“Crap, crap, crap!” I lose my balance and fall flat on my face.
The creature pulls itself partially out of the ground and hisses. It has a humanoid shape with mottled gray skin stretched tight over its boney frame. It has large black eyes and elongated, pointy ears that move in the direction of sound much like a dog’s. It drags itself toward my flailing legs. Houston gives it a kick to the side of the head. It snaps its head in his direction and takes a swipe at his leg. Houston jumps out of the way, but the claw just catches his jeans and tears the material. The creature goes back underground and I scurry to my feet.
The ghul bursts up out of the ground just behind Houston and slashes him across the back. He falls to the ground, rolls over, and kicks at the creature. I conjure a bolt of fire and throw it at its head. The creature shrieks in pain and starts thrashing about. Houston kicks it a second time in the midsection and sends it backward. I pray no passerby hear the commotion and throw a second bolt of fire at the ghul and it tries to go back underground.
Houston scurries after the ghul and grabs it around the legs to keep it from escaping. Blood is oozing from his back. The ghul twists around and tries to slash at Houston’s head. Houston barely keeps his head from getting lopped off. “Burn this thing to Hell, would you!?”
I offer a quick prayer to Hephaestus and call down a narrow column of fire on top of the ghul’s upper body. The heat causes Houston to let go and roll away, but at least he didn’t take the direct hit. I rush over to Houston as the ghul burns to ash.
“I feel a little lightheaded,” says Houston as his head lolls to the side.
“We have to get out of here. Can you walk?”
He shakes his head. “My back…argh!”
I dig a healing potion out of my purse. “Drink this. It should stop the bleeding so we can get you moving.”
I open the bottle. Houston squints. “It that potion red?”
“What does it matter what color it is?” I ask while pouring the potion into his mouth.
“I’m in too much pain to make the joke.” Houston struggles to his feet as we hear a siren in the distance. We have to get out of here before the police arrive. Thankfully, Hellfire is so lethal that it instantly turns undead to ash, so I don’t have to worry about that. But explaining what caused the explosion that was no doubt reported?
And then, of course, there is the matter of what appears to be a very illegally dumped dead body wrapped in a tarp.
I manage to get Houston into the passenger’s seat as two police cars and a fire truck speed by us. People are stopped on the sidewalks looking in that direction, but nobody seems to be paying attention to us. I drive Houston over to Doctor Maddley’s in Millville, the closest doctor in-network who treats supernatural injuries. It takes over an hour to get Houston healed up.
“You’re lucky the wounds are superficial,” says Doctor Maddley has he begins treating the second degree burn on Houston’s forehead. You’ll have some mild scarring on your back, but no muscle scarring. “
“They don’t feel superficial,” mutters Houston. “I can barely lift my arm.”
“Try to avoid any strenuous upper body activity for a few days to give everything a chance to heal. You are going to be sore. Just take some Tylenol and get a lot of rest.”
“Tell the slave driver there.” He turns to me and says, “You almost set me on fire!”
“The fire column was nowhere near you!”
“It was like three inches from my face!”
“You were the one shouting for me to burn it to Hell.”
“Since when do you listen to me?”
We get home and Houston goes up to his room to go to sleep. I call Steve and give him an earful, and he promises to cover Houston’s deductible out of his expense account. I turn on the news and listen to the report of a mysterious fire at the cemetery, and there are conflicting reports of a partially decomposed body of an unidentified female found at the site.
“What happened to my son!?” screams Vivika as she suddenly manifests almost on top of me.
“He’s fine, Vivika,” I reply without turning to her. I’m just too tired to deal with her.
“He’s not fine! Something attacked him. He said it was a ghul! Why did you take him out hunting a ghul? How could you let him get hurt?”
“I did it just to annoy you, Vivika,” I finally snap. I am so done with her attitude. “I figured the best way to get under your skin was to injure my apprentice. Is that what you expect to hear?”
“You listen to me, you little harpy. My son—”
I stand up. “Back…down…now.”
