Devil Days in Deadwood

by Ann Charles

  What did it take to train an imp? A chair and a whip? A tiny tricycle and clown shoes? Hoops lit on fire? Wait, why was this turning into a circus?

  I stopped the big-top music playing in my head. “Then why is this one causing such a mess?”

  “Because it’s not properly trained.”

  Doc sighed. “Where’s its owner?”

  “She met her demise some time ago.”

  She? Was it a human? One of Dominick’s many wives over the years? “Was her demise due to the imp?”

  “No.” His jaw tightened. “It was due to me. I don’t abide traitors.”

  What did he do to this “she”?

  Did I really want to know that?

  Probably not.

  “You need to catch the imp before it really starts causing problems,” he told me.

  I did a double take. “Why me?”

  I wasn’t going to be his damned Scharfrichter-for-hire anymore.

  “Because you are the one who let it loose.”

  Okay, so maybe it was a tiny bit my fault.

  “Fine. I’ll catch the little shit.”

  Dominick scoffed. “One does not simply catch an imp, Violet.”

  One didn’t simply catch a lidérc, either, but I was going to have to do that, too.

  “What do you mean?” Doc asked. “Why not?”

  “Imps are renowned escape artists. That is why I had it doubly caged and sealed in the first place.” He turned to me. “Until you let it out.”

  “I told you that was an accident.” At his doubting look, I added, “Besides, you should have let me know it was in the Sugarloaf Building when I called to tell you I was going there to see if I could find any clues to help me catch your freaking lidérc.”

  “You have been in that building several times before without dismantling any of my other traps.”

  Other traps, huh? As in more than two? “What else do you have caged in there?”

  “That is none of your concern.”

  Not yet, anyway, but if I had to keep catching his wayward pets, I was going to make it my concern.

  “What is not imprisoned in there yet and should be,” he said with an air of impatience, “is my lidérc. You are running out of time, Scharfrichter. Tell me, how is your aunt doing these days?”

  I was really getting tired of his games when it came to Aunt Zoe. “She is none of your concern,” I said, throwing his words back at him.

  “Oh, but she soon will be.”

  My fists tightened yet again tonight. “Tread carefully, Masterson. You are not immortal.” At least that was my understanding.

  His chin lifted, nostrils flaring. “Is that a threat?”

  “Only a reminder for now.” I decided changing the subject might be a good idea. “Your lidérc tried to kill me earlier today.”

  “What?” Judging from his suddenly wide eyes, that was not at all what he’d expected to hear from me. “How did this happen?”

  “The how is not important right now.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “Why is that?” Doc asked.

  “In my experience, the worry is always in the how.”

  In my experience, it was in the who, what, where, when, and how. “I need more time to catch it,” I told him.

  “You don’t have any more time.” He sounded resolute.

  “Don’t give me that. You can wait another week or two on getting your pet devil back.”

  “You are not listening to what I’m saying, Scharfrichter.” He stared at me with an unsettling expression that I hadn’t seen on his face before.

  “Why are you looking at Violet like that?” Doc asked the question for me.

  He turned to Doc. “If the lidérc came for Violet, that means it has set its sights on her.”

  “Yeah, so?” I asked.

  “Hungarian devils are as vengeful as they are single-minded.”

  “So, you’re saying that the lidérc is hunting Violet now?”

  “Exactly.” Dominick focused back on me. “It will stop at nothing to destroy you.”

  “Fuck!” I wanted to kick something. Detective Hawke’s shin would do for starters.

  “This is a good thing, Scharfrichter,” Dominick consoled. “Very good if you look at it from another angle.”

  I could look at it upside-down and inside-out, and it would still make me want to board up my doors and windows.

  Doc harrumphed. “How can this possibly be good?”

  “Well, for one thing, Violet will not need to search for the lidérc any longer. It will come to her.”

  “I don’t see how that’s good,” I griped.

  “You will need to set a trap,” he told me, as if it were as simple as putting out some cheese to lure the critter.

  “A trap, he says.” I smacked my forehead when I really wanted to wallop his. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Actually, Prudence had mentioned using bait to catch the lidérc. She and Dominick must be in cahoots.

  Dominick frowned at Doc. “She’s not very good at sarcasm, is she?”

  I didn’t wait for Doc to answer him. “Do you have any idea how tricky this son of a bitch is?”

  “Of course.” Dominick’s smile was downright crafty. “That’s why I want you to find it. A lidérc is notoriously deadly.”

  Muttering under my breath, I looked toward the glass doors where Cooper was talking to one of the Lead police officers while Hawke held a cell phone to his ear. If only my problems were as simple as being a witch who could sense ghosts.

  Back to Dominick, I asked, “Why is this sucker choosing me instead of you? You’re the one who locked it away for decades.”

  He steepled his hands in front of him, like the guy selling reverse mortgages on the Old West TV network that Harvey liked to watch. “Apparently, the lidérc sees you as a more entertaining challenge than me.”

  “That’s just fucking wonderful,” I said.

  Doc caught my hand, squeezing it.

