by Devon Monk
“I know you’re on vacation,” I said. “This is kind of a work thing.”
He turned just a bit my way, angling his wide shoulders so he could better see me. I turned toward him too, planting my elbow on the bar.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
I reached into my pocket and placed the black bag with scissors on the bar.
Bo stared at the bag a moment, then nodded. “You planning to use those on someone?”
“Have you met Ordinary’s only demon yet?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“If you had, you’d want to use them on him too. Right on his smug face.”
“Bathin, right?”
I nodded. Turned the shot glass by half again.
“So you hate him?”
“I didn’t say I hated him.”
“Those scissors in your bag are very old, very hard to find, and very dangerous. They are not something you should carry if you care at all for the demon.”
I grumbled something about demons and just exactly how much I didn’t care about one specifically, and most of them generally.
Bo made a humming sound and drank beer.
“You don’t think I like him,” I said.
“I think you need to be very clear what you feel for him before you do anything with those scissors.”
“He took my sister’s soul.”
“I’ve heard.”
“He had our dad’s soul trapped. Did you know that?”
Bo tipped the bottle again, then set it down. He signaled to the bartender to bring him another, and to bring me a second shot.
I hadn’t even had a sip yet. Yes, I liked to sip tequila, no lime, no salt. I liked the taste. Liked to savor the burn. Had always preferred my drinks raw and hot.
When fresh drinks were in front of us, Bo finally answered me.
“I did know.”
“You knew that Bathin trapped Dad’s soul? Why didn’t you tell us about it? I thought you were our friend.”
He gave me a tolerant look, the look of a god who had bigger concerns than a few gifted mortals policing a tiny beach town.
“My power is an old one, Myra.” The neon behind the bar cast soft blue and red glow on his shorn head. The diamond in the top of his ear glittered like a single star. “Have you ever read the original records of how Eros began?”
My pulse sped up a little. This was information I wasn’t usually offered. “I have not. But I would love to.”
“Lots of people would. But if it’s ever been written fully or accurately is not the point.” He winked.
“My beginnings are lost to memories so long ago that even I wonder what is the truth and what are dreams. I am old. Very old. I am harmony; I am binding; I am the connection between light and darkness, heaven and earth, life and death. All that is separate, I join together.
“Or I rend it apart as I see fit. I am love. I am hatred. I am alliance; I am destruction. When your father chose to give his soul to the prince in return for keeping Ordinary safe, I knew about it. That was an agreement, a joining. Your father gave his soul into Bathin’s care.”
“More like Bathin tricked him into it,” I said.
“Perhaps. Your father had a very great heart, a very great love for this town, and an even greater love for his daughters. He may have entered into the agreement willingly. As did your sister.”
“She had no choice.”
“We always have a choice,” he said. “She chose.”
All right. That was true. “You bring things together,” I said. “Including demons and souls. That means you can take them apart.”
He rubbed one hand over his mouth and then tipped his head so he could hold my gaze.
In his eyes were universes, sorrow, laughter, love, fury.
Darkness and light.
“All things joined fall beneath my powers.”
I shivered. He might not be carrying his power right now, but there was still a godliness about him. A presence that gave his words weight.
“You could make him give Delaney’s soul back to her.”
“Probably.”
He eased back on the bar, his gaze drifting across the room, lingering a moment on the door, then coming back to me.
“You aren’t going to do it, are you?”
“One”—he held up a finger—“I am on vacation. To do what you ask, I’d have to pick up my power, and that is not going to happen. Not until…not until I decide.”
Another shadow crossed his face, and I had a moment to wonder why he had chosen this time, of all time, to put his power down. I wondered that often about the gods. Did they come here because they were bored, or tired? Or did their choice to step away from their power, no matter how temporarily, have nothing to do with emotions a mortal would understand?
If I had to guess what had brought Bo here to sit in this little bar in this little coastal town in the middle of almost nowhere, I’d say it was sorrow. I’d say he’d been on the road too long, and was looking for a place to rest his bones, lick his wounds.
It wasn’t something I’d ask him. And since my family gift was being in the right place at the right time, I was pretty sure he was getting as much out of me being here at the bar on this dark and lonely night as I was.
“Don’t you think Delaney gives enough of herself to this town?” I said quietly. “Don’t you think it’s time for someone to give up something for her? Give something back to her. To keep her safe. To make her happy?”
“I do think all those things,” he said. “Are you the person to make all that happen for her?”
“I’m the one with the libraries of knowledge. I am the one Dad left with that responsibility. She’s the only one of us who can bridge the god power into rest here. She’s important. To all of us. And it’s my job to take care of her when she does something like this—gets herself tied into things that are going to hurt her.”
“Bathin’s a thing you think is going to hurt her?”
“He already has. He’s a demon. They thrive on pain.”
Bo took another drink, then placed the beer carefully down on the bar, heavy fingers caging it.
“Bathin isn’t like most demons,” he said. “Or he isn’t now.”
“Now?”
