Raven Miller Project

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Raven Miller Project - book excerpt

Prologue: Fruits of Lilith

Adam, God’s first creature, had been sick for days. Traveling through the dense arctic snow, the world seemed to blend into a painful grey. He sought a treasure that was thought to not even exist; the isle of faeries.At least that’s where the weary man hoped he’d find her. His lover, his redemption; the demon goddess, Lilith.Although he had not seen her in many years, there was a rumor of a portal, deep in the snowy wasteland, so that one day they could reunite.

With the loss of his family, his faith, everything he held dear. All he had left was the hope of reuniting with her: securing his fate in Hell.That is if he could even make it there.

Adam had been without sustenance for so long, his body was too weak to stand. There were no plants, nor animals, only ice. In an act of desperation, he sat, resting his back against the cold of a rock or maybe a dead tree. He scratched his fingers along the surface, pulling off dirt, ice and whatever else lay on the surface. Adam then forced the mixture down his throat. This proved to be a mistake.

He coughed until he vomited back up the vile substance. But this fluid was at least warm. Licking his lips, he could taste the metallic blood. There was something so warm, comforting, and delicious.

Since he could no longer see in the blinding snow, Adam tore at his eyes. He scratched and clawed with his overgrown fingernails until blood streamed down his face. Adam chuckled to himself, as he was not even remotely shocked that he had no sensation of pain. The warm blood had such a beautiful taste.Was it what his son had tasted before his death? Or his wife? The idea made him laugh harder than he had ever laughed before. “Do you hear me, Lord? Praise be to you and your infinite mercy!”

In truth, Adam prayed to no God. No one could save his damned soul.He laughed until his head felt heavy, groggy, and he simply allowed himself to pass out. Adam awoke in darkness, lying comfortably on a warm blanket. Was this death? It had to be. To his left, he could hear the sound of tinder being arranged in a fireplace.

“Hello,Father,” said a soft female voice. “Be still, you’re very weak.”

“Where are you?”

“Where, not who?” she asked with a giggle.

“I know who you are. You sound just like your mother.” Adam couldn’t help but smile. Even if the act caused the muscles of his face to fully experience the pain of his previous actions.

“Are you saying all Nordic faeries sound the same?”

“Is that what you identify as, dear daughter?”

“That is what my mother raised me to be.” She placed her gentle hand upon his. “I’ve missed you. It feels so strange to have such love for someone I’ve met only a handful of times.”

“I could never forget you.” Adam raised his hand to his face. He could feel where she had bandaged his eyes.

“Rest now. Mother instructed me to watch over you. Soon you will be by her side.

“In Hell?”

“Is that what your people call our homeland?”

“Your homeland?”

“I am proud of Mother’s heritage. It is your kind, the humans, that make us out to be demons.”She was stirring something in a wooden bowl. “You need to eat.”

Adam struggled to lift his head as she placed the spoon to his lips. The warm liquid tasted sweet, salty like a broth of fish bones and tea leaves. But he could barely swallow.

“I know your throat hurts. This broth will help with the pain. Just take soft breaths, let the medicine flow down your throat.” She attempted another spoonful, cradling Adam’s head in her arms. “Hold my hand, let me take some of your pain.”

In the hours to follow, Adam suffered tremors followed by an intense fever. He feared he was being dragged into the fires of Hell , doomed to spend all eternity with his regrets.Adam could feel his daughter’s touch as she attempted to bathe his frostbitten limbs. “Are you skilled in surgery?”

“I am.”

“May I make a request?”

“I cannot kill, nor can I save you. I may only ease your pain.”

Adam winced as she removed the bandages from his eyes.

“I’m going to clean the wounds.”

Adam felt the comfort of a warm liquid followed by a soft cloth. The sensation was almost pleasurable. If he had still had the means, he would have wept from the joy in his heart. “Why are you even kind to me? I can’t even recall your name.”

“I don’t mind,” she said as she washed his wounds with the soothing mixture of oils. “My name has been lost to history.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“There is not much need for a name when living among the ice and snow,” she said happily as she kissed his forehead. “As for why I’m kind to you? You’re right, I don’t know you. I know not the man exiled from paradise, banished by his wife, disowned by his family including his God.”

Adam swallowed hard, choking down his emotions.

“What I do know is of a man whose heart thirsts for wisdom. A man who taught me how to catch a bird on my arm and how to treat its broken wing.”

Her sweet story seemed to imply that he was her inspiration for becoming a healer. “That sounds more like your mother.’

“Well, it’s a memory I have of you. One of many. And they are mine alone to treasure.”

Adam was left speechless, that this remarkable creature carried memories of him that made him seem like something other than a waste of life. “I wish to will my heart to you.”

