Raven's Moon Read online

  I didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t remember that sleep had ever been written into my script in the past. With hours to fill before my creator (in more ways than one, now) stirred, I rifled through her desk, looking for any notes she might have ferreted away about the next book. The search came up empty. I cranked up her laptop.

  Luck was with me. She hadn’t changed any passwords. Not a bit of treasure came to light, though. Not even a tentative title or newly created file. Defeat was difficult to admit, but as the sun cast aside the swaddling clouds and pushed a determined path through a gap in the drapes, I gave up and headed for the kitchen. It was time to test-drive those bright and shiny new senses again.

  The number one item on Calie’s “must have” list was a chef. A status thing, I presumed. The current chef was female. The music spilling from the room indicated she had a weakness for Michael Bublé. Mike’s voice was already stroking the cook’s soul, courtesy of a portable CD player, insisting she should call him irresponsible.

  I knocked on the cabinet nearest the door to get the chef’s attention. Being irresponsible might have resulted in her spilling hot, spitting oil from the skillet she had in hand.

  “Morning,” I called.

  The appearance of a strange man in the kitchen, hours before the mistress ever chose to rise, didn’t faze her a bit. A smile lit her classically molded face as she slid the pan back onto the burner.

  “Oh, you must be the nephew,” she greeted, her accent claiming that she hailed from somewhere in the middle of New England. “The one Ms. Amberson named that character in her books after.”

  Hmm. Seemed Calie had paved the way for my arrival.

  “Yup, that’s me. Bram Farrell,” I said.

  “You must have been little more than a toddler when she started writing,” she declared. “I’ll bet there are even people who think you’re lying when you tell them your name.”

  “You got it. They think I’m fictional.” Which, up until a few hours ago, I had been. Perhaps I still was.

  “I’m P. T. Kosmas.” A hastily wiped hand was extended my way.

  I shook it. “P. T. as in Cruiser?”

  “As in Philomena Theora,” she said. “You can see why I decided to shorten it.”

  “But not to Phil.”

  “Too butch for me. You’re probably looking for a cuppa coffee,” she said, grabbing a serviceable mug from the nearest cupboard. “You take it black like your fictional namesake or with cream and sugar?”

  “Sugar.” Considering my fictional self preferred thick Turkish coffee, which when delivered was already an overly sweet sludge, I’d probably need the two-pronged kick of caffeine and sugar high to survive the day. Dealing with my new senses was not going to be... well, easy hardly described it.

  P. T. motioned me to take a seat at the kitchen island and reached for the already freshly brewed coffee. “You an early bird, then? Ms. Amberson is never up until noon.”

  “Night owl,” I said. The Raven—the moniker nasties knew me best as in the series—stalked night creatures. “Just dealing with a major case of time zone confusion today.”

  Okay, I lied. That also went with The Raven’s territory.

  She slid the mug across to me. It was a promotional product for Raven Takes Rook, the most recent of my fictional adventures. A reproduction of Calie’s scrawled signature was on one side, the book’s cover on the other, featuring a Hunter’s Moon and an artist’s rendition of me. I’d have to find a mirror to see if I looked anything like the guy featured. Somehow, I doubted I did.

  “Then this will be the only breakfast you’ll be needing?” P. T. asked, placing a spoon and sugar bowl next to the mug.

  “I could always adjust my sleep priorities if you’re offering food—or anything else—at the crack of dawn,” I offered, adding a generous scoop of sugar to my coffee.

  That wasn’t a total fib. She was a nicely shaped woman, round in all the right places. Her fair curls clustered at her nape and ears and tumbled over her brow. Her eyes were blue, I suppose, for the shade was a near reflection of the now cloudless sky beyond the broad kitchen window. The come-hither grin curving her lips wasn’t bad, either.

  P. T. chuckled. “Oh, you’ve as wicked a tongue as Ms. Amberson writes for the other Bram, but yes, I am offering breakfast today. It’s closing in on nine, though, which is not exactly the crack of dawn.”

  “Feels like it to me. What are we having?”

