Copyright © 2016 Sarah M. Cradit
Cover Design by Sarah M. Cradit
Editing by Shaner Media Creations
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Follow the links below for more information on each title, as well as purchase links for all vendors.
Crimson & Clover Series Prequels
The Storm and the Darkness | Shattered (novella)
The House of Crimson & Clover
Volume I: The Illusions of Eventide | Volume II: Bound (novella) |Volume III: Midnight Dynasty | Volume IV: Asunder |
Volume V: Empire of Shadows | Volume VI: Myths of Midwinter | Volume VII: The Hinterland Veil | Volume VIII: The Secrets Amongst the Cypress | Volume IX: Within the Garden of Twilight
La Famille Lagniappes (Character Bonus Stories)
Flourish: The Story of Anne Fontaine | Shame: The Story of Jonathan St. Andrews | Banshee: The Story of Giselle Deschanel
Crimson & Clover Lagniappes (Bonus Stories)
St. Charles at Dusk: The Story of Oz and Adrienne | Surrender: The Story of Oz and Anasofiya |
Fire & Ice: Remy and Fleur Fontenot | Dark Blessing: The Landry Triplets | Pandora’s Box: Jasper and Pandora Broussard |
The Menagerie: Cyler| A Band of Heather: Colleen and Noah | The Ephemeral: Autumn Sullivan
Box Sets
Lagniappes Collection I | The House of Crimson & Clover Boxed Set Volumes I-IV | The Prequels | Lagniappes Collection II
And many more to come…
"Cradit’s words flow in prosaic candor like a melody of the ages: pronounced, patient, lingering, and beautiful.”- Dionne Charlet, New Orleans Examiner
"Her (Cradit's) talent for creating atmosphere rivals Daphne du Maurier. This is modern Gothic with fierce smarts. Can't say it enough. I loved this book."- Christopher Rice, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Heavens Rise
"It takes a great writer like Cradit to weave the threads of so many characters into an enjoyable story. I have no doubt that the name Cradit will one day be associated with the echelon of gothic fiction writers, namely Radcliffe, Blackwood, and Rice."- Becket, Bestselling Author of The Blood Vicicanti and Assistant to Anne Rice
"Sarah Cradit's writing is tight and masterful. Her keen sense of how to pace a book and her ability to use just the right language to express the desires, fears and hopes of her characters is flawless."- Ionia Martin, Vine Top 100 Reviewer, Readful Things
"Cradit does an incredible job of building suspense. It's a slow, moody, edge of your seat suspense with a palpable sense of foreboding. This atmosphere kicks the book off and slowly escalates as you sink deeper into it."- Julie Whiteley, Clue Review
"The books are well written, the plot flows so quickly that you reach the end of the story well before you are ready and without realizing how much time has gone by since you were enchanted, committed and flung into the world of the Sullivan's, Deschanel's and their friends. You become a part of their lives as you are reading the books and think about the characters long after you have finished reading the book."- Stephenee Carsten, Nerd Girl Official
"The writing is top-notch, the story gripping and fast-paced, and the character development incredible. I will be impatiently awaiting the next installment."- Teri Polen, Books & Such
Never miss a single moment in the lives of these ancient, powerful, cursed families…
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la·gniappe
ˌlanˈyap,ˈlanˌyap/
nounNorth American
noun: lagniappe; plural noun: lagniappes
something given as a bonus or extra gift.
The House of Crimson & Clover Series includes many titles, some essential to the progression and others, simply, lagniappe.
This collection contains five such lagniappe, or bonus, stories that can be enjoyed at any point in your series journey. These are quick and easy stories, easily consumed alongside something tasty on your lunch break. From the joys and heartbreaks of first love to a secret club of hedonism, there’s something here for every mood.
At the end, you’ll find an excerpts from both The Storm and the Darkness (Series Prequel) and The Illusions of Eventide (Volume I), should you find your appetite whetted to dive into The House of Crimson & Clover.
Pandora’s Box
The Menagerie
A Band of Heather
The Ephemeral
Banshee
For all the peculiar hearts out there
I
Jasper straightened his tweed jacket, moving through the halls of Brother Martin High School with the joyous ease of someone who knows exactly where they’re headed and can’t wait to get there.
Inside the worn leather bag, draped artfully over one shoulder, was a letter. The very one he and Esther had been waiting to receive for months. Her own letter came weeks ago, leaving them questioning whether his application would be accepted as well. With a sad sigh, she’d declared their efforts at an impasse, believing if the news was good, they’d have heard by now. They would make the journey together, or not at all.
Jasper envisioned her pale face taking on a shock of excited color as he leisurely revealed the scintillating contents of the delayed missive.
