To the Devil a Daughter

by K. H. Koehler

  Turning at the same time, we both sink down the floor to either side of the window and just look at each other.

  “Some gang hit?” Sebastian suggests. We both know the gang presence in this part of town is strong. You don’t go walking around at night unless you’re in a group.

  “I don’t know. Are there any gangs in a war?”

  Sebastian opens his mouth to answer when we both hear banging on the back door downstairs. We jump at the sound, then settle to the floor again. The man announces himself as Sergeant Detective Something Something and asks politely (but not too politely) to open up. When we don’t answer or immediately rush downstairs, he just keeps banging.

  “You should answer that,” he says.

  “Why do I have to answer it? You’re the guy.”

  “I’m suspicious looking.”

  I shoot him a look. “You don’t have any warrants, do you?”

  He shrugs.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I say too loudly.

  “It’s not like he’s going to bloody go away!”

  Sighing, I force myself to stand. I don’t want to do this. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law, none of them good. The first time was when the apartment complex I was living in with Mitchell burned to the ground. That time, the authorities were more interested in knowing what started the fire and frustrated when the arson team couldn’t pinpoint it. The second time was when one of the Arcana, the ancient order of angel-eaters, set me up for my roommate Tiffany’s murder. That time, I wound up in the Carbon County lockup for almost three days, until Nick unraveled the mess and got me out. I’ve never been mistreated by the police—I mean, I’m a very white-looking girl and that isn’t going to happen, let’s be honest—but I have no fond memories of dealing with the fuzz.

  Dropping the blanket, I grab a thick, insulating sweatshirt and shrug it on over my T-shirt and boy shorts. It falls to my hips. Then I take the backstairs to the prep room, which connects to the delivery alley. When I open the back door, a cold draft of air hits me and swirls around my ankles, reminding me that my legs and feet are bare.

  The officer on the other side has his hand up to pound on the door once more, but he lowers it as soon as he sees me standing in the open doorway. He’s a large, powerful-looking black man in plainclothes. Looks early forties, with just a touch of virile grey in his beard and at his temples. Handsome like Idris Elba. Intense dark eyes and a no-nonsense posture. His grey suit clings to his athletic build, and his afro looks regulation-perfect. He wears the kind of expression that suggests he’s seen a lot of bullshit but can handle it. He’s strong enough to keep it all properly compartmentalized. Perfect cop material.

  “Ms…Summers?” the officer says, briefly consulting the flip pad in his hand. “I’m Detective Miles McCall with the PPD.” He shows me the gold badge around his neck as if I can’t already see it. It reads Philadelphia Police with the words “honor,” “service,” and “integrity” engraved in it. “Mind if we speak a moment?”

  Of course, the first thing I do is compare him to Nick, who was also a cop once upon a time. But they are as different as night and day. Nick always looks on the verge of cracking wise, and there is a certain feral, almost primal, air about him. He’s the kind of man who might do anything, even if it gets him in trouble. But I have the feeling that Detective McCall is orderly and mature and by the books. He doesn’t take chances, and he also doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

  He’s as far from “my type” as one can get. Not to mention there’s a wedding band on his ring finger—I noticed that peripherally, but it draws my attention. In that moment, I have a strong feeling about Detective McCall. I trust him…and I get the impression he’ll be important to me in some way.

  Feeling a bit more relaxed about the situation, I pull the door fully open and motion him inside. “Sorry about the mess,” I say. It’s not really messy. A couple of ladders are set up, and some paint cans and their accessories are sitting on the workbench. The industrial fridge is humming nearby. But you say things like that, not really meaning them, in order to break the ice.

  The detective glances around, noting everything. “You bought the Pig Palace.”

  “Excuse me?”

  McCall indicates the room with his pen. “This place had a real name—Bob’s Place, I think—but everyone local called it the Pig Palace. Bob cut the best damned spare ribs.”

