Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails Read online

  Yep, she was a demon. A seriously powerful one, too, if she could see past my wards and charms. She turned around, bent over at the waist, kissed her nebbish on his forehead, and walked off to a door beside a mountain of humanity that made the doorman look like Peter Dinklage’s stunt double. She put a hand on the arm of the mountain by the door, and he leaned in to her. She motioned toward me, he nodded, and she passed through the door and out of sight. The second I couldn’t see her anymore, the spell was broken and I could think again, mostly clearly.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” a gravelly voice came from behind me.

  I jumped and turned to see the bartender staring off where the succubus had vanished, a wistful smile on his face. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that she wasn’t just out of his league, she was out of his dimension, so I just said, “Yeah.”

  “You can go on back there and say hello,” he said, gesturing toward the door. “That’s what she was telling Verne, to let you back.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well, there ain’t but two of us over here, and she sure don’t want nothing to do with me!” He let out a chuckle, then his face grew serious. “But be careful back there. Angelica’s hot, but she’s rough on her partners. I’d hate to see you get hurt.” He reached out a hand like he was going to stroke my cheek, but I stood up and moved back.

  “I can handle myself.” I walked across the room to the black door, looking up at the behemoth as I approached.

  “Second door,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass. I did, trying to figure out exactly what I was going to do with the succubus once I caught her. I’ve got magic, sure, but she was a demon. I know, succubi aren’t like Lords of Hell or anything like that, but they’ve still got some pretty impressive mojo. Maybe I could just shoot her instead. Yeah, that would go great. Just start a shootout in a doublewide strip club. I could see how that would look in the morning papers.

  I walked down the surprisingly long hallway, wondering if somebody plopped a Tardis down in the middle of a topless bar, because this place seemed way bigger on the inside. I knocked on the second door, and a sultry voice from inside called, “Come in.” Of course she sounded sexy as hell. She was a lust demon, everything about her was designed to make humans horny.

  News flash—it was working. I gave a fleeting thought to taking the door guy back to the bus when I was finished with the demon, or just jumping into the middle of whatever antics Lily was up to. That girl could get downright gymnastic when she had a mind to. I pinched myself on the arm, traced a warding sigil on my forehead with my left hand, closest to the heart and all that, then opened the door.

  Holy. Crap. She was butt-naked, lounging on a small red leather sofa, smiling up at me with one of those languorous, half-lidded smiles that says, “Tie me up and do really pleasant things to me.” You know the one. You don’t? Oh. Then find somebody that smiles at you like that. It’s a recipe for a good night.

  She was one of the rare people that looked better naked than half-dressed. Usually, with the right lift and tuck and separate and squeeze provided by sexy underwear, people look their best when kinda naked. There was no kinda about this naked. She leaned back against one arm of the sofa, her breasts sagging just enough to say, “I’m real,” but not so much as to say, “I’m a zip-loc bag of mashed potatoes running for the door.” I’ve literally never seen a leg that long and smooth, it was like there was an underlying strength to her limbs that came from nowhere, because there was no hint of muscle definition about her, just endless smooth curves that seemed somehow soft and iron-strong all at the same time.

  Magic, Kels. Remember, it’s all demon magic.

  “I suppose you’re the big bad Hunter the Church sent to banish me?” she asked, her lips forming a perfect kewpie-doll pout. Okay, so she wasn’t completely naked. She wore lipstick the color of my favorite sin. But other than that, completely naked.

  I closed the door behind me. “The Church didn’t send me. I’m a freelancer.” That wasn’t quite true. I worked for Dawn. I just didn’t know who the hell Dawn worked for. It sure wasn’t the Church, though. I’ve never met anyone who hates organized religion more than my…case agent, I guess?

  “Oh, good. I do so hate corrupting nuns. They don’t know what to do with their hands. Do you know what to do with your hands, dear?” She was in front of me. I never saw her move. One second she was lying on the couch like a Penthouse Pet, then before I could blink, she was inches away from me, so close I could feel her breath cascading down on my cheek.

