The Vengeance Demons Series: Books 0-3 (The Vengeance Demons Series Boxset)

by Louisa Lo

  Chapter Nine

  A FEW SECONDS AFTER Enid left, Rosemary came out of her magic induced brain-freeze. As far as she was concerned, she’d just heard a doorbell and was on her way to investigate.

  I waved her off. “I’ll get it.”

  On my way out of the kitchen, I reached for my second croissant of the day from the batch Rosemary had made earlier and finished it before I reached the foyer. Hey, cooking and plotting my way back to co-op was hard work, you know. I had to reward myself.

  I didn’t actually expect anybody to be at the door, of course. So I was the one who was startled when the doorbell rang again. Had Enid returned to provide more information on the whole freelancing business? Was it Esme, coming to check on me? No, I felt no magical disturbance from behind the closed door. Whoever was standing on the other side was human.

  I opened the door, and there stood a guy in his mid-twenties with olive skin and large glasses.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Is Rosemary here?”

  “Jordan!” Rosemary came rushing out of the kitchen and beamed at the newcomer, wiping her hands on her apron self-consciously.

  “Hey, Rose.” Jordan’s attention was so focused on my roommate, I might as well have not even been there. “I thought I could give you a ride with all those dog biscuits.”

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she protested. “I’m fine rolling it along in my shopping cart.”

  This must be what humans meant when they described saying one thing but meaning another. Despite Rosemary’s verbal objections, she seemed rather delighted by Jordan’s presence.

  I cleared my throat.

  Rosemary turned to me, as if suddenly remembering I was there. She blushed. “Jordan, this is my roommate, Megan. Megan, this is Jordan, our volunteer leader from the shelter.”

  With everything Enid had told me about vengeance freelancing, I almost forgot I’d promised Rosemary I’d help out at the shelter. As much as I itched to start on the freelancing ASAP, a promise was a promise. After I paid my debt to Rosemary, I’d search out pockets of untended injustices and create my own assignments.

  The next hour was spent doing more baking and packing. Well, Rosemary was baking, but Jordan and I were only allowed to pack.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Jordan winked at me. “I had a little accident in her kitchen too. So I’m as banned as you are.”

  I laughed. Nice to know that even humans could screw these things up.

  Together we transferred the cooled dog biscuits into plastic containers and stacked them up in the trunk of Jordan’s beat-up car. But there was only so much of that we could do, so we ended up talking quite a bit while we waited around in the kitchen.

  That must be what “hanging out” was all about. Since I’d gotten neither prank nor insults from my fellow hangee yet, I’d say it was so far so good.

  “So if you don’t bake cookies, what do you do for the shelter other than organize volunteers?” I teased Jordan.

  Jordan’s expression became guarded. Not wary, per se, but closed off, like he wasn’t sure how much he should tell me.

  Rosemary looked up from her cookie trays, saw his face and sighed. “Jordan’s got one of the toughest jobs in the shelter.”

  “What is that?”

  “Helping the vets with the new arrivals,” Jordan said.

  “Some of the animals show up in really bad shape. From neglect and abuse,” Rosemary explained. “Hypothermia, malnutrition, broken bones…you name it.”

  I gaped at the two humans in horror. “People don’t get caught over this?”

  “Some do. But even in cases when we know who the culprit is, most of the time they get away with a slap on the wrist.”

  “What?” I was outraged, and yet the vengeance demon in me sensed opportunity like a shark smelling blood.

  Jordan fisted his hands. “The arcane animal laws haven’t been updated since the horse and buggy days, and they don’t always protect the animals. Truth is, most of the time they don’t. I’ve seen some nasty stuff I wish I could unsee. Animals come in all banged up, get patched up by us then sent straight back to the bastards who did it to them.”

  There, in that instant, I realized I’d be killing two birds with one stone by going to the shelter. Injustices were closer to home than I thought.

