To the Devil a Daughter (A Vivian Summers Investigation Book 1)

by K. H. Koehler

  I’m not so stupid as to run up to a potential drunk or rapist, so I hung back near the employees’ exit door, and watched the mouse scamper over the man and crawl up the length of his body until they were practically nose to nose. I thought for sure the mouse was going to bite the man’s face. Instead, the creature kind of shuddered and then fell over, dropping off the man’s chest and to the ground, where it squirmed for a few seconds before climbing back to its feet and running off.

  The man opened his eyes. They looked black, like the mouse’s eyes, and blood had dripped into them from a deep wound in his scalp. He’d been rolled well. “Oi, witchy,” he said, flexing a hand toward me, “you got that gin for ol’ Sebastian?”

  “I don’t have any gin,” I explained.

  By then, however, the man, Sebastian, had passed out again.

  I pulled my cell phone, ready to call for an ambulance…but then tucked it back into my pocket. Except for Nick, I’d never met another witch. Or whatever Sebastian was. Some kind of witch or shapeshifter I’d never heard of. Maybe something no one had ever heard of before.

  It was stupid, I know. I knew I shouldn’t get involved with this strange man. But I really wanted to know what he was. I wanted to know if he was like me.

  Approaching him was hard. I kept expecting him to jump up and scare me like in a horror movie—but he never moved. It was harder still to get an arm around him and maneuver him around into a sitting position. Even though he looked like he was made of a bundle of sticks, he was tall and heavier than he looked. There was no way I was getting him down that long, long alley. That left me with the only option I could think of.

  Running back around to the front, I drove the jeep up the service alley, backed up as far as I was able to get to the fence, and then got out. Wrangling Sebastian into the jeep took some doing, but I managed it. I’m a lot stronger than I look. But I was left with the dilemma of what to do with him. I had no idea where he lived, and looking for a wallet or cell phone turned out to be a fruitless affair. If he’d had either of those to start with, the ones who had mugged him had long since taken them. But I had to do something with him before he stunk up my car with the faint aroma of old gin and vomit.

  I’d been running on instinct all day. This seemed just an extension of all that. I drove Sebastian back to the motel room and, because it was late and I was on the ground floor, I managed to drag him in through the door without anyone noticing.

  The question remained, though: Now what?

  I didn’t know if Sebastian was dangerous. Most witches are, to some extent. I also didn’t know if he would bleed to death if I did nothing. So, the first thing I did was drag him across the room by his shirt and wrangle him into the big porcelain soaking tub in the bathroom. He filled the whole thing.

  First, I checked out the hole in his side. It looked like a stab wound, but I didn’t think it was too deep. I cleaned the blood away as best I could. He probably needed stitches, but I didn’t have the skill—or the nerve, frankly—for that. After I got his dirty white dress shirt off—it had taken the brunt of the blood, booze, and vomit, I noted—I used butterfly bandages from the complimentary first aid kit to pull the wound closed and then bound the whole sordid thing with some toilet paper because I had no gauze. Next, I cleaned the wound in his scalp, though that had long since stopped bleeding. When I was done, I closed the bathroom door, stuck a chair under it—just to be safe—and tried to get a few hours of sleep.

  In the early hours of the morning, Sebastian knocked on the bathroom door and politely asked to be let out. He was badly hungover, with no memory of the knife fight he had lost. He looked surprised that I had cleaned his wounds, that I had given him a bed for the night. That I had given a damn. And I knew then I’d made the right decision in saving him.

  He also asked if I had a tipple, which I did not.

  3

  I’M AT Home Depot, picking out more paint, brushes, and that blue tape you use around the painting edges. I originally thought four cans would be enough to cover the nicotine-yellow walls of the tiny prep room at the back, but orangey-yellow bloodstains keep bleeding through. Sebastian has tasked me with the job of making the prep room as clean and sterile as possible for us while he dresses up the shop proper.

  “A Liverpool sweet shop, witchy,” he told me that morning when we woke up in the studio apartment above the shop. We dragged ourselves up off the inflatable beds we are using and I went to put coffee on in the galley area. The studio was empty except for the beds, the coffee machine sitting on the one lone chair in the whole flat, and a broken-looking refrigerator gurgling worrisomely in the corner. We hadn’t bought any furniture, and I wasn’t sure when we would have the time (or cash) to do so. We sat on the bare wood floor and he showed me a diagram of how he wanted to set up our shop.

  I was afraid he would make it look like some stodgy old Victorian sweet shop or something out of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but he had some pretty lit ideas that didn’t require too many modifications. A full wall of glass jars behind sliding panes of glass, a window display, the converted meat counter for the chocolates, fudges, and other perishables, and a number of large barrels on the floor for the honey-based “Brighton Rocks” he insisted I work on. He said they were delish.

  I loved how bright and lighted and wide open his ideas were. The place was going to look practically space age. When I said as much, he touched his chest dramatically. “Oi,” he said, “it ain’t like I ain’t been an interior designer.”

  “Along with the hundred other things you’ve done?” I pointed out, half-joking. According to Sebastian, he’d been a butcher, a baker, a cabaret singer, a street magician, and about a zillion other things. But I wasn’t sure if I should take him seriously.

