Grave Debt

by D. D. Miers

  Grave Debt

  How to Be a Necromancer: Book Two

  D.D. Miers

  Graceley Knox

  Chaotic Press, LLC

  Grave Debt Copyright © 2018 by Graceley Knox & D.D. Miers

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Edited by: Lorraine Fico-White - Magnifico Manuscripts

  Cover Design by: Rebecca Frank

  Praise for Graceley Knox & D.D. Miers

  “The dawn of a new age of vampire.” - Crafting Geeky Bibliophile

  "Thirst is the first in a new series from the writing team of Graceley Knox and D. D. Miers. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it right because Thirst had me riveted." - Tome Tender Book Blog

  "The premise for Thirst is so unique... And these aren't just vampires, they are Kresova." - IB Book Blogging

  "A CRAZY, WILD, INSANE RIDE THAT KEPT ME ON THE LEDGE" - Marie's Tempting Reads

  “If you haven’t read any books by Graceley Knox or D. D. Miers well get busy because you are missing out on two very gifted story weavers!" - Goodreads Reviewer

  Dear Reader,

  First off, thank you for choosing to read Grave Debt! We can’t express how much each one of our fans (new and old) mean to us. Without you, there would be no stories to be told or shared. You keep this journey going for us.

  We’d like to let you know that unlike some of our other stories, this is a Slow Burn Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy. (Boy that’s a mouthful!) What does that mean? Well, this is the second book in a five-book series with a kickass heroine, a powerful enemy, and series of lovers dedicated to our leading lady.

  If you’ve never tried a reverse harem, this is the perfect series to start with! There’s a great story, exciting, mysterious, and sexy heroes, and an enticing adventure awaiting you!

  Happy Reading!

  D.D. & Graceley

  Contents

  Praise for Graceley Knox & D.D. Miers

  Dear Reader,

  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

  The Kresova

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Thank You!

  Also By Graceley Knox & D.D. Miers

  About the Authors

  Chapter 1

  Every morning this week, I've woken up with something dead next to me.

  I used to be able to ignore any death smaller than a house cat. Now the minute I let my guard down, every dead bug for a mile came running.

  Tired of the constant unwanted visitors in my bedroom, I sat in my aunt's garden, flipping through the old family grimoires like photo albums, looking for some trace of the truth or an explanation. Mort, my large, shaggy, black undead dog, lay near my feet, stretched out and panting in the heat. The past few days of laying out in the sun had dried out whatever remaining flesh he had, like beef jerky.

  A bumble bee drifted through the unseasonably humid air to land on the grimoire. I stared, watching as it inspected the handwritten script, the old ink, brown and faded on thick vellum. It was one of Aunt Persephona's older books, and the only one that directly mentioned the Candle of the Covenant.

  I knew almost nothing about this artifact except that my great-uncle had it before he died, along with a portrait of our ancestor Aethon holding it. It was apparently the source of all necromantic magic in the world. Oh, and I had somehow bonded myself to it.

  Yay, me!

  Aethon took exception to that fact, nearly killing me to steal it before he realized he couldn't use it while I was magically attached. I still haven’t sorted out how my ancient, mysterious ancestor was still alive despite all logic.

  I’d love to ask him a million questions . . . if he didn’t want me dead.

  Well, not dead, precisely. He'd said that would be "inconvenient." But he was certainly fine with torturing me and killing anyone near me.

  I heard a rustle in the hydrangea bushes and looked up as a cat slipped past the heavy pink flowers, a mouse in its jaws. Normally, outdoor cats don’t survive long in these parts. But this particular cat had nothing to fear from cars, dogs, or rabies. It was already dead.

  Even in daylight, its eyes had the faint yellow glow of Aunt Percy's magic, the only external clue that the cat is a reanimated corpse. I learned everything I know about taxidermy from my aunt.

  She's exceptionally talented.

  Re-animation was different from resurrection. True resurrection was, as far as I know, impossible. The reanimated returned with little to no free will or memory. They’d act out basic instinctual behaviors but they couldn’t speak, learn, or improvise. The parts moved but there was no one behind the wheel.

  My very much alive three-legged rescue cat, Morgana, currently sitting in the kitchen window and hissing at her undead compatriot, did not approve. She didn't approve of Mort, the dog lying beside me, either.

  "It's a shame," I said with a sigh, watching the dead cat, a long-haired orange and cream, move silently through the tall grass. "Cause you're awfully cute. And I’d love to add a cute li’l brainless zombie cat to the family."

  The undead cat stopped suddenly and for a moment, I thought it had heard me.

  Maybe it was more alive than I'd given it credit for?

