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

by K. H. Koehler

  Sister Marie finally looks up. She’s perhaps middle-aged, pretty, but there are lines around her eyes and mouth. I can tell she’s been around the block a few times. “We all know.”

  “‘We?’”

  “We who serve the craft. We know you, Princess.”

  It takes me a moment, but then I laugh. “You’re a nun and a witch?”

  Sister Marie scowls as if she can’t understand how the two can be mutually exclusive. “I am whatever is required of me.” Setting down the matchstick, she gives me a critical look that leaves me unbalanced. “What are you doing with that sad, drunken little necromancer? Seems a bit beneath you, Princess.”

  I blink as I catch on. “Sebastian?”

  “Is that what the pathetic creature calls himself now?”

  That irks me. “He’s a good man.”

  “He’s not a man, but, yes, Princess, whatever you say.”

  Her tone of voices pisses me off. “Don’t call me that.” I take another step toward her, my fists clenching. I don’t feel the pain of the cross as much.

  Sister Marie looks surprised that I’ve made it this close to the altar—and to her. She glances around the cathedral, but we’re alone together. There is no one here to rescue her.

  She starts when I reach out and take her hand. It’s dry. I feel a slight spark and see a swirling darkness that quickly disappears, leaving me blinking at her surprised face. “Why were you in the alley behind my shop?”

  Her mouth moves but nothing comes out for a second. Then she clears her throat and says, “I wanted to see the place where he was found.”

  “Who?”

  “Him. His name is—was—Razor Wire.”

  The name chills me. “The man who died.”

  “He wasn’t a man!” she spits angrily and shakes my hand loose, drawing it back against her chest as if I’ve burned her. “That…creature…was never a man.”

  I wait in the hopes she’ll explain.

  Again, she glances around, but we are truly alone. Maybe that’s why she spits it all out at once. “He violated and then murdered one of my girls. Sonja. Beat her to death. I barely recognized her sweet face when he finished with her.” She rubs her wrist. “God help me, but I don’t care if He damns me for it. I’m glad that beast is dead. I hope he died in shrieking agony.”

  No lie. Her words freak me out, they’re so unexpected.

  She says something else in Spanish that sounds like a curse, but I can’t follow it. I don’t know that much Spanish, even though I took it in high school. She even spits on the floor.

  I blink at that, shocked by her anger. But then I remember my waking dream. “I think…I think maybe he did die in agony,” I tell her, hoping it will console her even just a little. “I think you got your wish, Sister.”

  “Good,” Sister Marie snarls. “It is the least God can do for Sonja—and for the other girls he has violated.” Lifting her head slightly, she announces, “You must excuse me, Princess. I have duties to perform. And Sonja’s funeral to plan.”

  As she moves past me, I hold out my hand—not touching her, but it stops her in her tracks. I turn to her. “Why don’t you go to the police? Tell them about Sonja? Or…have you…?”

  “The police,” Sister Marie laughs bitterly. “Sonja was from Guatemala. Illegal. Do you honestly think they care about someone like her?”

  I don’t know how to answer that.

  She pushes past me and heads back down the aisle.

  My heart hurts. I turn to follow her.

  She stops and glances at me over one shoulder. “I’m sorry, Princess,” she says, sounding sincere. Her face is clouded with grief. “I don’t mean to seem disrespectful to someone of your breeding, but, please, there is nothing you can do. Forget about Sonja. And forget about me.” She nods at the cathedral rearing high above us. “Forget about all this and return to your home and your life and your little necromancer.”

  I open my mouth to speak, but I just can’t find the words for a moment.

  “Yes, Princess?”

  “How…many of you know who I am? Do you…? I mean…”

  “You have nothing to fear from us, Lady Lucifer,” she tells me, her voice soft and even reverent. “But, yes, we know. The whole city knows who you are, Daughter of Darkness.”

  I won’t lie. Her words fill me with a cold dread and a fear of things to come.

