Death Be Blue (The Terra Vane Series Book 1)

by Katie Epstein

  Bernard had always found comfort among the humans. He found the laws of the vampires far too confining, so he’d chosen to have his permanent residence over on Earth away from the drama.

  That’s why we’d settled for a friendship in the end. After we’d dated for a while, we both knew things would things would fizzle out eventually. It had been inevitable when I loved it over here, and he loved it over on Earthside. A long-term future between us had been shady from the beginning, and knowing that had made it easier for us to fall into a pattern of friends who came together to scratch an itch every now and again.

  “Whatcha doing, Terra?” a voice shouted at me as a figure jumped out of the shadows. I had to admit I screeched a little before I noticed who it was. Kaleb was doubling over with laughter.

  “You’re a piece of shit, do you know that?” I pushed at his shoulder and walked away. My heart was having a dance off with my pulse after his stupid surprise arrival.

  “Stop,” Kaleb chuckled, trying to contain his mirth. “Terra, wait.”

  Howling with laughter again, he tried to compose himself as he fell into step beside me. There was no point trying to out-walk him. I would just embarrass myself.

  “What?” I snapped as I dared to glance over at his face. His laughter had dispersed into a grin and he was wiping away tears of humor.

  “You should have seen your face.” He pushed his hair back and it swayed with elegance. All he needed was Mayra’s Slo-Mo spell to make him appear as if he was in some kind of shampoo commercial. I had to admit, I envied that hair.

  “What kind of face do you expect someone to pull when you scare the living daylights out of them?” My patience was running thin. I was tired and annoyed and, unfortunately, it looked like he was going to wear the brunt of it.

  “I take it Cole gave you the desistance order?”

  “You had better received one too, Kaleb Cipher, otherwise, I swear, I will go over Cole’s head to your dad. Alpha or no.”

  “No need for that extreme,” he visibly shuddered. “Just the thought of you and my pops in the same room has made me go cold.”

  “I’m not as weak as you all keep thinking I am.” I was getting sick of the same old argument and I stuffed my hands into my leather jacket pockets to keep them warm.

  “I was more worried about my father.”

  His comment brought a reluctant smile to my lips and I felt some of the heavy weight shift from my shoulders.

  “No need to worry,” Kaleb continued. “I got an order, too. And an earful from Cole for letting you go through with it. He threatened to send me back home for the week as opposed to me kicking it back here. But I was able to talk him out of that one.”

  “Would it really be so bad?” I dared to ask, wondering why it would be so hard for him to go back and see his family.

  “About as bad as you going to see your mom on Earthside.”

  “Oh, that’s bad,” I couldn’t help but say and he chuckled.

  “Now we’re on the same page.”

  Of all the bits and pieces Kaleb knew about my past, the one thing he was fully aware of was the relationship I had with my mom. He knew how fragile it had been when she’d lived over here in Portiside with me. And he was very much aware of how fractured it had become since she’d decided to move back through the portal to Seattle. She was someone who really knew how to push my buttons, without the added crap of what I saw as ignorant neglect for the first sixteen years of my life. Forgiveness and my mom didn’t usually sit within the same sentence.

  “What are you going to do with your days off?” I asked Kaleb as he followed me in the direction of The Rail. I wasn’t sure why he was heading this way since he shared a place with Cole located in the other direction.

  “Are you saying I can’t come and annoy you?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Damn. You’re such a spoilsport. I figured I’d just catch up on the sleep we’ve missed out on for the past month.” He nudged me with his hip. “Unless you want to go back to your place and pass the time away differently.”

  This time I did laugh. “I think we’ll leave our partnership as a working one. I don’t want you ruining me for any other men that may swing my way in the future.”

  “Yeah, there is that. Let’s keep it platonic then. For the moment.”

  “Oh, my,” I put a hand to my chest, “you’ve just used a three syllable word. I should rip your clothes off here and now.”

  He playfully tugged on my hair. “If I thought for one minute you were serious, you would be up against that building in a heartbeat.”

  “Then I’m happy you’re sharp enough to know when I’m definitely joking.” I let out another large sigh and felt myself settle a little more. Kaleb was a great tonic when you just wanted a light-hearted kick up the backside.

  “You’ll come running to me one day,” he sang. “I just know it.”

  “Maybe I will. When desperation reaches me.”

  “Oh, it’s already there. You wear it like a perfume.”

  Glaring at him had him winking at me, but he still wasn’t expecting a punch in the gut.

  “Oomph,” he sounded, doubling over. Then he wagged his finger at me. “Good one.”

  “Did Cole tell you that the wendigo had escaped prison?” I asked as I kept on walking. He righted himself and fell into step beside me once more.

  “He mentioned something about it. He was pretty het up that no one from the prison raised the alarm to him to ensure the protection of the citizens. He’s called in some favors from the Consilium to have it investigated, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stinks of a cover up to me. And I believe Cole is suspecting the same. He doesn’t like the fact that the wendigo could have taken some form of a drug enhancer before trying to take you down. It wasn’t such a fair fight between me and the furry piece of crap either.”

