Morrigan's Bond: Crow's Curse

By Laura Bickle

To end the war between vampires and witches, Garnet must battle the queen of the vampires, a woman who the Morrigan narrowly escaped in the skies of World War II.

Garnet Conners, incarnation of the legendary Morrigan, has pieced her life back together. After being turned into a vampire against her will, she's quit her career as a surgeon and taken a job on the night shift at the city morgue. To her dismay, victims of vampires are piling up at the morgue…including the body of the vampire who turned her, Merrel.

Merrel's faked his own death to set into motion a plot to wrest control of Riverpointe's vampires from their queen, Varya. If Garnet helps him, he promises to move the vampires away from Riverpointe entirely, leaving Garnet and her lover, the warlock Sorin, in peace.

But Garnet's haunted by dreams of her prior incarnations as Alix, one of the pilots of the fabled Night Witches in World War II. Alix fought Varya during the war… and was nearly destroyed by her. Varya held a magical artifact hostage, the magical sword Durendal, which she still uses to control the Asra hive of vampires.

When the vampires burn down the witches' coven house, Garnet and her allies must locate the vampires' stronghold. She, Merrel, and the surviving witches must rip Durendal away from Varya…or the city and all its supernatural inhabitants will be devoured in flames.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syrenka Publishing LLC
• Release date: Nov 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9798201425920

Laura Bickle

Laura Bickle grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology–Criminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs. Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015-2016. More information about Laura’s work can be found at www.laurabickle.com.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: SPEAKING WITH THE DEAD

Ihad always looked to the sky with a sense of longing.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’d tried to grab the moon out of the tree branches beyond my window. I was inconsolable when it vanished during dark moons and overjoyed when it appeared again as a sliver in the east. I made up my own names for the stars that rose and fell over our little house in the Ukrainian countryside. Some nights, I barely slept for watching the stars. My father had taught me all the names of the constellations, and I spun stories of fantastical people and creatures in my head that carried over into my dreams. I hunted with Orion and slew Draco, and Cassiopeia allowed me to sit on her throne.

During the day, my gaze was drawn skyward by the crows. I even had a birthmark on my calf in the shape of a bird, which my mother always made me cover. The crows swept down over the fields in autumn, stripping wheat from the stalks, chattering to themselves. I would walk among them, talking to them with mimicked squeaks and caws. It seemed that they understood me, sometimes. My mother was horrified by this, and would scoot me back indoors, shooing away the crows with her broom. She insisted that crows embodied the souls of the unholy dead, Cherti demons, and that no daughter of hers had any business speaking with them.

But I talked with them anyway. When I was a little girl, it seemed that I could have whole conversations with the birds, where they would tell me tales from the underworld in their reedy voices. When I grew older, I forgot their language, but I always kept a pocket full of seeds to feed them whenever I was lucky enough to see them. The crows were wise to my mother by that point, and one of them would caw an alarm from the forest whenever my mother left the house. The crows would scatter, and I would turn my attention back to my farm chores. I was supposed to be a dutiful daughter, and I pretended.

My family was part of a small kolkhoz, a collective farm that grew wheat after the October Revolution. It was hard work, and my family always feared another famine, like the one that shadowed my early childhood. I remembered that as a time when my parents foraged in the forest for food, and we all grew hollow-eyed and sunken. My grandfather did not survive the famine, and he was buried in our tiny private plot behind the house. His grave was marked by a stone that I decorated with flowers, wishing that the flowers had been food.   

But that was the way of things when one worked the land, my father said. We worked from dawn until dusk, when I basked under the eye of the moon, rather than the eyes of the crows.

Life became more difficult after my father left for war. Without his labor, my mother and I did our best to compensate. All the women did. The men were called away, and the crops still needed to be sown and harvested. The crows did their best to help, planting seeds in freshly turned earth and stripping stalks for me when no one was looking. But it was never enough. Our collective’s tractor broke down. Spring saw the nearby creek wash over its banks and rinse away seed in low lying areas. My mother predicted another famine.

The crows whispered to me. They told me that my father was never coming home, that I must flee the farm, that darkness was coming. I relayed this information to my mother, and she slapped me for it.

Do not repeat the evil utterances of the Cherti! she hissed. You will bring what they say to pass, Alix.

I shook my head. They’re not Cherti. They’re my friends.