Esther Prejean was the love of his life. The soft, warm center of his curious heart. And soon—very soon—they would begin their lives together as anthropologists of the occult.
The first time he saw Esther, freshman year, she was a cape of golden hair, leaning over a hand-bound leather copy of The Necronomicon, carefully inserting a rainbow’s assortment of sticky-notes for later reference.
Once a week, all the private schools in New Orleans brought students together at the Brother Martin school library to give them research time for their studies. Judging from the jacket draped over her chair, he deduced she was from McGehee.
When girls from Louise McGehee, in the Lower Garden District, came to study, they rarely gave the Brother Martin boys the time of day. The Sacred Heart girls were usually more laid back.
Not that Jasper had much of a positive impact on girls from any school, with his elbow patches, tweed pants, and penchant for quoting from centuries-old literature.
“H.P. Lovecraft studies? Quite an unusual assignment,” Jasper declared, standing over her with a blend of inquisitiveness, high intrigue, and inexplicable fear.
“This is not for an assignment,” her smoky voice, shockingly mature for a girl her age, retorted back without even a slight glance his direction.
He straightened his lapel, a gesture his classmates often rankled him for. Don’t be such an old man, Jasper! He dared not wear any of his favorite vibrant cravats. “I don’t recall ever seeing you here before.”
With a resigned sigh, she closed the book. Her silken hair fell away from her face as she looked up, and gazing back at him was the most exquisite creature he’d ever beheld. Her almond-shaped amber eyes were painted up at the corners, giving her a distinctive feline appearance. The shocking
shade of red coating her lips was the kind one is used to seeing on pinup girls.
“We’re from Baton Rouge,” she explained; the way she accentuated the words made it evident she believed where she came from to be far superior to where she ended up. She blinked twice, sizing him up. “That jacket is groovy.”
“It’s my father’s,” he confessed, not adding he’d taken the jacket from a pile intended for Goodwill. “Nice shirt.”
The blonde bombshell glanced at her Souxsie & the Banshees tee, intentionally shredded at one shoulder, and shrugged. “I’m Esther. Prejean… of Prejean Textiles.”
“Jasper Broussard. Of the Deschanel dynasty.”
Esther wrinkled her nose with a snicker. “Dynasty, huh? Yeah, I know who you are. My father says the Broussards made their money by selling off all their land inheritance to oil companies. That they aren’t fit to share blood with the Deschanels, let alone a dinner table.”
“Sure, and?” Jasper nodded at the tome sitting on top of her knees, just past the hem of her very short skirt. “Where’d you get that, anyway?”
Esther smiled. “I stole it.”
“Sure you did.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“How would a girl like you even know about the vast pantheon of a genius like Lovecraft?”
Esther tucked the book into her beaded sack. “Maybe the kind who has studied the entire Cthulu Mythos forward and backward, in four languages, since she was seven?”
Jasper reflexively straightened his posture, beyond even his usual careful deportment. “I have a signed first edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
Esther stood, looping her bag over the crook of her elbow. “We should be friends, Jasper Broussard.”
We should get married, Jasper thought to himself, as his heart leapt forward with a light, merry skip.
Esther had a curious and complicated relationship with authority. She couldn't bear to be told what to do, by anyone, but sought out approval as if it was vital to her emotional survival.
When her father declared Jasper an inappropriate boyfriend for someone of her breeding (despite Jasper’s constant reminder he hailed from the most venerable family in the state of Louisiana, ahem), she immediately acquiesced, thus her rebellion existed solely outside of his knowledge.
Through Esther’s clever manipulations, they made a game of sneaking around, managing to keep the secret of their relationship hidden through the end of their senior year. Taking their occult research to the New Orleans Library, they used code to communicate from across the room, meeting between the Travel and Business aisles to discuss their findings, and lament the unfairness of their situation.
Their shared dream was to open a museum of the occult; a place where true enthusiasts of the supernatural could come and browse legitimate relics with actual merit, and not merely the smoke and mirrors found in most New Orleans tourist establishments. They’d corresponded with their idol, a Dr. Archimedes in Paris, who, inspired by their energies, offered to sell them a number of artifacts at cost, to help them get started.
Picture it, Jasper! A place where our passions could be taken seriously! There’s no better city for this than ours, yet you won’t find anything like what we’re proposing anywhere here.
Esther’s romantic notions made Jasper dizzy with love. For her, and for what they could accomplish, together, if only they could spend time unfettered by the fear of her father discovering they’d gone against his wishes.
Esther insisted Jasper was her boyfriend, though Jasper’s definition of the word included more than covert operations conducted in complete subterfuge. It also didn’t involve watching her date the insipid white-collar playboys her father approved of. He’d never even held her delicate hand in his!