  “Needless to say,” Dominick continued, “I want it back in its cage. We made a deal and I delivered on my part. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What are you going to do with it if you get it back?”

  “Again, that is not your concern.”

  The bastard was starting to sound like Cooper with his constant “that’s police business” mantra.

  “All you need to know is that I want it returned to the Sugarloaf Building promptly. I have fixed the window you broke and established wards that will hold it if you can manage to lure it up there.”

  “Without dying in the process,” Doc added dryly.

  Dominick shrugged. “That goes without saying.”

  “And the imp, too, I suppose?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I do not expect that to be an easy task for you, so there is no time limit. Keep in mind, however, that an imp thrives on chaos. Look at all it has accomplished in such a short time already.”

  Thrives on chaos, huh? Why couldn’t these pets of his thrive on peace, love, and happiness? “How can such a little thing cause so much trouble?”

  Dominick extracted his gloves from his pockets. “Its size is deceptive.”

  Doc eyed me. “Dangerous things come in small packages.” To Dominic, he asked, “Why does it seek out honey?”

  “Imps are well-known for having a weakness for honey.”

  Doc scoffed. “I don’t believe it’s that simple.”

  “Think of it as an addiction. They will stop at nothing to sate their need. Fermented honey is favored. Always has been.” He smiled and shook his head. “You should have seen the destruction a clan of imps caused during the … never mind.”

  Splendid. I had a crazed addict on my hands now, as well as a vengeful devil hunting me down. “So, will the imp calm down for a while now that it got hold of some mead?”

  “Perhaps. But if there is one thing I’ve learned about imps, it is that their ability to wreak havoc is surpassed only by their need
for more honey.”

  “Shit.” I glared at him. “Why must you keep such pain-in-the-ass pets?”

  “Because if I don’t, they will fall into the wrong hands.”

  “And your hands are the right ones?” Doc asked.

  “Well, in Violet’s case, I’m the lesser of two evils.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “You and Rex Conner are running neck and neck right now.”

  He chuckled. “Ah, your ex-lover. He is quite full of himself.”

  I was surprised he’d noticed. Dominick was very enamored with himself as well.

  “What are you doing with Rex?” I pressed. This was my opportunity to see if it had anything to do with the growing caper-sus problem at the mine that Mr. Black had warned about while at Prudence’s earlier.

  “Using him,” Dominick said without hesitation. “Does that bother you?”

  “Only when you send him my way with silly messages.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted challengingly. “I have committed no such crime.”

  “Then why did he come to me saying you had?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I wasn’t sure if I could believe him or not.

  He must have read the doubt on my face. “Trust me, Violet, manipulating your ex-lover as some sort of pawn serves me no purpose.”

  I still didn’t believe him, but I moved on anyway. “I want you to lay off about getting your lidérc back. I’ll catch it for you as soon as I can.”

  His lips pursed. “I’m not so sure about that now.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because it may catch you first, and if that is the case, we will soon be short one Executioner in Deadwood.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sunday, January 13th

  When I was a kid, one of my favorite places to hang out was Aunt Zoe’s glass workshop, especially in the winter when the warm blasts from the glass furnace made the place nice and cozy, like now. Surrounded by her creative fodder, I was inspired to dream big about my future, often returning home to my parents’ place filled with hopes and ideas for what might yet be.

  Fast forward almost three decades, two kids, and a shitload of inherited problems later, and here I stood again among my aunt’s glass block and metal tools. The stale smells of charred wood and damp newspaper were not quite covered up by the cinnamon air freshener this morning. On the old stereo on the shelf, Emmylou Harris was singing about drinking Bluebird wine. My big dreams about what was yet to come had been replaced by even bigger self-doubts about how to kill a monster without ending up dead myself.

  “I don’t know, Violet.” Aunt Zoe sat on a bar stool at her worktable. Multi-colored glass vases, goblets, and squishy-looking evergreen trees—lots of trees—covered most of the space in front of her where her notebook full of drawings lay open. “I’m not sure that the mirror is the answer to this particular problem.”

  The mirror in question was the one hanging on the wall by the door. Its four corners were fogged with age. A picture of me in my purple boots had been lodged in the edge of the mid-sized frame for years. It was the same mirror that had been hanging in here ever since I was a little kid. Once long ago, Quint had told Aunt Zoe that he wanted the mirror for himself when he was grown up. With a kind smile, she’d explained to Quint that he couldn’t have it, because only the girls in our family had the strength to use the mirror without letting it change them.

  I’d always wondered what she’d meant by that. Now, I questioned her words even more, especially after Mr. Black had mentioned something about it being a “gateway.” Over the last few months, I’d passed through a few so-called gates in this realm—at least I think that was what I’d done. Anyway, it was time to find out what was so special about this mirror, besides that it looked really old.

  I stared at my reflection in the glass, patting down my wayward spirals. I hadn’t had a chance to shower yet this morning, coming straight out here in my pajamas and robe to see Aunt Zoe after waking up and finding a note on the nightstand from Doc that said he’d taken all three kids to the Rec Center. I tilted my head and turned my chin to get a better look at the bruising around my eye. It was now as green and blue as it was purple and black.