  “A nice Mediterranean omelet.”

  “With a side of bacon?”

  She frowned at me, then turned to the ingredients. “You don’t understand what a Mediterranean diet consists of, do you?”

  Considering she’d laid out a selection of fresh vegetables and herbs to be chopped up, I had a pretty good idea.

  “Oh, I’m fine with it, as long as there are three to five pieces of bacon on the plate as well. Carnivores have their needs.” Plus, I was curious to know what bacon really tasted like. With such a bad rep, it had to be a food fit for the gods. Those of Asgard rather than Olympus, of course.

  P. T. blew a stray curl out of her face with a disgusted sound and reached for a chef’s knife. Her wrist action was fast, accurate, and impressive as hell.

  “Bacon isn’t something I keep on hand.”

  “Prejudiced against pig products, huh?” I asked, taking shelter temporarily behind the mug.

  “All I’m saying is that this household gets healthy meals. A bit of chicken, often fish, but in terms of meat, that’s it. Tonight, Ms. Amberson is hosting her lady friends at dinner and requested we have octopus because the doctor told her to increase her iron intake,” P. T. said, totally destroying any desire I might have had for dinner that evening. I’d had to deal with a kraken in the third book in the series, and I didn’t fancy having anything with tentacles anywhere near me.

  That Calie had been to the doctor’s office was news, though. Had she gone about that nagging cough that had bothered her the past few years? I had little practical medical knowledge, but a dearth of iron didn’t seem like something that would be connected with a chronic cough. Had Calie endured more than just a bloodletting for tests?

  “Thanks for the warning.” I raised my mug to P.T. in a salute. “Here’s to finding a steak joint to amscray to this evening.”

  If Calista let me off the leash, that is. She certainly hadn’t gone to the effort required to call me from the shadows to the solid world without a good reason. Would she give me a fond grin and wave me off to find my feet, so to speak, or turn despot and insist I be homebound?

  “There’s a place only a mile away,” P. T. surprised me by saying as she put down her knife and scraped a neat pile of julienned vegetables and shredded herbs into the warming skillet. “The assistant manager went to culinary school with me. I’ll call and make a reservation for you.”

  “Great! My metabolism thanks you.”

  She looked away from cracking eggs into a bowl to study me, one corner of her lower lip caught between her teeth, her head tilted to the side, her eyes slightly narrowed.

  “Now, the question is, are you a toasted bread man or a whole grain muffin man?”

  “A large cinnamon roll with thick cream cheese icing man.”

  “In other words, a culinary philistine and a future heart attack. You should take a note from your aunt’s book,” she suggested.

  Which book? There were twenty of the damn things, and considering that I had eaten, though not tasted, the heaven of a soft, warm-from-the-oven cinnamon roll in more than one adventure, I was pretty sure Calie had a thing for them too. Or perhaps she had had a thing for them. That mysterious doctor’s visit nagged at me.

  “She never used to watch what she ate,” I said. “When did this begin?”

  I was serious. When had Calie begun to develop health problems? It was difficult to remember that while I’d only aged a little more than a year during the progression of the series, she had aged over twenty. Calie hadn’t been young when she began writing me to very profitable life, either.

  P. T. shrugged as she beat the eggs into submission. “No idea. I only took over the kitchen three months ago, but I’m under the impression she’d been trimming a lot of foods from her diet for a while before that.”

  I gulped down a mouthful of coffee. Whatever it was supposed to taste like, I decided this batch was nowhere close to Nirvana.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  Miss Efficiency was adding the eggs to the mix in her skillet, but she spared me a glance back over her shoulder. “Coffee not to your liking? We do have a variety of juices. I make them myself.”

  I pushed the mug aside. “What’s in them? They’re not those noxious things that look like fresh cement, are they?”

  “Pure juice. Nothing added, and any seeds removed. Right now, all I’ve got made up is orange or carrot, though.”

  “Opting for orange, please,” I requested. “It wasn’t the coffee I was commenting on but why Calie didn’t tell me she was worried about her health. I knew about the cough, but she spent years lighting one cigarette from the embers of another. Seemed a logical progression that she’d have throat problems as a result.”

