“I’ve felt the same way. Many times,” she said. “You can’t leave. It has to be four Fates. Like it was before.”
The door opened as our guests arrived. The store was soon filled with the magical community, all eager to tell us how grateful they were. Representatives from each of the Houses arrived for the ribbon-cutting.
“Where’s Ambrose?” I asked. It was his big day. He was the new leader of the House of Zeus and he hadn’t even needed to kill anyone to do it.
“Just getting the champagne,” Ambrose said.
Willow had taken her uncle’s place as the head of the House of Poseidon, and the House of Hades was represented by Johnny Asari. The House of Fates would lead as a foursome.
Ambrose popped a bottle of bubbly and we all cheered. He and Talbot filled up glasses and passed them out.
“Here’s a glass for you,” Talbot offered. I tried waving it away, but he put it in my hand. “It’s sparkling cider,” he said. “No alcohol. You’re on a roll. Let’s keep it that way.”
My heart lifted and then settled when Willow entered the store. A dozen or so naiads trailed behind her. Her dark hair had been styled into a crown of braids and she wore a simple green dress and sandals.
She was stopped by magicians who wanted to offer their condolences for her uncle’s death. She was gracious, but brief. She finally made it to my side.
“This is Nyx Fortuna,” Willow told one of her entourage. “He is the head of the House of Fates.”
“The House of Fortune and Fates,” I corrected her. “And I am only one of the leaders.”
She smiled. “It is a fitting tribute to your mother,” she said.
We watched silently as Ambrose used a pair of comically large scissors to cut the red ribbon wrapped around the display cases. After the ribbon was cut, the crowd burst into applause.
“Nyx, come take a photo with us,” Claire called out from the other side of the room.
I gave Willow a smile. “Duty calls.”
“It was good to see you, son of Fortuna,” Willow said.
“It was good to see you, too,” I said, “Lady of the Lake.” I kissed her cheek before I left.
I joined my cousins and we linked arms as we posed for pictures. “Where’s Johnny?” I asked Rebecca as the flashes went off.
She pointed to Johnny, who was holding court near Harvey the bear. “Doing the political thing. Glad-handing all those magicians who turned their backs on us.”
“He’ll do a good job as the head of the House of Hades,” I said.
“He’d better,” she said.
Eventually, the crowd’s exuberance was too much for me, so I slipped into Ambrose’s office for a moment of quiet.
I touched the charms around my neck. “I hope you’re proud of me, Lady Fortuna,” I said softly.
“I am.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Mother?” I could almost see her face.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said. “I’m proud of you, Nyx.”
“Proud?” I knew my mother loved me, but since I’d arrived in Minneapolis, I’d done many things that I was not proud of.
“You have managed to do what I could not. Reunite the House of Fates. That was your true destiny.”
“House of Fortune and Fates,” I corrected gently.
“Fortune and Fates,” she repeated. “I like that.”
“I have so much to tell you,” I said. Silence. She was gone.
When I rejoined the celebration later, Naomi handed out more champagne. “I wanted to toast to the Fates who came before us,” she said. “All four of them.”
She popped the cork and poured glasses for everyone. I declined mine.
“I’ll stick with the apple juice,” I said.
“Here’s to a new generation of Fates,” Naomi said.
I lifted my juice glass and clinked it with the other Fates. “With Fortune’s favor,” I said, “we will succeed.”
My sister, my cousins and I took our places and once again, there were four Fates. And fortune favored us.
extras
meet the author
Marlene Perez is the author of paranormal and urban fantasy books, including the bestselling Dead Is series for teens. The first book in the series, Dead Is the New Black, was named an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers as well as an ALA Popular Paperback. Dead Is Just a Rumor was on VOYA’s 2011 Best Science Fiction, Horror, & Fantasy List. Her novels have been featured in Girls’ Life, Seventeen, and Cosmopolitan, and Disney Television has optioned the rights to the first three books in the Dead Is series.
Marlene grew up in Story City, Iowa, and is the youngest of twelve children. She lives in Orange County, California, with her husband and children. Visit Marlene at www.marleneperez.com or at the Welcome to Nightshade Facebook community page at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Welcome-to-Nightshade-DEAD-IS/128231240528721.
Also by Marlene Perez
DEAD IS
Dead Is the New Black
Dead Is a State of Mind
Dead Is So Last Year
Dead Is Just a Rumor
Dead Is Not an Option
Dead Is a Battlefield
Dead Is a Killer Tune
Dead Is Just a Dream
The Comeback
Love in the Corner Pocket
NYX FORTUNA
Strange Fates
Dark Descent
Fortune’s Favors
introducing
If you enjoyed
FORTUNE’S FAVORS,
look out for
CHARMING
Pax Arcana: Book One
by Elliott James
John Charming isn’t your average prince…
He comes from a line of Charmings—an illustrious family of dragon slayers, witch finders, and killers dating back to before the fall of Rome. Trained by a modern-day version of the Knights Templar, monster hunters who have updated their methods from chain mail and crossbows to Kevlar and shotguns, John Charming was one of the best—until a curse made him one of the abominations the Knights were sworn to hunt.
That was a lifetime ago. Now, John tends bar under an assumed name in rural Virginia and leads a peaceful, quiet life. That is, until a vampire and a blonde walked into his bar…
1
A BLONDE AND A VAMPIRE
WALK INTO A BAR…
Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely human.
I later found out that her name was Sig.
Sig stood there in the doorway of the bar with the wind behind her, and there was something both earthy and unearthly about her. Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer’s, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad.
And I wanted her out of the bar, fast.