  But then I realized the mouse in its mouth was moving, squirming to get loose. The cat dropped the unfortunate rodent, which simply lay there for a moment, then scurried away a few inches, stopped, turned in a circle, ran again. At first, I thought the cat must have done it some kind of serious damage, but then I saw it.

  The blue glint in the mouse's tiny black eyes, the spark of my own power reflected back at me.

  "Oh no," I muttered. “Not again.” As if on cue, I noticed a garden lizard on the other side of the patio table holding unnaturally still. A desiccated sparrow was pecking awkwardly at the eves of the porch awning above me. Even the damn bumble bee, meandering in slow, confused circles across my book, was lit from within by the blue ember of necromantic energy. "Son of a bitch."

  Mort opened one blue eye, huffed, then rolled over to ignore me.

  "Some help you are," I muttered.

  The undead cat watched impassively as I summoned the dead mouse to me and did my best to put it and the others back down.

  "Come on," I whispered under my breath, trying and failing to find that zen sense of peace necessary to wash away the energy they've been imbued with. "Just go back to sleep. Just let go. Go into the light, you stupid rat!"

  The rat wouldn’t cooperate, and the more agitated I got, the more little sparks of undeath I noticed.

  Moths in the cover of the porch light twitched and shook themselves in
to dust. The husks of houseflies in the spider web under the fern flapped their wings and strained to take to the air. Something larger under the hydrangea soaked up energy like a sponge and would soon have enough to animate and claw its way out of its shallow grave if I didn't stop it. I cut it off quickly, horrified that I had come that close to reanimating something that large and complex without even noticing. Meanwhile, the garden crawled with tiny lives I'd accidentally bestowed.

  "Please lay down," I begged, trying to keep track of them all at once. "Please just stop. Stop!" I stood up too quickly, toppling the patio chair, and in its crash, I almost missed the sliding door opening.

  Aunt Persephona stepped outside, holding two cups of tea. She took one look at the menagerie of wandering dead things, sighed, and set the tea down on the table, brushing aside an undead grass spider the size of my hand.

  She turned and took me by the shoulders. "Deep breaths," she said, looking hard into my eyes. "Forget them for a moment. Focus on your heart beat."

  I closed my eyes and pursed my lips, trying to do as she said. Slowly, my breathing evened and my panic receded, but it still hummed under the surface, along with the awareness on the edge of my perception of the more than two dozen creatures I'd accidentally reanimated.

  "All right," Aunt Percy said, patting my shoulder. "Now, one at a time. Remember how I taught you. Wash the energy away. Start with the mouse. Work your way down to the smaller things."

  I took a deep breath through my nose and focused on the mouse. Slowly, one creature at a time, I restored the garden to relative normalcy.

  "How do you feel?" Aunt Percy asked as I reached for the garden shovel and used it to chuck the sparrow and the mouse back into the hydrangea. She grabbed a broom to sweep away they dead bugs.

  "It's like I'm overflowing.” I admitted, “All the ways you taught me to hold it back don't work anymore. It's like trying to stop a flood with a screen door. There's just too much."

  Aunt Persephona leaned on the broom with a sigh, looking out towards her garden. The tomato plants were getting tall, shading the emerald leaves of the basil plants growing near them.

  "I wish I knew better how to help you," she said. "I never had half of your power, even before the candle."

  "You are helping," I said at once, putting aside the shovel. "I'd be completely lost without you. If you hadn't spent all that time teaching me when I was a kid I'd probably have started a zombie apocalypse by now. It's because of the techniques you taught me that I'm handling this as well as I am."

  She smiled at me, sadness in her eyes. She knew it wasn't enough. That she wasn't enough.

  "Everything all right out here?"

  Ethan peeked cautiously around the edge of the sliding door, the sunlight gilding his curly brown hair. Even beat to hell as he was right now, he still reminded me of fine art.

  "You shouldn't be out of bed," I told him. He'd nearly been killed by Aethon a few days ago. I'd somehow managed to reverse the effects of Aethon's magic to heal him (yet another new power I couldn't figure out) but he'd still been severely weakened. He'd only woken up yesterday.

  "I'm fine," he lied, limping out onto the patio. "I just wanted to be sure we weren't under attack or anything."

  "Only a minor infestation, dear," Aunt Persephona told him, sweeping a dried-up spider off into the grass. "Nothing to worry about."

  "I'm having some trouble controlling my powers," I explained, straightening up the books on the patio table to hide my embarrassment.

  "That explains why Morgana woke me up by dropping an undead mole on me this morning," Ethan said, scratching the back of his head. "Is that going to be a permanent problem?"

  I frowned at the books I was pointlessly straightening, unsure how to answer.

  "She just needs time," Aunt Percy answered for me. "Patience and practice."