“Your heart?”

“When I pass, I want you to take my heart.”

“Yes, Father. As you wish.”

Adam could feel his consciousness starting to fade. “I want my memories.”

“Your memories?”

“While banishing my regrets.”

“To exist without regrets is not possible. Not in this life or the next.”

Adam nodded. His wish was the ravings of a mad man. “It was worth a try.”

“And try I shall.”

Since Adam was already blind, he knew not the difference between wake and sleep. All he knew was that his daughter stayed by his side, humming soft melodies as she tended to his wounds.He felt no pain, only truth, trust, and love.

After a time, she stopped feeding him, but Adam could still hear her voice.

The world felt warm.So warm, and then wet.Followed by a blinding white light.

Adam opened his eyes to the glow of the sun. He was no longer a man but an infant, seeing the world through brand-new eyes. His vision was blurry, consisting of only light and darkness. But he could feel her heart, her skin; the warmth of her bosom as she held him close.

“Everything will be fine, little one.”

Adam could feel his new form being lowered into a basket.

The same process followed.Over and over, his consciousness flashed between two perspectives, then three, then four.For a while, it stopped at four.

Four lifetimes; four children. Each had their own love, victories, failures, and regrets.

One by one, they died, but each time they were reborn.Over and over.

For generation after generation; thousands upon thousands of mistakes, victories, tragedies, and pain.But the true agony, the living nightmare, was that he never saw his beloved daughter again.

Chapter 1

“I think I found him!” I shouted, wiping the sweat from my face. Even though I wore no make-up, the muggy summer heatof the deep South made my skin clammy. My tear ducts watered, as if non-existent foundation was melting into my eyes. I removed a McDonald’s napkin from my pocket. Thankfully I had kept it clean and unused for just such an occasion. “Holy crap,” I groaned as the thick sweat stung my eyes. It was like the universe wanted to remind me just how much my partner and I did not belong here. “Oh, damn.” This was something no sane person would ever want to see, much less track down of her own free will. I wasn’t a cop, or even getting paid. How the fuck was this my life’s work?

The body was in bad shape; his assailants had tried to cover their tracks while clearly never having watched a true crime documentary. He was cut up, burned, even partially skinned, including the removal of his hair and facial features. What lay before me barely looked like a human. In fact, had we gotten to the body any later he would have likely been ravaged by the local wildlife. And if that had happened, the police would have had the perfect excuse to shelve the case.

Who was I kidding? Local jurisdiction for the attempted murder of a drifter: they’d shelve it anyway, maybe even have him declared dead so they could deny medical care and treat him like something less then human; like a slab of meat. But I knew he was human. I could feel his strength, his spirit. I even knew his name. “Hi, Bobby.”

If I had to guess the thought process of the psycho-bitch who’d masterminded this display, I’d have to go with a lack of time and resources. Meaning, since they could not fully or properly destroy the body, his attackers simply tried to remove the parts that would be used for identification.I just hoped that most of this was done after he was rendered unconscious, because he clearly wasn’t dead.

I placed my fingers in his mouth to feel around for the presence of teeth or a confirmation of breath. I could feel shards of bone sticking out from a broken jaw; clearly the work of a hammer, not pliers (removing teeth with pliers would have been much easier and much faster). Yup, this was a hack job. I didn’t even want to know what had become of his teeth.But on the bright side, I felt a warmth coming from the back of his throat confirming that he was in fact alive and strong enough to fight. “You’re good, Bobby. You’re good. I just pray that all this shit happened when you were already knocked out.”Or that he was at least, at the current time, actually knocked out. If that was not the case, he was likely to jump up like a frightened zombie upon feeling my touch. And that would be creepy, even for me.

My small hands stroked what remained of the victim’s blood-stained jeans. Much to my surprise, his lower body seemed to have taken less abuse. But even without damage to his legs, hips or spine, this was going to be a difficult one.“Wow. Makes me almost wish I wore gloves,” I muttered aloud as I examined the state of his genitals.Granted, male victims cannot (usually) be identified by their penis and testicles, but the mutilation and/or removal always seemed to be part of the disposal process. “Holy fuck.”

“And mainstream mediacallswomen the weaker gender.” That sentiment always made me laugh. After all, I came from a long line of powerful women. Some of whom would have been drooling over the sight that lay before me.Those bitches were thetrue man-eaters; females who killed simply to prove they were the stronger, more deserving sex.This was why, despite the gruesome state of the victim, I had it on good authority that the mastermind of this particular crime was a female.

The weather was uncomfortably hot, making the blood sticky and the body smell. I had to keep reminding myself he wasn’t dead; his chest was moving ever so slightly to represent breath in his still functional lungs; I just had to stay focused on my job.But as the minutes went by, my eyes were growing at odds with my other senses.