You have to understand, Rigby’s is not the kind of place where goddesses were meant to walk among mortals. It is a small, modest establishment eking out a fragile existence at the tail end of Clayburg’s main street. The owner, David Suggs, had wanted a quaint pub, but instead of decorating the place with dartboards or Scottish coats of arms or ceramic mugs, he had decided to celebrate southwest Virginia culture and covered the walls with rusty old railroad equipment and farming tools.
When I asked why a bar—excuse me, I mean pub—with a Celtic name didn’t have a Celtic atmosphere, Dave said that he had named Rigby’s after a Beatles song about lonely people needing a place to belong.
“Names have power,” Dave had gone on to inform me, and I had listened gravely as if this were a revelation.
Speaking of name
s, “John Charming” is not what it reads on my current driver’s license. In fact, about the only thing accurate on my current license is the part where it says that I’m black-haired and blue-eyed. I’m six foot one instead of six foot two and about seventy-five pounds lighter than the 250 pounds indicated on my identification. But I do kind of look the way the man pictured on my license might look if Trevor A. Barnes had lost that much weight and cut his hair short and shaved off his beard. Oh, and if he were still alive.
And no, I didn’t kill the man whose identity I had assumed, in case you’re wondering. Well, not the first time anyway.
Anyhow, I had recently been forced to leave Alaska and start a new life of my own, and in David Suggs I had found an employer who wasn’t going to be too thorough with his background checks. My current goal was to work for Dave for at least one fiscal year and not draw any attention to myself.
Which was why I was not happy to see the blonde.
For her part, the blonde didn’t seem too happy to see me either. Sig focused on me immediately. People always gave me a quick flickering glance when they walked into the bar—excuse me, the pub—but the first thing they really checked out was the clientele. Their eyes were sometimes predatory, sometimes cautious, sometimes hopeful, often tired, but they only returned to me after being disappointed. Sig’s gaze, however, centered on me like the oncoming lights of a train—assuming train lights have slight bags underneath them and make you want to flex surreptitiously. Those same startlingly blue eyes widened, and her body went still for a moment.
Whatever had triggered her alarms, Sig hesitated, visibly debating whether to approach and talk to me. She didn’t hesitate for long, though—I got the impression that she rarely hesitated for long—and chose to go find herself a table.
Now, it was a Thursday night in April, and Rigby’s was not empty. Clayburg is host to a small private college named Stillwaters University, one of those places where parents pay more money than they should to get an education for children with mediocre high school records, and underachievers with upper-middle-class parents tend to do a lot of heavy drinking. This is why Rigby’s manages to stay in business. Small bars with farming implements on the walls don’t really draw huge college crowds, but the more popular bars tend to stay packed, and Rigby’s does attract an odd combination of local rednecks and students with a sense of irony. So when a striking six-foot blonde who wasn’t an obvious transvestite sat down in the middle of the bar, there were people around to notice.
Even Sandra, a nineteen-year-old waitress who considers customers an unwelcome distraction from covert texting, noticed the newcomer. She walked up to Sig promptly instead of making Renee, an older waitress and Rigby’s de facto manager, chide her into action.
For the next hour I pretended to ignore the new arrival while focusing on her intently. I listened in—my hearing is as well developed as my sense of smell—while several patrons tried to introduce themselves. Sig seemed to have a knack for knowing how to discourage each would-be player as fast as possible.
She told suitors that she wanted to be up-front about her sex change operation because she was tired of having it cause problems when her lovers found out later, or she told them that she liked only black men, or young men, or older men who made more than seventy thousand dollars a year. She told them that what really turned her on was men who were willing to have sex with other men while she watched. She mentioned one man’s wife by name, and when the weedy-looking grad student doing a John Lennon impersonation tried the sensitive-poet approach, she challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He stared at her, sitting there exuding athleticism, confidence, and health—three things he was noticeably lacking—and chose to be offended rather than take her up on it.
There was at least one woman who seemed interested in Sig as well, a cute sandy-haired college student who was tall and willowy, but when it comes to picking up strangers, women are generally less likely to go on a kamikaze mission than men. The young woman kept looking over at Sig’s table, hoping to establish some kind of meaningful eye contact, but Sig wasn’t making any.
Sig wasn’t looking at me either, but she held herself at an angle that kept me in her peripheral vision at all times.
For my part, I spent the time between drink orders trying to figure out exactly what Sig was. She definitely wasn’t undead. She wasn’t a half-blood Fae either, though her scent wasn’t entirely dissimilar. Elf smell isn’t something you forget, sweet and decadent, with a hint of honey blossom and distant ocean. There aren’t any full-blooded Fae left, of course—they packed their bags and went back to Fairyland a long time ago—but don’t mention that to any of the mixed human descendants that the elves left behind. Elvish half-breeds tend to be somewhat sensitive on that particular subject. They can be real bastards about being bastards.
I would have been tempted to think that Sig was an angel, except that I’ve never heard of anyone I’d trust ever actually seeing a real angel. God is as much an article of faith in my world as he, she, we, they, or it is in yours.
Stumped, I tried to approach the problem by figuring out what Sig was doing there. She didn’t seem to enjoy the ginger ale she had ordered—didn’t seem to notice it at all, just sipped from it perfunctorily. There was something wary and expectant about her body language, and she had positioned herself so that she was in full view of the front door. She could have just been meeting someone, but I had a feeling that she was looking for someone or something specific by using herself as bait… but as to what and why and to what end, I had no idea. Sex, food, or revenge seemed the most likely choices.
I was still mulling that over when the vampire walked in.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Extras
Meet the Author
Also by Marlene Perez
A Preview of Charming
Orbit Newsletter
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Marlen
e Perez
Excerpt from Charming copyright © 2013 by Elliott James
Cover design by Wendy Chan
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: August 2014
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ISBN 978-0-316-23356-9
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