  I glance at the old butcher stains I’m still trying to cover on the wall. What McCall said sheds a whole new light on the place. This was someone else’s dream once. “Did you know…Bob?”

  “No,” he laughs, consulting the pad once more. He has a deep, warm laugh that feels like honey sliding over my body. “Vivian Summers, correct?”

  “Yes.” I manage to suppress a shudder. I’ve never really liked the sound of my own name. Too many bad things linked to it. In all honesty, I’m glad Sebastian never uses it.

  Detective McCall looks up at me with those dark, penetrating eyes of his. Not predatory, but they can be, under the right circumstances. I wonder if he knows about my record. I wonder if it’s written down in his little notebook. I’m suddenly very worried about that.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, and his concern surprises me.

  “Yes.” I make myself say that. I’m suddenly aware that I’m leaning against the workbench slightly, my posture a bit too inviting to rightfully call it “decent.” Some defensive reaction, I guess.

  McCall seems to be enjoying the view. The coldness in the room has hardened my nipples, and they hurt a bit as they rub against the material of my sweatshirt. Long ago, someone once called me a whore, and maybe they’re right. I enjoy men. I enjoy having them look at me. But I don’t mean to invite their perusal.

  I stand up straighter. “How can I help you?”

  He shakes himself as if he’s waking up from a spell. “We’re canvassing the neighborhood and wonder if you’ve seen or heard anything suspicious. Sometime around two in the morning, a crime was committed outside your establishment.” He raises the notepad to show how all business he is, but it’s too late. I know he wants me, and it gives me a little thrill to realize that. Desire is a powerful tool. It makes people work against their better interest.

  “Outside…here?” I answer. I raise a hand to the edge of my T-shirt and give it a little tug. He follows the motion. “We were asleep.”

  “‘We?’”

  I try to determine if I hear a slight lilt of disappointment in his voice. “My partner and I.” I watch to see what response that drags from him, but Sebastian interrupts us by stepping into the room. He pulls up his suspenders and gives them a loud snap to get the detective’s attention.

  “Help you, Officer?” he asks, and McCall narrows his eyes and flares his nostrils slightly. It’s a primitive, wolf-like response to being interrupted. Walking over to talk to my partner, McCall leaves me to glance out the door.

  The alley has been taped up with yellow crime scene tape, and uniformed officers are stalking back and forth, speaking low into their radios. McCall still hasn’t told me what’s happened, so I discreetly slip out the door and into the narrow alley space. Barefoot and cold, I head to where several men are standing around something crumpled on the ground in front of the generator unit. They are wearing jackets with POLICE and CORONER on them in big, contrasting letters. It makes me walk a little bit faster.

  I get one of those waking dreams, but it’s exceedingly brief. I suddenly experience overwhelming, unbreathable pain…a truncated scream…a hard thump of fear in my chest. I feel sick at the end of it. Sick and angry, and when an officer grabs me by the shoulder to halt me in my tracks, I feel my skin heat up to the temperature of a frying pan left on a burner too long. With a yelp, he quickly lets go, allowing me to push through the crowd of officers to see more clearly the body lying in the alley.

  It was probably a man. The clothes look like those a man might wear—jeans and a T-shirt and some kind of leather jacket with patches on it.
But what’s inside doesn’t look human any longer. It makes me think of one of those anatomical dummies that represent the different muscle groups that I remember from science classes in college, and I can’t help but think someone dressed up one of those things as some kind of joke…

  But then I see the very real human eyes—wide open and staring up at me—and the mouth stretched wide open in a scream of perfect agony, and consider once more the fleshless face and arms sticking out of the shirt sleeves, and the strange, goo-like substance around the body that looks like spilled cover-up makeup. In fact, I’m standing in a sticky pool of it, but it’s not makeup. I eventually register that. It’s human skin. Liquefied human skin.

  Not fair! I think as the officers drag me back. Things like this are only supposed to happen in fucking Blackwater!