My mother threw up her hands. "You should make friends from the kolkhoz. You should be trying to find a husband, rather than talking with the Cherti. Our neighbors think that you are strange as it is, as old as you are and still unmarried. If they knew you spoke to Cherti..." She shook her head. My mother cared a great deal what others thought, and perhaps she was right to do so. Our lives depended on the others in the collective.

I don’t want a husband, I said hotly. I was eighteen and rebellious, and I knew my own mind. I’d resisted my parents’ efforts to find me a match for years. Why would I want one? The only eligible men who were not drafted are Sergei’s idiot sons. Those two had actively hidden from conscription in their mother’s basement.

"You could have your own household, added to the kolkhoz. You should have children by now, Alix. You could have a life of your own!" My mother nearly wailed. Her whole life had been the kolkhoz and her family. She could not imagine anything else.  

I crossed my arms over my chest. I got on well enough with the other young men and women, but no man had turned my head before the conscription. Even in the best of times, the men I knew were focused on harvests and money and counting grain. Like my mother, they never looked at the sky. Not ever.

I will not leave you, I said. That sounded dutiful enough.   

My mother’s face softened, and she placed her palm on my cheek. You should want to, she said.

Three nights later, a knock sounded at the door. It was late, and my mother and I exchanged worried glances over the table. My mother rose to answer the door.

A man in uniform stood in the doorway, holding a letter. My mother took the envelope, opened it, and crumpled in sobs. The man muttered placating words of patriotism, but I could not hear him over the roar of blood in my ears.

My father was dead.

As the crows had foretold.

My mother’s hair grayed overnight. Her dark hair became streaked with silver. She rarely spoke, focusing automatically on her work, like a factory machine. I had to pester her to eat, but she solemnly gazed out at the distant dirt road, as if her husband might return someday.

My father never used that road again.

But the enemy did.

I awoke one night to the raucous cawing of crows. Climbing out of bed, I opened the window shutter. A crow stood on the wooden windowsill, screeching at me. I smelled smoke rolling in behind it.

There was no mistaking the meaning of that caw: Get out. Get out now.

I woke my mother. I forced her feet into boots and arms into her coat. We shoved our meager possessions into grain sacks and slipped out into the night.

The wind turned, sweeping the smoke away from the house. In the distance, engines rumbled over the shouts of men.

The fields were on fire. The ground was ablaze as far as my earthbound eye could see. Behind me, I spied machines on the road, heavy trucks, and tanks. The rattle of machine gun fire sounded in the distance.

My mother put her hand over her mouth. The Germans, she gasped. The Germans will murder us.

A crow burbled, and I spun to find it perched on the roof, ruffling its feathers. Instinctively, I knew what it wanted: it wanted me to follow it.

I nodded at the crow. I will follow.

The crow took wing and soared over the burning field, skimming so low that sparks swept below its feathers.

I took a deep breath and grabbed my mother’s arm. Come.

And I pulled my mother into the burning field of wheat, into that landscape of death while the crow screamed overhead.

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

I leaned over the table to stare into the slack face of a woman. She was in her thirties, with a curtain of dark hair dusting her shoulders. Freckles crossed her nose, and she seemed as if she were sleeping.

But she wasn’t.

How’s your patient?

My boss, Dr. Parsons, the Riverpointe city medical examiner, drifted through the back of the examination room. I could smell the coffee he’d brewed. Just one cup; he knew I didn’t touch coffee anymore.

Dead. My patient is dead, I said, flipping over a page on my clipboard. The page showed a generic female body diagram for me to make notes and draw anomalies on. It was like a coloring book page for the dead.

Parsons slurped his coffee. He was an unflappable middle-aged man with a quickly receding hairline. Yeah. She smells like she’s been dead a while.

It’s funny. Once upon a time, I hated the smell of death. I would recoil from it. Now, it was just a background smell in the county morgue, one that blended in with the odors of bleach and steel and coffee. 

I pulled the bright overhead light closer with gloved hands that squeaked on the lamp’s metal handle. I squinted through my face shield at the lifeless woman. She had been found dead in the river, floating up underneath a skin of ice near the shore. The faintest flush of green had begun to form beneath her skin, as if moss were growing there. As I pulled the sheet down over her nude body, I saw her abdomen was swollen with gases that accumulated in decomposition. She’d been in the river for some time after she died. Maybe a few days. It was winter, and decomposition slowed in winter.