  “Yeah,” I said, twirling my fingers through the air. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what to do with my hands.” I called up a shield, spinning the melody from “Pour Some Sugar on Me” into a disk of blue force that radiated out from my wrist. I slammed my magical version of Captain America’s shield into the succubus’s face, knocking her back and getting myself some breathing room.

  Breathing. That’s what I’d been forgetting. Succubi don’t just work through magic; they secrete pheromones like crazy. That’s why I wasn’t able to think straight, the whole place smelled like her. She sprawled on her butt in the tiny dressing room, and I turned to the dressing table, really just a makeup mirror sitting on a board stretched across some cinderblocks. Something about trailers and cinderblock furniture, goes together like peanut butter and bananas. I spied what I needed and snatched up a glass bottle. I flung the perfume to the ground, but all it did was thud onto the carpeted floors.

  Dammit. I knelt down just as the succubus sprang for me, her hands morphing into long clawed fingers. Her illusion was slipping now that I wasn’t completely entranced by her anymore, so she was having a hard time holding on to her perfection. I made it harder when I stood up and sprayed her in the face with three quick blasts off Tocca perfume. The tiny room filled with the scent of wild orchids, and even with the cloying smell of flowers, I could think again.

  “That shit’s expensive, you bitch,” she growled, flipping open a jewelry box and withdrawing a small dagger. “I’m going to cut it out of your hide.”

  “This crap?” I asked, tossing the bottle at her. “It’s not even a hundred bucks at Sephora. Your taste is as pedestrian as your magic. Why don’t you just toddle off back to Hell and save us both the trouble?”

  She screeched at me and slashed wildly with the dagger. I’m no black belt, not by a long shot, but she was obviously accustomed to her magic making all her targets really complacent. I took one step back, then stepped in as the dagger went past me. I grabbed her wrist in my right hand and pulled, spinning her farther around and wrapping my left hand into that luxurious curly dark hair. She pressed her back up against me, trying to get her seduction on, but I was in the zone now, feeling the DJ jam to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and using the music to focus.

  With both hands full of sex demon, I couldn’t cast a spell, but I didn’t need to. She was taller than me, but not used to doing any real work, so when I pressed a shin behind her knee and shoved her shoulders, she went down face first. I slammed her head into the carpeted floor and dragged it left and right, washing her face in the carpet. She shrieked like a banshee and thrashed under me, but I kept slamming her face into the floor until she finally let go of the dagger. I snatched it up, then realized that I had never asked Dawn what I was supposed to do with the succubus. I couldn’t just cut her throat in the middle of her dressing room and leave the body lying in a pool of blood, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I could even banish a succubus.

  So I erred on the side of caution, kinda. I reversed my grip on the knife and slammed the hilt into the back of her head. She stopped squirming, and I got off her. “You faking?” I asked, poking the unconscious succubus in the side.

  She didn’t answer. If she was faking, she wasn’t in a mood to tell me about it. I looked around the room, found a dressing gown, and wrestled the sleeping demon into it. Then I tied the robe closed, hefted her up on my shoulders, and did my best Weekend
at Bernie’s walk out of the room. There was a door at the end of the hallway that I really hoped led out to an employee parking lot. I dragged the dead weight of the succubus down the hall, happy for once that my “day job” had me hoisting hundred-pound automated lights on the regular.

  The door wasn’t locked, wasn’t alarmed, and did, in fact, lead out into a gravel parking area with half a dozen or so cars scattered around. I spied a candy apple red Corvette and grinned over at the sleeping demon on my shoulder. “That’s got to be your ride, right? Yeah, no way any of these other goofs have wheels that hot.” I dragged her over to the car, dropped her on the hood, and walked around to the driver’s side. It was locked, of course, but I whistled the intro to Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience,” and spun myself a little magical unlocking action. I heard a thunk from inside the door as the car unlocked, and I hauled little miss sleepytime around and deposited her in the passenger seat.

