K.H. Koehler
To the Devil a Daughter
A Vivian Summers Investigation
KH Koehler Books
http://khkoehler.net
To the Devil a Daughter Copyright © 2019 by K.H. Koehler
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First edition
Cover art by KH Koehler Design
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
About the Author
Hungry for More Urban Fantasy?
Other Titles by K.H. Koehler
Written a Book?
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
God is love. But Lucifer does that thing with his tongue.
—Online Meme
1
THE SHOP is twenty by thirty feet, with a large, fairly modern prep room in the back. It’s small—barely large enough to change your mind in—and Sebastian keeps reminding me of that fact. But it has plenty of windows that look out over Broad Street, and the shop is in one of Philadelphia’s “revitalizing corridors,” so it gets a lot of coverage in the lifestyle section of the paper. I think it’s perfect. I think it’s going to work.
“Where should we start first?” I ask Sebastian as I carry in a box of tools and paintbrushes and dump it on the floor. I straighten up, stretching my back, and look at the walls. They are all a dingy beige color, except for the giant mural of a pig on one wall with all the choice parts outlined in broken lines. This was formerly a butcher shop. But my partner Sebastian and I plan to transform it into something spectacular
Sebastian looks unsure as he glances around. This is the first time he’s seeing it “in the flesh,” so to speak. Up until now, our shop (I want to call it “Confessions”) has been nothing but outlines on paper napkins and jots of ink on scraps of notebook paper. “I…well, it’s small, luv.”
He’s looking worriedly at the pig mural.
I smack him on the arm. “Look at it!”
He shoves his hands into the deep pockets of his drainpipe trousers. They look like he stole them off a carnival barker from the eighteenth century, and they expose his white socks and saddle shoes. The shirt he wears has a froth of cheap, gold-lined lace at the throat, and he’s wearing a garish tailcoat of red damask with velvet-trimmed lapels and flaps. I once discreetly snapped a pic of him and posted it to a British message board just to see what would happen. Everyone on the board wanted to know who the cute but woefully outdated Teddy Boy was.
“Sebastian!”
“I’m bloody looking, you cunt!” he shouts.
Sebastian Davis is head and shoulders taller than I am and as thin as a whip. He looks my age but talks like something out of Mary Poppins. Well, an X-rated Mary Poppins, anyway. He doesn’t really mean the “cunt” remark, by the way. At least, I don’t think he does. That’s just the way he rolls.
While he contemplates the property we’ve just leased, I look over at the glass counter that can be refurbished and filled with fudge, cordials, truffles, brittles, and fondant fancies (that Sebastian is in charge of because those are British and what the hell is a fondant fancy, anyway?). The hard candy I’ll make will go behind plates of glass along the walls, optimizing the small space.
My mind starts building the store up like some crazy fast-forward CGI sequence. I can see it in seconds—all of it, finished, painted and presented. It’s happened before. Sometimes I catch glimpses of things in the future—things that have yet to come to pass but absolutely will. One of the quirks of being a born witch.
I hear Sebastian talking but can’t make out the words. I turn my head and see his lips moving. Seconds later, the words catch up.
“…okay? Right then, let’s carry on…”
“I want to pain a hex over the pig,” I tell him.
He looks at me as if I’m mad. “A hex?”
Like me, Sebastian is a witch. Well, sort of. More of a necromancer…though he tells me the PC term is “resurrectionist.” (Eye roll.) He can move his essence—what he calls his “selfie”—into other bodies, either temporarily or permanently. He can also “put rise” into the dead, although it’s a complicated and screwy process, he says. Sebastian can appreciate the power behind symbols of power.
“Are you sure, witchy?” he asks.
I am. I’ve already seen it completed. A combination of mural and ward to keep the darker things away. And the gods know I need that in my life.
“It’s already painted. I just have to do the work,” I say, leaning over for a small can of blue paint from the box.
“You are one strange witch, witch,” Sebastian says as he goes over to the display counter and hikes himself up so he’s sitting on the glass, his long, long legs in those ridiculous trousers dangling down.
“I take it you aren’t going to help?”
“I like to watch you work, you sexy thing,” he coos.
He makes it all sound so scandalous, but I’m not fooled by his display. Sebastian is as kiki as a $700 Chanel scarf.
An hour later, the ward is complete and covers the old pig mural top to bottom, as well as most of the wall. It’s a complex hex made up of wards—some well known to various witches and other occultists and a few others long since lost to history. But in the middle of it all is a simple but infinitely more powerful symbol only I and one other person in the whole world know how to draw.
One long line with a little curl at the bottom and two forked lines at the top.
The bident.
The Morning Star. The sign of my father’s house.
The House of Lucifer.
