Gray and Graves: A Dark Fae Menage Urban Fantasy (The Three Courts of Faerie Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Front Matter Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Signup for my Newsletter

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Back Matter Dark Glitter Cover

  Indigo & Iris Cover

  The Nine Cover

  Allison's Adventures in Underland Cover

  Pack Ebon Red Cover

  Keep Up With The Fun

  More Books By C.M. Stunich

  About the Author

  Welcome to the House of Gray and Graves where we never lie still and death is only the beginning …

  Gray & Graves

  Gray & Graves © C.M. Stunich 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  The For information address Sarian Royal Indie Publishing, 89365 Old Mohawk Rd, Springfield, OR 97478.

  www.sarianroyal.com

  Cover art and design © Amanda Carroll and Sarian Royal

  The The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, businesses, or locales is coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  This book is dedicated to all the new friends I met last year, all the new ones I hope to meet next year, and to the fae.

  Because if I don't dedicate this book to them, they may very well come through the Iron Veil and get me ... ;)

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  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Welcome to the world of "Gray and Graves", the first book in the Three Courts of Faerie series. This is an urban fantasy read with dark fae, vampires, necromancers, and at least two love interests. This is a menage story, meaning the main character will end up with at least two love interests in the end. But you never know, we may go reverse harem and add a third …or more. You've been warned. ;)

  CHAPTER ONE

  ZOMBIE

  “An undead entity whose body has been raised without its soul intact. Even necromancers with rudimentary training may be able to summon one given the right circumstances. However, the more powerful a necromancer, the longer a zombie's corpse will ward off decay. Zombies are not for the weak of heart; human flesh is required to sustain them.”

  I stood over a shallow hole and watched my boyfriend drag a corpse across our front lawn. He was struggling with the waspish body: a blonde probably no older than thirteen or fourteen, dead maybe three, four hours tops. Her skin was still pale, limbs stiff, no obvious signs of the decay that was perching on her doorstep. Still, it didn't mean that I was going to like what I had to do.

  “I said fine dining, Corey,” I snapped, arms crossed over the front of my black dress, gloved hands grasping the fabric in an attempt to soothe my nerves. I glanced back down at the dirt, at the shadowed black pit that was going to be that girl's tomb. A gust of wind snatched at my veil and threatened to topple my hat. I clamped my hand over the top of it. Nobody saw me without my coffin clothes when I was like this. Nobody. Not even Night, herself.

  “You're a fucking zombie, George,” he snarled back at me, his breathing labored and beads of sweat dripping down the sides of his pale, freckled face. “This is fine, fucking dining.” He dropped the girl in front of me, her head smacking the earth with a wet thud, sinking into the muddy grass while he wiped at his brow with the back of one hand and glared at me with emerald eyes. This was the last time I ever asked him for a romantic, Saturday night out. He just didn't get it. And keeping my glamour from me? Now that, that was just unforgivable.

  “Not for long,” I whispered back as I knelt in the mud, cringing at the creaking in my knees. I'm going to decompose faster than this girl, I told myself, if I don't do this. I took one of her frozen hands in mine. Her eyes were closed, luckily, because the last time Corey had brought me one, it had been staring up at the heavens with empty, blue eyes that even now haunted me in my sleep.

  “It's only temporary, George. You know that,” he said, glancing up at the moon, fat and swollen and pregnant in the night sky. His voice was soft when he said it, like he was trying to lighten the blow. It still hurt. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Why can't I be at the Tartare, having a shrimp cocktail with Char, flirting with poker players and wasting money on rigged slot machines? I put the girl's hand to my mouth, pushed her fingers between my teeth, tightened my jaw. Her flesh – cold, stiff, wet – passed my lips and slid down my throat, crashed into a stomach that didn't work on anything anymore except this. Fate is fucking cruel.

  I gagged and turned my head to the side, wished I could vomit. Instead, I sat there in my backyard that was also a cemetery and swallowed pieces of a girl I didn't know, let my body revel in the feel of sustenance while my heart tore another inch and my mind blanked, trying to protect me from the horror of what I had just done.

  “Where did you get her?” I gagged, waiting in terrified anticipation of that next bite. The second was always the worst. With the first, I pretended I didn't remember how bad it was. I told myself that my mind was playing tricks on me and that this time, it wouldn't hurt as much as it had before. After that first, morbid little reminder though, there was no pretending.

  “She did it to herself,” Corey told me as he pointed out the angry red gashes down her wrists. I hadn't noticed them before, but now that my eyes had caught on them, I couldn't look away. They were red and jagged and angry as hell. She hadn't done it with a knife, maybe a piece of glass or a scrap of metal, something sharp and bumpy and serrated. What could've possibly driven a thirteen year old to hate herself so much? I pushed the thought away and forced myself through another mouthful of … salad, light and fresh, with just a spritz of raspberry vinaigrette. I nearly choked.

