nancy werlocks diary s02e11 (3 page)

“Owww, lemme show you what I did!” she exclaims as she comes around the counter. I follow her over to the bottle shelf. Next to a tall pink bottle, she has a bottle of carrier oil and a bottle of rose essential oil. Next to a wide green bottle, she has a bottle of wintergreen essential oil and a bottle witch hazel. “So I’m always seeing people stop and look at the bottles, right, but a lot of people don’t buy because they are pretty but, you know, what are you supposed to do with them? So I got the idea that if I put some recipe ingredients next to the bottles, people will be like ‘oh my God! I can totally use this bottle to make my own perfume!’ and stuff like that, right?”

“Right,” I nod.

“I mean, I know you like everything in its little section and all, but we need a more organic approach to increase cart size. I mean, that’s like the latest thing in retail according to my mom’s study guides.”

“Okay.”

“Really? I mean, yeah. Good idea, right?”

“Anastasia, so long as people can find what they are looking for and we can track the inventory, I’m fine with it. Go ahead and set up the display and we’ll see what happens.”

Anastasia’s anima flashes a rainbow of happy colors and wraps around her neck. She unconsciously rubs her neck, inadvertently petting the entity. Though she isn’t a witch, Anastasia’s belief in magic, and her excessively bubbly demeanor, attracted the attention of a friendly anima that is rapidly evolving into a full-blown sprite.

My office door opens and Jacob walks out. I quickly steer Anastasia toward the inventory room to get stock and then lead Jacob back into my office.

“Your mom isn’t answering me
,” Houston telepaths into my head.

“Try again!”

“Maybe she’s busy?”

“I have the damn Jersey Devil in the shop and I am trying desperately to keep him from Anastasia here!”

“Wait, who? What?

“Find…my…mother!”

“On it, Boss.”

Jacob is staring at me blankly. I force a smile. He tries to smile back. I immediately regret smiling.

“Okay,” I say. “You know my mother is dead, don’t you?” Jacob shrugs. “She didn’t leave me with any information about your…arrangement with her.” Jacob grunts and nods. “What do you want for the…clippings?”

Jacob begins trying to scratch his wings from beneath the coat.

“By the gods,” I mutter. “Do you have a receipt from the last time? Anything I can go on?”

Jacob nods and digs into his pant pockets. He dumps a bunch of papers on my desk and points. Bus pass. Library card. A bunch of Wawa receipts…
he has a debit card
? Crumbled among the mess is a Three Wishes receipt from just before Mom died. Apparently Mom was making cash deposits into a bank account for him to the tune of…

…Two hundred and fifty dollars an ounce!?? What in the Greater Hells would you even use his nail clippings for to justify…

“
Your mom said you should find his file underneath the floor board under your desk
,” Houston pops into my head.
“She had to run but she said that she’ll explain later and just pay him.”

“Just pay him, she said? That’s gonna be Two thousand dollars!”

“I’m just the messenger.”

“I just need to get a…crowbar. I think,” I say to Jacob and go to the janitorial closet to see if I even have something to pull up a floorboard. I find a flathead screwdriver and go back to my office. I roll my chair out of the way and pull back the floor mat. I jimmy the floorboard up to find a leather satchel with Jacob’s file.

Apparently Mom had set up the bank account for Jacob, though how she managed to create a completely fabricated identity for him is unclear. I never considered my Mom to be shady, but I was starting to wonder how many alter identities she had manufactured for others.

These transactions occurred two or three times a year. That is a
lot
of nail clippings! But there was no record of any nail clippings in the inventory. Of course, my mother was notoriously bad at bookkeeping so that shouldn’t surprise me. But still, I would think if you are paying that kind of money you would have some sort of record of why?

I get a blank deposit ticket; a bunch of them are in the file, and fill it out. I also fill out a receipt for Jacob and tell him I will deposit the money by end of day. He nods and grunts…I think this was the
happy
grunt. He retrieves the rest of his receipts and papers, shoves them all back in his pockets, and leaves the shop.