  “Sure it’s not your pride hurting?” I probed intentionally and he growled at me. “Okay. I get it.” My hands raised in surrender.

  “Yeah, you’d better get it,” he snarled. “There isn’t many a shifter who can take me down. Let alone a flammable wendigo. That’s another thing that’s worried Cole.”

  “What?”

  “How easy it set on fire. He’s ordered some tests to confirm his suspicions.”

  “What suspicions?”

  “That wendigos themselves aren’t usually flammable.”

  “He said that. So he’s going to try and test what the wendigo may have taken?”

  “If there’s anything left after you finished with it, then yeah.”

  I grimaced a little. “It wasn’t as if I had a choice. He was taking a chunk out of your neck.”

  “After he’d taken a piece out of your leg and almost made you his dinner. It’s a good job I got there when I did.”

  “I was handling it,” I told him, trying not to sound as if I was sulking. But I hadn’t been handling it, and I had almost been the wendigo’s next meal.

  “Will Rosie be home?” Kaleb asked me as we neared the station.

  “I don’t know. She’s been staying over at the lab for the last week or so as they’re working on something with a deadline. I zoned out after she started to tell me some of the details. Why?”

  “Can I crash at yours tonight then? I want to stay out of Cole’s way for a bit and my friend isn’t back from his Earthside vacation until tomorrow. I can crash with him for a bit after that.”

  His attempt at nonchalance caused me to stop in my tracks, at the same time I realized why he was asking.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, standing off with him. “You haven’t talked Cole out of forcing you to go and see your family, have you? He really thinks you’re leaving?”

  “No,” he replied, but his left eye twitched and I knew that he was lying. He was great at charming his way out of things, but he wasn’t very good at lying directly. It was quite sweet; in
a weird Kaleb kind of way.

  “You’re not staying at my place,” I told him as I walked off. “Not with Cole already being on my ass with this.”

  “Please?” He twirled me around to face him. “Just one night. One. Then you don’t have to worry.”

  “I do have to worry because I’ll know you haven’t gone. What if Cole comes fishing around and asks me if I know where you are?”

  “He won’t do that. And at the moment you’re off duty and don’t have any obligation to tell him. Think of it as payback.”

  Rolling my eyes was the first sign that I was about to give in, and he knew it.

  “Fine,” I sighed in resignation. “But you’ll have to sleep on the floor in my room. Rosie still hasn’t forgiven me for letting you sleep on her white couch when you almost ruined it with your big, booted feet.”

  “Thanks, Terra.” He put his arm around my shoulders and urged me toward the station before I could change my mind. “Sure you don’t want to share a bed?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely sure about that.”

  “Such a shame. I’d be a ride you would never forget.”

  I punched him in the stomach again—just to make sure he knew where we stood.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning, I woke up to a message on my transmission pod from my stepdad. He wanted to check in and see if all was okay on my end and that I hadn’t ended the world as we know it. He often did that when our lives became hectic. Ask to see how I was, that is, not ask about the threat of me creating havoc in the world, which he often saw me doing. He’d bore the brunt of my fight against what Portiside citizens (and Cole) expected me to do for years. But between my recent case and his demanding hours at the labs, hectic had been an understatement. We hadn’t spoken directly in weeks.

  The time on my transmission pod said it was late enough to justify me getting out of bed, so I sent Chris a reply to say I’d see him at the labs at about midday.

  Yes, my stepdad’s name was Chris. And yes, that was strange considering he was a member of the Fey with an Emerald-Air Citizen banding on his ID—just like my roommate Rosie had.

  It would have been more fitting for both of them to have Fey-like names such as Alvar or Tatiana, but they both had dual citizenship and it was easier for their paperwork to have one name. Blending in was important for any Portiside citizen to do when they traveled through the portal. And keeping close to the stereotypical was a great way to blend in with the humans. When humankind saw what they wanted to see, the majority tended not to probe any further.

  I knew the name my stepdad had been born with was Elden because I’d teased him often enough when I’d found out. But Rosie had kept quiet on hers. She’d also been a colleague of Chris’s long before I knew him, as they worked together in the labs of Portis Forward Incorporated in the Crystal Quarter where we lived.

  Rosie looked to be my age but she was actually a lot older. My stepdad was similar in regards to their slow aging process. He appeared to be in his early forties but his true age was anybody’s guess. The Fey—depending on their species—aged differently. And both my stepdad and Rosie had slow aging genes. They were very lucky in that way.

  My stepdad was a griffin. He could turn into a massive eagle-like bird that was as tall as my average five foot eight height. It wasn’t something he liked to do often. He’d told me that each time he transitioned into his feathery self, the thirst for justice simmering in the griffin’s blood would grow stronger. His true calling would one day catch up with him if he did it too much. So he only transformed when the need to sprout feathers became too much of a nuisance to ignore.

  After Dan Vasquez discovered me in the St. Mary’s Hospital for the Insane (it wasn’t exactly called that on its paperwork). Dan had worked his magic and convinced my mom that a dimension pocket existed through a portal. Credit to my mom for finally listening, but I wasn’t naive enough to believe that it had been out of the kindness of her heart. Dan was a man—or elf—who could make you do anything if he so wanted.