“How dare—”
“You need me, Vivika. It isn’t the other way around. Remember that.”
Vivika’s facial expression hardens even as she changes her tone. “I…I don’t think you did anything on purpose, Nancy. I would never accuse you of willingly trying to hurt my son. I just saw his back and…it reminded me of the motorcycle accident. I wasn’t thinking rationally.”
I feign a smile. “You’re his mother. It isn’t your job to think rationally when he’s hurt.”
“I am truly sorry, Nancy. I forget how much stress you are under. So many people depend on you.”
“Well, I’m sure we can both agree a lot of this stress will be over after Samhain.”
“Oh yes, that we very much can agree on.” Vivika vanishes back across the Veil, and I’m pretty sure I’ve officially made her hit list.
A Deal With the Devil
October 16th,
As soon as I saw the Jersey Devil walk into the shop, I knew it was going to be a long day.
Jacob Leeds ducks his head as he walks through the doorway. He’s wearing a heavy, oversized coat that hides his wings and a pair of frayed denim jeans too long for his legs. This is just as well, since the pant legs dusting the floor hide his hooves. He’s clutching a brown paper back in his gloved hands. Even with his glamour active, his face is unnaturally wide and his jaw has a stark Neanderthal look.
I check to make sure Anastasia is busy with other customers and wave for Jacob to follow me to my office. He tilts his head and stares blankly at me, but then his eyes widen with recognition and he follows me.
As soon as I close the door, he drops the brown bag on my desk and points at it. I tentatively open the bag to find it filled with…nail clippings. “Oh,” I say and nod, hoping to trigger an explanation.
Jacob grunts and nods back.
I only ever dealt with Jacob once. I was twenty-three and Mom had just had knee surgery after slipping on a patch of ice. She had asked me to make a delivery for her to a client, which turned out to be a cave in the Pine Barrens. I dropped off a box, Jacob grunted at me and went back in the cave, and I reminded myself that I had totally made the right decision to pursue an advanced degree in psychology over demonology.
“Was this something Mom ordered?” I finally ask.
Jacob scratches his chin.
I look in the bag a second time. Yep, definitely nail clippings. “You want me to buy these?”
Jacob grunts and nods.
“All righty, then!” I take the bag over to the counter and put it on the scale. Eight ounces. Do you have any idea how much nail clippings that actually is? Was Mom buying his clippings all these years? And who the Hell was she selling them too?
I call Houston, who is still sitting at home nursing his injured back.
“What’s up, Boss?” he asks.
“Can you try to summon my mother and ask her why Jacob is trying to sell me his nail clippings?”
“Um…”
“Jacob Leeds.”
“Er…”
“It was your back that got tore up, not your vocal cords.”
“I just don’t know why these questions still surprise me, but they do.”
“I kinda need to know. Like now.” Jacob tries to sit in the chair, but can’t get comfortable because of his wings. So he sits on the floor.
“Okay. I’ll call
you back.”
I sit on the corner of my desk and fold my arms. “I have my apprentice…looking up prices.”
Jacob grunts and nods. A minute later, he removes one of his gloves to reveal a clawed hand. He starts to pick his teeth with his pinky claw.
“Do you want some water? I want some water. Just wait here. I’ll be right back.” I leave Jacob in the office and go check on Anastasia.
Anastasia is making doe eyes at a male customer while extolling the virtues of the Green Grove men’s line of haircare products. He ends up buying the box set with shampoo, conditioner, and a hair spritzer for $43. As soon as he leaves, she does a little happy dance. “Yeah, I’m good. I know it,” she sings.
“By the gods,” I laugh. “I swear you are destined for a career on the Home Shopping Network.”
“I know! I would be sooo good at that, too! But they don’t have any shows on New Age products. Oh my God! You should totally call them about doing a show! And I could be your spokesperson!”
“How about instead of worrying about your future spokesperson career, you stock the bottle shelf?”
