by Michele Hauf
She slid a hand along the white marble railing she kept polished to a shine. The house had been designed by Alphonse Fouquet in the nineteenth century and had been in the St. Charles family since. It was designed with eight walls in a round shape. Half the walls faced the four points of the compass, and the other half faced representative elements. The dwelling was very receptive to the angelic, which was a good thing, as far as their visitor was concerned.
Libby zoomed by her, taking the stairs as if in a track race, click-click-clicking in the high heels she’d slapped on. Without welcoming the visitor, her sister dashed into the kitchen. Vika smirked to know what she was up to.
“Reichardt,” Vika called in greeting to the stoic man attired in his usual black.
He stood beneath the chandelier, hands crossed solemnly before him. Broad and bold, he looked a misplaced warrior from a previous millennium who should be wielding an ax or some form of roughly forged iron weapon. He wore a goatee this evening, and the thick jot of blackness on his chin gave Vika a smile. The man had never a care for his appearance, though he was always neat, which appealed to her cleanliness fetish, so a little style was certainly a surprise.
“Looking rather chic this evening,” she commented.
Before she could ask after his new fashion statement, Libby breezed into the room and stopped beside her in a fury of fringe. Her sister, giddy with anticipation, held out a plate of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked earlier this evening before they’d gotten the cleaning call.
“Cookie?” she offered sweetly.
The soul bringer glanced at the plate as if Libby held forth a stew of rusty nuts, bolts and chirping crickets, and he wasn’t certain if one should eat it or build something with it.
Reichardt adjusted his attention toward Vika. “Take off your clothes.”
Sensing Libby’s pout, Vika tugged her shirt over her head again. “The cookies are excellent.”
“I grate chocolate into the mix,” Libby said proudly. “It makes them super chocolaty.”
Dropping her pants about her feet, Vika was thankful she’d worn a bra and panties today. Often, she forwent undergarments, preferring the sensual feel of fabric sliding against her skin. But when on a job, she wore as many layers as possible. Seemed to keep the unclean away for reasons she knew were superficial yet clung to anyway.
“Step back, please,” Reichardt said to Libby, ignoring the proffered treats.
Her sister dutifully complied, though Vika could sense Libby’s dismay at not being able to pawn off a cookie on the man.
Reichardt was a psychopomp, a soul bringer whose only job was to deliver the souls of the recently departed to Above or Beneath. The soul bringer put out his hands before him, palms flat, and drew them over Vika’s body, without touching. He utilized a form of catoptromancy—his silvered eyes were the mirrors—that would draw the wandering souls out of her body. He would pass over her many times, each time drawing up warmth to her skin and then pulling up a tickle as each soul left hers in a sparkle of phosphorescent light and attached to him.
Corpse lights, they were called in that moment of release from a body when they gleamed giddily. Yet they were lost and wandering souls not moved on to either Above or Beneath, usually due to a violent death—and an absent soul bringer.
Vika had a sticky soul, and when out on a cleaning job, she tended to pick up the wandering souls. It wasn’t purposeful; they attached to her for reasons of which she could never be sure. It was a condition she’d become aware of only since taking on the cleaning jobs.
She had developed an agreement with Reichardt years ago. Once a week he scrubbed her of the souls because they did belong to him, and he could not abide losing one. Which served her well because the idea of walking around with dozens of souls clinging to hers was weird. They didn’t hurt her and she didn’t notice their presence, save when they entered her soul or left it.
Feeling one last tickle, Vika let out a sigh as Reichardt stepped away from her. The man nodded, his eyes now closed, as he consumed the souls through his skin.
Vika winked at Libby, who winked back.
The man opened his kaleidoscope eyes, and the blade-sharp look he thrust at Vika made her gasp and press a hand over her lacy black bra.
“One’s missing,” he said in his deep, monotone voice that rattled in Vika’s rib cage.