  His speciality was in convincing people to listen to him and, thankfully, my mom had listened. Once we hit Portiside, she then met Chris who took us both into his home—even if I’d been reluctant to let him in at first. I never wanted to take his surname, even if my mom had changed it regardless after they married. But now, I embraced it with relish. Chris had been my constant from the moment my mom had left me in his care, and for that I would be eternally grateful.

  After getting showered and changed, I left Kaleb snoring his head off and made my way to the place where my stepdad worked—and slept most of the time.

  The sun shone down on the Crystal Quarter as I made my way on foot to Portis Forward Inc. The shine of the sun caused the varied styles of buildings I passed by to sparkle beneath its rays. Some of them resembled crystal-type rock, as if they’d just popped out of the ground one day in ages past. Others looked liked large, shiny tumble stone crystals with pretty windows and doors built into them. But irrelative of their differences, they all blended together in their light pastel shades with an ethereal glow that seemed to shimmer around them both day and night. It was completely different from the Victorian Quarter.

  The apartment block where Rosie and I lived had been made up of Brucite so it sparkled with shades of white and pale blue. Any hard edges of its raw form had been smoothed away to create a three-story block where we had a place on the top floor. It wasn’t as shiny as the tumble stone crystal homes were, and you could still see the tiny grains of crystal that had been pushed together like sand to make its form. But it still found a way to sparkle like the others.

  We didn’t have a garden like a lot of the homes, but that suited us both. We had plenty of nature ready and waiting on the outskirts of the Crystal Quarter if we needed it. And many homes had patches of green grass surrounding them with tended flowers and herbs growing out of the ground.

  It really was a beautiful quarter of the city where many of the Fey lived. And even the paving had been structured using tiny, black rocks that had been molded together with hardened sap. Everything glistened and shone responding to the sunshine as if they were lifelong friends.

  I loved the enchanted feeling it gave me, as if I’d been whisked into a world full of fairies and woken up to see the beauty of their nature inspired magic.

  It wasn’t far away from the truth though to be honest. There were many fairies among the Fey. Tall, short, tiny and large. Flower Fairies, Weather Fairies, Tree Fairies—you name it. They were all a fascination to me, and only a small part of the grand population that made up the Fey. Many different species were banded under the Fey banner, united by their connection to the five elements. And the sheer number of them with their varied views and traditions, made them a very complex race.

  Portis Forward Inc. was situated at the south of the Crystal Quarter, and their labs and offices took up most of the border. It had taken me about fifteen minutes to travel there on foot and I was desperate for a drink as I drew closer. The heat of the manufactured summer was definitely reaching its peak, but I wasn’t complaining. I’d been savvy enough to remember my sunglasses, and I’d wrapped my leather jacket around my waist to let my arms breathe. I just needed some hydration before my tongue started whinging with neglect.

  When I finally arrived at the building, I could see into the offices on the ground floor. Glass walls surrounded the lower levels, allowing the employees the advantage of looking out onto the greenery of the Fey Lands. Lands that began with the Moors of Maorga.

  The Moors were the beginning of the world of the Fey who chose not to live in the city. Vast numbers of Fey territories were immersed in a charming flow of green trees that began with the neutral, enriched beauty of the moors. No one had claimed the land the moors sat upon, so it was free for all citizens to walk within when they felt the need to do so without having to seek permission first.

  The Fey liked to be near the freedom of nature, even when confined within four walls. They
also preferred white or natural colors. I figured that’s why every part of Portis Forward Inc. was made from crystal quartz that was as white as fresh fallen snow.

  From the ground upwards, large windows supported offices and labs that reached about seven storys high. The labs where Chris and Rosie worked were on the higher floors, set away from prying eyes.

  I’d often wondered why the secrecy of the Evolvers was needed. That’s what Rosie’s and Chris’s official titles were: Evolvers. They were the scientist equivalents of this world, and they dealt with some top-secret stuff.

  Where the inventors and the engineers of the Industry Quarter came up with a lot of new-age innovation to help keep the cogs of Portiside running from a mechanical perspective (the monorail is their baby), Portis Forward Inc. was responsible for any technological advancements. Inventions such as the transmission pods and weather system had been of their creation. And they also dealt with defense systems and medicinal support to help Earthside when needed. That’s why both Chris and Rosie would often go over there to help keep balance as much as possible.

  Portiside had an invested interest in Earth. They still classed the place as their true home, and hoped for the day when they could return. That’s why they made sure they had key people over there in subtle positions, hidden in their guises from humans to stop things from going too far. It hurt many, especially the Fey, with what humans were doing to the planet. But they knew how important it was to keep a back seat until it was safe for them to return once more.

  Many had debated over the years, that although we were outnumbered by humans over on Earthside by four thousand to one, Portiside citizens were an amalgamation of power and a force. There had been talks of taking back their home a few times over the years. But those talks were quashed pretty quickly. It wasn’t the greatest motivation in getting your home back, when the result of Portiside outing itself could result in a war.