* * *

“Tell me you didn’t scare him,” says Nanna Morri as I walk in the door. Nanna rarely manifests to talk, but with the situation with Vivika what it is and me promptly shielding my mind before entering the house, the only way we can talk is if she manifests.

“Scare Jacob? It was more I was scared out of my mind Anastasia was going to see his wings or something.”

“He’s learned to be very careful. That isn’t a concern usually.”

“Where is Mom?”

“I felt it best that this come from me.”

“Do I need to sit down for this or something?”

“You may want to get a glass of wine first,” says Nanna with a grin.

I get a glass of wine and make myself comfortable on the sofa. “Why did I just deposit two thousand dollars into a fraudulent checking account?”

“It isn’t Jacob’s fault that he is the way that he is,” begins Nanna. “Jacob is a cambion. I don’t know the particulars of his birth. From what I gather his mother had an arrangement with a demon. The family was heavily in debt because of an unusually early winter that destroyed a lot of their crops. The demon was supposed to take the child as payment in exchange for gold.”

Cambions are the offspring of a union between a human female and a male demon. Contrary to popular paranormal romances, such offspring aren’t simply a matter of a little hanky-panky. It is a deliberate, convoluted ritual that has a high chance of failure and very often kills the mother in the process. It is a special kind of desperate to enter into such a pact.

Demons use cambions as anchors to the material world. So long as the cambion lives, daddy dearest can’t be banished back to the abyss or wherever he came from. Sometimes, the demon may actually take an active interest in the offspring to help him or her through life. Some do this out of genuine care for their offspring, but most do so out of self-interest. Usually, however, the demon ignores the cambion completely.

If daddy is powerful enough and really wants to be an ass, he can also take possession of the cambion as if the body was his own. It usually needs to be done when the cambion is very young; the older they get the harder it is to evict them from their own bodies. Unlike a normal possession, such a body won’t eventually break down and the demon can’t be exorcised from it.

Today, most cambions appear to be perfectly normal because demons realized that half-fiend offspring with glowing red eyes, claws, or batwings attract undue attention in the modern era. So a few discreet tweaks have been made over the centuries to produce mundane looking children. But back in the day, there was no special care taken to hide the cambion’s lineage. Which was fine, I suppose, when your nearest neighbor was twenty miles away. In the era of Youtube, not optimal.

“I take it things did not go according to plan?” I ask.

“Mrs. Leeds was in her mid-forties when she gave birth to Jacob. Not exactly optimum childbearing years. Jacob was born retarded.”

“Nanna, it’s called intellectual disability.”

“Well, excuse me Miss Politically Correct. I died before all your new vocabulary became popular.”

“It isn’t being politically correct. It is about sensitivity.”

“Are you going to let me finish my story or just lecture me?”

“By
Melpomene, continue.”

“Thank you.” Nanna rolls her eyes at me. “Because of Jacob’s retar…
condition,
the demon didn’t want him. No demon wants to be on earth so badly that it will move in to what it considered damaged property. So he canceled the contract because Mrs. Leeds didn’t deliver a suitable baby. Well, the Leeds could barely afford to care for the twelve children they had. So they abandoned him in the woods.”

“How did he survive?”

“Not sure. Maybe wolves took him in. Maybe some nature spirits near the cairn took pity on him. Jacob isn’t exactly in a position to tell anyone. But as he got older, he started making a mess of things. Chickens, goats, cattle. So the guild would send someone out to hunt him. He’s escape and disappear deep into the Pine Barrens, but then surface again a few decades or so later.”

“Where does he go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he hibernates for months or years at a time. Or maybe it is a glamour that makes people overlook him. I just know that if he doesn’t want to be found, he’s not being found.”

“So what does all this have to do with a bag of nail clippings?”

