House of Ravens

by Keary Taylor

  Copyright © 2016 Keary Taylor

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system,

  without the prior written permission of the author.

  First Edition: September 2016

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

  Taylor, Keary, 1987-

  House of Ravens (House of Royals) :

  a novel / by Keary Taylor. – 1st ed.

  Formatting by Inkstain Interior Book Designing

  www.inkstainformatting.com

  The Fall of Angels Trilogy

  The Eden Trilogy

  The McCain Saga

  What I Didn’t Say

  To view all of Keary’s books, in series order, click HERE.

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About Keary

  MY BRAIN CAN’T MATCH WHAT I’m seeing to the very simple facts I’ve known to be true for the last ten months.

  My father, Henry Conrath, was a docile man who just wanted to be left alone.

  My father, Henry Conrath, was killed last summer.

  He’s supposed to be dead.

  The breath rips in and out of my chest as my eyes dart from one end of the space to the other, trying to make sense out of any of it.

  The platform of my family’s crest finishes lowering to the ground, and the moment it does, a very dim, gentle light flicks on.

  The room is massive. Just as large as the ballroom that resides above it. Endless shelves line the sterile, clean, cement walls. Clear boxes of equipment rest on them. I see various tools. Things I don’t have names for. Dominating another wall is a line of bookshelves, stretching long, filled to the brim with thick spines. I step off the platform, and my eyes trace the titles.

  Educational. Every one of them. The titles have words like microbiology, evolution, and synthetic DNA mixed into their names. There are enough books here to make you a brilliant master on—what, I’m not sure. But this is a room of learning and science, no doubt about it.

  A table rests in the middle of the bookshelves, pushed up against the wall, with a laptop resting atop it, the screen asleep.

  I turn back to the rest of the room, and I truly can’t process it all.

  There are tables everywhere. Seven of them are laid throughout the room, all set up in a grid-like pattern. They bear scientific equipment. Projects seemingly only halfway finished. A file box rests upon one, and five books on another.

  If my brain were functioning better, I’d take a closer look and learn something.

  But I just keep blinking, rapidly, trying to bring it all into focus.

  “Is he down there?”

  Cameron’s voice causes me to jump in alarm. I had forgotten I had an audience above me.

  I walk back to the platform and see the faces peering down at me through the huge hole in the ceiling. “No,” I try to say, but my throat is too tight, and the sound comes out strangled. “It’s empty. Rath, did you know this was down here?”

  He’s pale, his expression stricken and sick. He shakes his head. “No.” His own voice is strained.

  “I think you should see this,” I say, fixing him with a solid, long stare. I just know the same emotions are rushing through the both of us. Neither of us can make sense of what is going on.

  Rath squats at the edge of the opening and hops down. Followed by him, is Ian.

  A dozen more faces stare down at us, and suddenly, I’m so terrified.

  My father kept this space a secret, even from Rath, all this time, and now I’ve shown it to half of my House.

  “Nial, a word?” I say as my voice quakes.

  The others don’t have to be told directly. They back away from the opening. The true thickness between the ceiling of the…lab, and the ballroom is revealed when even I cannot hear their footsteps retreat.

  Nial hops down to my side, and his eyes widen in wonder and awe as he looks around.

  “I don’t know what this is,” I say as I look around. My throat feels dry, but in a human, uncertain way. “Something…I don’t know. Something important was going on here. But my father obviously meant to keep it a secret, and I can only assume there’s a very real and very important reason he did.”

  I look around once more, still unable to piece everything together. “They can’t say anything. Everyone upstairs. To anyone. Not to each other. Not to the other House members who aren’t here. No one. Not until we know what Henry was doing down here.”

  “I understand, Alivia,” he says. He can’t stop looking around, each new object he finds adding more wonder to his expression. “Alivia, this… I beg of you to let me come back down and investigate.”

  “Please,” I say, nodding in agreement. “I… I don’t know…”

  He nods when I don’t have words, and without another of his own, he crouches for a moment before leaping straight up and out of the hole above us.

  I find Rath, standing in the center of the room. He slowly turns, observing the space surrounding him. But he doesn’t step foot from his place. He’s stiff, controlled. Unsure. A million emotions are obvious on his face as he looks around. And I feel for him, so much.

  “You really had no idea this was down here, Rath?” Ian asks. He wanders around, looking in the boxes on the shelves, reading small passages of the books that sit open faced on the table.

  “No,” Rath says quietly.

  I step forward, though I have no idea where I’m going or what I intend to look at. “When I first got to the Conrath Estate, you said you lived in the workers’ house,” I say. I stop just two steps away from Rath. I want to pull myself into his chest and wrap my arms around him. For the both of us to find some sort of comfort in the confusion we’re feeling right now. To go back to the familiar.

  But he’s so stiff and so tight, I’m afraid the slightest disruption will cause him to explode.

