Raven's Moon Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Beth Daniels

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Burns and Lea Books

  7919 Niemann Drive

  Louisville, Kentucky 40291

  www.burnsandleabooks.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Raven’s Moon: The Raven Tales Book One/ J.B. Dane -- 1st ed.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9995083-9-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7339806-0-9

  Dedicated to

  my dachshundric nieces

  Gizelle and Gretta Mae

  Oh, and to the rest

  of the family, too!

  Prelude

  Bram Farrell, the man who doesn’t exist. That’s my handle. I’m only a figment of Calista Amberson’s imagination. A figment that’s resulted in millions of rabid fans descending on bookstores to find out what Otherworld baddy she’s cast me against in The Raven Tales.

  Don’t pity me. Pity poor Detroit. Well, fictionalized Detroit. I’m guessing real Detroit lacks witches, faeries, and other legendary types with murderous intent. The clients who show up at Raven Investigations never have a problem as simple as a cheating spouse.

  Things in my world had been quiet lately, which made me nervous. You’d think that after twenty volumes’ worth of situations, enough to leave any bird plucked clean, I’d welcome a break.

  Yeah, right. Like that would happen.

  Calie puts me through hell—frequently. I retaliate with writer’s block, refusing to do what I know will get me flayed, gutted, possessed, crippled, or close to giving those proverbial daisies a push from the wrong side of terra firma. At least on paper.

  I’d been idle much longer than usual, which is why I’d stopped by Calie’s muse’s office hoping to wheedle information about the twenty-first book. He and I both live in the same world, fortunately.

  The muse was leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk, the mockup of the first Raven Tales graphic novel propped on his chest.

  “Look for yourself,” he offered, waving me toward the door that connected to Calie’s place. I hadn’t known for long about the portal’s existence, and I’d been fighting the urge to visit it again. There was no crossing the threshold between my world and the real world, but I’d considered an attempt.

  A fella can dream.

  Even if he’s only alive when the ink hits the page.

  Tonight, my glimpse wasn’t of Calie’s office but of a different room. Cushy place. No expense spared. Lots of windows, and beyond them one hell of a nasty storm raging. It was past midnight, and though I couldn’t see it, I knew the moon had risen. I could feel that it was gibbous and waxing, coming in at around 78 percent illumination.

  How’d I know? Picture me shrugging.

  Calista stood at what was obviously center stage, poised for act one. The way the torrent battered the landscape and rattled against the windows, the act would be a dramatic one.

  I took the position she frequently wrote me into, shoulder propped against the doorjamb, arms crossed over my chest. Total stakeout mode, sans munchies.

  The scene inched toward high drama. The sky cloaked in cloud, the wind drenched with rain, and Calie framed against the violence of it all within the archway that led to the wide patio beyond. She appeared to be transfixed by the scene, which usually meant she was imagining how to use the setting in the next book.

  Then inertia turned to motion. Though I’d been expecting something to occur, it still took me by surprise when her hands fell to the lever door handles, pressed down and pulled them inward, throwing the room open to the storm.

  The storm took the welcoming gesture to heart, roaring into the house, swirling around her with violent results. The long, silken folds of her robe lifted and snapped in the onrush of wind. The white streaks Mother Nature had artistically placed in Calie’s dark tresses flew in unruly tendrils. Within a nanominute she was soaked to the skin, every line of her wizened body outlined by the clinging black gown beneath her robe. The robe, which should have been hanging in sodden folds around her as well, leapt with life, streaming with angel-wing grace behind her.

  In the sky, a smoky roll of transparent cloud flashed briefly with the reflected glare of lightning, followed shortly by an ominous growl of thunder.

  Calie lifted her arms to the storm, then turned her hands from palm up to the sides and brushed her long fingers through the air as if to push the clouds apart.

  And, like the Red Sea obeying Moses, the damned things moved aside, curtains drawn on a stage to display the waxing moon front and center, bathed in cool, calm, pure white light while the night roiled around it.

  “Sister!” Calista cried in welcome.

  Now that was new.

  She’d written similar scenes in some of the tomes I starred in, but in all the years she’d kept me on a leash in her mind, I’d thought only her pen took those rubbishy steps into prose.

  Now she was cosplaying it. Story-wise, magic would follow.

  Still, Calie’s done enough research into the various lunar cults to know that a moon several days shy of being full was a lousy power source. Any wizard worth a bag of philosopher’s stones knows that. Combine this with a genuinely lousy night for conjuring, and she was writing this volume’s villain into the sort of trap Merlin stumbled into.

  Apparently, the old girl cared not for such considerations, for her arms stayed raised in supplication to the storm. Or the moon. Whatever.

  “Sister, have you heard my plea?” Calie’s voice was pitched to a normal tone now, as if she were conversing with someone nearby. As far as I was aware, there was no one else around but me, the figment of her imagination.

  “Shall you grant this wish?” Calie asked. “All that I do, I do in your name.”

  Who the hell was she talking to? A disembodied spirit? Someone who was equally nuts enough to be out in the storm? Hell, gusts were whipping the landscaping into a frenzy!

