Grave Omen (Raina Kirkland Book 3) Read online

  “Great, I want to leave a little early. I have something to discuss with her. Can you get Thomas dressed and his pajama’s packed while I call Damon?”

  “Yes, I can do that,” and with no more words she walked out of my room with her head held high.

  Wow, did I act like that when I took it? Weirdness. “And dress warmly, Katie!” I yelled after her, like a mommy.

  MOMMY ISSUES

  I COULD HEAR Thomas playing in the guest room down the hall from where Mom and I stood in awkward silence. It used to be my bedroom, with soothing green walls and a huge collage of pictures, but now the walls were bright blue and the pictures that made up the collage were in a scrapbook under my bed at home. Katie was waiting for me outside while I confronted my mother. I wish I didn’t have to. I thought we were doing so well. I thought that I understood her and that she accepted me, but evidently I was mistaken.

  Her large black elven eyes stared at the electric kettle on the counter in the kitchen. Her tea cup rested firmly between her hands, ready for the hot water with loose green tea leaves and fresh mint resting in it.

  “So, you’re just going to ignore the question then?” I asked with my hands in my coat pockets. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ignoring me was classic mom. Getting information out of her was always nearly impossible.

  The kettle’s red light went out to show that the water was good and boiled. She set her tea cup down on the counter and poured the water in as she spoke. “I don’t know what to say. The wedding is in a few days. Ruy asked me not to invite you. I thought it would be easier for you if you found out afterward.” Easier on me, right…

  “Ruy asked you not to invite me?” I asked, “And, you just agreed, just like that?” My tone was a mean one. I wasn’t as mad about not being invited as I was about being lied to. I could understand his point. Weddings are supposed to be happy, joyous occasions, and I was just a reminder that three of his friends were dead and I let the murderer get away.

  “He doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of you being there after you helped Nick escape.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I said. “He killed to protect me. If people found out what’s in my blood, I would be in danger, so he killed everyone who knew and then he called to me for help—I couldn’t turn him away.”

  She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. I’d always seen my mom as a strong, stoic and stubborn woman, but Ruy made her weaker somehow. She put up with too much: his dirtiness, his anger issues, his chauvinism. I got to hear all about every offensive thing he did because she had to vent it out with me to deal with him. That’s love for you. “Let me talk to him tonight. I know that if I give him an ultimatum, he’ll agree to let you come to the wedding.”

  “No, I don’t want to go. I just wanted to know that you want me there. That’s good enough for me. I can appreciate his wishes. I’m not angry about that. I just thought—I thought we were beyond petty lies. But, we aren’t, are we? You’re still keeping things from me, as if I were a child.”

  “Some things are best forgotten, Raina.” Mom turned then and with perfectly graceful movements, she sat down at her large wood dining table. As always, incense were burning in a brass holder that sat in the center of the table. The smoke danced up and up, to lose itself in the wrought iron chandelier. Everything about my mom was exotic and charming; from her home, with its bright colors, plentiful plant life and old world antiquities, to her appearance: her large black eyes, gold and black hair and pale skin with a pearly sheen. Tall and curvy, she was so perfectly a blend of witch and elf. “I’ll talk to him, and you’ll be there. With most of the vampires from Darkness attending, I need more people on my side of the aisle.”

  Crap, Darkness! If most of Darkness was in attendance then Mato would definitely be there. Right there were two really good reasons not to be at that wedding. The people Nick killed were well loved citizens of Darkness, a Native American vampire town high on Mount Rainier, hidden in her dense forest. He killed Tasha, their only doctor, and two of her nurses. They were the only people who knew about my blood test results, the only people who knew I was a demigod. I was sure Ruy didn’t tell anyone I had a hand in Nick’s escape to Canada, but I’d feel guilty being in their company all the same. Oh, and don’t get me started on Mato. It was lust at first sight and we both fell hard. He’s Darkness’s vampire Sheriff, a centuries old Native American vampire, too sexy for words. It was too cliché, but I was enamored with him. He was so loving and protective. It was just my luck that he turned out to be a cheating slut. Well, we had a bit of miscommunication, I think. I thought he loved me, only me, and that we had the beginnings of a long monogamous relationship. And, he did love me. We could very well have had a long relationship. But, Mato wasn’t into monogamy, a tidbit of information that he conveniently forgot to tell me before I gave him my virginity.