  “You said it was the way Henry preferred it,” I breathe. “I never understood that. Because you said you and he were brothers, that you shared a bond. It never made sense to me why he wouldn’t want you to live in the house with him. But…” I falter as I look around.

  “This was why,” Rath finishes for me, enlightenment in his voice. Understanding has finally dawned on him.

  “He wanted it to remain a secret,” I continue.

  I wander back to the library and let my eyes travel over the titles, not really taking them in. I hardly understand the titles, much less what could be learned from their contents.

  “I’ve known Henry so long,” Rath says. He takes one hesitant step forward. Not really toward anything, but I feel it’s a break of the extreme control he’s trying to hold onto at this moment. “And suddenly, I feel as if I never really knew the man, at all.”

  “Thi
s space,” Ian says as he walks toward another wall that holds row after row of filing cabinets. “It’s been here a long time. There’s no way it was excavated after the original house was built. It’s been sitting here all this time. What year was the house built?”

  “1799,” Rath says without hesitance. He takes another step forward, in no particular direction.

  “You think the other House has one, too?” Ian asks.

  The thought makes my heart skip twice. “It’s possible,” I say. “This house holds so many secrets and hidden things. If Henry felt the need for them, I don’t know why Elijah wouldn’t have, as well.”

  “Damn,” Ian breathes. “Crazy vampire brothers. Sure know how to keep the spook in all that lore.”

  “I will advise you not to speak ill of either Elijah or Henry Conrath,” Rath growls.

  Ian holds up his hands in surrender, and he’s wise doing so. Rath is deadly, dangerous when he needs to be. I still don’t understand what Rath is or what he’s capable of.

  Once, months ago, when all of this was just beginning, I saw him without a shirt. His body was covered in scars. I still don’t know how he got them, but without a doubt, Rath has a deadly history.

  “The smell,” I say as I take in a deep breath through my nose, “it’s hard to tell how long it’s been since he was down here. All the chemicals and equipment are messing with my senses.”

  “Same here,” Ian says. He walks over to a cabinet and opens the doors. Inside, he reveals bottles full of chemicals. He moves to the next cabinet, but it’s locked. Same with the one after that.

  “Alivia, do you really think…” Rath can’t even finish that sentence. His throat chokes up and the words can’t leave his lips.

  “I… I don’t know,” I say shaking my head. “What we found in Colorado-”

  “Shit,” Ian says as suddenly the pieces slide together for him. “This is what you got so weird about when we were at your old apartment.”

  I nod. Just last night, Ian and I were back in Colorado, at my old apartment. We found the entire building abandoned and when we went into my unit, the scene that greeted us was a grim and unexplainable one. Blood everywhere, splattered on the walls, saturated into the worn out carpet. Multiple people had lost their lives in that space. There was no doubt about it.

  But the thing that spooked me the most was what rested on my old desk. A few small candles, battery operated, and two pictures. One of my mother, the one used in her obituary. And another of me. From when I was eighteen, at prom. It was taken from a weird angle, likely from the shadows.

  The reverence in that shrine. The viciousness in the room.

  I nod once more. “I couldn’t think of anyone else capable of that level of violence.” My mind flashes to a night in 1875, when Henry lost someone he loved, and the kind of retaliation he’d been capable of. He snapped. He killed over thirty citizens of Silent Bend that night. “Or who would have cared enough to place a picture of both me and my mother there.”

  Ian just shakes his head and turns back to investigate the space.

  “And did it…” Rath tries to talk. “Did it smell like Henry?”

  I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. “I don’t know. There was so much blood there. The building had been abandoned. I’m sorry, Rath. I’m just not sure.”

  “Whoever put that stuff there, it had been within the last four months,” Ian says. “So if it was Henry, then he’s very much still alive.”

  “It’s kind of hard to question and deny an empty tomb,” I say as my voice lowers. Emotions are rising up in me. My thoughts are running a million different directions.

  Just minutes ago, I opened Henry’s tomb, only to find it very much without a body.

  It’s been one of my biggest desires since I came to the Conrath Estate. To know my father. To have Henry at my side. To learn about this man who created the other half of my DNA.

  Now, standing in this chamber, I realize there is so much more to him then I had ever realized.

  “Rath, I need you to tell me every detail about the morning my father was killed,” I tell him. I walk forward, and for the first time since he left me because of the choices I had made, I touch him. I take his hands in mine and draw his eyes to me. “All of the details. Small, big. Maybe we can figure this out.”

  Rath nods, his eyes already growing distant. When his knees seem to weaken, I lead him to a stool at one of the tables and help him sit.

  “It now seems I know far too little,” he says as his eyes fix on a non-particular spot on the floor. “I was just arriving at the House in the morning. Your father didn’t often sleep, so I was expecting a full day’s worth of work for the two of us. He only slept maybe once a week, and that day was not a day for him to sleep.”

