?” I heard Katie say. I was digging into my food like a woman on a mission, only half listening to Damon and Thomas talking quietly about school and the fast approaching Halloween festivities, or as we witches call it, the Sabbath of Samhain. I still didn’t know what I wanted to dress up as, but Katie was going to be Marceline from the cartoon “Adventure Time” and Thomas was going to be Finn from the same cartoon. They wanted to use body paint to make Damon yellow so that he could be Jake. Jake was a shape shifting magical dog, so the character actually suited him.

  I looked up to find Katie staring right at me. She looked gravely serious, but that was normal for Katie.