  “What can I say? I’m one fucking talented bloke,” he reminded me for about the hundredth time, and I laughed.

  “When you’re not a homeless drunk,” I pointed out.

  He pursed his lips. “Witchy, that was merely a blip in my otherwise spotless career history.”

  I loved how Sebastian could make me laugh at anything. It was like being with Josh again.

  So, here I was, getting the paint and accessories. The white we’d bought wasn’t working, so I was looking over different paint sample cards and thinking about something darker when I heard an argument break out in the next aisle over, the one with the brushes, paint thinners, and tarps.

  A man with a deep, threatening voice was saying, “…don’t fucking touch it. Leave it alone! I swear to Christ, Emily…”

  I don’t want to get in the middle of a couple’s argument, so I shift a paint can a little to the left and peer through the rack. A pretty young black woman with a ponytail is bent over a can of paint she’s dropped. The top has come off and red deck stain has splashed across the floor, making it look like a massacre has taken place. A large, burly man—her boyfriend or husband, I presume—is grabbing her by the arm and roughly manhandling her. “Don’t touch it, for fuck’s sake! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Emily mumbles an apology, and when she stands up straight, I see she’s around six or seven months pregnant. Her eyes are glued to the paint she’s dropped, and she looks like she might start crying at any moment—like it’s the end of the whole world. Her bae jerks her around and pulls her upright as though she’s some kind of puppet. I feel a sympathetic pain in my own shoulder. Not psychological; I really do feel other people’s pain sometimes.

  Emily doesn’t cry out, but she does make a low moan. I see she’s wearing an ace bandage on her arm to keep it immobile, noticeable when her sleeve rides up.

  “Go fucking back to the car, you stupid cow,” says the man, keeping his voice pitched low so it emerges as a sibilant hiss.

  “Brandon, I’m so sor—”

  “I said get the fuck out of here.” Brandon makes a motion like he’s going to backhand her, which makes her cringe in a way that drives a surge of primal, red rage straight into my head like
someone is pounding a nail into my skull. At the same time, one of the heavy paint cans on his side of the rack flies off and hits him hard in the shoulder, making him stagger to the other side and collide with the rack there. He makes a low roar in response. Emily doesn’t see any of this because she’s already fleeing toward the exit of the store.

  The man whips around defensively, big hands clenched into fists as if he’s convinced someone assaulted him—which, I suppose, is true. But now there are no paint cans to obscure his view. He can see me through the rack.

  I get a wave of raw, primitive rage off him, the stuff that comes from old childhood trauma. The kind of killing rage that usually puts a man in the newspaper and on death row. Briefly, I have one of those waking dreams (nightmares?): Emily on the floor of their home, a red gash in her forehead from where it connected with the edge of their marble counters after Brandon punched her. Brandon is frantic, screaming. I don’t know if Emily is dead or alive, but before my mind’s eye can investigate, I’m back in the Home Depot, looking right at this human monster.

  “The fuck you looking at, bitch?” he says.

  I want to be witty and say something like, “Not much.” That’s something that Nick would do. He’d probably start a fight with the guy right here in the middle of the store and put his fucking lights out. In fact, I know he would. But I’m not Nick. I never react until it’s too late, and then, when I do, it’s usually really too late. For them and for me.

  All this reminds me of Mitchell. I knew he was cheating on me with every girl he came across. Because I was weak and afraid of losing him, I let him do it until I couldn’t endure it any longer. Then, one night, when he started with me…well, that was it. I don’t have many memories of that night. All I know is that the next morning, the Fire Department found me and the whole apartment complex buried under burned stuff.

  So, yeah, I’m a disgusting little church mouse most of the time. And I’m one right now as I stand there, gaping at this piece of human garbage, my heart beating so hard, I figure he can hear it. He can probably smell my fear, and he might even come around the racks to get me. Probably, I’d let him do it. I’d let him hurt me until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I’d lash out and wind up destroying him. How fucked up is that?

  “Stupid cunt,” he says before walking away.

  I feel an enormous wave of relief. He’s not going to hurt me. I don’t have to be afraid of him.

  Taking a can of white paint, I check out and walk as quickly as possible to my jeep. I’m loading it in when I look over and see the woman, Emily, crying in a sedan two cars down. I think it’s pretty damned unfair of fate to throw her into my path again. I was being a good girl, keeping my nose clean, until now. Closing the hatch of the jeep, I start walking around to the driver’s side when I find my eyes betraying me and sliding over.

  Emily’s head is down and she seems to be staring at the floor of the car in defeat.

  With a sigh, I fish my cell phone out and find the name of a local woman’s shelter. I take the paint sample out of my pocket and write the address and phone number in a blank spot. Husband dear doesn’t seem to be around, so I hurry over to the sedan and knock two knuckles against the glass.

  Emily looks up with large, nervous eyes. She doesn’t seem to want to roll down the window, even for another woman, so I scoot down and knock again with a small and (I hope) non-threatening smile. I mime to her to roll down her window.