“Not since he made that deal with your father.”
“Okay. I don’t follow.”
“Your father had a very great heart. He stood in Delaney’s exact position, gateway for the gods. Holding that soul, his very specific soul…that can’t be without consequence.”
“What consequence?”
He flicked at the nail of his thumb with the callous on his middle finger. “That’s not my story to tell.”
I slugged back my first shot. “Not nice, Bo. Teasing me with information. Not nice.”
“It’s not my job to be nice.”
“If Mercury were here, he’d tell me the story.”
“Oh, he’d tell you a lot of stories, I’m sure.” Bo smiled, a light of delight in his eyes. “Some of them might even contain a word or two of truth.”
I laughed and lifted the second shot in a toast to a god I hadn’t seen in years. We both sipped.
“Do you like him?” Bo asked.
“Mercury?”
“Bathin.”
“No.”
He made another humming sound around a swallow. “Do you want to?”
That surprised another laugh out of me. “I thought you weren’t willing to pick up your power.”
“Oh, I wasn’t offering. I’m just curious. If you had just met him and hadn’t known he was a demon, if he hadn’t taken your sister’s soul, would you give him a second look? Would you like him?”
It was probably the bar, the music, the familiarity of the god beside me, and the tequila (definitely the tequila), but I took a moment to really think it over.
“He’s complicated. Mysterious. I love solving a mystery. He likes the chase, and doesn’t give up easily, so…I like that. He’s done s
ome really…decent things. Heroic things when we didn’t have anyone else to turn to. He might not seem reliable, but when the chips were down, yeah, he was there. Every time.”
I stopped and rubbed a fingertip over the edge of my shot glass. That was a pretty long list of positives. I needed some negatives to balance it out. The only problem was that no negatives were coming to mind. There were tons of things I didn’t like about him. Weren’t there?
“I don’t trust him. Not at all.”
“I didn’t ask if you trusted him,” Bo said. “I asked if things were different, if he had never touched your father’s soul, or your sister’s soul, if you would want to get to know him.”
The answer floated there, somewhere in the warm tug in my chest, in that same part of me that held my family gift. The part of me that always knew where I should be. The part of me that knew where I belonged, where I fit in, like a puzzle piece pressing into place.
The part of me that was never wrong. And it knew where I fit. Who I fit.
Yes.
And that single, shining truth startled the hell out of me.
“Oh,” I said, reeling under the immensity of that truth. “Oh.”
Bo’s eyes were kind and endless.
“Thing about the heart? It is never wrong. It might be inconvenient—damned inconvenient.” He lifted his beer to wash away whatever memory that statement drew up in him. “And it might be foolish,” he continued. “But it is honest. It feels what it feels. The trick to living with a heart is figuring out how much you listen to it, and make decisions on its counsel.”
“That’s such an easy trick,” I grumbled. “Thanks a lot for that.”
“And the thing about the scissors?” he went on, a little like he was enjoying turning this screw. “They will extract a cost from anyone who uses them.”
I groaned. “They’re made by a demon, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“So I have to decide if I’m going to use the scissors to free my sister’s soul, harm Bathin, and pay whatever price comes along with the things. Do I have that all right?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t suppose you know what the price might be?”
“Nope.”
“Fantastic. Here’s to impossible decisions.” I held up my glass he clinked it with the neck of his beer. Then I slammed back the shot.
Chapter Eight
I slept like the dead. In my bed. After I’d pulled off the comforter, blankets, and sheets and replaced everything with clean linens from the cupboard.
The scissors had been stashed in my closet in a box Odin had carved for me when I was a little girl. It was smooth, beautiful wood, silky soft as it shifted into whorls and angles that made the whole thing look like an ocean seen from between the branches of a great tree. Here and there in the water, fish jumped. The back of the box was dominated by anemone in full bloom, three tiny hermit crabs playing between them.
He’d told me the crabs were my sisters and me.
The box was blessed and warded against darkness. He had told me it was big enough to hold my favorite things, and for years I’d locked my diaries in it, mostly to keep Jean from reading them.
But after I grew up, the box had remained empty except for a few small prizes. I’d recently added the flyer from my first game on the roller derby team and newspaper clippings of cases we’d solved to the bracelet Mom had given me, and the tarot card from Jules.
And now, a black bag holding a pair of golden scissors—that could somehow free my sister’s soul, but at a cost to me and extreme pain to Bathin—filled the space.
There wasn’t a rule book or journal that could tell me what I should do.
But there were my sisters. We’d figure this out together. Now that we had the weapon—the scissors—we could decide on the right way to use them.
Of course, we still needed that one page from that one book that explained how to use the scissors.
Still, today felt like a victory, except for the whole worms and stalker poem thing.
I packed the black bag, the letter, and the worm bucket, which I did not open, because: ew, and drove in to the station.
I considered stopping by the bakery to get some donuts, but then I remembered that my sisters had thrown me at Bertie’s mercy and made me sit through speed dating in a bowling alley.