  I’ll own it. I copped a feel as I belted her into the seat. Then I walked back around, slid into the driver’s seat, and whistled up just enough mojo to start the car. As the big engine hummed to life, I felt the last of the magic drain out of me. That was all I had for a little while—I’d need some rest and live music, not recorded, to be able to weave more. I hadn’t done anything big, but trying to use magic on tech like automatic door locks and a car ignition was a big resource drain. That, coupled with the late hour and expending a lot of my energy on the show, left my batteries dry. I really needed this succubus not to wake up and kick my ass in the two minutes it would take me to drive her car around the building and dump her at Dawn’s feet.

  For once, luck was with me. I pulled up alongside Dawn’s Escalade and rolled down my window. “I have a delivery for you.”

  Dawn’s driver window rolled down and she stared at me. “You didn’t kill her?”

  “I don’t kill if I don’t have to. You know the deal.”

  “I just assumed she wouldn’t let you take her alive. Did she say anything?” Dawn’s normally placid face was drawn, and there was a worry line between her eyebrows that I’d never seen before.

  “She tried to seduce me. I didn’t go for it. We fought, I knocked her out, stole her car, and brought her to you. We didn’t have a lot of time for conversation.”

  “She tried to seduce you? You mean you didn’t have sex with her?” Dawn gave me a sly smile.

  I held up on finger. “Okay, in the first place, I didn’t have time. I haven’t even been gone half an hour, and I like to take my time.” A second finger joined the first in the air. “And in the second place, there is no way I am getting naked in a nasty strip club in a doublewide trailer in Arkansas, not even with a woman as fine as this one. Now what do you want me to do with her?”

  “Take the Escalade back to your bus and leave the keys under the mat. I’ll dispose of her.”

  “You mean kill her.” It’s not that I disapprove of killing monsters, really. It’s just that we had no real proof, other than her trying to stab me. If I went around killing everybody who tried to stab me with something, let’s just say there wouldn’t be very many guys working the club circuit anymore.

  “You can’t really kill a demon,” Dawn said, opening her door and sliding to the ground beside my window. “They aren’t of this plane, so if I destroy her physical body, she just goes back to Hell, where she belongs. No muss, no fuss, just another demon notch on your bed post.”

  “I told you I didn’t sleep with her,” I grumbled.

  “Metaphorically speaking. Now get out, so I can get this dealt with before the sun comes up. Some of us have to work during daylight hours tomorrow.”

  “Sucks to be you,” I said, unfolding myself out of the low-slung sports car. I gave the car a soft pat on the roof. It would have been nice to ride around in one of those for a few hours, but my bunk was calling me pretty hard.

  “Sucks to be you, too, little Miss Sunshine. You’ve got church in the morning.”

  “Is it…crap, it is.” The realization that it was Saturday night, well, Sunday morning, hit me like a hammer between my eyes. Dawn was right, I had church in a few hours. Yes, it was streaming on the internet from my home church, and yes, I could watch it later on YouTube if I couldn’t make myself get out of bed, but I really tried to get up every Sunday, no matter how quickly I was back in my bunk after the service ended.

  I groaned, then heaved myself up into the driver’s seat of the Escalade. I looked back at Dawn and said, “Hey D?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are we actually accomplishing anything?”

  “What do you mean, Kelsey? Of course we are. We’re getting dangerous creatures off the streets.”

  “Yeah, but it just seems like for every one we catch, there’s another one, bigger and badder, around the corner.”

  “It’s important, Kels. I promise. What you’re doing out here will pay big dividends in the future, I promise.”

  “Okay,” I said, and closed the door. “I hope so.”

  Dawn smiled up at me, the worry line on her forehead gone, and she smiled up at me with her million-watt smile. “Trust me.” Then she put the rumbling sports car in gear and roared off into the night.