  9

  THE DAY of our Grand Opening, I get up at the crack of dawn, go downstairs, and tie on my apron. I check on the candy I set the night before. I look over Sebastian’s confections. I even duck low to look in on my honeybees. Everything is going to plan.

  I step out into the display room and flip on the spacey blue uplights. The jars of candy behind the glass walls shimmer and the display window is full of perfectly boxed chocolates and teddy bears. The Confessions sign seems to glow faintly above the hex on the wall. I walk to it and trace the bident symbol with my finger. I think about what Sister Marie called me while we stood in the church the other day. A Princess. Yes, I guess I am. Sort of like a Disney Princess…from Hell.

  I’m only twenty-eight, but a lifetime of bad things has already happened to me. Now, for the first time, I’m happy, even if I am hanging out with a drunken necromancer. I realize—maybe for the first time—that life is good.

  There is a knock on the front door of the shop. My heart flutters. Our first customer!

  I can’t wait to let him or her in and see their expression when they look upon the place that Sebastian and I have built! I virtually fly to the door and unlock it, flipping the sign to OPEN. The glass is frosted, so I can’t see more than an outline. It looks like a man.

  I throw the door open…but there is no one standing there.

  In fact, there is no one on the street at all. No one walking by. No one standing by the curb, waiting for the bus. No vehicles of any kind. And, this early in the morning, that seems suspect.

  I feel the first twinge of concern, then. I step out of the shop and onto the sidewalk and look around. No joggers. No dog walkers. No one going to work. There are cars parked in the curb, but no one is in them. I check the Laundromat next, but the building is completely empty, though I do spy laundry churning in a dryer.

  Turning back to the street, I walk to the curb and glance up and down Broad Street. The florist, the bakery, and the restaurant across the street are all lit up. The nail salon is full of welcoming light. But there is no one inside any of the establishments.

  Something terrible has happened in the night while I was asleep.

  As that knot of fear and desperation tightens my throat, I step into the middle of the deserted street and start to shout hellos up and down the corridor, but no one answers, and nothing seems to happen. The street is desolate and empty of life. Distantly—very distantly—a dog barks.

  I try to decide what to do next. Call the police, call my friends…run screaming down the street…?

  But while I’m working through my panic, I hear a low-grade thump that sends a shockwave through the street under my feet. I swing around to find the source of the noise, my eyes and mouth wide open, and see an enormous fiery pillar mushrooming up into the lower atmosphere. It’s as if a minor nuclear device has gone off. The sky immediately turns blood red, and I can smell ozone and burned stuff, even from here. Cracks streak across the asphalt in front of me from the impact, making crazy patterns around my feet.

  “What the hell?” I hear myself shout as I start running down the street in the direction of the fire. I know, intellectually, that that is probably not a good idea. But I have to see. I have to know what happened to all the people.

  I reach an intersection where the traffic light is blinking all kinds of crazy colors and turn left, toward the cloud. I jog past endless rows of dead, empty vehicles in the street and dozens of lighted but unoccupied shops—and stop dead in my tracks when I see what’s ahead.

  The street is cracked and jacked up in places like a minefield of jagged aspha
lt. Broken pipes spew noxious gases. Cars lay on their sides—those knocked over by the explosion. The buildings on both sides have caved in from the impact, and black smoke pours from them and fills the air, making it difficult to see clearly. Worst of all, there is a giant bonfire in the middle of the street reaching a hundred feet into the sky. I’m two or three hundred feet away, and I can still feel the excruciating heat even from here as it prickles my face and eyes and dances along my exposed skin. I’ve never seen such total and complete destruction. Not in real life. Philly looks like the Gaza Strip or something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. I wonder if a bomb has been dropped on the city, or if we’re fighting a war I don’t know about.

  I take a hesitant step toward the ruins, wondering if anyone has survived it…and then stop when my foot comes down on something jagged and hard that crumbles. I look down through the smoke and see I’ve stepped on what looks like the burnt remains of a human rib cage. The sight makes me jump back. But, as the black smoke slowly swirls away on a rising gale of wind, I see how much worse it is.

