Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1)

by Jen Rasmussen

  My stomach flipped, and it took a few more deep breaths before I could speak again. Cooper knowing I was a witch was one thing. Knowing I was only half human was quite another. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

  He gave me an impatient look. “We have a lot of ground to cover, and it’s already been a long day. You really want to waste time playing games?”

  I shrugged. “All right, then. How did you know?”

  “You mean besides those orange eyes of yours?”

  “They are not orange. They’re brown.” But the fact is, they’re a lot closer to orange than brown. And plenty of people find them unsettling. Not very many jump to the conclusion that I’m not human because of them, though. (The occasional would-be pickup artist citing them as evidence of possible angelic origins notwithstanding.)

  But then, I realized as I fully processed what he’d said, it might take one to know one. I studied Cooper, the body that could have been chiseled from marble, the eyes so intensely aqua-blue they could have had their own career. Genetic gifts, to be sure. But from where?

  “You’re not human either. Are you…” I trailed off, feeling like Are you whatever I am? was a weird thing to ask. I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t actually know what I was.

  But he seemed to understand the question. “No. I’m guessing you’re a phantasm. Or half?”

  “Half,” I agreed.

  Half devil. Devilborn, my mother had called me. Always with affection and pride. Others had used the nickname without such fondness.

  Phantasm was new to me, and I quite liked the word. But I resisted the urge to ask Cooper to tell me more. I didn’t want to talk about anything so personal with him. I was already feeling agitated just by his presence, and not because of who he was, or even because of everything that had happened. I hated having anyone in my apartment. Instead I threw the focus back on him. “You?”

  “I’m…” Cooper began, then stopped and ran a hand through his already messy hair. “My Grandad always called our kind vitals. And Kestrel’s kind feeders. I’ve never really liked either word, but I don’t have better ones.” Like a dog trying to settle down, he walked a few laps around my tiny living room before sitting on the couch. “I don’t even know the language of the world we’re from. It’s been gone for centuries. I was born here.”

  “But your kind and Kestrel’s come from the same world?” I asked.

  None of this shocked me the way it might have someone else. The idea of worlds other than ours was something I’d been comfortable with for as long as I could remember. Heck, I’d spent countless hours as a child knocking on the backs of closets, tapping on looking glasses, and jumping into puddles, trying to get to those worlds. And although everyone called him a devil, I’d always been pretty sure my father wasn’t actually from the Hell.

  “Same world, two beings that evolved differently,” said Cooper.

  “What did she want from you?”

  For a second his eyes looked guarded before he shrugged. “She’s a Wick. Hunting Blackwoods is what they do. Call it a clan rivalry.”

  “Hunters… feeders…” I said. “Does that make you the food?”

  He smiled, more with his eyes than his mouth. “Actually, it kind of does. They live on vitality.” When I looked blank, he added, “Life force, energy, mana—”

  “Did you just say mana?” I knew the word; I’d played my share of RPG’s. But Cooper Blackwood didn’t seem like the nerdy type.

  “Whatever you want to call it,” he said. “The same energy you call on to do magic.”

  “So they’re like vampires, except they suck on mana instead of hit points.” I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. There was only the couch, and I didn’t want to sit beside him.

  Cooper chuckled. “That’s a good way to sum it up.”

  “But these Wicks, they go after Blackwood vitality, specifically? That seems weird.”

  He hesitated, then sighed. “No, it’s not that simple. But I’m debating how much to tell you. I’m sort of honor-bound not to share certain things.”

  “Then you shouldn’t.” I said it with complete conviction, suddenly kicking myself for ever thinking I wanted to ask questions. Why had I even let him in?

  Curiosity is dangerous. Never let it trick you into inviting darkness over your threshold. Balls, Verity, you know this.

  Whatever Cooper was involved with, I was sure I wanted no part of it. I’d already stabbed somebody. Me, who avoided even talking to people if I could help it, had stuck a knife in one of them. I felt dizzy, and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. I stared at my fingernails. Was there blood under them?

  “No, I shouldn’t,” Cooper agreed. “But you need to know what you’re up against. If Kestrel survives what you did to her, she’ll come after you.”

  “And if she doesn’t?” I asked, feeling a little guilty for the flare of hope I felt. “She might just die, and that’ll be the end of it. She might be dead already.”

  “She might,” agreed Cooper. “It’s entirely possible she was wounded so badly that the best she could do was go to ground somewhere I wouldn’t find her, and die. But if that’s the case, it’s even worse for you.”

  “How?”

  “Her clan will avenge her. She was probably hunting alone, and that’ll buy you some time, but only so much. They’ll find out where she was. They’ve got trackers and seers. If they ever find her body, they’ll figure out it was you who killed her. You need to get out of here, one way or the other.”

  I shook my head hard enough to bring on another wave of dizziness. “You want me to run away?”

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I want you to come with me. I’ll have to move on, now that they’ve found me. A witch with your kind of power could be useful to our cause.”

  Our cause.

  No. Absolutely not. I was not the kind of girl who committed to causes. Causes were the number one cause of death.