  “Seriously, Mom, that’s not necessary. I don’t want to make things awkward. Plus, it’s also Ruy’s big day. He has the right to be free of worries and old grudges.”

  “Nonsense. You are my only daughter, and I love you. Also, almost the entire family is coming up from South Carolina. How would I explain your absence?”

  Ah, so there was her real reason, keeping up appearances. She kicked Nick out of the family when we were still teens for some secret reason I wasn’t allowed to know about. And then she kicked me out of her life a couple of years ago, when the vampire infection awoke the demigoddess within me. It scared her too much to be my mother anymore. That was when Adia and my Aunt Fauna stepped up, and watched over me while I was hiding from Raphael. Mom and I were only just now making up. I had to wonder then if she only began talking to me again in preparation for her wedding, and then Ruy had to go and ruin it by forbidding my attendance. If I’m not at her wedding, then it’s just my oldest brother, Tristan, one out of three…Was she just worried some might consider her a failure as a mother? I didn’t want to believe that was her only motive for rebuilding a relationship with me; I couldn’t. She might be calculating, but she wasn’t completely unfeeling. Even so, I gave her pinched brows and narrow eyes.

  She gave my obvious suspicion no attention, and instead began sipping her tea. I could smell the mint from where I stood by the sink. I was going to just walk out of there with a curt goodbye, but something caught my notice. A pair of muddy boots was stashed away under one of the heavy chairs that sat around the dining table.

  “Are those Ruy’s muddy boots,” I asked, but I knew they had to be. “Ewe, there’re dirty socks sticking out of them.” I scrunched up my nose at the very thought of the smell coming from those filthy things. I was so very glad that I’d mastered my super charged senses a long time ago.

  Mom looked around the room before following my eyes to the chairs. She leaned to see them and then shot straight up in her seat. Her anger was both obvious in body language and too potent to keep out of my head. It was a wave of heat that made the room suddenly too uncomfortable.

  “Goddess damn him!” she shouted.

  “So, I guess I should get going.” I began inching my way out of the kitchen.

  Mom stood in a hurry, grabbed a kitchen towel and in one swift motion, picked up Ruy’s boots, opened the kitchen window and tossed them outside, socks and all.

  She was still hot with anger when she turned to me. She motioned for me to hug her. I made my way across the kitchen reluctantly and embraced her. Her body was tense. She and Ruy were going to be fun newlyweds. I could tell.

  Holding me at arm’s length, she asked, “Will you pick Thomas up tomorrow morning then?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. Detective Fillips just said something about mass murder. She won’t give me anything more until I get there. It could be a quick exchange of information, and then yeah, I’ll pick Thomas up in the morning. If Fillips keeps me all night, I’ll be sleeping the morning away.”

  Mom patted my upper arms and smiled, her anger forgotten for the time being. I relaxed a bit. “I�
�ll be expecting Katie to pick him up then,” she said before picking up her cup from the table and taking a sip.

  “Actually, Katie’s coming with me on this one.” Mom gave me a look of disappointment and shook her head. “Hey, don’t give me that look. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She wants to become a hunter, and I’d rather she learn it from me then from some bigot out there.”

  “Really?” Mom asked, giving me the same pinched eye brows and narrow eyes that I was giving her just moments ago. “Do you really think any bounty hunter out there would ever agree to train someone like Katie? Not only is her body weak, so is her mind. No one needs your mind reading abilities to see she’s a perpetual victim.”

  My mom had a point, but she also missed my point. “This is what Katie wants, and I can’t risk that she won’t find a way.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just looking at Katie and seeing yourself, your own need to prove yourself?” I wanted to argue with her, but I couldn’t think of a comeback.