  It was certainly why, in the series, I frequently fumbled for a cigarette or got possessive over any shaman’s proffered pipe. Okay, so the pipes were loaded with damn powerful hallucinogenic shit. Sue me. Maybe I was in one of those dreams and only thought I was real.

  “Your aunt doesn’t seem to be close with family members,” P. T. commented. “I didn’t even know you existed until she told me you’d be coming to stay for a while.”

  A while. That didn’t sound like I had a permanent gig in the real world. Wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Yet.

  “She’s close to her female friends, th
ough,” P. T. continued as she headed to the refrigerator at the end of the long counter. It had two doors and looked capable of housing an abominable snowman. “They get together frequently. When the weather is nice, it’s a picnic in the woods Ms. Amberson orders. There’s a very pleasant, natural clearing there. As I’m heading for home, they troop off with baskets, blankets, and lanterns.”

  “You don’t live on the estate?”

  P. T. returned to the counter with a large carafe of liquid that I suppose was orange in color. There was so much to learn!

  “Oh, now you’re disappointed,” she cooed, setting down the juice and a dinky little glass, gesturing for me to help myself while she turned back to the stove. “No sneaking from the guest room to some servant’s attic room to tempt me into some lurid mischief.”

  I laughed. “Can’t picture you in a dinky attic room, sweet.”

  “But you can see me getting up to mischief?”

  “You said lurid mischief. Was that just to get my hopes up?”

  She turned off the stove burner and whisked the omelet from the skillet, dividing it neatly onto two waiting plates.

  “Perhaps,” she admitted. “I’m not sure I should take anything a confessed carnivore tells me as gospel.”

  “I do have a reputation to live up to,” I said. “Bram Farrell is the—”

  “The Raven,” she said, shaking her head.

  My fictional self was more than merely a carnivore, a scavenger. He was a hunter.

  So, I realized, was I.

  I was rifling through Calie’s financial papers in search of clues to who her doctor was, and whether he specialized in anything, when the doorbell pealed. A second later, P. T.’s voice blasted at me from the intercom on the desk. “I’m in the middle of kneading bread. Could you get that, Bram?”

  Having no idea whether there was a button I should push to answer, I simply yelled, “Got it!” at the top of my lungs and pushed out of the comfy office chair. I’d only reached the study’s open door, though, when I heard voices in the entryway.

  “Don’t you dare ask me what I’m doing here, Calista Amberson,” a woman’s voice growled. “You knew I wouldn’t be able to wait until tonight to find out how things went. If, that is, you had the strength to do it yourself. I told you a group effort was needed.”

  “You could have called,” Calie said at her most arrogant.

  This would be interesting. I assumed the same stance I’d had when the moonlight whammied life into my fictional self the evening before. The sensation of the sharp edges of the doorjamb stabbing into flesh nearly made me reconsider. The stance was natural, though. Calie painted me thus poised, while on stakeout somewhere, in nearly every volume of The Raven Tales.

  The unknown woman snorted inelegantly at the very suggestion of picking up the phone and brushed past Calista. “Patience might be my middle name, but it isn’t a virtue I’ve ever nurtured, dearest, as you know quite well.”

  “Patience has never been your middle name, but judge for yourself, Delia,” Calie invited, and gestured dramatically to where I stood. How she’d known I’d be in that spot, I’ve no clue. Probably just expected that I’d materialize where she wanted me. “Bram, meet your... hmm... distant cousin Delia Maddox.”

  The distant cousin swept down on me in a wave of perfume.

  “Oh, my!” she gushed.

  I straightened and stepped away from my convenient prop, hand extended to do things properly. The woman ignored my mitt and circled around me, taking an inventory of everything else in sight. I feared for a moment she’d decide a fondle would clarify what her eyes told her. Rather than a grope, she settled for poking one well-manicured, bloodred, lacquered claw into the center of my chest.

  “Oh, he is real!” she exclaimed, whirling to face Calie.