  6

  “I WISH you’d stop thinking about it,” Sebastian says as we roll the last of the wooden barrels into place on the shop floor. “It’s not as if you can do anything about it anyway.”

  He may be right, but it doesn’t mean I can just eject the image of the dead man’s raw, red-meat face and hands from my brain. I rub my hands on my jeans as I stand up straight. “I wish you’d stop crawling around inside my head, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, either.”

  “You know you are lovely when you are sarcastic?” he remarks.

  “Do tell.” I leave the main floor to step into the prep room and check on my honeycomb molds, pulling on an apron as I go. It’s a heavy-duty apron for candy making, with a thick lining and sleeves. It goes on sort of like a surgeon’s jacket and ties in the back. The last thing you want is to get bubbly, boiling candy on your skin.

  In the last two weeks, Sebastian and I have made the decision to take out most of the wall separating the prep room from the rest of the shop. It opened up the limited space a lot, making it seem much larger, which I liked. I’d also had one of those waking dreams, which had given me what I thought was a good idea. Why not let customers watch us make our confections in the back? It was like combining a sweet shop with performance art, and the Hibachi grill down the street was already doing something similar. Sebastian immediately thought it was a great idea.

  I pulled open the cooling drawers containing my honeycomb stick candy—one of my personal creations, but one Sebastian said he couldn’t stop eating. Crystallized honey swirled in rock-candy pattern around long, thin sticks. He called them “sweet wands,” which I’d thought was a pretty fly name for them until I realized he was making a raunchy double entendre at my expense. (“Witchy, I just love a sweet wand now and again.” It made me roll my eyes big time.)

  Sebastian steps into the prep room behind me…then stops short when he spots the hive, which is quite literally “buzzing with activity” at the moment. “Did we really, really need that?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I answer for the hundredth time. “We really, really need it.”

  I’ve invested in a “beecosystem,” or indoor beehive. It sounds scarier than it is. It’s a bee cabinet fitted into one corner of the room. The outside is made of durable oak with a display window fitted into it, making it look like some weird Victorian curio cabinet. Inside, though, there are thousands of worker bees frantically building honeycombs, making nursing cups, raising little bees, and producing the honey I need for my hard candy. I can easily slide the racks of honeycomb out of the cabinet and back in again.

  The beecosystem has a tunnel that connects to the back of the building, allowing the bees to come and go as the like. Occasionally, an errant bee will find its way into the shop, but since they are my familiars and animals to call, they never create any kind of havoc. Instead, they will land somewhere in the prep room, a high shelf or the casting of a window or door, and wait for me to find them and carry them back inside the hive.

  My bees have never stung anyone. They’re not aggressive honeybees. But that doesn’t mean they don’t freak Sebastian out—which is funny, to be honest. He can’t actually die in the traditional sense, but he still won’t go anywhere near the hive. He makes a wide berth around it just to join me at the prep station.

  “Wands!” he gasps when he spies the set candy.

  He tries to grab one, but I slap his hand away. “Stop eating our profits!”

  Sebastian pouts and rubs his hand, looking cartoonishly crestfallen.

  “Go check your fudge!”

  Sauntering off to the fridge like some wounded animal, he checks on his latest batch, but while he’s in there, he says, “It won’t affect our grand opening. People die in this city all the time. I’m sure more than a few have died in our alleyway.”

  He’s not talking about my bees.

  I wince internally at his extremely tactless comment. The idea that our alley is a popular dying-off spot does not alleviate my concerns about our grand opening. Sebastian rightfully believes I’m worried about whether the incident will drive traffic away, but that’s not my primary concern. The incident happened over a week ago. It’s already been pushed to the back pages—if, in fact, anyone is even still following it. It’s a whole new news cycle this week, and in another week, when we’re ready to open, I’m confident no one will even remember it happened. Well, maybe the police officers tasked with solving what is most likely an unsolvable mystery. But not the common people. Not the ones walking past our store every day and sometimes trying to peer under the edges of the white paper we’ve taped over the display window.