“Missing? But—”
Oh, hell. The sneeze. She’d actually sneezed out the soul that had attempted to attach to her. How that was possible, she had no idea, but she innately knew that is what had happened earlier.
“I didn’t do it purposefully,” she offered. “It just— You see, I sneezed.”
“I need that soul.”
Vika felt Libby’s arm brush aside hers, joining her ranks in support, the plate of cookies still held in feeble offering.
“You will return it to me by next week’s scrubbing or...” Reichardt paused, bowing and shaking his head as if to lament her stupidity.
Or he’ll kill me? she thought dreadfully, fully expecting such an announcement from so ominous a being.
“I will take your soul in exchange,” he finally announced. With the speed of a homeless thief, the soul bringer nabbed a cookie from Libby’s plate and disappeared.
Libby squealed. “He took a cookie!”
Vika could but shake her head and grab a cookie from the plate herself. But she didn’t take a bite. Instead, she stared at the lumpy brown morsel as if it were her soul, all flattened, cooked and...not in her body.
Bending, she tugged up her pants. “Libby, how am I going to get that soul back? I don’t know where it is. It’s probably floating all over Paris by now. And he’ll know. Reichardt will know exactly which one it is if it isn’t in me next time he visits.” She took a bite of cookie. “Oh, great goddess, this is good.”
“I know, right? It’s the best batch I’ve made so far. I’m thinking of entering this recipe in the annual Witches Bazaar SpellCast and Cook-Off. Vika, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. We’ve got a whole week. We need to return to the scene of the crime. I’m sure the soul is floating about in the vicinity.”
“Maybe.” She tugged on her shirt. At her ankles, a black cat with a white-striped tail snuggled against her leg and meowed. “Not now, Salamander. I need to think.”
Which meant...
“You want me to get out your cleaning bucket?” Libby asked.
“Please.”
While Libby retrieved Vika’s cleaning supplies, Vika bent and slipped the slender cat into her embrace. Sal nuzzled against her chin, rubbing his soft cheek against her. He’d always been a faithful guy, even when he’d once been human.
“I wonder about that man.” Vika’s thoughts raced through the night’s events as she absently stroked Sal’s back. “The derelict. I sneezed directly at him. Could he...?”
* * *
The archives in the basement of the Council’s Paris base were vast, stretching half a mile in labyrinthine twists and turns similar to the catacombs that surely hugged up against the subterranean walls. The occasional skull even appeared embedded in the walls, of which some had been left in their natural limestone state.
CJ felt at peace here beneath the fluorescent lights he’d had specially installed a few months ago after his return from Daemonia. If it hadn’t been for his twin brother, TJ, he may still be wandering the bleak and torturous landscape of the place of all demons. The lights had been a necessity and, he admitted, were out of place in the ancient archives normally lit with soft lighting to protect some of the older books, parchments and manuscripts that lay scattered everywhere.
There were stacks of grimoires—books of shadows—and ancient texts CJ had marked on his mental list to get scanned for easy reference, but he estimated such an arduous process would take decades. He had the time but not the patience or the technical know-how. An assistant was necessary, but a call for job applicants was out of the question. Assistant to the Keeper of All Things Paranormal w
asn’t exactly a position one could interview for. He had the notion he’d know the perfect assistant when he met him or her.
The Council was an organized body of various paranormal breeds that kept watch over the paranormal nations but notoriously tried to never act in a violent manner to stop wars between nations or petty crimes among the breeds. They suggested, smoothed over and made nice—or so that was their claim.
They’d done plenty to interfere over the centuries, but CJ couldn’t think of a time when the interference hadn’t been necessary.
Now he searched the computer archives of known paranormals on a shiny silver Mac computer. Before entering the archives he always warded himself against electricity so his magic would not react and burn out the wiring or the fancy new computers. This database had only recently been computerized thanks to Cinder, the former fire demon—now vampire—who did security and IT work for the Council all across Europe.