  Bones litter the ground at my feet. At first, I think there are a few—maybe a dozen. But as I look more closely, I realize the bones number in the thousands and form a path leading toward the pillar of fire. And all of them are singed and blackened as if they have been through a crematorium.

  The smoke finally lifts and I see that just beneath the fire, feeding its greedy need to burn, there are more skeletons. So many more. What looks like millions of human bones are piled up as high as a small building. The bones, I realize, of every person in this city. Maybe in this state. Maybe the world.

  I stand there, gaping at this impossibly huge altar of burning human remains, thinking I’ve gone mad. I shake my head to clear the image. I think this must be one of those waking dreams. But the image doesn’t disappear. I can feel inside of me that this is real, and suddenly the panic is clawing its way up my throat as it tries to escape my mouth in a primal scream.

  And then it gets even worse. When the woman appears, stepping right out of the fire—but remaining untouched by it—I think I’ve probably died and gone to hell. That’s the only explanation. There is no way this is real. And, yet, it feels painfully—horrifically—real.

  The woman stands proudly upon that enormous, burning Golgotha. She’s supernaturally beautiful and at least eight feet tall. Her skin is brown like calfskin, and her hair is a blue-black skein of what looks like frayed silk that falls down to her ankles. Her body is encased in a tight white gown with bell sleeves and a slit up the side that goes all the way to her waist. I can see she is naked and unashamed beneath the dress. On her head, she wears a giant golden headdress engraved to look like the rising sun, and the long red feathers of some exotic bird stand up from it in a fan-like pattern. Her lips and the areas around her eyes are blackened with kohl, making them look endlessly deep and dark, like tarns into an unknowable future. But her eyes…oh my god. Her eyes are as huge and blind white as peeled eggs, and blood runs continuously from the corners like alien tears.

  I can’t help but be mesmerized by the sight of her. She is both glorious and horrifying at the same time, and, as she descends the mountain of bones—the skulls of which are acting as steps in a long, jagged staircase—I see that where her bare feet touch them, they crack and small fires emerge.

  It’s stupid, but I wait for her to come to me. A huge part of my brain is screaming at me to run away. Fucking run away! I know she is the one who has done this terrible thing. She is the one who has murdered every single human in this city. And I know she could just as easily murder me where I stand if she wants to. But my feet won’t move, and I can’t seem to take my eyes off her.

  In some ways, I feel like my entire life has led up to this moment. That I have always been destined to meet her.

  She spreads her arms as she reaches me—it’s a distinctly queenly gesture—and I see she is wearing thick gold bracers on her forearms engraved with primitive and intricate flowers and birds. Some look familiar, like things I might have seen in a museum exhibit. Some, I’m afraid, might be wards and sigils.

  The Aztec Queen stands there, towering over me. I can smell her. She smells like rotting flowers—overly sweet, with an undercurrent of decay. And under that…fire and smoke.

  “Oh, my flower,” she says, but, as with Sebastian that first time we met in his mouse form, her lips don’t move at all. I’m only hearing the echo of her voice in my head. “It is done.”

  “Yes,” I agree even though I have no idea what she means or what I’m agreeing with.

  “And now we can be one.”

  She smiles down at me, her mouth stretching unnaturally wide, and more of those bloody tears fall down her cheeks and speckle her beautiful white linen gown. I see something in her mouth that looks like long black petals spreading outward at both corners of her lips. She has no teeth, just these black petal things. From down in her throat, I can hear the cry of birds as if she has one stuck down there somewhere. She is beyond doubt one of the most horrifying creatures I have ever seen. And yet, I feel a strange peace overwhelm me as she looks down into my face.

  She loves me. She desires me. We can be one.

  I want that. I’ve never wanted anything as I’ve wanted that. Not the shop. Not Nick. Not even the freedom to choose my own path—to choose who I am. All of that is worth sacrificing just so I can be with her.

  She nods. “You understand at last, Daughter of Darkness.”