  No, that’s not it at all. I have concerns, but they are of a different nature.

  Trouble follows me. Even as a girl, it’s trailed after me like a pet that won’t leave me alone. Ever since the incident, I’ve become afraid that this is just the precursor to something bigger—and darker. I’m secretly terrified every dark thing that lives in little Blackwater will migrate here. I think about the hex on the wall, and I wonder if it’s enough.

  The little bell above the door tinkles, startling us both.

  Sebastian smacks the back of his head on the roof of the fridge and mutters a curse before ducking out.

  “Who the hell is that?” I ask, jiggling with the knot in my apron. “Did you leave the door unlocked again?”

  “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Maybe.” He turns to the display room where I see a tall, thin shadow moving swiftly across the newly painted walls. “Right, then. Let me sort the fella out.”

  While he’s gone, I reach across the workbench and grab a French rolling pin from out a nearby canisters—just in case. I don’t lift it up, but I keep it close. It’s not for our visitor, though. I can use it to break the glass on the beecosystem, if need be. And then…well, my familiars will do anything for me.

  Only a few seconds pass, and after the bell tinkles again, Sebastian is back. He’s got an apologetic little smile on his face as he plucks at his apron strings. “Left the bloody door open, I did. But the bloke was cool about it. Said he wished us luck.”

  “Why? Did he know you?”

  He shakes his head. “Nah. But he knew you. He knew your name.”

  I stare at him wordlessly for several seconds, wondering who in Philly it could be. I don’t have any friends here. “What did he look like?”

  Sebastian raises his hand a couple of inches above his own head. Sebastian is tall, so he’s indicating the guy was a real monster. “Blond and youngish. Hot.” He grins at that. “Real heartbreaker.”

  My heart thuds quickly, twice, close together. Dropping the rolling pin, I dash across the shop and fiddle with the lock until I get it open. It’s old-fashioned and tends to stick. Stepping out onto the cracked pavement, I look around, but I don’t see anyone even approaching that description.

  “Nick!” I call for the hell of it. But of course, no one answers. I do get an odd look from the woman who runs the laundry next door. She’s sweeping leaves out of the doorway and frowning at me as though I might be a little touched in the head. But then she smiles suddenly and comes over to extend her hand.

  “Hi, de
ar! I’m Sheri,” she says brightly, looking over my shop. “Oh, wow! You bought the Pig Palace!”

  7

  IT'S TWO days before our Grand Opening. According to Sebastian, the shop is “sorted” exactly as he wants it to be. And it’s beautiful.

  It feels miles wide even though it’s still a tiny space. And now it’s lit up like a mother ship. Hard candy in wrappers fills the barrels on the floor, and honey wands, swirly sticks, lollipops, and other gourmet confections bloom in the jars along the lighted display wall. The confection counter houses the perishables that Sebastian is personally responsible for—cordials and fondant fancies and fudge and chocolate pops. We’ve dedicated half a wall to a contents menu and special order list. Chocolate boxes with the Confessions logo fill the display window. I’ve even ordered cute little white bears with shirts that have our business name and website on it.

  I’ve personally taken care of the newspaper and online announcements, and the Philadelphia Tribune promises it will be here to cover the event. We’ll be giving away free samples all day. Of course, the local neighborhood seems particularly keen on that. Sebastian says he has friends who will definitely show up, and I know Josh will be here on Saturday to support me.

  I am so broke, it isn’t even funny. Not for the first time, I’m truly concerned about this little endeavor of mine, and, as a result, I keep second-guessing myself. It’s all happened way too fast. Three months to the day since I first peeked into this abandoned little shop. Three months doesn’t seem long enough to have pulled it all together, even though Sebastian and I have worked our asses off night and day to make it happen.

  I’m exhausted. Mentally, physically—emotionally. If this fails…well, I’m trying not to think about that. I have no back-up plan for my life. It’s no joke when I say I’d rather die than go back to Blackwater.