CJ scanned through a list of cleaners the Council employed nationwide. None displayed the pentacle with the vacuum cleaner symbol. Jiffy Clean? He suspected it a joke on the cleaner’s part. The white hearse had been a kick, as well.
“Two women,” he muttered as his eyes scrolled down the list. “In Paris.”
Most cleaners worked a specific city or country. Paris was large enough and hosted a massive population of paranormals, so it listed half a dozen cleaners—but only one under a woman’s name.
“Viktorie St. Charles,” he said. “In the fourth arrondissement.” One of the oldest parts of Paris in the old Marais neighborhood, laid out in the shadow of the former Bastille. “Hmm, not far from where the vampire, Domingos LaRoque, lives. Quiet neighborhood. Gotcha.”
“Hey, CJ!”
Think of the devil, and one of his former minions walks through the door. Cinder strolled in, his height forcing him to bend to pass through the doorway built at the turn of the eighteenth century. He also had to turn slightly to manage his broad shoulders. The dark-haired man patted the top of the computer. “How’s the system working?”
“Very well. I appreciate all the work you’ve done. Makes it easy to find things around here, at least the few lists and files I’ve been able to enter in the database.”
“Great. You need an assistant.”
“The right one will walk through that door someday.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t hold your breath, buddy. How about you? You look...” The former angel, who had long ago been forcibly transformed to demon, and who then centuries later became mortal, and who was now only recently vampire, gave him a discerning once-over. “Not terrible.”
CJ smirked. He looked like hell and hadn’t been right for months, since his return from that damnable place, Daemonia.
“You have a talent for compliments. I’m learning to control...things.”
He’d told Cinder about the demonic passengers that occupied his soul, yet despite having worked at the gates to Beneath for millennia, the guy hadn’t a clue how to get the damned things out of him.
“I think I found the one person who might be able to help me. Viktoria St. Charles,” CJ said.
“I think you mean Viktorie. Or Vika, as her friends call her,” Cinder said, pronouncing it Vee-ka. “It’s a Russian name. She’s the pretty little witch who lives in the round house.”
“Round house?”
“That’s what some call it. I think it’s actually a hexagram. It was designed by a witch to perfectly align with the planets, stars, the moon and whatever else you witches worry about. I’ve been told it’s a cool place to see. Probably comparable to the spectacle you live in.”
“My flat is not a spectacle. It’s a means to survive.” A horrible, mind-eating, depressing means to survival. But his current mode of decorating style was the one bit of luck CJ had discovered to keep back his nasty passengers.
“So you’ve told me. Still seeking prismatic light?”
“Always.”
“What’s got you looking up the St. Charles witch? Or I should say witches. They are three sisters, but I think only two live in the round house. Gad, I hate calling it the round house. A hexagram is so not round.”
Cinder was some kind of numbers whiz, due to the fact he was originally the angel who created that sort of stuff—the whole mathematics shebang.
“If she is the woman I ran into last night,” CJ said, “then she was able to exorcise one of my demons.”
“Just like that? Without a hello, how do you do?”
“It was an auspicious sneeze, actually. And no, no introductions. In fact, she fled the scene soon after the accidental exorcism.” CJ rubbed a hand along his jaw. “She’s a cleaner, eh?”
“Yes. Nasty job.” Cinder gave a dramatic shudder. “Especially for two pretty women.”
“Speaking of pretty women.” CJ closed out the program and leaned back on the creaky office chair. “How’s the little woman?”
“You mean my tiny vixen?” The vampire grinned a mile wide, revealing the points of his fangs.
“That good, huh?”
Cinder nodded. “Love is the coolest thing, CJ. You should give it a try sometime.”
“So I’ve been told by my best friend, Lucian.”
“Bellisario? I haven’t seen that vamp in a while. And what about your brother? Didn’t TJ and his little kitty cat just get married?”
“Yep, and expecting a litter, I’ve been told.”
“A litter?”
TJ’s wife was a cat shifter, and CJ liked to tease his brother he was going to have a litter instead of a baby, which was unfeasible but still fun to joke about. “You know, she’s a cat.”