  "I'm not sure we have time for patience and practice," I said, frustration making the flies in the spider web twitch again. I clamped down on it quicker this time. "Aethon will be back to try and make me break my bond with the candle. He knows where to find me. He could show up literally any second. Frankly I don't know why he hasn't yet. We need to be using this time to figure out a way to stop him. Or at least how to hide from him."

  "Believe it or not I have been looking into ways to magically conceal you," Aunt Percy said, putting her broom aside. "The problem is that most of them are beyond my ability to even test, let alone to tell if they'd be effective in evading a magic user of Aethon's skill. He has had thousands of years to practice. I'm not sure anything we could do could stand up to him and whatever he has planned."

  Ethan frowned, leaning against the doorframe. Exhaustion still drew lines under his eyes.

  "There's got to be some way," he murmured. "I mean, all we have to do is keep Vexa safe, right? He can't do whatever he's planning if he can't separate her from the candle. As long as we can find a strong enough concealing spell, everything will be fine!""I doubt it would be that simple," I said, sitting down at the patio table again. Ethan limped over to sit beside me. Mort finally got up from under the table to put his big shaggy head in my lap. I stroked his ears absently.

  "Even if it were," Aunt Percy said, “as I said before, I lack the skill to cast such a spell. And I doubt we could train Vexa in time. No offense, dear."

  "None taken," I said with a shrug. I'd seen some of her non-necromantic general magical practice books. It looked hellishly complicated, involving a devious combination of high-level math, astronomy, meteorology, and quantum chemistry.

  The theory in most of them, as explained to me by Aunt Percy, was that certain magic, like necromancy, was inherent, like our ability to walk or run, and could be trained the same way a professional athlete trained themselves to run better.

  General practice magic, or wizardry, was more like . . . contortionism. Or brain surgery. It wasn't something we were ever supposed to be able to do, biologically speaking, but it could be performed by anyone with enough time and patience to study it.

  The fact that Aunt Persephona, who was one of the smartest people I knew—and certainly the most patient and determined—had spent nearly her entire life studying wizardry and could barely perform any practical spell work at all said a lot about its level of difficulty.

  "But the curators are magic users," Ethan reminded us.

  I'd almost forgotten about the people who had sent him after the candle in the first place, causing us to meet. They were a part of the local magical community who concerned themselves with keeping dangerous magical artifacts out of the hands of normal people and magic users who might misuse them. "One of the folks at the museum might be able to cast a cloaking spell strong enough. I need to report what happened with the candle to them anyway. I haven't talked to them since everything went down."

  "You're not healthy enough to be going anywhere right now," Aunt Persephona said.

  "She's right," I agreed. "You can barely walk."

  "I just need a couple days’ rest," he said. "I'm fine. I can handle a drive to the library and a brief conversation."

  I chewed my lip, considering it, fingers running through Mort's fur.

  "Maybe the day after tomorrow," Aunt Percy insisted. "You're safe here. You don't want to be wandering around in the open still weak."

  "We don't know that we are safe here," I said. "Or how much time we have before Aethon comes looking for us. It may be a good idea to do this as soon as possible."

  Aunt Persephona fidgeted with her broom, jaw tight.

  "I just don't think it's a good idea," she said, sounding a little frustrated.

  "This isn't because of my near-death experience, is it?" Ethan said, raising an eyebrow.

  Aunt Persephona huffed and put the broom aside.

  "They aren't going to tell you anything you want to hear," she said at last. "If they talk to you at all, it'll only be to tell you to solve the problem yourself."

  "Hey, the curators are good people," Ethan said, offended. "The
y helped me when I had nowhere else to go."

  "It isn't about how good they are," Persephona said sharply. "It's about us. Other magic users, the 'magical community' or whatever you want to call it, they don't deal with our kind. The minute they learn she's a necromancer, they won't want anything to do with either of you."

  I leaned back in my chair, shocked by the anger in her voice. It sounded personal, hurt. Even Mort raised his head to look at her curiously.

  "You think I haven't tried to find other magic users before?" she asked, looking away, almost ashamed. "Do you know how many doors I've had slammed in my face? It's why I never told you there was other magic out there, Vexa. Necromancers keep to their own because no one else will have us."

  I swallowed, my throat suddenly tight. I'd felt outside of normal society for so long. If the magical community didn't want me either . . .

  "They aren't like that," Ethan insisted after a moment of hesitation. "Things are different now that the community is more connected. They'll help. I promise they will."

  I looked between the two of them, realizing it was coming down to me. There was no real choice. Aunt Persephona couldn't help us on her own. Even if the curators rejected us, it was worth trying.

  "You're still really weak," I told Ethan. "Give it a day or two. I don't think you're even strong enough to shift right now, right?"