  “And you don’t think I have something to prove?” Katie very nearly yelled from the entrance to the kitchen. “You said it yourself. I have victim written all over me. Everything about me says I’m just waiting to be abused; raped, beaten, tormented. I don’t want that anymore.”

  “And you think hunting and killing other people will make you into a stronger person? That’s a perverted sense of strength, young lady.”

  I had to stop my mom there. I knew that a lot of preternatural folks saw hunters, even me, as an evil, but I didn’t operate like any other bounty hunter. “I don’t kill indiscriminately, and you know that, Mom, so don’t make me out to be a killer.”

  “That you can kill at all is beyond my comprehension. You are an elf, Raina. All violence is against your very nature.”

  Great, here we go again. My mom was half and half, witch and elf, but she was so pious about elf tradition: strict veganism, long hair, gracefulness, bla, bla, bla, but above all else, elves never hurt a living creature, no matter their crimes. Not even in self-defense.

  “But, I’m more than an elf, and every other part of who I am is so much more demanding. The witch in me screams for righteous retribution. The human in me loves too deeply to not risk all. The vampire in me craves the consumption of life and the god in me sees this argument as a trivial waste of our time. This is my life, and Katie’s life and not yours.”

  Mom’s normally perfect posture softened a bit. “Then what are you still standing in my kitchen for? Go do as you please.”

  Katie walked out, but I stayed for a moment longer. “I love you, Mom, but I’m not you. I’ll call you when I wake up tomorrow. Thanks for watching my son tonight.”

  She gave me a sullen nod of her head and sat back down at the table to finish her tea. I watched her for a few seconds more before I headed for the door. Thomas stopped me to say goodbye and give me a hug and kiss.

  “Be safe,” he said.

  I smiled at him. He was my sweet little man, so clever, so thoughtful. He probably overheard our argument and I felt terrible about that. Growing up was hard enough without the troubles of others bearing down on tiny shoulders.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, sweetness,” I said before I closed the door behind me.

  Mom lived just a few blocks from the interstate, and Katie and I quickly found ourselves flying down the freeway, heading toward the Emerald City.

  CAGED

  WE WEREN’T IN Seattle for long. I parked my car across the street from the half court house, half police department that was the Justice Center, when a dozen men and women spilled out of the building and got into six police vans that were parked at the curb. Most of the men and women wore black armored uniforms with EID in metallic blue lettering on their backs, loud combat boots and a gun on each hip. I knew from experience that one gun held silver ammo for were-animals, and the other held iron bullets for all the many flavors of fae.

  It wasn’t hard to find Detective Fillips. She was in the passenger seat of the leading van with a mess of officer’s crowding her window, receiving orders.

  “What’s going on?!” I yelled over the shouting.

  “We received a call from Fall City. Hunters are riding with me. I can fill you in on the way. Jump in the back.” The back door swung open on her word and Katie jumped in after me. Fillips turned in her seat to look at us. “Looks like you two arrived just in time.”

  “In time for what?” asked Katie.

  “That’s what I want to know,” a man grumbled from behind us. I looked back to find three big burly men, bounty hunters. Another one climbed in after us and sat by Katie.

  “We got a call that another cage had been found. This time it’s in Fall City. There really is no rhyme or reason to the locations, is there?” she asked the driver with a deep frown.

  I gave Katie a long face. “Sounds like field work. Do you want to take the car home and I’ll get a taxi afterward?” She shook her head. I opened my mouth to argue with her but I was interrupted.

  “At least y’all will see what we’ve been up against first hand. Pictures don’t do it justice,” said the driver. I recognized him as Justin Wheat, a young police officer fresh from training. He was one of the rare officers who actually asked to be placed in EI. He was a good man, a good cop, and a big joker.

  “Fancy seeing you here, Wheat,” I said with a smile.

  “I work here, Miss Kirkland,” he smiled back.