  Was it a hitherto unknown sister? I lived in Calie’s mind, and I’d never run into a stray memory of a sister. A heck of a lot of discarded lovers, but no sister.

  Extremely uncivilized to invite one over on such a night. Unless she’d passed beyond the physical state and wasn’t the type of spirit for whom one dropped the drawbridge down over the moat.

  Calie closed her eyes and stepped further out into the storm, her miraculously alive cloak flying, snapping, and soaring around her as the rain pelted down.

  Insanity reigned. Pneumonia would no doubt frolic in its shadow. Calie was blind to the possibility of either. If anything, she moved farther from the woman I thought I knew. As though she’d been reenergized, her arms lifted higher, were spread wider.

  “Sister!” she cried once more, voice rising in volume as though she needed to be heard over the storm. “I call on Menily, on Huitaca, Chia, and Ka-Ata-Killa of the council of goddesses.”

  Was it my imagination, or had Calie’s voice caressed the syllables of each name before they were caught up by the wind?

  I knew those names. They were all moon goddesses, though not the ones commonly heard by modern ears. They belonged to the long-dead tribal wilderness of America.

  This wasn’t Calista’s normal mode of plotting a story. She’d never enacted a scene physically before, much less keep secrets from me that involved research into beings I’d be facing down in an adventure. What was my creator up to?

  Beyond her, the moonlight wavered as though disturbed by unseen, vaguely human figures, forms that were mist-like and yet not part of the storm.

  Calie was firmly in chant mode now, for more names dripped free into the night. The goddesses of not exactly kindly religions. What might any of these deities attempt to do to me in Book 21? I was going to get totally screwed in the next volume, and not in a good way.

  Names rilled as Calie plucked deities from more ancient pantheons, her voice as strong as it had been at the start. There wasn’t a hint of the cough that had plagued her these past months. As she added to her tally, the silhouettes of more moonlight beings joined those already formed. They were separate yet joined, pinned by Luna’s spotlight. None moved. They waited as my creator requested that they guide her words, weave a spell.

  I’d mentally been ticking off the names—she’d tallied up thirty-five already—charting the course Calie was taking through godlings’ halls around the world, but that one word shredded my concentration. A spell? Calie was working a spell?

  Holy hell spawn! This had nothing to do with the plot line of a book. This was serious shit!

  Or else it was one seriously dangerous way to research the old ones.

  While I dealt with this mental machete strike, Calista swayed slightly, as though each additional manifestation drew energy from her. Yet she continued, adding more obscure and nearly forgotten goddesses, until she had forty-three deities seeming to hover just beyond the open doors.

  “I petition you, sisters, to make the wish flesh.”

  Her plea was barely voiced when a jag of lightning struck a hapless tree somewhere in the woods that bracketed the house beyond the well-manicured swath of lawn. The crack of the tree’s cry added punctuation to her prayer. The thunderou
s boom that followed seconds later appeared to be an answer from the skies. Considering she’d called back nearly every lunar goddess the planet had known since mankind took a chance on walking upright, it could be nothing else.

  Calie had pitted me against paranormals, demons, and the more vicious beings and creatures of legend in The Raven Tales. Could she be about to throw me into the already-bubbling cauldron of an ancient god in the next book? Or perhaps that of more than one manifestation of a goddess?

  The wraiths gathered in that moonbeam had seemed centered on Calista, but now their attention appeared to shift to where I stood in the doorway. Creepy. Really creepy, considering I was the guy Calie merely pictured propping up the doorjamb. How could they know I was there?

  “Sister!” Calie shouted again into the wind.

  Which of the horde of gathered goddesses had she addressed? Not that they were really separate, considering all names were aspects of the glowing lunar orb above. Well, partial orb. She was one-fifth shy of being full. Yet the building power behind the light, behind those gathered goddesses, was palpable. Even a non-magical human would have felt the weight of it.

  The light crept into the room, covering Calie and casting a long shadow behind her. The shadow touched the floor at my feet. Then Calista shifted slightly to the side, and moonlight struck me as the wisps of the gathered goddesses rushed forward.

  Whether it was the power of the chanted words, the assault by the spirits of nearly forgotten deities, or the stunning effect of the heightened candle-power of that lunar glow, something unseen hit me. It swirled around, dived through me, leaving an unnatural chill working its way through my arms, legs, chest, mind. Felled to my knees, I gripped the doorjamb to keep from falling flat on the faded fibers of Calie’s favorite antique Oushak rug.

  The tips of my fingers tingled. I felt the way the cut of my jacket pulled across my shoulders, the way my toes flexed within my boots as I knelt, determined not to be forced into the prostrate pose of a supplicant worshipper in the onslaught. Fixate on something, moron, I snarled. Fictional experience had to count for something. I knew better than to let any Otherworld type get control of my body or gain a hold on my mind.