No donuts for traitors.
“Morning!” I said as I strolled through the door. “What fresh joy do we have on the docket today?”
The first thing I noticed was the boxes of cookies on the counter. Six boxes of Girl Scout cookies, all open. Looked like Mindy had done pretty well for herself and her daughters last night.
Delaney leaned on the counter, half a Thin Mint in her hand, coffee cup in the other, talking to Jean. I was here early, but Jean should have finished her shift already.
“Switch with Roy again?” I asked her.
She took a huge gulp of whatever iced coffee/extra Red Bull/ice cream monstrosity she’d talked the drive-through coffee shop to Frankenstein together for her.
“Yes. Trying out a few mornings in a row. See if I like it.”
I raised an eyebrow. She was a total night owl. Always had been. I figured she’d changed hours so they more closely matched up with her baker boyfriend’s very early morning schedule.
“Look at all those cookies,” I said to Delaney with a sly grin. “I wonder where you got them.”
She rolled her eyes. “Mindy talked me into a dozen. I figure I’ll keep them in the cupboard here and we can bring them out when things get really stressful.”
“There are six on the countertop,” I said. “How stressful has the day been so far?”
“I only put one box on the counter.” She contemplated the lineup. “Mindy must have hit up the entire town last night. We’ve had a few people stop by to thank us for our service.” She tipped her head at my hand. “What’s with the bucket?”
“Worms.” I crossed to my desk, set the bucket on the floor, and draped my coat over my chair. “So there are a couple things I need to fill you both in on.” I pulled out the plastic evidence bag with the letter, then the black bag, and placed them both on my desk.
I did not sit down, but Jean and Delaney came over to stand and stare at the items with me.
I went through everything. From receiving the letter on my doorstep, to the crossroads demon and her intel, the cookie-cruncher suspect, right on through to the worms, the scissors, and my conversation with Cupid.
“How do you even do so much in two days?” Jean asked me. “Two days, Myra. All I got done was dyeing my hair and wrapping Hogan’s gift. And why didn’t you tell me about the letter or the crossroads deal—”
I opened my mouth to argue.
“—fine,” she said, “the crossroads intel when it happened? I was right there.”
“So was Bathin.”
She blew out a breath and squeaked her straw up and down in its plastic lid. “Right. He was. And then the fire department, and then we went shopping. Still. You could have said something.”
“I didn’t think she was going to actually bring me anything that could save Delaney’s soul, since she disappeared before I could really pin her down.”
We all stared some more at the black bag and the golden scissors that glinted on top of it.
“Okay,” Delaney said. “The only information you have on the scissors is what Bo said, right?”
“Yeah. I haven’t gone through the records to see if there is a mention of them that I missed, so all I have to go on is what Bo told me.”
“And he said they will cause Bathin pain, free my soul, but all at a cost to the person who uses them?”
“Yep.”
Silence, except for Jean slurping her drink.
“You are not using those things,” Delaney said.
“Delaney,” I said, “be smart about this.”
“I am being smart. Those scissors are dangerous, probably deadly, and they are of demonic ori
gin. We do not just willy-nilly start snipping away with a magical weapon to see what happens. Do you understand me, Myra? I am officially ordering you not to use these until we have hard data on what they can do—what they will do when used.”
Okay, she was making sense, but I didn’t like it.
“Promise me you won’t use them, Myra.”
“I won’t use them.”
She held my gaze for a moment, my sister who could face down gods and monsters without flinching. My sister who was following so closely in our father’s footsteps that I wondered if her life would end the same way: suddenly and too soon.
“Good.” She took a sip of her coffee, then pointed at the letter. “Let’s see if we can find out anything about this, since it’s our ground zero, okay? I can get Jules in here and see if she can get any vibes off it.”
“I’m on it.” Jean skipped over to her desk, snapping her fingers on the way.
“How much sugar and caffeine was in that thing?” I muttered to Delaney.
“All the caffeine and sugar. We should make her clean out the evidence room.” She grinned. I grinned. It was great to have a younger sister on the force.
“We should,” I agreed.
“Lock those up, okay?” Delaney pointed to the scissors.
“What about the worms?” I asked.
She sighed. “They’re just going to stink up the place. Let’s get some more pictures, then shake them out, seal the box, and store it. The worms can go in the bushes.”
“You got it, boss.”
Maybe it was the tone of my voice, but Delaney paused and pressed her hand on my arm. “I love you, Myra. Thank you for looking for a way to get my soul back. This might be the way we go. I just don’t want any of us to pay any more prices for this situation, okay? Not me. And not you.”
“I know. It’s just…we’re so close. I want to see this done and over. I hate that he’s holding your soul.”
“Me too. But it’s a lot better than it was. I couldn’t feel anything when he first took it; now I only notice it when things get too quiet, when I don’t have anything to do.”
“What’s it like?” I asked her softly enough Jean wouldn’t hear. I hadn’t talked to her about it for a while. But each time I had asked before, she’d given me a different answer.
