CHAPTER ONE: DEADLY ENCOUNTERS

I'm writing the 4th book in the Raina Kirkland series. Here is chapter one. 

ONE

      “Hello?” I called out as loud as I could, which wasn’t all that loud.  In fact, it was a down right whisper. I gave myself a mental slap.  Let’s try that again, and this time with more earnest efforts. “HELLO?” I called out. For goddess sake, how many times did a girl have to die to get some attention around here?

     I heard footsteps coming closer, but I couldn’t turn my head to see who it was.  I was lying in the dark, hurt, unable to move, hardly able to speak at all.  I didn’t like being so vulnerable!  So, you could imagine the wash of relief I felt when an old friend of the family peered down at me. Kamaria’s hair was white with age and up in curlers.  Her floral summer dress was soaked with sweat and blood; my blood, her sweat. She looked older than last I saw her; a few more wrinkles, thinner skin, nothing more.

     “You’re safe. You’re on a table in my dining room in the back of my cafe. How do you feel?” she asked. 

    How did I feel?  My entire body was in stitches. Every inch of it was sewn in place, bloated and stinking of rot.

       “I hurt,” I mumbled between swollen, stitched lips. I could taste the bitter-sweetness of my wounds.  Running my tongue over the roof of my mouth, I could feel the stitches holding me together. Bits of flesh hung here and there.  I tried not to think too hard on it. I knew if I let myself dwell on it that I’d break down. I didn’t want to break down.  I wanted to know what the hell was going on!

     “You’re healing.  I can see it,” she said.  Her words were kind but her eyes looked fearful.  I couldn’t imagine what my face must have looked like; puffy, half rotten, stretched and sewn. Goddess!

     My muscles felt stiff, the ones I could feel anyway.  They felt ridged.  “Where did my brother go?” I asked quietly, because my vocal cords and lungs were still healing.  The men that murdered me cut me up into little bits of meat and bone. Their plan was to throw my remains into running water so no one could put me back together again, like humpty-fucking dumpty.  But, somehow my brother got to me first.  He brought me to the café. He sewed me up.  It was his face I first woke to, his smell, his words.  I swallowed.  Damn, it hurt!  “I’m thirsty.  Where’d Nick go?”

     “Nil is bringing you some food,” she said.

     “Why did he bring me here?”

     “He needed a safe place to...”  She let out a heavy sigh, “Goddess, I didn’t think it would work, just sewing you up like he did, but by the gods, Raina.  You’re back!”

     “Ta-da,” I said. Even in my revolting, delicate state, I couldn’t keep my sarcasm to my damn self.

     “Yes,” Kamaria said thoughtfully.  “Very impressive, dearie.”

     I tried to sit up, but I was still healing, as fast as any vampire, but still.  In many places only thin thread was keeping me together.  I felt like Frankenstein’s monster.  When I sat up the thread ripped through my flesh and I cried out. “Damn!” Kamaria helped me lay back down carefully.

     “Shit,” I breathed past the pain.  “Is my daughter okay? Where is Isobel?”

     “She’s fine,” she said. “Both of your children are just fine.”

     I nodded, taking in shallow breaths. “I want to see them,” I said.

     I heard a heavy door open and a few moments later Nick came up and looked down at me.  His wild red hair and big, almost black eyes stood out drastically against his vampire gray skin. Hurriedly, he took off his heavy coat to reveal a red shirt that clung to his skinny frame.

     “I didn’t know what you’d want to eat,” Nick said. “As a vampire, I was sure you’d want blood, but then again you’re a demigod, also, so you may crave ambrosia.”

     “The food of the gods?” I asked.

     He set down a velvet bag and pulled out two large jars.  The first had dark red blood filled to the rim, while the other was filled with a glossy, pink-ish substance.  “Yes, but we don’t know which nourishment your body needs.  Whatever part of you that was human is dead.  So, do you now have the internal workings of a vampire or a god?”

     I was giving the jar of pink shit some seriously apprehensive looks.  I wasn’t too keen toward anything god-like in that moment.  I certainly didn’t need another reminder of the bit of god I had inside me. 

     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, of course,” he said. “After I slaughtered them.”

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

     Nick looked at the older woman warmly.  “Kamaria is the only person in my life that 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 that badly.

     “How was death for you?” Nick asked.

     “I went to Hell.”

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

     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 magnificently actually, with aqua green skies,” 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 a god while in Hell, the very goddess who saved me as a baby, but it didn’t feel right to mention that just then.

     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-ish 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 manure.  The very smell of it repulsed me.  “There is no way I’m putting that stuff in my mouth.” Nick frowned and moved to force feed it to 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.  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 heavily.  “There isn’t much written on the subject of resurrection or demigods.  From what I could gather, as long as there’s a body the soul will come back, as if the body acts like some kind of beacon.  Shortly after you died I was going to do it. I was going to put you back together, 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.  I had to study your anatomy.  It was like putting a two-thousand and seventy-five piece 3D puzzle made of frozen flesh together.”

     “Frozen?”

     “The night you died I knew I would try to bring you back, so I 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 word’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 deep frown. “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.  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 pulled the fabric of his shirt free of my fingers.  “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 on 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, and then he lost another mother. He’d be thirteen now.

     “Rest. 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 you’re back.  Raphael betrayed you.  He gained your trust and 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, however, make a list of people I knew for certain would never betray me. 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.