  What I really wanted was for Cooper to go away, so I could put some wards up, write some spells of protection, and start some more ink. Best to convince him that I was useless. “What do you mean, my kind of power? I didn’t use any magic against her. I just stabbed her. Terry could have done the same.”

  He frowned. “Yeah, now that you mention it, and you only did that much after you stood there staring like an idiot for a couple of minutes first. Why is that, exactly? Because you should have been able to flick a wrist and send Kestrel Wick straight to her grave.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I know how powerful you are. I can sense vitality, and you have a ridiculous amount of it.” He gave me a warm smile, one I struggled not to return. The last thing I needed was to be exchanging tender looks with the likes of Cooper Blackwood. “But I do thank you for sharing it so I could heal up,” he said.

  “Yeah, that was… a first for me.” Healing was one thing, with herbs and potions and sometimes even spells. But I’d never heard of a spell that could actually steal life from one person and give it to another.

  “Normally I wouldn’t need it, but she’d just taken so much from me,” Cooper said.

  “So you’re a mana vampire, too.”

  “Only in extreme circumstances. My kind don’t expend vitality doing magic or anything like that. We direct it all inward.”

  “Hence being able to heal yourself.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, you’re welcome, I guess,” I said. “And I was not staring like an idiot.”

  “You sure as hell weren’t doing any magic.”

  “My magic isn’t really good for emergencies. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work?” he asked.

  “In advance. I’m a storyteller.” I reached inside my shirt, into the special pocket I’d sewn into all my bras for the purpose of carrying spells around, and plucked out the one I’d written that morning.

  Cooper raised an eyebrow as I held it out to him, then got up to t
ake it. “A storyteller, huh? Not sure I’m familiar with the term in this context.”

  “In this context, I kind of made it up.”

  What we call magic comes down to an imposition of will or energy—vitality, to Cooper—on something or someone else. If our force is stronger than the force we’re trying to manipulate, we win. It’s that simple. That’s why it’s easier to work magic on an inanimate object, something that has little or no will of its own, than it is a person.

  Like many skills, it’s a matter of potential and talent. Some people don’t have the potential and can’t do magic at all. Of those who can, most will need things—incantations, rituals, herbs, dolls, fire, water, all sorts of things will work—to focus that energy. I’m powerful enough to do some simple stuff without any props at all. But to work any serious magic, I need paper, and ink made from my own blood.

  Also like many skills, those who advance beyond a certain point tend to specialize. They say my father was extraordinarily good with heat and fire. I’m a storyteller.

  “I write my spells down, like bits of a story,” I said to Cooper. “And hope my will is stronger than whoever wants to hurt me.”

  “Hurt you?” He unfolded the spell and read it. “So what did Kestrel do to try to hurt you?”

  “She threw a knife. It missed.”

  “Because of this.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.

  “Which means your magic was stronger than hers, even after she took so much vitality from me,” Cooper went on. He’d been standing over me since I’d handed him the paper, but now he crouched down, arms on his knees, face close to mine. “That makes you extremely powerful. Just like I said. You could help me. We could help each other.”

  “Balls,” I muttered.

  “What is with you and balls?” he asked with a laugh. “I hear you muttering it all the time. What’s wrong with good old shit or damn? Or something a little stronger?”

  I was taken aback that he had ever heard me mutter anything at all. That seemed to call for him to notice me kind of a lot. But then, he’d worked out that I was a witch. And that I was only half human. I guessed he’d been paying more attention to me than I realized. Despite the circumstances, I felt a flare of self-consciousness. “I don’t like to curse,” I said to the carpet.

  He laughed again. “If you mean it as a curse, it still counts as cursing, even if you made it up yourself.” When I didn’t answer, he moved to sit beside me against the wall, and got back to business. “Sounds like you use your magic mostly for protection, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfect. It so happens I have something in dire need of protection.”

  “Cooper, I can’t help you.”

  “You don’t have a choice. You can’t stay here.”

  The words you can’t stay here were still hanging in the air when my phone rang. Again. Three more calls had come in while I was busy dealing with everything at the restaurant, all from that same Bristol number.

  This time, I decided to answer it. I figured even Bristol couldn’t be worse than Cooper Blackwood insisting I give up the uneventful, safe little life I’d worked so hard to build, to get involved in some war against vitality vampires.

  I went into my bedroom and closed the door while I talked to the man who’d been calling me all day, a soft-spoken attorney by the name of Mr. Pickwick.

  By the time I hung up, I wasn’t at all convinced that what he’d had to say wasn’t worse, after all.

  I sat on my bed for a few minutes, fighting with myself over which of the two almost unthinkably unpleasant options I now had before me was the lesser evil. I stayed there for so long, in fact, that I kind of hoped one of those options might cross itself off the list, and show itself out.

  But when I finally went back to the living room, Cooper was still sitting against the wall, waiting.

  “You’re right,” I told him. “I can’t stay here. But I can’t go with you, either. I have to go back…” My voice cracked over the word home. “To where I was born. In North Carolina.”

  Cooper frowned at me. “What happened?”

  “It would seem I’ve just inherited a small fortune and a hotel.”

