Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1) Read Online Free

you.”
    “You don’t have a choice. You can’t stay here.”
    The words you can’t stay here were still hanging in the air when my phone rang. Again. Three more calls had come in while I was busy dealing with everything at the restaurant, all from that same Bristol number.
    This time, I decided to answer it. I figured even Bristol couldn’t be worse than Cooper Blackwood insisting I give up the uneventful, safe little life I’d worked so hard to build, to get involved in some war against vitality vampires.
    I went into my bedroom and closed the door while I talked to the man who’d been calling me all day, a soft-spoken attorney by the name of Mr. Pickwick.
    By the time I hung up, I wasn’t at all convinced that what he’d had to say wasn’t worse, after all.
    I sat on my bed for a few minutes, fighting with myself over which of the two almost unthinkably unpleasant options I now had before me was the lesser evil. I stayed there for so long, in fact, that I kind of hoped one of those options might cross itself off the list, and show itself out.
    But when I finally went back to the living room, Cooper was still sitting against the wall, waiting.
    “You’re right,” I told him. “I can’t stay here. But I can’t go with you, either. I have to go back…” My voice cracked over the word home . “To where I was born. In North Carolina.”
    Cooper frowned at me. “What happened?”
    “It would seem I’ve just inherited a small fortune and a hotel.”

I was thirteen when my mother died. I didn’t own a single skirt or dress at the time, so I attended her funeral in a gray woolen dress that belonged to Miss Underwood, the owner of the hotel where we lived and my mother worked as a maid.
    Miss Underwood was thin enough for a girl to fit passably into her clothes, but she was also quite tall. The dress was ridiculously long. I kept tripping on the hem. All day I worried about what would happen if I tore it.
    There was a reception afterward at the hotel. Miss Underwood gave a short speech that she directed, ostensibly, to me. She said that everyone at the Mount Phearson was family. That all of them shared in my loss. And that like any family, we would pull one another through it. I stood awkwardly, hating all those eyes on me, and nodded into my glass of fruit punch, sipping carefully so as not to spill it on the dress.
    Afterward, Miss Underwood walked me back to the room I’d shared with my mother. “Will you be wanting to move to a different room?” she asked. “I can arrange that if you like, as a courtesy.”
    “I’m staying at the hotel, then?” Nobody had told me.
    “Of course. I’m your guardian now. It’s best for your life to remain as stable as possible while you grieve.”
    “Oh. Then no, our regular room is okay.”
    “Don’t use that word. I despise it.”
    “Our regular room is fine. I’ll just live alone, I guess?”
    Miss Underwood laughed, as though I’d just said something really imaginative. “What a thing to say. Nobody is ever alone at the Mount Phearson.” She was right about that.
    She stopped outside our room—my room, now—and handed me the key. “You’ll take over some of your mother’s shifts, after school and on Saturdays. But you may have the next three days off out of respect for your loss.”
    I struggled for a second with the etiquette. Was I supposed to thank her for the time off? Or for the job? For agreeing to be my guardian?
    But no, she didn’t seem to expect any response. She was already turning away.
    “Be in touch if you need me,” Miss Underwood said.
    I washed the dress myself, that same night, and returned it unharmed.
    Now it was Miss Underwood who was dead. She’d died in prison, of all places, where she was serving a sentence for murdering her husband. I was more shocked by the husband part than the murder part. Miss Underwood had never seemed like the marrying type.
    Mr. Pickwick, who was both her executor and her lawyer, didn’t seem to