Death by Chocolate (All's Fae in Love and Chocolate)

By Michelle L. Leavigne

Fae use dark chocolate as a cure-all, so how did the Queen die of eating too much?

Epsi gave her former school chum a boatload (we’re talking Cleopatra’s barge here) of chocolate as a coronation present. Now she’s a prime suspect. Where’s a knight in shining armor when a Fae damsel in distress really needs one?

Enter Guber, Fae of royal blood, Human-phile and techno-geek. Mysteries and gizmos to test for substances harmful to Fae life and limb are right up his alley. Epsi is the prettiest damsel in distress that he’s ever seen--and she doesn’t think he’s weird.

Guber has been living in the Human realms for decades to avoid both the Fae who want to reinstate the hereditary royalty and those who want to eradicate anyone with the slightest trace of royal purple blood. Both of them are on Guber’s tail, and could focus on Epsi at any moment.

It’s a good thing they have an entire warehouse of possibly poisoned chocolate to use as a weapon. This title is published by Uncial Press and is distributed worldwide by Untreed Reads.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Sep 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781601741219

Book preview

Death by Chocolate

All's Fae in Love and Chocolate

Story #4

By

Michelle L. Levigne

Uncial Press       Aloha, Oregon

2011

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-121-9

ISBN 10: 1-60174-121-9

Death by Chocolate

Copyright © 2011 by Michelle L. Levigne

Cover art and design

Copyright © 2011 by Victoria Conrad

All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author or publisher.

Published by Uncial Press,

an imprint of GCT, Inc.

Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

Some stories don't die--but they might be asleep for a long time.

Many thanks to my intrepid publisher for picking up these stories again, and for encouraging me to write another misadventure of lovelorn Fae in the Human realms.

This story might--and might not--be the last Fae adventure. It ties in some characters and locations from the Neighborlee, Ohio books, most notably the Divine's Emporium stories.

Death By Chocolate

Queen Mellisande IV--the fourth Fae Administrator Queen of that name, and no relation to the previous three--was dead of a surfeit of chocolate.

Such a thing had never been heard of, or even imagined, in all the Fae realms. It was like one of the gods of Olympus being dead of too much ambrosia and nectar. Or a Fae not getting tipsy after chugging an entire six-pack of diet cherry cola.

In short: impossible.

Yet she was dead, with a blissful grin on her face. That was entirely expected, considering the ambrosial, healing qualities of chocolate. However, no one expected to find her bloated to the point of strained seams in her official royal gown. This was her uniform of sorts, worn for official public presentations and functions, and when the Fae Council was in session and all the Fae in the Enclaves as well as the Human realms could tune in through the Ether and watch as their duly elected government handled the careful administration of all things magical.

It was a pity, too--about the gown, at least. The queen had just been elected and crowned after the impeachment of the previous Administrator King, and the gown was still stiff and shiny, practically fresh from the silkwyrm's lair.

The usual suspects: the administrators who had been rivals in the election, the upper class Fae who thought they had previous claim on the silk from that particular silkwyrm, the rabble-rousers who wanted to bring back the hereditary royalty, and everyone who had brought Queen Mellisande chocolate to celebrate her election.

That was a lot of Fae, because most of the queen's congratulatory gifts were chocolate. As evidenced by the fact that it had taken her nearly three months to eat her way through the inventory of gifts to reach the chocolate that killed her.

Everyone who had brought the queen chocolate was notified by communication globe not to travel, period, until they were taken off the suspect list, the investigators came to talk with them, or they were given further instructions. Whichever came first.

Okay, Epsibellah said, when the communication globe patiently strobed through green to blue to green to yellow and back again, waiting for her response. But does that mean I stay here? She gestured around Lori's kitchen.

Technically, it was Brick's kitchen in his big, two-hundred-year-old ancestral home in Neighborlee, but since Lori and Brick were on their honeymoon, it was now Lori's house and kitchen. Epsi was house-sitting and trying some exposure therapy to get over her agoraphobia directly linked with being in the Human realms. She was an Enclave baby, which meant she was terrified and broke out in purple and yellow spots when she was exposed for too long to alien environments.

She had spent the last three days isolated in Brick and Lori's home, watching DVDs, learning to bake chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies the Human way, and enjoying herself tremendously. She had run out of chocolate chips and cocoa powder. Because her experiment had gone so well so far, she had psyched herself up to venture out to the grocery store instead of transporting Fae chocolate in to her.

Now the communication globe floated in the air in front of her, with the warning, and she was frozen again, terrified to move. And wondering if she was smart to just stay in the Human realms for the rest of her life. She had given Mellisande a boatload of chocolate as a congratulation gift. Her election as Administrator Queen had been a triumph for Epsi, by extension, because they had been classmates at Serafina's Fine Arts Academy for Magically Slow Young Ladies of the Slightly Purple Blood. Meaning they were descendants of the last of the royal line of the Fae, and had a hard time getting control of their magic when they were children. Like Human children were a little slow in learning to walk or talk.

And when Epsi gave a boatload, it was exactly that: a boat the size of Cleopatra's barge, the small one, for private day trips down the Nile when she wanted to get away from Julius and Marc, made of chocolate and filled with chocolate.

Knowing Mellisande and her tendencies, Epsi was pretty sure that boat wasn't sitting there in the royal gift cupboard-slash-warehouse, waiting to be eaten. With her luck, the queen had floated the boat in that royal Olympic-sized pool of chocolate syrup that Epsi's wretched distant cousin--but not distant enough--Theodosius had given her for her coronation gift. Then she had gone deep sea diving, so to speak, and ate her way down to the life preserver of chocolate-coated marshmallows.

That was a lot of chocolate to investigate. Epsi could only hope the queen had eaten all of that first, and not recently enough for it to be considered the murder weapon.

Which brought up a point that hadn't been explained to her yet: How could chocolate kill someone? Especially a Fae?

Or do I have to come home? she asked the communication globe.

Processing, it responded, the magico-mechanical voice somewhat static-filled, owing to the multiple dimensions it had to reach through between the Human realms and the Bureaucracy Enclave where it originated.

Epsi sighed, knowing that processing was bureaucrat-ese for wait until your ear points droop. She looked around the kitchen and wondered if maybe there was some chocolate she hadn't discovered yet.

Three hours later, she had ransacked the entire kitchen, drank two cups of hot chocolate mix--not bad, but she decided to save the rest of the box for emergency rations, like in case of a siege--and considered breaking into the crate of diet cherry cola that Maurice at Divine's Emporium had given Lori and Brick as a wedding gift. Sighing, she crooked a finger, beckoning, and the communication globe followed her as she went downstairs to the pantry in the cellar.

The communication globe was still strobing through