  “How will we know if we don’t try it?” I looked at the weirdly shaped symbols etched into the dented frame made of some metal that had a thick layer of patina or tarnish on it. “What are these symbols?” I asked, running my finger over a circle with curved lines coming off of it.

  Aunt Zoe’s bar stool scraped across the cement floor. “They’re ancient alchemy symbols.”

  “Alchemy? You mean the study of how to change lead into gold?” I remembered seeing an eighteenth-century painting at the Denver Art Museum of an alchemist years back. There were interestingly shaped vessels all over the man’s table and floor, books with symbols splayed wide here and there, and a human skull on the table next to him.

  “Converting lead to gold, and the process of how other substances transmuted from one element to another, was only one school of practice in alchemy.” She joined me, standing behind me while staring at me in the mirror. Her blue eyes were lined with worry. “Many alchemists also explored and experimented with how certain substances were related to magic and astrology.”

  “Magic?”

  Aunt Zoe nodded. “Mr. Black was right. It’s a special mirror. A magic mirror of sorts.”

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall?” I said, making big googly eyes at her.

  Her smile was short-lived.

  So was mine. “So tell me about it.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen the mirror used, of course, so I only know what your great-grandmother told me about it.” Aunt Zoe nudged me aside and lifted it off the wall, carrying it over to her worktable. She pushed the vases and goblets aside and then gently laid the mirror down.

  I joined her, moving several trees out of the way, and hopped up onto her table where I’d sat many, many times since childhood. I turned toward the mirror, bending and tucking one leg under the other. “Wait, don’t tell me. I’ll bet Grandma-Great said it was an evil mirror and told you to keep my picture wedged into it so you’d never forget how deadly both it and I were.”

  Aunt Zoe grabbed a cloth from a cupboard under the adjacent work counter and began to wipe away the dust that had accumulated on the outside and in the corners of the frame. “Contrary to what you think, Violet Lynn, your great-grandmother did not think of you as evil incarnate.”

  “Ha! Then why did she talk about my hidden danger and the smell of death when I was near? Those aren’t exactly words of comfort and love.”

  She frowned up at me for a moment and then returned to polishing the mirror. “She saw the seeds of a killer in you early. That’s why she told me to watch you closely for signs of our family birthright.”

  “More like family curse most days,” I muttered.

  She sighed, looking up at me with narrowed eyes. “Are you going to sit here and whine about what is now a fact of life, or are you going to listen to what I have to tell you about this mirror so we can decide if it will help you catch the lidérc?”

  My cheeks warmed. “Sorry. I’ll be good and listen. It’s just sometimes I wish I had as good of a relationship with Grandma-Great as you had.”

  She reached out and lifted my chin. “I’m going to say this once today, and then we are moving on. Your great-grandmother did not loathe you, as you tend to think. She loved you. It may not have seemed like it with how she sometimes treated you, especially when the budding killer in you showed itself in ways that would scare her. However, she spoke often to me of your potential, and she wanted to make sure I knew how to help you to live long and kick ass.” She brushed a curl out of my face and smiled, tweaking my nose. “She was very proud of you and what she was sure you would someday become.”

  “A screwup?” I joked, but not really.

  Her lips thinned. “Violet Lynn, you are not a screwup. You need to get that through your thick sku
ll.” She knocked on my forehead to emphasize her point.

  “What do you call letting that imp go free?”

  “An accident.”

  “See!” I smiled, feeling vindicated. “That’s what I told Cooper and Dominick, but they disagreed.”

  “Listen, baby girl. I am a firm believer that there is a purpose behind everything that happens in this life. That imp needed to be freed in order for something else to occur. Only time will tell what that ‘something else’ is.”

  “Yeah, well, now Dominick has added it to my to-do list. He says I need to capture his imp because I’m the one who broke the window and let it go free.”

  She shrugged. “One fish at a time.”

  “I need a trawl net.”

  “What you need is to pay attention now, because I’m going to explain what I know about this mirror and then you’ll understand why I’m not so sure it’s what you need to catch the lidérc.”

  I nodded once, giving her my full attention. “I’m all ears.”

  “First, you need to understand that the mirror is old.”

  “Like Venetian mirrors old?”

  “What do you know about Venetian mirrors?”

  “I know what you taught me years ago. That the Venetians were the ones who perfected mirror making, but they weren’t the first to blow glass. Didn’t that start in Turkey or somewhere in the Middle East?” Before she could answer, I continued. “Anyway, I remember the story about an English queen who sold a huge wheat farm in order to buy just one Venetian mirror. That’s how expensive their fancy mirrors were.”

  “She wasn’t English.”

  I waved her off. “I also know that some Venetian guy invented clear glass in like the fifteenth century and that’s when mirror making really caught fire.” I smiled at my own pun. “Did you get that? Caught fire? Like a glass furnace fire?”

  “Yes, clever girl, I caught that. Your history refresher is close enough for now, but this mirror is not Venetian. It’s younger than that.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because I’ve been studying and working with glass for all of my adult life.”

  “Oh, right. So can you tell where it was made?”