  ***

  When it came down to it, vengeance freelancing was pretty much the same as any co-op assignment, procedure-wise. The difference lay in the very first step, which is the procurement of the job itself. In a co-op program, students relied on their mentors to select their targets for them. A freelancer created his or her own jobs by seeking out kinks within the Concord, resolving the injustice stuck in the entanglement, and releasing the pent-up negative energies from the victims in the process. Those dispensed energies, stemming from helpless anger and frustration, were the vengeance markers that the training manual was talking about.

  I needed ten of them to get back in the game.

  The Council probably thought I wouldn’t be sensitive enough to the Concord to detect its entanglements. If so, they’d underestimated me. While I might be lacking in full vengeance instincts, I planned to make up for it with resourcefulness and relentless hard work, plus a healthy lack of disdain for the mortal’s own sense of right and wrong. They weren’t all selfish and cruel. The very existence of the shelter proved that.

  Why bother hunting for clogs in a system when I could go straight to the sources? If humans had set up a shelter for these animals, surely they also kept records of cases where justice hadn’t been served. Every abused animal had an abuser, and every abuser deserved someone like me.

  The abuser would get his or her comeuppance, the animals would get to be free of them, and I would get my vengeance markers. Everybody would win. Well, not the abusers, but who cared about them? And oh, did I mention there was a monetary reward to freelancing, just like the co-op assignments but at a better rate? That meant rent money. Cha-ching!

  Plus, the sooner I got out of suspension, the sooner I could figure out who was trying to hurt me in the Shadow World. And if this was a true case of mistaken identity, then who was the intended target? There might be some way to do investigating on that front, but I’d have to enlist my half-brothers’ help…

  Stick with the rent payments, Megan. Focus on that for now.

  When we arrived at the shelter, I was assigned to the understaffed and overcrowded grooming room. Once there, I was handed a brush, a trimming kit, five cats, four dogs, and a rabbit.

  Three hours later, I was blow-drying a black Scottish terrier when a shadow came over me.

  “I heard you’ve got quite the magic touch with the animals,” Jordan mused.

  I snorted, and then sneezed at the flying fur. Magic touch indeed. Even the meanest and barkiest stayed perfectly still while I clipped and brushed them. No wonder. Unlike humans, those little buggers had the instincts to know exactly what I was. “It’s nothing.”

  “Is there anything you need?”

  “I could go for a cup of coffee. In your office.”

  I added compulsion behind my words. Through the groom-room chitchat in the last few hours, I’d learned that Jordan kept records of all the new arrivals in his office. Sounded like a good place to start.

  “Sure,” Jordan said woodenly. I got up and followed him as he led me through a few corridors, then opened the door to a tiny office with paperwork covering every inch of space. There was a small desk, a chair, four large file cabinets, plus boxes with files crammed to the top.

  Now where should I start? I doubted there was any sort of filing logic to the mess. I looked into Jordan’s eyes and remembered the Sherlock Holmes story of how he tricked Irene Adler, The Woman, into revealing the location of her most prized possession. “Alright, where are your files on the animal abusers?”

  Jordan went to the upper drawer of the second file cabinet and took out two envelopes, both label-less.

  “Leave,” I instructe
d. “And forget that you took me here.” With him gone, I sat on the chair and spilled the contents of the first envelope on the table.

  There were pencil sketches of various animals, plants, and landscapes. Must be a hobby of Jordan’s. And to be honest, they were pretty good, though useless for my purpose. I was just about to put them away when I caught sight of a portrait.

  Of Rosemary. In her apron, holding a tray of dog biscuits with a smile on her face.

  Huh, could Jordan have a crush on my roommate? Something to think about. Later.

  I opened the second, much thicker, envelope. The first items to fall out were a couple of lottery tickets. Another false lead? But the rest of the envelope proved a lot more promising. Looked like Jordan kept the names of every asshole who’d ever sent an injured animal his way, from mild negligence to the really nasty stuff. There were pictures of the worst of the beaten animals, case notes, and best of all, a printout of an excel spreadsheet summarizing the cases, with the addresses of the offenders to boot.