“Owww, lemme show you what I did!” she exclaims as she comes around the counter. I follow her over to the bottle shelf. Next to a tall pink bottle, she has a bottle of carrier oil and a bottle of rose essential oil. Next to a wide green bottle, she has a bottle of wintergreen essential oil and a bottle witch hazel. “So I’m always seeing people stop and look at the bottles, right, but a lot of people don’t buy because they are pretty but, you know, what are you supposed to do with them? So I got the idea that if I put some recipe ingredients next to the bottles, people will be like ‘oh my God! I can totally use this bottle to make my own perfume!’ and stuff like that, right?”
“Right,” I nod.
“I mean, I know you like everything in its little section and all, but we need a more organic approach to increase cart size. I mean, that’s like the latest thing in retail according to my mom’s study guides.”
“Okay.”
“Really? I mean, yeah. Good idea, right?”
“Anastasia, so long as people can find what they are looking for and we can track the inventory, I’m fine with it. Go ahead and set up the display and we’ll see what happens.”
Anastasia’s anima flashes a rainbow of happy colors and wraps around her neck. She unconsciously rubs her neck, inadvertently petting the entity. Though she isn’t a witch, Anastasia’s belief in magic, and her excessively bubbly demeanor, attracted the attention of a friendly anima that is rapidly evolving into a full-blown sprite.
My office door opens and Jacob walks out. I quickly steer Anastasia toward the inventory room to get stock and then lead Jacob back into my office.
“Your mom isn’t answering me,” Houston telepaths into my head.
“Try again!”
“Maybe she’s busy?”
“I have the damn Jersey Devil in the shop and I am trying desperately to keep him from Anastasia here!”
“Wait, who? What?
“Find…my…mother!”
“On it, Boss.”
Jacob is staring at me blankly. I force a smile. He tries to smile back. I immediately regret smiling.
“Okay,” I say. “You know my mother is dead, don’t you?” Jacob shrugs. “She didn’t leave me with any information about your…arrangement with her.” Jacob grunts and nods. “What do you want for the…clippings?”
Jacob begins trying to scratch his wings from beneath the coat.
“By the gods,” I mutter. “Do you have a receipt from the last time? Anything I can go on?”
Jacob nods and digs into his pant pockets. He dumps a bunch of papers on my desk and points. Bus pass. Library card. A bunch of Wawa receipts…he has a debit card? Crumbled among the mess is a Three Wishes receipt from just before Mom died. Apparently Mom was making cash deposits into a bank account for him to the tune of…
…Two hundred and fifty dollars an ounce!?? What in the Greater Hells would you even use his nail clippings for to justify…
“Your mom said you should find his file underneath the floor board under your desk,” Houston pops into my head. “She had to run but she said that she’ll explain later and just pay him.”
“Just pay him, she said? That’s gonna be Two thousand dollars!”
“I’m just the messenger.”
“I just need to get a…crowbar. I think,” I say to Jacob and go to the janitorial closet to see if I even have something to pull up a floorboard. I find a flathead screwdriver and go back to my office. I roll my chair out of the way and pull back the floor mat. I jimmy the floorboard up to find a leather satchel with Jacob’s file.
Apparently Mom had set up the bank account for Jacob, though how she managed to create a completely fabricated identity for him is unclear. I never considered my Mom to be shady, but I was starting to wonder how many alter identities she had manufactured for others.
These transactions occurred two or three times a year. That is a lot of nail clippings! But there was no record of any nail clippings in the inventory. Of course, my mother was notoriously bad at bookkeeping so that shouldn’t surprise me. But still, I would think if you are paying that kind of money you would have some sort of record of why?
I get a blank deposit ticket; a bunch of them are in the file, and fill it out. I also fill out a receipt for Jacob and tell him I will deposit the money by end of day. He nods and grunts…I think this was the happy grunt. He retrieves the rest of his receipts and papers, shoves them all back in his pockets, and leaves the shop.
* * *
“Tell me you didn’t scare him,” says Nanna Morri as I walk in the door. Nanna rarely manifests to talk, but with the situation with Vivika what it is and me promptly shielding my mind before entering the house, the only way we can talk is if she manifests.