  “You doubted me?” My creator sounded honestly surprised. “After all the things we’ve done over the years, I’d—”

  “We did those things together, sister. But this... this...” She waved distractedly in my direction.

  “This,” I pointed out, “is standing right here, you know. Sight, sound, touch: all came with the package deal.”

  In fact, to prove it, I was rubbing the aching spot where she’d nearly impaled me with her fingernail.

  Delia cocked her head to observe me further. “I don’t remember that he was this touchy in the books, Calista.”

  “He was,” Calie said. “You don’t remember because it wasn’t directed at you personally.”

  “Still standing here,” I reminded.

  “Yes.” Delia sighed, this time in wonder, as she turned to me. “Isn’t Calista marvelous? I never would have believed it was possible, but Calie always planned to make you flesh. I don’t know what took her so long.”

  “It would only work when I required him here,” Calie explained.

  “I was forgetting that,” Delia admitted.

  “Required me for what?” I demanded. Knew a pound of flesh would be due for my arrival in the physical world. Just hoped it wasn’t a literal cut of personal beef.

  “You’ll find out in time, dear,” Calista soothed.

  Didn’t soothe me in the least. In fact, I felt a chill run up my spine. This did not bode well for continued existence.

  “You need to learn this world first,” she said. “In fact, I was about to send you out to explore.”

  That didn’t sound too bad. In fact, I was anxious to venture out.

  “Beelzie!” Calie called.

  On the floor above, I heard a hinge creak, then a scrambling of clawed feet and a thundering on the hardwood floor. The tip of a dark snout appeared. Then the rest of the creature trundled into view as it lumbered down the stairs.

  “A dog?” Seemed incredible that she had one.

  “More than merely a dog,” Delia said.

  The pooch had traversed the staircase now and stood in a threatening stance, four paws planted on the rug, a growl emanating from deep in its chest. The creature was a deep-space sort of black, his coat glistening with a sheen very like the moonlight of the evening before. His lower jaw was burnt caramel colored, but it was the eyes that weren’t right in the face of any dog that really drew attention. They were bloodred. Floppy black ears and a long, curving, non-feathered tail completed the picture.

  The beast would have been intimidating even without the low growl had the dog not been less than a foot tall, though far longer in length.

  “A dachshund? You want me to take a doxie for walkies?” I demanded. A man had his reputation to maintain. Well, at least the reputation he’d gained at the bookstore.

  “Beelzebub is not a dachshund,” the ladies insisted in unison.

  “He’s a hellhound,” Delia said.

  “A modern hellhound,” Calie added. “Did you think they all looked like rottweilers?”

  I’d met a few hellhounds in my years adventuring as The Raven, and every single one Calie’s pen had described looked more demon than any sort of dog, therefore the answer was simple.

  “I’ve never run up against one like this, as you very well know.”

  I stared at Beelzebub, and he showed me even more teeth. “Has he been fed lately?”

  “Beelzie has a special diet. He doesn’t eat snarling fictional heroes,” Calie said. It sounded a lot like a snarl when she said it, too.

  “Does he know that?” I demanded.

  “Beelzie. Leash,” she ordered.

  And like the good dog I doubted he was, the short-legged hellhound trotted off to the kitchen. I heard P. T. greet him with pleasure, giving the beast a gushing welcome that no doubt involved a tummy rub. “Who’s a good boy?” she cooed, and the damn pooch’s answering yip sounded anything but demon bred.

  Of course, the fact that there was a demon on this plane sorta answered something I’d been wondering about: Were there Otherworld beings in the real world? If the hot dog from Hell was any indication, the answer was, yup.

  “I’m sending Beelzebub with you to ensure that you come to no harm,” Calista said.

  Me? Ah, Raven, remember?

  “This isn’t your world,” she continued.

  Damn right, it wasn’t. This one should be a hell of a lot tamer! Even if there were Otherworlders in it.

  “And if anyone asks if those eyes mean he has a contagious disease?” I essayed.

  “Birth defect,” she said. “He’s missing some DNA link or something. Babble anything that sounds like science. Most people will tune you out.”