  I was thirteen when my mother died. I didn’t own a single skirt or dress at the time, so I attended her funeral in a gray woolen dress that belonged to Miss Underwood, the owner of the hotel where we lived and my mother worked as a maid.

  Miss Underwood was thin enough for a girl to fit passably into her clothes, but she was also quite tall. The dress was ridiculously long. I kept tripping on the hem. All day I worried about what would happen if I tore it.

  There was a reception afterward at the hotel. Miss Underwood gave a short speech that she directed, ostensibly, to me. She said that everyone at the Mount Phearson was family. That all of them shared in my loss. And that like any family, we would pull one another through it. I stood awkwardly, hating all those eyes on me, and nodded into my glass of fruit punch, sipping carefully so as not to spill it on the dress.

  Afterward, Miss Underwood walked me back to the room I’d shared with my mother. “Will you be wanting to move to a different room?” she asked. “I can arrange that if you like, as a courtesy.”

  “I’m staying at the hotel, then?” Nobody had told me.

  “Of course. I’m your guardian now. It’s best for your life to remain as stable as possible while you grieve.”

  “Oh. Then no, our regular room is okay.”

  “Don’t use that word. I despise it.”

  “Our regular room is fine. I’ll just live alone, I guess?”

  Miss Underwood laughed, as though I’d just said something really imaginative. “What a thing to say. Nobody is ever alone at the Mount Phearson.” She was right about that.

  She stopped outside our room—my room, now—and handed me the key. “You’ll take over some of your mother’s shifts, after school and on Saturdays. But you may have the next three days off out of respect for your loss.”

  I struggled for a second with the etiquette. Was I supposed to thank her for the time off? Or for the job? For agreeing to be my guardian?

  But no, she didn’t seem to expect any response. She was already turning away.

  “Be in touch if you need me,” Miss Underwood said.

  I washed the dress myself, that same night, and returned it unharmed.

  Now it was Miss Underwood who was dead. She’d died in prison, of all places, where she was serving a sentence for murdering her husband. I was more shocked by the husband part than the murder part. Miss Underwood had never seemed like the marrying type.

  Mr. Pickwick, who was both her executor and her lawyer, didn’t seem to find it surprising that she’d left me everything, including the Mount Phearson Hotel. “She was your adoptive mother, wasn’t she?” he asked when I spoke to him again, the day after Kestrel’s attack at the restaurant.

  “She was my guardian,” I said, which was not at all the same thing.

  “Well, she had no children of her own, and all her siblings appear to be deceased.”

  My stomach went cold. “What do you mean, appear to be deceased? Deceased seems like a pretty binary condition.”

  “Yes, well. There have been some questions… and Mark… missing, you know… probably best explained in person…” Pickwick trailed off and cleared his throat. “But in any case, Madeline’s will was very clear. You are her beneficiary.”

  I let it go. Mark was not the Underwood brother whose fate concerned me.

  So they all—Mr. Pickwick, the hotel staff, the manager—wanted me to come home. And how serendipitous, when I’d just found myself in the position of being hunted by a psychotic feeder. (Cooper might not like the word, but I thought it suited what I’d seen of Kestrel Wick just fine.) Or possibly in the position of having just murdered a psychotic feeder, in which case, I would be hunted by her entire clan.

  Bristol was uniquely positioned to be a safe haven. It had been built as one by my
own father. At the turn of the nineteenth century, that was, my father being either a demon, or some other creature (phantasm?) with a very long lifespan.

  But Bristol had never been a haven for me. It was the last place I would ever feel safe. I might as well do what Cooper wanted, and get mixed up in his clan war.

  For three days after the attack, I made no commitments, either to Mr. Pickwick or to Cooper. I assumed in the latter’s case, that would be the end of it, and he would leave town on his own. Each day I expected to hear that he just never showed up for work. But each day he came.

  And each day, he left early and followed me home, then stood across the street from my building for an hour or so, like some kind of sentry. He didn’t seem to think I knew, so for the first two nights, I didn’t say anything.

  On the third, I walked a cup of tea out to him. He was obviously going to need some convincing to leave, and scrawling Verity was left to herself in Lenox, all alone in spell ink that morning hadn’t done the job. My will must have gotten soft, after so many years with nobody to resist it. I was going to need stronger spells to deal with Cooper. Maybe to deal with his enemies, too. Better ink would be a start. I would need to use a higher concentration of blood.

  In the meanwhile, I would have to deal with Cooper directly. I pushed the mug into his hands and asked, “Are you stalking me, or protecting me?”

  His scowl didn’t make him look like much of a white knight. “The second one.”

  “In that case, let me return the favor.” I nodded at the tea. “Cinnamon and angelica root.”

  “It’s going to take a lot more than herbs to protect us from the Wicks,” he said. “You have no idea what we’re up against.”

  “Maybe they have no idea what they’re up against.”

  My bravado was too obvious. Cooper scoffed at me, then sipped the tea and made a face. “I hate angelica root.”

  “Way too bitter,” I agreed. “I was hoping to pawn the last of mine off on you.”

  He smiled, and I felt like I’d won a prize. A traitorous feeling if ever there was one, so I pushed it aside.

  “I thought you were leaving town,” I said.