One strange witch. Poor Sebastian doesn’t know even the half of it.
2
THE DAY after I buried my business partner, Mike Bartholdi, I stepped into the law offices of Butcher & Butcher (what an awful name, I thought peripherally), shook the rain off my coat, and prepared to be slaughtered upon the legal altar.
Mike was dead. Murde
red, if you wanted to get technical, and his little Mafioso family was going to rip the club Mike and I owned right out from under my feet. I mean, why wouldn’t they? They owed me nothing. Neither did he—even though we were more than friends for a short time.
“You can go right in, Ms. Summers,” the secretary who looked to be in her seventies, and who was likely the Butchers’ Sons’ mom, said with a cheery, apple-cheeked smile that made me want to cringe.
“Thanks.” I sounded about as enthusiastic as Anne Boleyn being led away to the royal executioner.
I wasn’t in the office more than three seconds when the elder Butcher brother rose from his desk and raced to me, taking my hands as if I was a widow in mourning in a gothic novel. “If you want to sell, I’ll be happy to help you with that, Ms. Summers,” he said, and then followed up with some legalese I couldn’t understand but I interpreted to mean that I was now sole owner of The Loop, the club Mike and I had bought and fixed up three years ago.
Well, Mike had bought it with his family’s dirty bloody money. I just redesigned the interior because, for all of Mike’s disposable income, he knew exactly squat about gothic subculture. Not that I was an expert, but I’d been to enough raves in Philly and New Jersey to at least know what one should look like.
The Loop was mine—to run or sell. When I asked how that was possible, the elder Butcher said Mike’s family was honoring his Last Will and Testament, and I had been named his sole heir and executor.
“It’s a clean break,” my brother Josh said that night while we were sitting together on the sofa, watching SpongeBob SquarePants on Netflix as if we were kids again. We used to watch Saturday Morning cartoons all the time while we ate our sugary cereal—at least until the networks yanked them all off. It was our thing.
I sat there, munching on Lucky Charms, the new owner of fifty-thousand dollars worth of failing rave club, and looked over at my brother. Josh had lost his sight while serving in Afghanistan. As always, I figured he was watching TV with me for me. He was getting a damned thing out of it, but that was just like Josh. Being there for me.
“Is that why you keep taking off?” I ask, referring to all the times my brilliant but chronically underpaid musician brother hit the road and did a circuit through some godforsaken armpit of the country. Sometimes he didn’t call for days on end. “Because you know my dump is your dump,” I said, indicating my cheap, chintzy apartment in a renovated and desanctified church.
I persisted. “Is it all clean breaks, Josh?”
He laughed at that. “Maybe.” He popped a mouthful of Trix into his mouth.”You want some serious advice, sis?”
“Hit me.”
“Unload The Loop and get the hell out of this fucking town. What has Blackwater ever done for you?”
I thought about his words that night and in the nights that followed. I had moved here after our parents died. I had gone to school here. Been hunted and terrorized here. Found out who I was here. Met Nick here.
Nick. Yeah, if I wanted to be honest with myself, it was probably he more than anything else holding me back. And I didn’t know why. We weren’t going to be together. That wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t even want it to happen. I was so done with the walking, talking calamity that was Nick Englebrecht.
But we had a connection. One I hadn’t felt with anyone else.
I still loved him. That much was true, and would probably always be true, but we were not suited to each other. Bad things happened when we were together. And those bad things would always happen no matter how much we tried to stop them. I looked at the witch’s mark on my wrist, the one he had given me. Touching it sent a wave of sensual echoes throughout my body. I knew it was the same for him. No matter where I went in this world, I would never be rid of it. I would never be rid of him.
If I went to the ends of the Earth, I would forever be taking Nick with me.
Well, then, I thought. What difference does it make where I go?
I owned so little. Some out-of-date clothes. A few personal trinkets. All of it connected to this town in some way. The following week, I sold the club to a developer and put the keys to the apartment into Josh’s hand.
“What’s this?” he asked. He was sitting at the table, feeding his service dog the bacon off his plate. I had made eggs—badly. Burned around the edges. But he ate them anyway.
“It’s yours,” I said from across the table. “All of it. Even the dresses in the closet. Though I don’t think they’ll fit you.”
He laughed at that. “You’re going to do it. You’re really going to do it! You’re going on a great adventure.”
“You make me sound like a Hobbit.”
That made him laugh even harder.
Later that day, I got a check cut from the lawyer and came back to pack a single suitcase. A few changes of clothes. A few small personal items. My business course textbooks. A few old DVDs of Josh and me from our birthdays from a time when our parents were still alive, and a photo album full of pictures of people not related to me but who were my family nonetheless. Sentimental stuff, sure, but I felt I needed to know where I’d come from before I knew where I was going.