“Scare Jacob? It was more I was scared out of my mind Anastasia was going to see his wings or something.”
“He’s learned to be very careful. That isn’t a concern usually.”
“Where is Mom?”
“I felt it best that this come from me.”
“Do I need to sit down for this or something?”
“You may want to get a glass of wine first,” says Nanna with a grin.
I get a glass of wine and make myself comfortable on the sofa. “Why did I just deposit two thousand dollars into a fraudulent checking account?”
“It isn’t Jacob’s fault that he is the way that he is,” begins Nanna. “Jacob is a cambion. I don’t know the particulars of his birth. From what I gather his mother had an arrangement with a demon. The family was heavily in debt because of an unusually early winter that destroyed a lot of their crops. The demon was supposed to take the child as payment in exchange for gold.”
Cambions are the offspring of a union between a human female and a male demon. Contrary to popular paranormal romances, such offspring aren’t simply a matter of a little hanky-panky. It is a deliberate, convoluted ritual that has a high chance of failure and very often kills the mother in the process. It is a special kind of desperate to enter into such a pact.
Demons use cambions as anchors to the material world. So long as the cambion lives, daddy dearest can’t be banished back to the abyss or wherever he came from. Sometimes, the demon may actually take an active interest in the offspring to help him or her through life. Some do this out of genuine care for their offspring, but most do so out of self-interest. Usually, however, the demon ignores the cambion completely.
If daddy is powerful enough and really wants to be an ass, he can also take possession of the cambion as if the body was his own. It usually needs to be done when the cambion is very young; the older they get the harder it is to evict them from their own bodies. Unlike a normal possession, such a body won’t eventually break down and the demon can’t be exorcised from it.
Today, most cambions appear to be perfectly normal because demons realized that half-fiend offspring with glowing red eyes, cla
ws, or batwings attract undue attention in the modern era. So a few discreet tweaks have been made over the centuries to produce mundane looking children. But back in the day, there was no special care taken to hide the cambion’s lineage. Which was fine, I suppose, when your nearest neighbor was twenty miles away. In the era of Youtube, not optimal.
“I take it things did not go according to plan?” I ask.
“Mrs. Leeds was in her mid-forties when she gave birth to Jacob. Not exactly optimum childbearing years. Jacob was born retarded.”
“Nanna, it’s called intellectual disability.”
“Well, excuse me Miss Politically Correct. I died before all your new vocabulary became popular.”
“It isn’t being politically correct. It is about sensitivity.”
“Are you going to let me finish my story or just lecture me?”
“By Melpomene, continue.”
“Thank you.” Nanna rolls her eyes at me. “Because of Jacob’s retar…condition, the demon didn’t want him. No demon wants to be on earth so badly that it will move in to what it considered damaged property. So he canceled the contract because Mrs. Leeds didn’t deliver a suitable baby. Well, the Leeds could barely afford to care for the twelve children they had. So they abandoned him in the woods.”
“How did he survive?”
“Not sure. Maybe wolves took him in. Maybe some nature spirits near the cairn took pity on him. Jacob isn’t exactly in a position to tell anyone. But as he got older, he started making a mess of things. Chickens, goats, cattle. So the guild would send someone out to hunt him. He’s escape and disappear deep into the Pine Barrens, but then surface again a few decades or so later.”
“Where does he go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he hibernates for months or years at a time. Or maybe it is a glamour that makes people overlook him. I just know that if he doesn’t want to be found, he’s not being found.”
“So what does all this have to do with a bag of nail clippings?”
“The last time the guild sent someone to hunt him down, they asked me to do it. So I went out there and I found him. Poor thing scared out of his mind because some developer was leveling his hunting grounds and he had been shot at a few dozen times by hunters. Jacob isn’t violent. He’s never been violent. Otherwise, there would be a line of bodies the length of the shore. He still, in a lot of ways, has the mind of a child.”
nancy werlocks diary s02e11 Page 2