  Me? I clicked on my seat belt, because I’m a good girl, and that’s what we do. Then I headed back to the bus to try and get a few hours’ sleep before church, knowing in my heart that I’d spent the night doing the Lord’s work here on Earth.

  Foxglove’s Henna Worshipper

  inspired by Neil Gaiman and Chris Bachalo

  The girl with the long gloves

  came to the city

  to get away from the man

  with thick porkchop hands

  and sing her song

  in coffeeshops to crowds of one.

  The callouses on her fingertips

  plucked notes from sweaty air;

  her solitary spectator

  drank spiced cider in the corner

  and dabbed his eye with paper napkins.

  On A Hill Far Away

  A Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency Short Story

  Well, I have to admit, this is not how I expected my night to end,” I said as I watched my boyfriend tighten a climbing harness around his waist and slide down a rope into a deep, kudzu-lined gully on the side of Highway 49. We were almost exactly halfway between Lockhart and Union, which is to say the absolute middle of damned nowhere, South Carolina, and I was watching Sheriff Willis Dunleavy, the aforementioned boyfriend and apparently secret rock-climbing aficionado, slide down a rope to where Clyde Peabody, the owner of the originally named Peabody’s Wrecker Service, stood beside an overturned vehicle about thirty feet below us.

  We’d been finishing up dinner at this new Italian place called Luigi’s in Union when the radio in Willis’s Prius went off. I may have made some threatening statements about him letting some asshole caught in a speed trap interrupt date night, but I only meant about half of them. But when Ethel told us there was a car wreck that looked an awful lot like a fatality, I quit griping. Mostly.

  Ten minutes later I was standing by the back of the car as Willis took off his necktie and dress shirt, handed them to me, then slipped on a spare uniform shirt to go with the boots he changed into.

  “You always keep a change of clothes in the back of your car?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he replied, pulling a complicated net of straps and buckles out of a bag and shaking it until it looked like the climbing harness it was. “Ever since the first time I had to notify a victim’s spouse that her husband was dead while I was still wearing her husband’s blood on my shirt.”

  I sometimes forgot that before taking the job as sheriff of Union County, SC, Willis was a homicide detective in Milwaukee, a place that saw a lot more murders in some city blocks than the whole town of Union. “Well, that makes sense, I reckon. And the climbing gear? I can’t imagine there was a lot of call for that in the big city?”

  “No, that’s all recreational. Me and Tommy were planning on ri
ding up to Crowder’s Mountain tomorrow and doing a little climbing. Wanna come?” he asked, grinning at me as he clipped something to something else and slid down the rope.

  “No!” I hollered at him. “And what in the hell are you doing climbing rocks with a deputy barely half your age? Willis Dunleavy, you are sixty-one years old. You don’t have anything left to prove to that young’un, and I am not going to deal with you falling off a mountain and breaking a hip!” He just grinned at me and waved, then pointed to his ear and shook his head like he couldn’t hear me. I gave up. There was no way I was going to win against a man who was married and divorced twice before we ever met. He learned a long time ago how to be deaf when it suited him.

  I turned and walked back to the side of the road, the red flashing lights from the ambulance and firetruck bathing everything in an eerie crimson glow. “Leon, what’s the story?” I asked as I approached the short man with the giant mustache standing by the firetruck. Leon Fuques was the chief of the Lockhart Volunteer Fire Department, and he was the man in charge on most accident scenes in this part of the country.

  “I don’t rightly know, Lila Grace,” he said. “We got the call that somebody’d seen headlights down off the side of the road, and we got here ‘bout the same time as the Highway Patrol.” He waved his hand over at a tall man in a big hat standing beside Clyde’s tow truck talking to Mark Ferber, a SC Highway Patrol officer who frequently rode the local highways. Officer Ferber and I might have had one or more less-than-friendly conversations about my speed over the years.