My partner just laughed as she brushed a lock of sticky gray hair from her equally sweaty forehead. “Yes, all us ladies are the weaker gender, and on Wednesdays we wear pink, right, babe?” The old hippie woman wore camo print T-shirt that showed off her strong abs. This, paired withcolorful sweatpants, made her look younger than her sixty-plus years.

Did you seriously just call me babe?“I can’t believe you actually know that movie.”

Annie was old enough to remember the good old days; hippies and disco, punk rock and nuclear war. She even had a father who’ddied in Vietnam.“Well, all good lesbians know Mean Girls; the Plastics, all them jokes about friendship and white Africans.” Annie’s southern twang was playfully adorable, especially when she walked with a spring in her step.

“The first movie anyway.”I pulled my ceremonial bracelets over my perfectly manicured nails. Cleanliness was a necessary, vital part of my practice, since my powers required skin to skin contact. I rubbed my moisturized, lavender-scented hands, letting the colorful wooden beads of my chunky jewelry roll over my skin. (I was a total fem-girl witch.)“You know, the second movie was a piece of shit. What was the point of making a sequel with none of the original cast, nearly ten years later?”

Annie shrugged. “Well, there are mean girls in every generation.”

“And some of us were born from them.” I smiled at my own joke. I wasn’t a ‘Mean Girl,’ like the clique in the movie. But I credit that to my mother; if the Plastics were real, she would’ve been a founding member. And some of us murder them to steal their powers. “Annie, go check in on Lola. I don’t need her waking up to this.” I remembered putting my toddler down for a nap before arriving in North Carolina but not much after that.

Annie stifled a laugh. “Our little hell spawn is almost three. Trust me, she’s woken up to worse. And before you get your panties in a bunch, you know I mean that in the kindest way.”

“I know,” I said as I tied my hair back. “My curious tiny angel, she always wants to play in the blood. But last time I let her get into my tool kit, I almost lost a finger.” I was, of course, kidding. I adored my daughter’s passion for medicine and forensic science. Black magic, however, was a little more than what I wanted her exposed to. And black magic was a big part of my therapeutic process.

Annie rolled her eyes and chuckled with her sweet southern elegance as she fanned herself with her hand.“I will leave you to your work.”

“Thank you, Miss Annie,” I replied as I returned my focus to my patient. “Twenty-seven-year-old Roberto Gian ‘Bobby’ Reyes, occupation: freelance model and graffiti artist. Your drifter ass got cut up worse than Humpty Dumpty.” But unlike the nursery rhyme, I was more than capable of putting him back together again. I just needed to focus on what was still there. “Show me you’re still in there. You may look like a side of beef, but you still have some fight left in you.” I took a breath, continuing my search for a connection point.

“I bet you have such a kind soul. This kind of thingonly tends to happen to nice young men who get caught up in the search for love. You meet a sweet girl, who tells you all the right things. Then after a night of drinking and/or drugs,your pretty little girlfriendcuts off your junk and leaves your mutilated body on the side of a North Carolina highway. At least according to the police report.”

The publicly released police report was drafted only after the arrest of nineteen-year-old university student Ramona Quinto. The local girl was found to be in possession of an artifact; tattooed skin that used to be part of Bobby’s upper arm, wrapped around an eyeball (all of which was carried on a keychain).Without a location for the body, the police didn’t have enough to charge her with assault or murder. They just kept her in custody on charges of conspiracy, offering her deal after deal for information about the ‘actual killer.’ Since there was no way a good little Christian girl could have been acting on her own. Sexist assholes.

“How you doing, Bobby?”Since I wasn’t able to feel for a life force, I pulled out a penlight, shaking it a bit to get the battery to activate.“You still there, sweetheart?” I asked out loud as I focused the light onto his eyes.

His dark pupils twitched, followed by a blink.I couldn’t help but crack a smile. The man was alive, or at least what remained of him was. “Good job.” I reached for his left hand, giving it a tender squeeze. Now that I’d found a point of life, I could feel other energies rippling through his muscles, nerves and blood.“This world has dealt you one hell of a bad hand, but just know I believe in you, Bobby.”

I moved on to tending his wounds, stabilizing his body enough to move him.“I’m pretty sure you just met Ramona and she saw you as an easy mark. But damn, not even livestock deserve this.” I’d seen many discarded lovers of witches; beautiful men and women, thrown away like garbage. But most witches have the decency to finish them off by devouring the heart. To leave a victim like this was an act of pure hate.

A clattering sound coming from behind forced me to turn my head. “Annie, are you serious?”My partner was leaning against our car. She held our squirming toddler in one arm and her police scanner in the other.