  The mind tricks weren't working.

  There was no disguising that smooth, almost waxy texture. It didn't even help that I tried not to chew, pretty much swallowed the damn bites whole.

  “Hurry up,” Corey said, the impatience in his voice making me wish I could push him down the hole with the girl. He could sleep outside with this corpse tonight. Yours truly had a different date lined up for the rest of the evening. It was a full moon night, my night, the one night where under all that pretty skin and shining hair was just a girl, not a corpse. Not even a whole truckload of fae blood could make a glamour as good as the real thing. “Anelie will be here in less than fifteen minutes. Last time I made her wait, she gave me less than a pint.” I frowned, bid the girl a silent 'RIP' and pushed her quiet form across the grass and into the shadows of the eart
h.

  “Goodnight and good luck,” I whispered, holding my hands out in front of me. Even now, the sparkle of magic was tickling my fingertips, sneaking away from the beams of moonlight to caress my skin and kiss away the death with life. It was midnight. I was whole again.

  I stood up and headed into the house for a hot shower, a change of clothes, and maybe just a count or two of grand larceny.

  The banshee was sitting in a mahogany armed reading chair upholstered in green velvet. Her lavender eyes were glamoured to look human, her hair, instead of its natural white, gleamed a light chestnut under the brass reading lamps, tossed casually over her shoulder in a long braid. She was hunched forward, shoulders taught under her red sweater, brows drawn and eyes dark. To the few people around us, it might've looked as if she were engaged in her novel, lost in another world, another place, another time. But I knew better. She was waiting for me.

  I strolled up to her as casually as I could, ignoring my shaking hands and beating heart. This was not a good idea, I told myself as I set my purse down on the unused ottoman in front of her. She paused in her pretend reading, even tucked a bookmark between the pages, before glancing up at me, a slight smile playing about her lips. Tonight is a full moon. You know better. If something happens … I relaxed my shoulders, took a deep breath, and smiled back.

  “Georgette,” she said carefully, placing the book on her lap gingerly, as if it were an old tome, dusty and torn, pages loose and spine cracked, instead of a dime a dozen paperback. We'd seen each other less than a month ago, but it felt more like a year with the chasm that loomed between us. That's how it was, I guessed, when you went from seeing someone every day, sharing coffee with them every morning, kissing them goodnight, to meeting them in public like a stranger. “Did you find your way here okay?” Her words were weird and hollow, foreign, and not just because she was speaking in another language.

  “You've always given good directions, Rachel,” I replied, trying to infuse mine with some sort of warmth. She deserved that. More than that, really. But I wasn't going to be the one to give it to her. I'd already had my chance and I'd blown it. The saddest part was, she'd just started to trust me again and I was about to let her down.

  “Did you bring it?” she asked me, eyes darting around the room, taking in the library's late night patrons, the shelves of books, the red eyed employees, before flicking her gaze back up to my face. I nodded and reached for my purse, for the single glass bottle that should've been one of many. “Not here,” she said and then, switching to English, continued with, “Let's go out and get something to eat, shall we?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, grabbing my purse and trying not to feel relieved. I didn't have to let her down yet; I still had a few good moments of our strained friendship left. I adjusted my wool coat, checked to make sure my skirt was still decent in the back, and followed her down the winding staircase and onto the white marble floors of the main lobby. All the while I found myself running my hands across one another, touching my knuckles to my face, twisting strands of hair around my fingers. It was good to be whole, to be me again.

  Rachel, on the other hand, was spending her time watching her own paranoia follow her like a cloud. She kept glancing over her shoulder, casual as could be but with a hard glint in her eyes that would've frightened me away, had I been one of her imaginary stalkers. Still, it couldn't have been easy to have the Unseelie court tracking your every move. I suppose she had a right to be scared. Luckily for us, nobody stopped us on our way to the front doors.

  They waited until we were outside to do that.

  A woman in a white T-shirt and jeans thrust a cross into my face.

  “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.” I took a step back, ignored Rachel's scowling face and tried to walk past the woman. Finding religious nutcases outside the library wasn't anything new. We were in downtown Eula for God's sake. This is where the fuckers lived and breathed.

  “Just ignore her,” I snapped, reaching out for Rachel's hand, trying to draw her away before she made a scene. My heart was racing, and although I tried to reassure myself that the comment had absolutely nothing to with me, I was scared. Until the sun came up, I was temporarily whole, pretty, but I was also powerless. Any trouble was too much.