“I don’t think it works that way, man.”
“Just kidding. No one ever seems to get my jokes. So you in Paris for a while?”
“Parish and I have relocated here for the summer. I will be updating more hardware for the Council. Might even get a fancy scanner in here to scan books without breaking the spines. Bet that would make your day.”
“It would. The ancient grimoires are delicate. But I’ve no time to work on such a project. Now I’ve got the witch’s address, I’m on my way out.”
“All right, man, take it easy.”
“Say hi to Parish for me,” CJ said as he walked Cinder out of the office and headed for the fourth quarter.
* * *
Libby breezed into the bright, spotless spell room, swooshing a flutter of purple ruffles in eyesight, as Vika bent over a mortar of crushed lavender. The spider’s eyes listed in the ingredients she doled out carefully. Only needed half a dozen.
“Working on a sleeping draft?” Libby asked, leaning on the cool, white marble counter. She snapped her banana-scented gum. She cocked out a hip, hitting a pose as always. Rock star was Libby’s innate M.O., despite her lacking fame and the ability to carry a tune.
“For Becky. She’s been sleeping less than a hour a week lately.” The vampire, who was Vika’s best friend, had a lot to deal with, her dad being the devil’s fixer. Becky worried about him constantly. “I don’t need help. I know you had plans for today.”
Libby’s mood perked. On the other hand, when wasn’t her mood perky? The dress she wore was vintage, and the cinched skirt with wide white plastic belt reminded Vika of an old baking ad she’d once seen while paging through her grandmother’s magazines from the fifties. Always so spiffy, those pre-feminism women, when doing household chores.
“I figured I should stick around,” Libby said. “When do you want to head back to the crime scene to look around for the will-o’-the-wisp?”
Will-o’-the-wisp was another name for the corpse light or wandering soul that usually stayed firmly attached to Vika’s soul until the soul bringer arrived to scrub her clean.
“Soon as I’m done here. But I can do that myself. Really, Libby, go and have fun.”
“I wish you’d come along with me. The witches bazaar is always a riot.”
“I know. You’ve told me about all the eligible young witches.”
&n
bsp; “I’m sure there’s a few to catch your eye. I know you like them tall, muscled and blond.”
“The opposite of your thick, brute and dark,” Vika answered with a grin. She tapped the last spider eye into the mortar and rolled the marble pestle over the contents with a satisfying crushing noise. “You think Reichardt liked the cookie?”
“Oh, Vika.” Libby sighed. “I dreamed about The Taking of the Cookie last night. You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, you probably better keep that one to yourself. Would it matter if I said, once again, how wrong having a crush on a soul bringer is?”
“Nope. He’s the guy for me. I know it.”
Good luck with that. The guy was thousands of years old and hadn’t cracked a smile in a millennium, Vika felt sure. His life consisted of collecting souls, all day, all night, all the time. She imagined he did not have a social life, or even a concept of what socializing implied. And to consider love or romance? Forget about it.
“If they’ve any vetiver for sale today, would you pick me up a pint? I’m fresh out. Salamander got into the plant out in the garden and mowed that down smartly.”
“Will do.” Libby leaned in and kissed her on the brow. “Talk to you later, sis. Good luck tracking the soul. But if you can’t find it, I’ll put in a good word for you with Reichardt.”
Libby flounced out of the spell room, and Vika sighed. “If only that were possible.”
She knew well if she didn’t find the soul, Reichardt’s retaliation would be swift and just. She didn’t particularly favor the idea of having no soul, but she knew she could live without one. A soulless body grew cold and emotionless. Soulless would leave her open to all sorts of untold evils. She would not be the same witch of the Light, and she didn’t know if she could live with the consequences.
“Um, Vika?”
She looked up to see Libby peeking into the room, her smile gone. “You forget something?”
“There’s someone here to see you,” her sister whispered covertly. “The guy from last night.”