  Rath lets go of my hands and carefully folds them in his lap. The crow’s feet around his eyes darken as they tighten. His gaze grows even more distant. “I heard a disturbance. No one should have been at the house, and your father was…is, not a clumsy man. So, I ran. Heard his yell of pain. I ran through the front doors, and saw, just as the man raised his hand, your father on the floor in the foyer.”

  Rath closes his eyes for a moment.

  “There’s no doubt, it was a snake branded into the back of the man’s hand. Perhaps it is what distracted me for just a second too long. I didn’t react fast enough before the man swung that arm down, stake in hand, and drove it through your father’s chest. He dragged your dying father out onto the front steps, where the sun was rising.”

  “That’s the first weird part,” Ian says, stepping forward with his arms crossed over his chest. “A stake through the heart normally kills a vampire pretty much instantly. Henry was still alive though when he was taken outside?”

  Rath’s eyes suddenly flick over to Ian. The wheels are once again turning in his head. “Yes,” he confirms. “In a tremendous amount of pain, but alive.”

  “For how long?” I ask, even though it’s breaking my heart. I don’t want to be imagining my father’s death, to try to build the scene behind my eyes. But…but what if we can figure something out? Something that leads to Henry?

  “Perhaps two minutes,” Rath answers. His voice is thick. If this is difficult for me, it’s nothing to how it is for him. “There was so much blood. More than I think there should have been. I was trying to stop the bleeding, I yanked the stake out. I wanted to take him back inside, to get him out of the sunlight, but I didn’t dare move him.”

  “Did Henry say anything before he died?” Ian asks, his brow furrowed.

  Rath’s eyes jump from Ian to me. My skin grows very cold, and I’m not sure I want to hear what he’s about to say. “Only two words,” he whispers. “Guide her.”

  Tears spring to my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. My bottom lip begins to quiver, but I roll my hands into fists and swear I will be strong.

  “And then what?” I choke out.

  Rath looks away. There’s something that looks a lot like shame and disappointment in his eyes, and I know it’s there because of me. Rath tried his best to fulfill my father’s last request, but I ruined it all.

  “He died. I checked his pulse, felt it stop. Wept as his body cooled and began to gray.” Rath clears his throat, attempting to dislodge the emotion. But his voice remains rough.

  “I carried him back inside the House. Laid him there,” he points to the crest, which all this time was a platform, hidden on the ballroom floor. “And I watched him. For perhaps a day. Just waiting…” Emotion takes his ability to speak for a moment. “Waiting for him to wake up. Waiting for him to move. For him to sit up and ask me to prepare him some tea. But he didn’t.”

  My eyes flick to Ian’s as Rath falls quiet for a long moment. There are so many things to be read off of Ian. Doubt. Wonder. Shock. Hope.

  And it’s all there, reflected inside of me, as well. I don’t dare hope, but I also can’t ignore what is before me.

  “So, the next morning, I made phone calls. The lawy
er. To have a new tomb built. All the plans that your father had laid for me to carry out should he meet his demise somehow. He’d already had a plan in place should something like this happen.”

  “Maybe that’s another clue,” Ian says. “He told you what to do should he die. He already put the puzzle pieces together, so he could somehow fake this death, for whatever reason.”

  Fake his death.

  It shakes my bones.

  Fills my lungs with ice water.

  Why?

  Why would he do that?

  “Perhaps,” Rath says, clearly as rattled by the words as I am. “But his procedures were long laid out ones. He told me of certain plans, and those changed after he learned of Alivia’s existence.”

  Once more, I’m asking myself just how long Rath has worked for my father. But I know I’ll get no answers from him.

  “Rath,” I breathe. “How long before he died did my father write that letter to me? He put that key in the envelope. It was a clue. He wanted me to someday find this place.”

  So many pieces to this huge and complicated puzzle are falling into place. The answers to so many questions I’ve had are being revealed. But there’s still so many missing pieces that I just can’t make out the picture yet.

  “Eight days,” Rath says. As he says the words, I see him mentally accepting something. “Your father gave the envelope to me eight days before he was killed. He instructed me to give it to you should anything happen to him and you came to the Conrath Estate.”

  “That’s it, then,” Ian says, holding his hands up and shrugging his shoulders slightly. “Henry’s still alive. He somehow planned his death; faked the whole thing. He’s still out there somehow.”

  “But why?” My voice cracks slightly. And suddenly, I feel so betrayed. “Why would he do that to Rath? To me? He had to know everything would be turned on its head the moment I arrived in town. The way Jasmine would come after me. How Silent Bend would hate me. That the King would come to investigate. Why would he do this?”

  The tears that have been threatening to spill finally let loose, and two of them roll down my cheek as my body shakes in anger and loss. Ian crosses to me and pulls me into his chest, tucking my head under his chin.