Page 1 of Demon and the Raven

ONE

I love summer. Not as much as fall, but it runs a close second.

Honestly, I love all the seasons, but summer is slower, gentler. Walking in dappled sunlight, listening to the warm wind through ancient trees, stepping into the coolness of the shadows, getting caught in a brief summer squall…all those things are truly magical. But what holds the most mystical, dreamy allure are the nights. It’s never truly dark.

On stormy evenings, the clouds appear slate gray, stamped on an indigo-blue sky, and when it’s clear, the stars are so bright, it makes sense that sea-tossed sailors could follow them home. When it’s still warm outside at midnight, I love to walk through the thicket, hunting for fireflies and fairies, seeing how quickly I can spot the difference. The forest calls to me, beckoning me to take another step, farther away, pulling at my hair, tugging on my heart. I could stay away all day and night and never notice the passing of time.

Before Lorne MacBain came into my life, sometimes I would fall asleep in the tall grass and spend the night outside with the moon watching over me. It’s like being in another age, a feral, primordial one, when the world was younger and everything from a single blade of grass to the wild wind was enchanted.

There will always be the lure of the deep woods, and that welcome, necessary communion that I need, but now Lorne’s pull is stronger than anything else, even when I’m asleep on my feet.

Now, on those nights when I’ve walked too far afield, chasing some restless feeling to follow my magic farther into the untamed darkness, drawn there, there’s always a sudden flutter in my chest that nudges me home. I stumble from the trees, across the small grass-lined stream, to the door of the greenhouse he added in the spring, and then into the sunroom, where the windows are all open because even at midnight, the breeze is always warm. Lorne, the man I love, takes my basket from me that’s always full of stones and clippings, making sure to put my grandmother’s embroidery scissors back in their place in the kitchen so they’ll be there the next time I need them.

“Thanks for coming home, Xan,” he murmurs.

“Always,” I whisper back.

He then steers me into the bedroom, strips me down, and puts me in bed before I can speak again and ask him questions about his day. Turning off the lights, he slides into bed beside me, wraps me in his strong arms, and tucks me against his big, hard body. I don’t stir until the morning.

The truth is, I’d rather sleep beside Lorne MacBain than anywhere else. My love for him is like a siren call, except he’s not trying to kill me. He wants me. He loves me.

Now, that’s not to say he doesn’t sometimes have homicidal leanings, especially when I do something he considers dangerous.

For instance…

I heard the horns as I flew through the intersection and realized, for possibly the hundredth time, that the traffic situation in the small town of Osprey, New York, where I lived, had changed drastically. Back in November of last year, we had some excitement over the discovery of a doomsday cult in our little corner of the world. The fact that every member of the cult had died over a hundred years ago didn’t stop the wave of interest, translating to tourism, that hit our town like a tsunami.

That was the cover story.

The real one, about a god trying to cross from his realm to ours, was far too fantastic to share with the public. So the press ran with what they knew, and our town was swamped with visitors. In theory, not a bad thing. Retail businesses were especially appreciative of the influx of dollars. The downside was the surge of cars on two-lane roads with stop signs at four-way crossings that people were not paying attention to. On Yelp it said: Great town, but no one knows how to drive! That was a wild exaggeration. People in my town could certainly drive, they simply weren’t used to being honked at, passed on hills, and cut off while making left turns.

The parking was a whole other horror. Whenever I locked my bike into the rack in front of the library, I thought again how fortunate I was not to have to parallel park. Not that I could even if I had to. Driving had never been a skill I’d acquired. I lived in a tiny town. In the winter I could walk, and all other times, like now, in high summer, mid-July, I could ride.

Lorne, who was the chief of police, along with being my fiancé, had been to many meetings about putting in more traffic lights. He vehemently opposed those initiatives. His contention was, what if everything died down and we were left with useless lights in the middle of town, slowing up tractors and parents taking their kids to school. Not to mention the cost of the added infrastructure to the taxpayer. It was a valid argument. Conversely, people were tired of nearly being mowed down as they crossed the streets on the weekends, on holidays, and certainly anytime it rained when visibility was poor. I saw both sides.

At the moment, though, that wasn’t going to help me. Because whereas I used to glide through intersections on Friday afternoons without nearly getting hit, just now I’d narrowly missed getting sideswiped by a Toyota Highlander, which was why, suddenly, there was a police utility vehicle beside me. I had called it an SUV in the past, but apparently that was wrong, and I’d been educated.

“Are you trying to kill yourself, Xander Corey!” Tanner Murphy, a recent addition to Osprey, yelled at me as he drove by in the Abundant Light Church van. He was the youth pastor there.

Side note: not everyone in the one-horse town I grew up in liked me. Some, like the aforementioned Tanner, saw me in league with dark supernatural forces. As if I were stupid enough to ever tie myself to something malevolent. Ridiculous. I was raised better than that.

There was also Diana Flint, the leader of the Osprey Conservation Society, who had tried, on many occasions, to have me fired from my job at the town library and banned from teaching classes, which I’d been doing more of lately, at our local youth center. Diana’s hatred had begun in second grade when her family moved here. Her mother thought my grandmother was crazy, which she wasn’t, and a pagan, which she was, and did not want her angel Diana associating with me. That stuck all through high school and beyond. When she took over the aforementioned group, which I thought meant wildlife or the wetlands but was actually historical landmarks and buildings, she needed to map my family’s land. Ours being the oldest homestead in Osprey, it was important to the Conservation Society to have that done. I declined, and she took it to the town council. But as Corvus was older than Osprey, she didn’t have a leg to stand on. That had cemented her animosity toward me. While normally I made sure to steer clear of her on general principle, today she was in one of the many cars that drove past me as I stood on the sidewalk.

“You’re going to kill someone, you idiot!” she shrieked at me.

I waved at her just to be a dick. Her, I wasn’t afraid of. But the man sitting in the vehicle to my left, with the rolled-down driver’s window, him I really didn’t want to piss off.

“Hi,” I greeted Lorne with a huge smile, thinking it was probably my imagination that his cobalt eyes looked even darker than usual. Or, quite possibly, he was mad. Or worse, I’d scared him. I truly never meant to frighten him, but it happened on occasion.

“No,” he replied, getting out of the car that was painted the most horrible shade of blue anyone could imagine. Some heinous cross between teal and bread mold. Why navy hadn’t been considered, I had no idea.

“I was in a hurry and⁠—”

The Mercedes Benz S-Class sedan that came to a screeching halt behind his utility vehicle stopped us both from saying another word, and I wasn’t surprised to see my best friend in the world, Amanda Sterling, throw open the door, leave the car there running, and rush over and smack me really hard in the bicep and then the stomach.

“Ow,” I yelled at her.

“What the hell are you doing?” she roared back. “You took ten years off my life with that stunt!”