Grave Omen (Raina Kirkland Book 3)

by Diana Graves

  Nick sighed and looked at Kamaria before looking back down at me. “You don’t feel much like eating, do you? I don’t blame you.”

  “How did I get here? I mean, how did you get my body?” I asked.

  “I took it from the men who killed you,” he said. “After I killed them.”

  “Why are we here, at Kamaria’s Café?”

  Nick looked at the older woman warmly. “Kamaria is the only person in my life who never let me down. When Mom and Dad shunned me, she took me in, she saw to my wellbeing.”

  “Your family attracts drama like flies to shit,” Kamaria said and Nick smirked, because it was true, too damn true.

  “Maybe we’re cursed,” Nick shrugged. He was joking, though his words made me think for a moment, but damn if I knew who my parents or grandparents could have pissed off so badly.

  “How was death for you?” Nick asked.

  “I went to Hell.”

  He gasped. “No! You’re the best person I know.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. As a bounty hunter, I killed people for a living, bad people, but people all the same. “Hell wasn’t such a bad place. It was wonderful actually. It was very green. Even the sky was a deep aqua green,” I said remembering the lush beauty in perfect detail, the sounds of the forest and the feel of the dewy grass on my naked body. I also met the goddess who made me a demigod while there, Melpomene. She spoke to me, but damn if I could remember what she said. I just remembered the look of her, a pale giant with dark hair and red eyes.

  Kamaria put up her hand. “You may not feel like eating, dearie, but you must heal, and for that you need food. Try the ambrosia first.” She unscrewed the jar of odd looking pink goop.

  “Ambrosia grows wild on the foothills of Mount Olympus in Greece. It’s the only place in the world that it does grow,” Nick explained. “And only one company harvests it for the gods, and they don’t sell it to mere mortals. It was not easy getting my hands on this much of it. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get it,” he said with a distant look in his eyes.

  Kamaria handed Nick a spoon and soon a bit of pink stuff was held before my mouth on a metal utensil. I sniffed it and frowned. It smelt like a horrid mix of lemon grass, strawberries and roses. The very smell of it repulsed me. “There is no way I’m putting that stuff in my mouth.” Nick grimaced and moved to force feed me. “Do you want me to puke on you?”

  Kamaria pursed her lips. “Nil.”

  Nick groaned and set the spoon in the jar of Ambrosia. “Let’s try the blood then. I bought it from the grocery store a few blocks away,” he said as he unscrewed the top of the jar, but before he could even take the lid off I somehow found strength enough to grab it from his hands with vampire fast reflexes that tore at my stitches. I didn’t care. I could smell the sweet metallic scent of the blood and I was overtaken with an awesome hunger. I wanted, needed to drink it down, all of it! With the heavy jar to my lips I took in the blood as fast as I could; gulp after heavenly gulp until I was left sticking my fingers in the jar and licking them clean to get every last drop.

  “Well, vampire organs it is,” said Nick.

  “It’s almost daylight,” said Kamaria.

  “Raina’s not ready to be moved just yet. Is it okay to have her here for another day?” Nick asked.

  “Child,” Kamaria said. “Of course it is. Now, I better get cleaned up and get my store open. You two need to get to sleep.” And with that said, she left us.

  “We should go to sleep,” said Nick, but I grabbed his arm before he could leave me.

  “How long have I been dead?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer me. Instead he looked to a window, thickly covered by black drapes to keep the sun out. “We should get to sleep.”

  I shook my head. “How long have I been dead, Nick?”

  He sighed. “I was going to put you back together right after you died, but as the days went by I just—wanted you to rest in peace. Plus, I didn’t trust that it would work, sewing you up like that. There isn’t much written on the subject of resurrecting demigods. From what I could gather, as long as there’s a body the soul will come back. It’s as if the body acts like some kind of beacon. All I had to do was study your anatomy. It was like putting together a two-thousand and seventy-five piece 3D puzzle made of frozen flesh.”

  “Frozen?”

  “I had to put you in the freezer to keep you fresh. But the longer you stayed gone the more I thought you were better off dead. The world’s a shit hole.” He looked to the clock on the wall. “I worked on you for ten straight hours. Toward the end you started to ripen a bit.”

  Ewe. I cringed. “How long? How long was I dead, Nick?”

  “Five.”

  “Days, weeks?” He looked to the floor with a long face. “Shit, five months!”

  “Years,” he said softly.

  I was stunned into silence for a moment. Five fucking years. It didn’t feel like five years. It barely felt like five minutes. What, what about my kids!? What about Damon, the man I love, the father of my children. I’ve been dead for five years!?! No doubt, I had a funeral and everything. My eyes were wide with distress. My heart thudded in my chest. I grabbed at Nick’s shirt so he couldn’t leave before he answered me. “What’s happened to my family, Nick?”

  He grabbed my hands and gently loosened my grip on his shirt. “I don’t know. Kamaria said Damon came into the café the other day for coffee and he seemed fine.”

  “Fine?” That bothered me for some reason. “Damon was here, at the café while my body was frozen in Kamaria’s freezer and he was fine?”

  “Well, it’s not like he knew you were in the freezer. He just thought you were…”

  “Dead,” I finished the sentence for him. Thinking too hard about my family, I absentmindedly let Nick walk away from me. Isobel was only a few days old when I was killed. Now she’s five. And poor Thomas. He’d lost his entire family before Damon and I took him in as our adopted son. He’d be thirteen now.

  “Raina, get some sleep,” Nick said from someplace unseen.

  “I can’t rest without seeing them. I want to see them, Nick. They need to know that I’m alive.”

  He didn’t respond for a time and I began to think that perhaps he left the room or fell asleep, but eventually he said, “We need to know who we can trust before we let the world know that you’re back. Raphael betrayed you. He gained your trust, he got close, he got into your head and then he had you killed. We can’t be sure he was working alone. Are there others, other people who you’re close to that were plotting against you?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone else could have secretly wanted me dead, but I couldn’t even begin to make a list of likely suspects. I could make a list of people I knew for certain would never betray me, and Damon was at the top of that list.

  “Get some rest, Raina. We’ll talk when the sun goes down,” Nick said.

  I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to scream my frustrated emotions, but I didn’t. I left it at that. He couldn’t possibly understand how important seeing my kids was to me. He wasn’t, nor would he ever be a father.

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