“Mama Raven!” Lola was a curious little girl. Her long, jet-black hair was pulled back in pigtails highlighting her adorably round cheeks.“Mama! Mama! Mama!”I was the one who’d gotten her dressed that morning. (Annie liked to keep her hair in braids, a process that took well over an hour.) And my partner would’ve never allowed Lola to wear her beloved sunshine-yellow off-brandT-shirt with a neon pink pony that attempted to mimic a certain popular series. That thrift-store find was her favorite and as such had not been washed in nearly a week. Not that we ever did much laundry anyway. And she wore no pants, only a pull-up as she flailed her little legs in the muggy heat. My little girl laughed and giggled; to her, everything was play. Such innocence was truly inspiring.

Annie did not appear to have heard me as she was muttering profanity under her breath. “Fuck it. Earth to Raven!”

I could hear her losing her grip on the scanner. Would it really kill her to let Lola see it for a while?“What’s up? Did you catch something?”

“Not yet, but we can’t risk it,” Annie muttered, shifting Lola in her arms. “We need to gethim the fuck out of here before the local cops start arriving.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch; I’m going as fast as I can. You can’t rush this shit!” I groaned. Annie clearly didn’t want to be here. Not in the sweaty armpit that was North Carolina, or accompanying me on the investigation of a possible witch and her male victim. There was nothing in it for Annie; no politics, no fame, no taking down the one percent, or whatever. That was all the stuff she cared about, what made her who she was.

My words bought me only a few seconds of quiet before Annie returned to her bitching. “And by that, I mean we need to get the fuck out of here, before we’re locked away, finger printed and sent to a high-security military prison off the coast of Cuba.”

I paused, tapping my fingers on my leg in frustration. It was obvious she just wanted help with the baby but lacked the social skills to simply ask. If necessary, I could hold Lola on my back or even keep her next to me strapped into her carseat.

Unfortunately, the sudden gap in productivityonly shut my partner up for all of sixtyseconds. “Well, you’re going to have to try and hurry up, Raven, darling. Is the dumbass fuckboystable enough to move or not?”

“No, he’s not,” I replied, attempting to harness my mental focus. “I am working as fast as I can.”Stupid cunt never takes my job seriously.“You can put the baby in her carseat if you like. You know, to gain full use of both your arms.”

“You know that’s the one skill I lack,” Annie muttered.

“Are you kidding me? So you’re not even going to try?” I shook my head and groaned. “Such bullshit.”Annie was the older one, the wannabe super-soldier who never actually enlisted. Some might even call her a terrorist since blowing up buildings that don’t belong to you is considered a crime. (Even if they do contain evil military, political or local government figures.) I knew for a fact; all her balls came from her work as a wannabe superhero or Robin Hood. She had skills (like that one Liam Neeson character), but I was the one with powers.

“Roberto Gian Reyes,” I said as I placed my hands on his chest. I was feeling for a nice bloody open wound to use as my entry point, to unite our lifeforces.“You’re about to make a deal with the devil. But don’t worry, I’ll make it worth your time.”

My curious fingers found the perfect spot; an injury just below his clavicle where a shard of bone was protruding through his skin. Using the sharp broken bone as my cutting tool, I made an incision across my palm, along my lifeline. Whenever he flinched, I held him close, forcing the bone further and further through my hand, until at last I was impaled to the point of being immobile. The pain was not too unbearable. I imagined it was what normal people felt then they got implant piercings, except they got a little jewel or an odd-shaped piece of silicone. (Or devil horns, those were also pretty cool.) That’s all this was; body modification. The first few times had been the worst. No matter the prize, the human body still has nerves and tendons to deal with. But much like all body modification, piercings, implants, gauges, or tattoos, it only gets easier with practice.

“Bobby Reyes, I give you my hand, in exchange for your life.”If I was a bad witch, I would’ve just fully sacrificedone finger.I’d bleed until my body absorbed his life force like a sponge. Once the spell was complete, I’d be down one finger but have gained a slave. And I mean it in the worst sense; he would be a living doll who bent to my will. But I kind of like having two complete hands. (Plus, what the heck would I even do with ten slaves?)

I watched cautiously as his skin regrew and his body healed. “Yes!” With each new layer of cells, his features started to become more human. As bones fused and rebuilt, I could see the man was tall, with light skin and dark brown hair. His hair had previously been cut or burned off. To see it regrow like the most beautiful grass was truly awe-inspiring. To disfigure such a beautiful human was just criminal.“I can see why you were identified as a freelance model.” I couldn’t actually remember where I’d read that. Oh, well. I’d figure it out once we got back on the road.

I carefully moved him to our trailer, with my hand pinned to his still exposed bone.