  “Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun,” touted the tiny blonde, shoving the silver cross into the flesh of my arm as if she were branding me. Before I had a chance to react, Rachel was shoving her back, hard. She fell to the pavement in a tangle of skinny limbs and laughter. When she glanced up, her face was wild with rapturous confidence, scary. She was more than just another crazy person off the street. This was someone that knew something. She had selected Rachel and I for a reason. We had to get out of there and fast. I tried to keep walking, to tug Rachel along with me. The last thing I wanted to do on my night off was listen to someone preach to me about the dead. I knew all about them. Hell, I was one of them. And somehow this woman knew. Is she one of the ones that's been stalking me? I swallowed heavily and tried to put that problem on the back burner.

  When Rachel refused to budge, I glanced back over at her face. Her brown eyes were pinched and her mouth pressed tight, but she wasn't looking at the blonde or even at me for that matter. She was looking at the two armed men that were approaching from the alley at our backs.

  The library's security guard, who spent the majority of his day scolding teenagers and rousing sleeping bag ladies from the self help aisle, stepped forward and slipped his thumbs in his belt loops. He was a nice looking boy, but a boy he was. I don't think he even saw the guns. “I'm going to have to ask the five of you to leave.” He pointed at a red and white 'No Loitering' sign by way of explanation. “Now, please exit the premises before I alert the police.” He was nice enough about it, and I was more than willing to comply, but our zealot friends had dropped their hands to the weapons in their belts. They were religious soldiers on a mission. Nothing as insignificant as the threat of cops would sway them from their path. I grabbed Rachel's wrist and squeezed.

  “These women are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” said the man to our right, his graying hair and soft brown eyes at odds with the measure of hatred in his words. He practically spat them at us. “If you interfere with our eradication of them, you interfere with God's work.” The security guard shook his head, cast a sorry glance our way, and turned around. I saw him pull a phone from his back pocket. No doubt he expected the usual nutcases, the ones that spouted a lot of crap, but were more harm to themselves than they were to others. Even the guy on the corner selling balloons with the faces of congress printed on them hadn't turned our direction.

  Either the men thought he was pulling a gun, or they didn't care about the lives of innocents. Either way, it happened before I could even think about trying to stop it.

  The second man, cloaked in a red flannel shirt and brown jeans, lifted his hand, took aim, and dropped the guard to the cold cement. When he shifted the gun to me, I was surprised to see the lack of emotion there. He had killed a helpless man in the name of his god, and it didn't frighten him a bit. It sure as hell scared the crap out of me.

  “Rachel,” I whispered fiercely, wanting to run, but unwilling to leave her behind. It might not have done me any good anyway. I could only run as fast as a normal human. Tonight, I was not an undead, semi-immortal minion. Tonight, I was just a girl. I could only stand there and hope the sounds of a gun being fired so close to the door would bring people pouring from the library. Seconds ticked past, slow as hours, and no one emerged. Not even the balloon guy was looking at us. A glamour.

  I looked at Rachel, gauging her reaction and trying to find some measure of hope in the situation. She wasn't worried, just pissed.

  “The least they could have done was leave the kid out of
it.” She opened her lips and looked down at me, switching from English to what I could only assume was the language of the banshee. She'd never specified. “Cover your ears. Now.” I hesitated, but just for a second. It was proof of what a coward I really was. I cared more about myself than I did about her. Always had. And she knew it.

  Rachel lifted her chin to the sky, opened her mouth, and screamed.

  Balloon guy was lucky he couldn't hear. He was gazing at and through us from behind the soapbox he used to house his cash register, head cocked to the side, eyes curious, aware that something was going on but unable to see or hear it. I envied him. The noise was horrible. Even with my fingers in my ears, even with the mantra in my head that she couldn't hurt me, wouldn't hurt me, it was painful to hear.

  Rachel's voice was like a torrent of emotion, sweeping down over the men, the blonde, me. Loss and sorrow made sound slithered through the cracks in my hands and dug into the deepest recesses of my brain promising me nothing but pain. It was all an illusion, but it was a very, very good one.

  A cold hand slipped around my waist, drawing me to my feet. The scream was still echoing between the walls of the library and the grocer next door, but Rachel was shaking me, speaking words that were lost in the aftershock of it.

  The men had dropped their revolvers and lay huddled together next to a garbage can, stains creeping down the legs of their jeans, eyes squeezed tight. If we shut the fear out, it can't get us. I could see it in their posture, in the way their hands shook. They had lost the connection to their god. All that had hold of them now was fear, base and primal. It wasn't enough though. I wanted to kill them. I wiped my hand across my face and came away with tears. It was natural enough. The blonde was sobbing on the ground next to me, cross glinting on the sidewalk beside her. Even she'd forgotten.