  Then the last item, a sheet of lyrics for a song called “If I Had a Million Dollars.”

  Lottery tickets, a spreadsheet of bad deeds, now these lyrics…could it be that Jordan had vengeance fantasies of his own? The If-I-Had-the-Money-to-Hire-Someone-These-Were-the-Assholes-Who’d-Get-It fantasies?

  Deep down, I’d always hoped that living amongst humans would help my control issues. Since humans had no magic whatsoever, I figured it wouldn’t even cross their minds to be tempted by it. Looked like I was wrong. In a sense, the lottery was the human way of seeking quick and easy solutions, wasn’t it? The ability for magic might not be there, but the desire for it turned out to be pretty universal.

  So was the desire for justice.

  I took out my cell phone and snapped pictures of the spreadsheet.

  ***

  From that afternoon on, I picked names off the list at random and with each abuser punished, made the human world a slightly better place. I’d first considered ranking the spreadsheet rows by order of the severity of the abuses but had decided that reading the entire list in one sitting would be far too depressing.

  When I came across straightforward ones that wouldn’t earn me much in terms of markers anyway, I sent them to Serafina so she could have some practice off the books. She needed it. The work they gave her was far too complex. It was like asking a beginner pianist to play Chopin.

  Within three months, I had performed four vengeances in a wide range of technical difficulties, from sticking a careless owner who left her puppy in a sweltering car with a large parking ticket, to arranging for a dog poisoner to be mauled by coyotes.

  I even filtered the spreadsheet with a new column, courtesy of a vengeance spell called the Six Degrees of Separation. It told me if any of the names on the list could be tied back to Dan Pillar, and lo and behold, it found one connection. The woman who got the parking ticket due to the overheated puppy? She was the mistress of Dan’s lawyer. The parking ticket might seem like a small thing, but the car was paid for by the lawyer. One thing led to another and eventually the wife found out about the affair. She did a Lorena Bobbitt on her husband, and last I heard he was still recovering from his reattachment surgery. It’d be a while before he handled Dan’s business again.

  I might not be able to touch Dan, but there was no rule preventing me from getting at those who flanked him. Sounded like fair game to me.

  The four vengeances tallied up to around three markers in total. I wish it was a simple ‘one vengeance equals one marker’ system, but it wasn’t. Oh well.

  A balanced range of successes in my freelance venture, big and small, made Enid at first very surprised, then very pleased. She didn’t ask where I got my ideas, and I didn’t tell. Things had gotten so good, I even started thinking about improving my efficiency by mishmashing various vengeances together, animal-related or otherwise, and getting more bang for the same buck. For example, causing a drunk driver to smash into a dog fighting ring owner, and the pile-up in turn prevented a bank embezzler from crossing the border in time. It’d take some precise calculation, but with my newfound confidence I felt like I could do anything.

  These vengeance combos brought my number up to nine markers. Only one more to go.

  Everything was looking up, thanks to one little spreadsheet. With the monetary rewards of credits well earned, I’d more than enough converted human dollars to cover the rent payments for the rest of the co-op term, and then some.

  Little did I know, it was my final case that would prove to be a nightmare.

  Chapter Ten

  FOR MY FINAL FREELANCING case, I didn’t choose it randomly. I picked a low-medium skill level job on the spreadsheet. My goal was to be unsuspended as fast as I could, and as long as the last assignment topped up to ten markers, that was all I needed. I wanted to save my energy for the other forms of trouble that might come my way in the future.

  The assignment had led me to a puppy miller with a track record of providing pet stores with sick and malnourished animals. Unsuspecting pet owners purchased these animals and ended up with huge vet bills in hopes of getting them healthy again, or worse, had to watch their new pet die soon after welcoming it into their homes and hearts. The puppy mill was just small-time enough to avoid scrutiny, but through the years, it’d sent dozens of distressed pet owners to the shelter seeking medical and legal advice. Jordan was able to direct them to the right professionals for the former, but the latter often became a sad lesson in buyer beware.