  Fillips tapped the dashboard. “Take off!” she ordered Wheat, and we sped through the city, onto interstate 90 and across Lake Washington as Fillips unloaded on us the short history of a massive killing spree. Each crime scene was the same and they all told the same story. Twenty people or so were abducted each time. The abductions seemed to be random. The victims were then stripped naked and forced into a small cage. They were sprayed with fresh animal blood, usually acquired directly before they were killed. Then they were sprayed with an unidentified accelerant and set on fire, burned alive. The first cage was found in Port Angeles, and then Belfair. Then they found one in some place called South Bend by the ocean coast, and another in a tiny town called La Grande and now Fall City; five cages in five days. No wonder everyone was freaking out.

  Eventually we found ourselves driving down a road that was normally pitch black in the absence of street lamps, but tonight police cars lined the narrow country road, and they had their red and blue lights blazing through the darkness.

  There were cops everywhere, mostly the local fuzz but EI had a few people on the ground already—a couple of crime scene investigators who I knew as John and Richard. They ran up to us as we climbed out.

  “It’s exactly like all the others, everything,” said Richard, a tall thin man in blue coveralls. John, his mostly silent partner, stood beside him. He was a slightly shorter, tall thin man.

  “Have you been in contact with the local animal stores or shelters?” Fillips asked him.

  “Yup, but they aren’t missing any animals.”

  “I saw an animal hospital maybe a mile back,” said Katie. I really wished she would wait in the van, but she wasn’t having any of that. Because of the potion she was acting braver than she was, and I was hard pressed to deny her anything.

  Fillips smiled at her. “Good, have the locals look into it,” she asked Richard, and he was off. She turned back to us and the other bounty hunters. “Come, on. Maybe you’ll see something we haven’t.” She turned to the field beside the road and followed the well-worn tracks the other police had made.

  I trudged through the mud with Katie and the October wind at my back. The wind sent my soft hair into my face to obscure the view of the structure we were approaching. It wasn’t visible from the road, but the farther we walked into the clearing, the clearer it became. It was a large cage, low to the ground, maybe two feet high. The cage was made out of braided wire, like a fishing cage. Even at night it was a horrific sight to see. I couldn’t imagine stumbling upon it in the day time, with so much unforgiving light
. Little fingers poked out from the woven wiring, blackened and flaking. What was beyond the tiny fingers was a sight that would haunt me forever. I was looking down at the mostly charred remains of almost two dozen people. The bodies were contorted. The flesh was clinging like black and red puff pastry to scorched bones. My heart fell into my stomach and I looked away. Fillips told us what we would find, but being told the facts of something horrible was very different from seeing it for myself. It was all too real now. You would think that I’d be used to seeing the remains of violent deaths, but I wasn’t sure desensitization was possible or even desired.

  “Oh my God, what is that smell?” I heard Katie ask from behind me. I looked back at her. She hadn’t yet seen the cage because her eyes were on her feet, watching each step she took in the treacherous muddy grass. I opened my mouth to voice some kind of warning, but nothing could prepare her for the emotional and psychological toll of what she was about to see.

  “Barbeque,” said Henry, one of the bounty hunters we just met. He was a bulky man, most of the hunters were, but unlike the rest he was actually civil with me. While the other three men avoided my gaze, made hurtful comments or ignored me altogether, Henry treated me and Katie like ladies. He opened our door for us and caught me when I stumbled in the mud. He was a perfect gentleman, so logically I was very suspicious of him.

  “It doesn’t smell like barbeque.” She looked up at him and then followed his eyes to the cage. I watched the horror of it distort her face. I didn’t want to look back at it. I didn’t want to see those delicate fingers gripping the wire so tightly, reaching out for help that never came. I didn’t want to see their faces and broken, burnt bodies. I didn’t want to know their gender or age or names. I wanted to grab Katie and take her home, and at the sight of tears streaming down her face, I might have done just that. But, Fillips put her small firm hand on my shoulder.