I got it all in that one suitcase and set it in the back of my jeep, Daisy. Then I got in the driver’s seat and closed the door. I laughed. I had no plans. Nowhere to go. Not even a clear direction. So, I flipped a coin. Heads and I would drive out to New Jersey. Tales it was Philadelphia.
Tales won. And, three hours later, dog-tired from turnpike traffic, I checked into a dump that looked like a slightly nicer version of Bates Motel and threw my bags on the floor before collapsing on the big weird waterbed. And then I laughed and laughed, shaking the whole bed. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Totally winging it.
I should have been frightened half to death. About now, I should have been questioning my life decisions. Normally I did, even under the best circumstances. But I wasn’t.
I was free. For the first time ever, I felt I was deciding my own future. My own fate. Going on a great Hobbit adventure, as Josh had said.
Once, long ago, I had had plans. Plans set in stone. Life could only go one way for me, Vivian Summers. But I’d been through so much hell in the last few years. So much had changed me, inside and out. I wasn’t that girl who’d wanted to launch her own bakery one day, and all those dreams were now dust.
Witches can’t bake. All those romance novels about witches running super cute cupcake shops as the front for some secret spell-casting service? Lies and bullshit. The author didn’t do her homework, let me tell you. Something about leavening and witches does not mix. And, for a while, I’d been pretty messed up about that. Of all the stupid legends to be true, why that one?
But as I lay there, thinking about how that old dream would never be mine, I remembered being eight. My mom would take me to the YMCA for swim lessons, and, afterward, we’d stop at this sweet shop for chocolate pops. They had them in all different shapes. Cats and dolls and even an ice cream cone, which was my favorite.
I sat up as I had my first—but not my last—vision of the future. It was terrifyingly explicit and wonderful and full of small details. After it was over, I got back into my jeep and, even though I was exhausted from the long drive, I found myself cruising the streets of Philly after dark, looking at the neon signs on all the little elicit shops. You could watch a movie, buy ice cream, or get a lap dance here. Porn was available on every corner. I liked how limitless the possibilities were.
Eventually, something pulled me to the curb. I got out and walked across the street and found myself standing in front of a dark, boarded-up shop, the second half of a side-by-side row establishment. I cupped my hands around my face to block out all the neon and peered through the dirty window. I could see a big dumb pig mural on the wall, just like in my waking dream.
The other half of the side-by-side was a modern Laundromat. I went to peer in there, as well, because, as silly as it might sound, I’ve always loved Laundromats. I find them so str
angely magical. The bright blue lights and wide-openness and churning machines like something that’s the unlikely offspring of a spaceship and a discotheque from the 1970s.
I stood there a long time, watching the people in neat rows reading two-month-old magazines and feeding coins into hungry vending machines, until a voice behind me said, “Oi, witchy, you got some spirits?”
Turning guardedly, I glanced around the street. My shoulders stiffened as I prepared to be rushed. But the street on my side was empty. A couple was walking down on the other side, but it was obvious they hadn’t spoken. Then I turned my eyes down farther and saw a small brown mouse sitting up on the broken pavement in front of the abandoned shop. It was looking straight at me.
“Ginny will do,” echoes the disembodied voice.
I continued to look around, but, after a moment or two, I realized the voice was coming from inside my head. The mouse was twitching its nose and glaring at me intensely with its black beaded eyes. My attention kept coming back to it. I thought of all the weirdness I had experienced in my life and figured why the hell not?
Scooting down, I looked closer at the mouse, which did not run from me.
“It’s not you,” I said.
“Oi! If you ain’t got no ginny, witchy, just say so.”
“It is you,” I sighed.
It seemed to look deep into my soul…and then it startled and shook its head as if it wasn’t prepared for what was in there. Turning tail, it suddenly fled down the alley that ran alongside the abandoned shop.
I’d never met a talking mouse before, but I followed it around the bend and down the dark, narrow space beyond. The alley was barely wide enough to get your shoulders through without brushing against the privacy fence that separated the property from the one next door, and the ground was all broken, wet concrete, making it treacherous, but I managed to catch a flash of the creature as it disappeared around the back of the building.
A narrow service alley ran behind the establishment, barely recognizable in the dim moonlight and the yellowish bulb of a single security light from the Laundromat next door. Another weathered picket fence encased a large blue dumpster and what looked like the casing for a gas back-up generator. Sprawled against the fence, I spotted a tall, immensely thin (and rather dodgy-looking) young man. He was bruised and battered and seemed to have a bloody hole in his side. The asphalt under him was dark with blood.
To the Devil a Daughter Page 1