  After a few tense seconds, she does. But she doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I know what you’re going through. Take this.” I hand Emily the card with the information for the shelter on the back.

  She looks at it as if it might poison her. Her lips move, but it takes a second for her small, dry, scratchy voice to emerge. “Brandon won’t like this. He won’t stand for it.” She tries to give me back the card.

  I look at the paint sample card. It’s a bright mustardy-yellow color I’d picked out called, rather ironically, Giallo. Not the best omen, I figure. “Please take it,” I beg of her. “Something bad is going to happen.” I nod at her pregnant belly. “It’s going to happen to you and to him if you don’t do something.”

  Looking pale and terrified, Emily lays a hand protectively over her baby bump.

  I don’t wait for her to take the card. I simply drop the card in her lap and stand back as she rolls the window back up.

  I never learn what happens to Emily and her baby, but also never see anything in the local papers or on TV to suggest she was hurt as in my vision. That means I did a good thing. Right?

  4

  I DON'T tell Sebastian about the incident. Mostly it’s because I know what he’ll say. He’ll scold me for stepping into a situation I know nothing about—even though I did the same for him.

  But another part stems from my obsession with personal privacy. I don’t share the little anecdotes of my life with anyone unless I absolutely have to. Besides Josh, I’ve never had a best friend (or even a casual friend), and even though I enjoy the occasional sexual encounter, I don’t like to become romantically involved with any of my partners. Nick was the exception that proved the rule. I’d loved Nick—or thought I did—and I still didn’t tell him even half of the things I’ve experienced. Some people like to overshare. I don’t share at all. Never have. Maybe that’s why my relationships never work out.

  But Sebastian knows there’s something bothering me, because the following day, while we’re installing the shelves of the display rack, he keeps staring at me with this squinty eye of his that’s driving me crazy. Around noon, I finally cave—mostly due to being hangry and having had no breakfast—and say, “So, yeah. I almost got into a fight at the Home Depot yesterday.”

  He holds up his hands defensively. “I didn’t say a bloody word.”

  “But you thought it.”

  “I thought no such thing,” he insists as he picks up the hammer and looks at one of the supports. Then he turns and points the tool at me. “You can’t save the world, you know.”

  His ability to pick up on certain things is uncanny.

  “I saved you!” I point out as I perch on the one stool in the whole place and grab a bottle of water from off the floor. Maybe if I stay better hydrated, I won’t give off vibes that lead to conversations like this. “I should have left you a rat!”

  “Oi! I was never a rat!” he points out with enormous insult. He shakes the hammer. “And you are changing the subject!”

  I think about coming clean and telling him everything, but something stops me. If I tell him about the incident, we might segue into my waking dreams, and I’m not ready to share those with him. Maybe one day. But that day is not today, as Aragorn would say.

  “We got any petty cash?” I say instead. I sound irritated, even to me “I need food.”

  “You’re the money witch,” he tells me, going back to the shelves. “How much do we have?”

  I dig out enough for some Tai from the dump around the corner. Petty cash is running perilously low these days. When I started this venture, I sank everything I’d gotten from the club into it. I had this vision that it would all work out. That it really couldn’t not work out. That I deserved for it to all work out. But now I’m not so sure.

  Another thing I can’t discuss with Sebastian. He’s counting on me to make the shop work so we both don’t wind up out on the street. He’d probably survive it, but, for me, it would be the end of my Hobbit adventure. I’d have to crawl back to Blackwater and my old job. I would rather die than live in Blackwater, slinging hash at Molly’s Steakhouse, for the rest of my life.

  So, I spend the evening and part of the night going over the finances and my business plan once more. I run the numbers over and over. If it’s one thing I learned while splitting a business with Mike Bartholdi, it’s that 500 grand isn’t that much money in the greater scheme of things—not when it comes to leases, insurance, property taxes, repairs, and supplies. I don’t think we’ll have e
nough to do all the modifications we want. We might have to open early just to turn a profit before all the money runs out.

  I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweaty panic. I think how I’ve probably made a terrible mistake, which leads me to toss and turn all night long on the air mattress.

  Sebastian? He’s dead to the world. It doesn’t matter to him. If I fail, he’ll just go off and be a rat or mouse somewhere in the city.

  Me? I have nowhere to go from here.

  This is it.

  I’ve gone over the cliff. And where I fall is home.

  5

  I JERK awake at the sound of loud voices.

  It’s still dark out, but there are flashing lights in the windows overlooking the delivery alley and the static sounds of a police ban radio going off. As the red and blue lights strobe through the tiny, empty studio, I catch a glimpse of Sebastian in rumpled clothing and fallen suspenders standing to one side of a window, peering out.

  I sit up and start saying his name, but he turns and puts a finger to his lips.

  Dragging my warm blanket along, I stumble to the window and look down.

  The place is crawling with police. Several vehicles are parked at both ends of the alley. I see black and whites, an ambulance, and—I think—a black coroner’s van, though it’s hard to tell in the dark. On the other side of the privacy fence, I see people on the street trying to get a glimpse of what’s going on. One of the cops, looking irritated, raises a bullhorn and warns the people back.