“Maybe next weekend we can sneak away,” she’d promise each time the subject came up, a vow that traveled over the space of years and yet somehow never dulled his hope.
On her eighteenth birthday—a mere month after his—he presented her with a gift, in the form of an opportunity: join him for a week in Paris over spring break. An adult now, she could make her own decisions. If she chose to come with him, he would give her the world. His world, and everything within their potential to create as a combined force.
In the secret pocket of his heart, the place where his doubts lived, he didn’t believe she’d come.
But she did.
Dr. Archibald Archimedes was not at all what Jasper pictured. Instead of a mad scientist, with tufts of white hair pointing haphazardly, and questionable social and hygienic standards, he was a young man fresh out of his PhD program. Handsome, too, based on Esther’s reaction. Abashedly, he’d explained the former Dr. Archibald Archimedes Sr., his father, had died unexpectedly sometime after their last correspondence. “I intend to keep his promises,” the young doctor vowed. “Everything he offered you, I offer still.”
“Our very own patron!” Esther declared as she fell back on the lush bed in their hotel, sprawling over the golden duvet. Outside their balcony, the Eiffel Tower stood watch over the young lovers.
“Do you love me, Esther?” Jasper asked, dropping to one knee. He’d imagined the slow, deliberate move many times in his mind, his debonair charm sweeping her off her feet. Instead, his palms were drenched in sweat and his heart raced off the charts.
He expected her usual, noncommittal response, so when she sat up and slid to the edge of the bed, taking his face in her soft hands, he audibly gasped. “I do love you. I saved myself for you.”
Tilting his head upward to face her, he was relieved to discover nothing playful or teasing in her expression. Esther Prejean had expressed her love for him, finally, and he knew the words reflected the contents of her heart.
“We’ll come back here after we graduate, Esther, and I’ll make an honest woman of you.”
“The Sorbonne,” she decided. “The University of Paris. They have a program made for us. If we do this, we have to do it right.”
They spent the next week writing Lovecraftian-inspired verses and discovering what it meant to surrender to another. Plans turned to promises. Love to something beyond their youthful definition.
“Was I worth the wait?” Esther asked him on their last evening in the City of Love, as her wide, amber eyes gazed back from the goose-down pillow.
“You’ll always be worth the wait, Esther.”
“Call me Pandora,” she purred, stretching her arms before her, twirling them in the air. “I don’t want to be Esther anymore. I never liked her much.”
Jasper cared not about the angry father awaiting them back in New Orleans. He would move the heavens for Esther Prejean. Would cross through Dante’s seven circles of hell to find her. He’d not once, not ever, met someone who embraced his unconventional eccentricities and his strange, twisted heart. Someone he could appreciate in equal measure.
With a skip in his step, Jasper made his way toward the library, to show her his prize: his acceptance letter, finally, to The Sorbonne.
II
When Pandora Prejean, formerly Esther Prejean, learned she was pregnant, her very first thought was, What will my father say?
Of course, she knew the answer. That was the problem.
When she’d accepted Jasper’s invitation to Paris, the gesture was more symbolic than even he knew. She’d strung him along for years, praying he’d still be there when she found her spine and learned to be satisfied with not pleasing everyone. Her father would survive her falling in love with someone he didn’t approve of. The world wouldn’t cease its rotation.
Upon their return to New Orleans, Pandora had even mustered a burst of courage to tell her father of her love for Jasper, convincing herself it didn’t matter that he’d turned and left the room before she finished explaining herself.
Jasper was her heart. All the rest was interference.
Pandora managed to prevent her inevitable groveling, her usual fare of begging her dad’s forgiveness when his silence grew unbearable. Es
ther would have, but Pandora was a strong, confident woman with a bright future ahead of her.
Not the future a daughter of Francis Prejean was expected to pursue, of course, but his pretentions had held her back long enough.
In the end, this was her driving motivation behind her regretful decision to turn to Cassius Broussard, instead of her own father, when she learned of the child growing within her.
Prejean Textiles pre-dated the Civil War, and enjoyed partnerships with over two hundred companies in Louisiana alone. The enterprise started with the hard work of Pandora’s third great-grandfather, Alistair Prejean, a man who, to hear her father tell it, should be held in equal reverence to Jesus Christ Himself.
In contrast, the Broussards inherited their fortune from their Deschanel cousins (a dynasty, Jasper had said, and that wasn’t far off in the minds of the peerage), then promptly sold all of the acquired land to interested oil parties. The same companies now responsible for their disappearing Gulf coastlines.
The difference between the two families was lost on Pandora. Capitalists were capitalists.
Cassius Broussard was peculiar, but not in the same way his son was. Intellectually gifted, though not as traditional as most of his generation, and prone to more direct language than many were comfortable receiving.
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