  But it wasn’t the goddesses or the moonlight that was the problem. As I stared at the protection symbols the Turkish weaver had incorporated into the design of the rug, the colors mesmerized me. Startling shades and variations that contrasted, complemented, and blended into new hues, colors I had not realized were missing from my monochromatic visual repertoire. They were there now, blazing in the moonlight. As the goddesses dissipated into the night, I saw deep, rich reds, glowing golds, midnight blues, and lush greens mixing with the familiar whites, blacks, and thousands of shades of gray that were all my fictional eyes had ever seen, even though Calie delighted in running through a universe of shades in her descriptions. They’d been words, not colors, to me before. Now they were sensuously real, and they seared my sight with their beauty.

  My sight wasn’t the only sense to suffer turmoil. I’d also suddenly been cursed with a sense of touch, or so it seemed, considering the way the fluted edge of the doorjamb bit into my fingers. My shoulder ached from leaning on that same doorjamb earlier. Feelings of hunger and thirst prodded, lusts I’d never experienced, though on the page I knew I favored mushrooms and peppers on pizza, drank aged Kentucky bourbon, and shared with E.T. a weakness for Reese’s Pieces.

  I could even feel the beat of my heart.

  And I could hear a rush of blood through my veins as my hearing also intensified. The storm I’d watched so casually cranked its volume to a deafening roar. I could hear the rain lash the windows on either side of the open doors, could identify the rattle of drops hurled at the plantings near the house. The wind was a scream and the lightning a veritable front line explosion when it flashed.

  I confess I cowered before these new sensations, arms over my head, trying to protect both eyes and ears but failing miserably. Each bolt Zeus loosed flared with blinding brightness. I could taste the rain in the air, although I was at least twenty feet back from where it invaded the room. Astonishingly, I heard an agonized groan and realized it had originated in my throat.

  Calista stayed silhouetted in the archway, though her back was turned partly away from the storm. In the moonlight, I could see her aging face break into a smile of nearly childish delight.

  “Bram.” She breathed my name in a rather reverent way.

  Only then did it truly strike me.

  A character born on a computer screen, brought to life only in a million print runs in over forty languages, a character who had a Wikipedia entry of his own, did not feel physical discomfort, could neither hear a sound nor identify a scent or taste, and could not be blinded, much less speak and be heard.

  I pushed to my feet. Took a step forward—my first step—stumbled and caught my balance on the back of a chair. The texture of the polished wood, the softness of the cloth and the scent of beeswax polish were nearly enough to unman me. Me! The guy who faced down demons in book after book and limped away only partially the worse for such wear.

  “What...?”

  But Calie had already turned back to the night and lifted her chin to gaze at the still-visible moon.

  “Thank you, sister,” she whispered, drawing her hands together to assume a worshipful stance.

  In the sky beyond, the clouds closed over the lunar face once more. Only the storm remained, and it was moving away. This act of the play had firmly closed.

  But not for me. My story was at Chapter One, and there was a lot of unknown world to cover in a life that might still last for the span of ninety thousand words but not much longer.

  I was her boon, the reason she’d cast a spell. To give me a physical presence in the real world her wish, and it had been granted. Why she’d made the request, how she’d contrived the spell and gathered the power, I had a feeling would be up to me to discover.

  But apparently, when a congress of forty-three goddesses and one insane author put their heads together, a moon registering 78 percent luminescence can work some powerful shit.

  Who’da guessed?

  Day One, October 27

  Was I human now? I doubted it, though what did human feel like? I’d been a creation on paper, just a string of words to describe my actions, my thoughts. Every word credited to me had come from the clatter of a keyboard.

  I was more than that but less than—well, whatever—yet. There was a path that needed to be discovered, a sense of self that was absent. There were too many distractions, too many questions to ask.

  And Calie was in no condition to answer them.

  Once the storm passed and the night quieted, Calie collapsed on the sofa, apparently lacking the strength to make it to her bed. Careless of her drenched state and tangled hair, she simply murmured, “Not tonight, Bram,” and passed out, but not before the plague-like cough made its reappearance.

  When I grabbed the fringed length of fabric tossed decoratively over the back of Calie’s reading chair, the pure softness of the thing against my newly gifted sense of touch was enough to make me forget what I’d grabbed it for. Once I shook free of the mesmerizing experience and draped the cloth over Calista’s unconscious form, I checked the lock on the now-closed patio doors and drew the heavy drapes across every window in the room and in the study next door.

  Security chores seen to, I settled behind Calie’s desk with a bottle of bourbon and a cut crystal tumbler. My hand shook a bit while handling the unaccustomed weight, but once bottle and tumbler kissed and two fingers of Evan Williams bourbon sloshed into readiness, I was girded for still more sensory battering.

  The scent of the bourbon wasn’t familiar, and while between the covers of a book I might have been able to discern the effect that twenty-three years in an oak barrel might have contributed to the finished product, right then I was more interested in the numbing effect it might have.

  It took two drinks to accomplish that numbing, accompanied by a burn in my throat and stomach that hurt and satisfied at the same time. Perhaps I should have found some pizza to accompany the whiskey down my gullet.