I’d already cataloged the woman’s personal effects. She had no identification on her, but I had put her clothes in an evidence bag. She was missing a shoe. She wasn’t wearing a coat, which seemed weird. Only a sweater, jeans, socks, and underwear. I’d found a ring on her right hand. Combing through her hair, I’d found pieces of what looked like silt and algae. Evidence technicians would examine those samples more carefully.

I was tasked with determining the cause of her death. I shone the light over every inch of her body, and my gloved fingers traveled just behind my gaze. I found an old scar that looked like it was from long-ago knee surgery. I recognized the way they’d tried to make the scars subtle. Once upon a time, I was a surgeon. I worked on the living. I was saving lives. Now, I worked in what my boss called the House of the Dead. I saw the dead coming in and tried to find what caused those ends. I rarely saw the peaceful ones, when the elderly passed away in their sleep in their beds. Usually, I saw people who had met accidental or violent ends.

I didn’t see any open wounds on the body, but I did see some marks on her arm that suggested intravenous drug use. I noted those on my worksheet and continued my examination, finding little else of interest. There was no external sign of sexual assault. I took some fingernail scrapings of crusty mud for the lab. Maybe they could tell where the dirt came from.

I lifted my scalpel to perform a Y-incision on her chest. I tried to keep my cuts as neat as possible, but I noticed my blade summoned very little blood. Foul gases escaped, and I turned on the overhead venting system to clear them. I leaned into the rib spreader, breaking her ribs up and open so I could examine her chest cavity. Cutting into her lungs, I expected to find that they were engorged with water and show signs alveolar rupture. But they were empty.

She didn’t drown, I murmured. I scanned the body again. I didn’t like that there was so little blood in the body. It made me think she’d met an end more terrible than drowning. I came back to the needle tracks on her arm. When I looked more closely, I saw a couple of puncture marks tucked away in the crook of her elbow that looked more inflamed than the others. They looked like bite marks. Biting my lip, I measured the distance between the wounds to discover that they were the average distance between a human male’s canine teeth.

Hell.

Parsons’ footsteps and coffee slurps orbited the body. Any signs of foul play?

I showed him the interior of her arm. I think these are fang marks. The body has very little blood, even in the heart. I think...I think she was killed by a vamp.

I hated saying it aloud.

Parsons’ eyes narrowed. Someone you know?

I can’t tell who it was. There are dozens of vampires in Riverpointe. But I’m guessing that the assailant was male, judging from the distance between the bite marks. I think she was drained, then thrown in the water to dispose of the body.

How long do you think she’s been in the water? he asked.

I was still new at this, and I welcomed his supervision. Parsons was pretty hands-off, but would drop in from time to time to gently prod me with questions. He wanted to see how I was adapting to dead patients, and I needed to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

Given the weather conditions...I’m guessing that it was between three and five days. We’ve had a little bit of a warm-up that might have allowed for some bacterial growth to account for the greenish tinge to her skin. The amount of abdominal swelling and gassing suggests to me that we’re somewhere less than a week. I spent my nights reading forensics journals now, and I felt the way that I had back in residency, absorbing facts to apply immediately in the field.

Parsons nodded, and his glasses glinted in the bright light. Just got an ID from Riverpointe PD. Her description matched a young woman who walked away from a rehab facility four days ago. Fingerprints matched. She’s Olive Solman, age 25, a graduate student in business school. Local girl with some problems she was trying to work out.

Looks like she ran into even worse ones, I said.   

Cops are looking at the traffic cams between the rehab facility and where she was found downriver. The state crime lab will compare the silt you found under her fingernails with the chemical composition of silt in various areas of the river. Hopefully, we can get an idea of where she went in.

I sighed. It’s a waste.

She was young and had her whole life ahead of her. I knew something about that. I’d been fed on by vampires, as well, but I’d been turned. No one had turned her. She was just food. They’d thrown her away like an empty candy wrapper.

Always, Parsons nodded.

What do we tell the police department and the family? I asked. I mean, we can’t say she was attacked by a vampire, can we?

We report the facts. We report that she died before drowning, that foul play is expected. She died due to blood loss. I’ll loop Gibson in with the idea that it could be vampires. He may have more insight.

I nodded. Detective Gibson knew all I did about the supernatural residents of Riverpointe. He knew that vampires and witches lurked in the shadows, waging their own private war. I wanted no part of it, but had gotten sucked in against my will. Gibson, in his fatherly way, had done the best he could to keep me safe. But there was only so much a mortal could do. Still, it was good to be able to be honest with him and with my boss about