  Reaching out, she touches my face with just her painted fingertips. Her long nails, painted a burnished gold, burn coolly against my skin like metal. The sensation is incredibly soothing, and yet, her touch also excites me. She gives me that black lotus smile and nods as if she enjoys this power she has over me. For her, perhaps, it is a natural thing.

  “You are so beautiful, little flower. So pure.”

  No one has ever called me that before. I’ve been called a bitch, a slut. A man once called me the Whore of Babylon. But no one has ever called me pure. It isn’t something I’m used to. It isn’t something I believe.

  “One day you will see,” she says as her hand drops to the front of my shirt.

  She undoes the buttons and I feel the superheated air touch my skin as she pushes the shirt off my shoulders. I’m not wearing any underwear under the shirt, so my breasts are bare to her touch. She seems to take great delight in them, tracing her long fingernails around one pebbled nipple until a low moan escapes my lips. Her touch is gentle but teasing. It immediately makes me wet, and I can tell she knows what effect she’s having on me. It’s odd, though, because I’ve never been attracted to women. But with her, it seems right. Everything seems perfect.

  “My dear little fire flower,” she says and plucks gently at my nipple until I start to squirm. I want to feel her inside me. I have to feel her moving inside my body…

  Smiling, those silky black petals lick at the corners of her hungry mouth. She moves her hand so it rests over my rapidly flitting heart. “Will you be my bride?” she asks.

  Her voice is musical in my head. I feel dizzy with a strange combination of euphoria and desire. Yes, I want to be her bride. I want that more than anything.

  I will do anything for her. My queen.

  “Say it. Say the words, little flower.”

  “I…” Behind her, the city is burning. The bones we stand upon are burning. I’m certain we are burning. I think about how this thing must have a terrible price. To be her bride. To be hers. What else must burn?

  I hesitate too long.

  The Aztec Queen narrows her bleeding eyes. “Say it!” Her voice is harsh now, scaring me.

  Deciding that maybe this is not what I want, I try to take a step back, but I find I can’t seem to move my feet. I moan in distress.

  The blood starts to flow more rapidly from her eyes. The petals around her mouth writhe in agitation. “Betrayer,” she says and closes her hand on my chest so it’s a hard, rocklike fist.

  Suddenly, I can’t
breathe. I gasp for air, but my lungs feel like they are full of concrete.

  “Traitor!” She gestures as though she is jerking something out of me.

  I feel my flesh tear.

  The pain is sudden and unendurable. I scream, but she keeps plowing my chest open with that relentless gesture of hers, unzipping me top to bottom. Blood splatters her face and dress. My blood. The black petals lick at the crimson fluid hungrily, and the bird trapped in her throat seems to scream with me as I slowly lose all strength and collapse to my knees at her feet.

  I can’t breathe—but I can feel myself dying. With my last bit of strength, I struggle to look up.

  The Aztec Queen is standing over me, looking disappointed. She is holding my beating heart, and it’s bleeding blackly in her hands. I never expected anything else. But actually seeing it makes me sad.

  “Little flower, you could have had the world.” And she squeezes my heart until it crumbles to dust in her hand.

  My head drops down so I’m looking at the cracked and burned asphalt beneath me. I start to choke. I cough and gag violently…and, suddenly, I heard that same bird twittering in my own throat. I can feel it fluttering, painfully panicked, inside me. I can’t remember how it got there, but I feel the wrenching pain of its horror at being trapped inside of me. I start clawing at my throat and coughing, trying to heave it up.

  It doesn’t want to come loose, and even though I should be dead, I scream and find myself gagging and finally vomiting until something starts moving painfully slow up my windpipe. I’ve never felt such horror.

  Wicked witch, I think. I’m such a wicked, evil witch…

  Finally, after much struggling, I throw up the poor little bird, but it’s all in bloody pieces as it flops out of my mouth and onto the burning street…

  10

  “OI! WITCHY, wake up!”

  I jerk awake, nearly swatting at the figure bending over me—then I realize it’s Sebastian. My hand is up, ready to swipe at him, but he gently catches it and holds my wrist before my nails can go for his face.