After mopping the floor, I flipped the sign to OPEN and settled down to business. I had three kinds of business in my life: serving alcohol, selling information, and tricking those who deserved it. Killing demons wasn’t business. It was Griffin and Zeke’s business, but for me . . . it was just my favorite hobby. My way of giving back to the community, by keeping a few more members of that community alive and undamned.
My first client didn’t come for the first kind of business, but I gave her one anyway. I looked her up and down and gave her a whiskey on the rocks. She was more of a wine cooler girl. Fruity drinks, light beer, not a serious drinker, but she needed a real drink now.
She sat down at the table across from me after introducing herself and touched a finger to the glass. She gave me her name, a nervous half smile, and said, “Normally I don’t . . . I mean, I’m more of a sangria, Fuzzy Navel person. Silly girl drinks, you know.” Her smile faded. “For a silly girl.”
But she wasn’t a girl. She was a woman, just barely . . . twenty-two, twenty-three. Almost a girl, but unlike horseshoes and hand grenades, “almost” didn’t count in this case. She took a swallow of the whiskey, made a face, but took a second swallow. “Better?” I asked sympathetically.
She nodded and pushed the glass aside. “Thank you.” She opened the purse in her lap—more of a bag really. It was big enough to carry around a sketch pad, pencils, a computer, any number of things. She had that artsy look. Homemade jewelry of silver wire with lots of polished stones and silver rings to match. Probably a vegan. She looked sweet and earnest and generally concerned for every living being. Probably had a bumper sticker for every endangered species on the planet. She certainly wasn’t my usual clientele. She wasn’t the kind looking for trouble or the kind looking to get herself out of trouble . . . unless she was caught breaking animals out of a testing lab. If that were the case, I’d give her my help for free. Turn the bunnies loose and stick a few death row inmates in those cages. Cute and fluffy versus killers with misspelled tattoos. It seemed like a fair trade to me.
It turned out I was wrong though. She was looking to get herself out of trouble—the very worst kind of trouble.
She took some photos out of the bag and was turning them over in her hands. “Somebody told me about you. What you do. That you know things that people shouldn’t be able to know. And that you believe in”—she flushed—“things people say don’t exist. That maybe you’re psychic.”
Now this was interesting. “No, sweetie, I’m not a psychic and don’t pay any money to anyone who says they are.” She flushed an even brighter red, revealing she already had. She was helpless and clueless, as out of place as a guppy in a shark tank. Poor little fish.
“That’s a pretty necklace,” she said, shuffling the photos faster.
I touched it. It was a pretty necklace, one Leo had given me . . . a gold sun with a red garnet. Red for me, and the sun to banish the cloudy days of my past, the days of finding revenge for my brother, for Kimano. And that was all beside the point. She was postponing the difficult, the painful. We all do.
I dropped my hand. “Show me the pictures, Anna. It’s like taking off a Band-Aid. The quicker the better. Let’s fix you up, guppy. Let you sleep again.”
“Guppy?” She rubbed self-consciously at the dark smudges under her eyes and curled her lips in a sad smile. “Little fish in a big scary ocean. Are you sure you’re not psychic?” Not waiting for an answer, she laid out the first photo as if it were a card in a tarot deck . . . as if she were laying out her life. Past, present, and future.
She was.
The first photograph rested on the table and I turned it with my finger to make it right side up for me. It was a girl, about ten. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t necessarily pretty either. But she had a sweet smile, freckles scattered over her nose and her dark brown hair drifting in a long-gone breeze. She clutched a kitten next to her cheek. It didn’t look happy, nose scrunched, tail poofed, but it put up with the hug. It was your typical little-kid picture. Cute, but nothing out of the ordinary. “What was the cat’s name?”
She blinked and smiled again. “Pickles. Actually Sir Pickles the Perilous. We both had delusions of grandeur.”
Then she laid out the next one and the smile vanished so thoroughly I couldn’t imagine she knew how to smile, much less just had been. This one was of a girl in a hospital bed. Half of her face was more or less gone, burned away. The eye was gone too, the hair a memory. They’d tried skin grafts and they covered the skull and muscle, but I don’t think anyone counted the operations a success.
She kept dealing out the photos. Eleven years old, twelve . . . “That’s when they gave me my first wig” . . . thirteen, fourteen . . . “This is when I had my second prosthetic eye. The first never fit right.” . . . fifteen, sixteen, seventeen . . . “This is me with my friends.” They were pictures of her alone. On the couch watching TV. In her room on her bed reading a book. In a backyard with Sir Pickles the Perilous in her lap. Alone again. Always alone. “This is me prom night.” It was another picture of her in a hospital bed. This time her wrists were bandaged. “And this is me”—the last picture—“on my twenty-first birthday.”
She looked as she did now. Smooth skin, freckles, dark brown hair to her shoulders, clear brown eyes. There wasn’t a single scar, much less the massive disfigurement of before, and in this picture she was smiling as she hadn’t since she was ten. She was happy, so happy that she could’ve powered all the neon in Vegas with the sheer joy in her face.
“Oh, sweetie.” I gathered up the pictures and turned them facedown. “I’m sorry. I am, but there’s no help for you.” I wished there were a way to soften it, but in this case there wasn’t. There was only truth, ugly and inescapable.
This time when she blinked it was to clear the tears clinging to her eyelashes. Then she used the back of her hand to wipe them away. “He was our neighbor’s gardener. He was new. He’d only been there for a few days, but he talked to me . . . over the fence. No one ever talked to me much except my parents. He just . . . talked. He didn’t try to make me fall in love with him or anything like that. He didn’t have to. He only had to be my friend. For a week I had a friend. And he was funny. I laughed for the first time since the accident. I spent the whole week laughing and actually not minding living, and then at the end of the week he asked me a question.” She took the pictures back and tucked them carefully away. “I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe in the devil. I definitely didn’t believe in demons.”
“But they believed in you.”
She nodded and ran fingers along her jaw. It was probably a habit—making sure it was real. “I didn’t ask to be beautiful. I didn’t ask to be famous or powerful or rich. I just asked to be who I would’ve been if the car accident hadn’t happened. I’m not pretty. I’m average and that’s fine. I never take average for granted now. I work at Starbucks to put myself through art school. I have a tiny apartment I can barely afford. There’s a guy who lives down the hall who smiles at me at the mailboxes. I think he might ask me out. I didn’t ask for anything extra. I only asked for...” She stopped and tucked her hair behind her ears. “I only asked for my life back. And I got it and it was wonderful, but now it’s three years later and I know. Trading eternity for twenty years, I made a mistake.”
Yes, she had—a big one. And she wouldn’t get eternity. I didn’t know why they bothered with that lie. I guess it sounded better than And sooner rather than later, I’ll eat your soul. Eternity gave them hope. God will forgive. God will set us free. With nonexistence, there was no hope.