  The puppy mill wasn’t in some old, abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere like one would expect. It was in a busy building at the heart of the Annex, a vibrant Toronto neighborhood with a healthy mix of musicians, artists, and students.

  I sat casually on the stone ridge lining the flowerbed in front of the rental building. I didn’t bother to glamour up my age with faery dust, because my real one suited the purpose of this mission just fine. Also, I was cheap.

  A thin man with a baseball cap and greyish skin rounded the corner, carrying the leashes to—let’s count it—seven Chihuahuas, five bearded collies and two Shih Tzus. Though they all seemed puppyish, there was a particularly randy one that couldn’t seem to help but try to mount every single thing in sight. It was funny but kinda disturbing.

  In stark contrast to the very adorable furry animals was their not-so-nice handler. There was a mean look to this guy I didn’t like, though I got the feeling he was perfectly capable of being charming when he wanted something from somebody.

  Like supplying puppies to legitimate-looking pet stores.

  “Oh, how cuuuute!” I crooned, bending down on one knee and letting myself become surrounded by a sea of fur balls. There was yapping and licking galore. And, oh no, was that randy one trying to hump my leg? I made a mental note to throw the jeans I was wearing into the washer and continued to sound bright and cheerful. “They’re gorgeous! Are they all yours?”

  Thin Man looked me up and down speculatively as I paid special attention to one of the bearded collies. My guess was he was judging if I had the desire and the means to buy pedigreed dogs, yet was not socially conscious enough to care where they came from. I’d dressed myself in Rosemary’s best clothes. Her mother was a fashion designer who never let go of her hope of converting Rosemary, and Rosemary never stopped being content with just the plain white chef’s uniform. She offered me access to her wardrobe, which was sweet on so many levels. It was almost as if we were sisters, if I could have a non-demonic, human sister who could bake like an angel.

  I was wearing a top that had outrageous patterns and holes in at least five different awkward areas. It was guaranteed to be hip for only one season. Add a pair of four-hundred-dollar jeans, and I looked like I could be a rich little girl with money to blow on purebred babies. The fact that the said jeans were made using child labor suggested I was the type who wouldn’t mind buying from a puppy miller, either.

  The guy’s next words confirmed he’d made just that assump
tion. “You like that collie there, sweetheart? You can have it for four hundred bucks.”

  My eyes widened in interest. “Really? That’s a lot cheaper than the pet stores.”

  “Yep, in a store they’re going for anywhere from eight to twelve hundred.” Thin Man thumped his own chest, not caring that his motion yanked the poor dogs clear off the ground. I repressed the urge to hiss. “You get it from me, you cut out the middle man.”

  I pouted. “I love the dog, but I don’t have the money on me.”

  Thin Man smiled the smile of someone who’d just hooked a fish. He tilted his head towards the lobby of the building. “I’m at three-twelve. Come when you get the cash, hon.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Curt.”

  “Alright, see you later, Curt.”

  He allowed me one more moment with the bearded collie before pulling at the leashes and taking all the puppies with him, including Mr. Humpy.

  Apartment three-twelve it was.

  ***

  I returned that evening with a teaspoon of faery dust and a dozen poop bags. The faery dust, custom formulated to induce a severe, lifelong allergy to furs, was for Curt, the puppy mill runner. The poop bags were for the dogs as I ushered them to safety.

  Apartment three-twelve was at the far end of the building, at an angle away from the constantly occupied elevator area. Perfect.

  I picked at the front door lock. Damn, it was much harder than the way they showed it in those human YouTube videos. I dared not use magic, as I wasn’t what one would call full in the tank. The freelance gig was paying, but with rent, food, mobile phone expenses and all, I had to watch my magical spending. The faery dust had been bought on credit as it was. Mr. Sparrow, the owner of Unnaturally Yours, a local alchemy shop, had been friends with my father for decades and knew I was good for it. But still, magic saved was magic earned.

  On the fifth try, I got it.