“The last time the guild sent someone to hunt him down, they asked me to do it. So I went out there and I found him. Poor thing scared out of his mind because some developer was leveling his hunting grounds and he had been shot at a few dozen times by hunters. Jacob isn’t violent. He’s never been violent. Otherwise, there would be a line of bodies the length of the shore. He still, in a lot of ways, has the mind of a child.”

“So you decided to help him.”

Nanna Morri nodded. “He can learn. He just never had anyone to teach him. I taught him how to tend to himself, and how to take the bus if he wanted to go somewhere, and I even taught him some basic arithmetic and how to read! Maybe if someone had gotten to him sooner…” She shakes her head. “Anyway, Geoffrey will buy the clippings from you for what you paid for them. He uses them as study aids for the apprentices and in rituals to control the cryptids being studied.”

“So why did Mom never tell me any of this?”

“She would have eventually. She wasn’t planning on dying when she did. And since then there has been so much else going on I suspect it just slipped her mind.”

“So, are there any
other
surprises I should be anxiously anticipating?”

Nanna flashes a wicked smile. “Now, Nancy. What fun would it be if I warned you?” And she vanishes back across the veil.

Careful What You Wish For

October 18
^th
,

Scott and I sit in Roy Frazner’s office and listen to his pitiful explanation of the plea deal he offered the man that killed our mother. Scott squeezes my hand in a silent reminder that it would be inappropriate to roast Frasner with Hellfire right now.

“My mother is dead, Mr. Frazner,” I say. “He had a blood alcohol level of almost point two. He shouldn’t have been walking down steps without assistance. Let alone behind the wheel of a car.”

“I understand your frustration, Dr. Werlock, but—”

“No. No you
don’t
understand my frustration. You told us when he didn’t take the original plea deal that you were going to throw everything at this guy to make an example of him. Now I’m supposed to just accept him with time served and five years of community service.”

“He’s also losing his driver’s license,” says Frazner.

“Except for that hardship waiver to drive back and forth to work, right?” adds Scott.

“He has a wife and three children to support.”

“And I
had
a mother. Now I don’t.”

All right. Technically, I still have my mother. But taking to her across the Veil and talking to her across a kitchen table is not the same thing.

“Look, the state is putting a lot of pressure on the courts to reduce prison overcrowding. Mr. Williams had a clean driving record before the incident and no history of crime. With the exception of his terrible lapse of judgment, he is an otherwise productive citizen.”

“My mother was a productive citizen.”

“Dr. Werlock, I was hoping this plea arraignment would save your family any further suffering. A jury trial might not have gone the way you think. Mr. Williams is a…sympathetic…defendant. And his attorney intended to drag this out as long as he could. And your mother may not have…may not have wanted you to have to listen to all of that.”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?” asks Scott.

“Mr. Werlock. Dr. Werlock. Your mother operated an occult shop.  Mr. Williams’ attorney intended to… point that out at trial.”

“What in the Nine Hells does the shop have to do with the fact that that man killed my mother?”

“Nancy,” Scott warns. The smell of sulfur fills the room.

Frazner sniffs the air and makes a sour face. “Must be something in the heating system. Let me open a window. I apologize. I don’t think they cleaned the ducts before turning on the heat.”

I take a deep breath and shake my head.

“There, that’s better,” says Frazner as he returns to his seat. “You can both, of course, speak at the sentencing hearing.”

“Why bother? The decision has already been made.”

“Mr. Williams is remorseful.”

“Remorse doesn’t raise the dead.”

Scott and I storm out of Frazner’s offer but linger in the lobby. Scott leans against the wall and says, “We could file the wrongful death suit.”

“What is that going to accomplish? It is already pretty clear a Christian male with three kids is more valuable than a single pagan woman.”

“Don’t go there, Nancy.”

“You heard the same thing I did, Scott! They were going to make Mom’s religion and occupation an issue at trial, and Frazner balked! He thought the jury would side with Williams! Like Mom…deserved to die.”

“I don’t think that is what he meant.”