Chapter Ten
Call Kel old-fashioned, but he thought that finding out Hell was a real and present problem—for him, specifically—warranted some sort of somber pause to absorb the information. Shepherd, it turned out, disagreed.
If Kel wanted to be read in on his new reality, he’d need to hobble along while Shepherd did his chores. So far, he’d snaked the drains, fed the plants, and now he was outside trying to paint-match the fence.
Apparently being a servant of Hell involved an early start to the day. That was one strike against it.
“Are you sure I don’t need some sort of jab?
” Kel asked dubiously as he hiked the leg of his jeans up to check out his ankle.
The scratches had been doused with hydrogen peroxide and covered with Band-Aids—there were cartoon dogs printed on them—but that didn’t seem like enough.
“Tetanus or rabies or…the black plague?”
Shepherd sat back on his heels and looked up at Kel. “They’re fully vaccinated,” he said. “It’s a condition in the contract with Renfields.”
“That sounds like a lie,” Kel said.
“If it was a lie, it wouldn’t,” Shepherd said. He screenshot the paint swatch and pushed himself back to his feet. “Stop trying to change the subject.”
Kel sighed.
“Fine,” he said. “You were telling me about the house.”
“It’s cursed,” Shepherd said. “And it looks like that’s your problem now.”
They looked at each other. After a second, Shepherd shrugged and pulled the list of HOA violations out of his pocket to consult the next item on his list. He started to walk away. Kel grabbed him by the back of the collar and yanked him back before he had to bully his aching knee back into a limp.
“That’s it?” Kel said. “That’s the big, So You Made a Deal with the Devil, Now What playlist?”
“Hey, I’m doing my best,” Shepherd said. “You want the liturgy and Grandier Examen from the guy who waters the plants and checks the mail?”
“Hell plants,” Kel pointed out. “Hell mail—”
“Actually it’s mostly just flyers.”
Kel ignored the interruption. “What I’m saying is that you know more than me.”
“I don’t even know what you don’t know,” Shepherd objected.
“The Baptist Church on Granville sees me twice a year, and if someone dies,” Kel said. “I’ve seen a lot of horror movies!”
Shepherd looked exasperated.
“That’s…” he stopped himself as he thought about it, and reluctantly conceded, “OK, that probably does give me an idea of where to start.”
He squirmed out of Kel’s grip and leaned back against the fence, arms crossed over his chest.
“You brought this on yourself,” he said.
Kel glared at him. “Thanks,” he said flatly. “That’s new information.”
“Hey, you said it,” Shepherd said. “You made a deal with the devil.”
“I tried to con a dead man.”
“Even better,” Shepherd said. “Perfidious intent, hoist by your own petard, and conned in the contract by the person you were trying to con. The silver lining is that somewhere an infernal underwriter was able to leave work early and catch his kid’s play. Because you did all the work for them.”
Kel clenched his hand into a fist and punched his thigh, grinding his knuckles into the clenched muscle. It was technically to loosen it up, but it got his frustration out as well. Some of it.
“Dio Madden owed me,” he said. “All of this? The only reason he had this was because his father got my grandad run out of town rather than honor his debts. All I did was make that right.”
Shepherd shook his head. “That’s not what happened,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time that Kel had heard that. He’d thought better of Shepherd, although he didn’t know why. A snort escaped him as he jabbed a finger at Shepherd’s chest.
“And how the hell would you know?” he asked.
Shepherd grabbed Kel’s wrist. He was faster than Kel had thought, and stronger than he looked.
“Because I know how long Dio Madden has been on Renfield’s books,” he said. “I don’t know what happened back then, but as for ‘who’? It wasn’t Dio’s father. It was Dio.”
Kel stared at him.
“No,” he said. “Dio inherited this place after the old man died. Everyone in town was talking about it.”
Shepherd nodded. “Yeah, probably because no one had ever heard of this kid before. Right?”
It was. Kel resented having to admit it, because…goddamnit, the con had been see through.
“That’s not…” he said. “Dio was only a few years older than me.”
“Huh,” Shepherd said. “Did people mention how much he looked like his dad at that age?”
They had. Ruby had scalded three people at the cafe when they’d kept pointing it out to her. It had gotten her fired. Not for long. Only until her boss had come up short on staff to take the late shift. Still…
“How?” Kel asked. Then closed his eyes and held up a hand to stop Shepherd before he answered. “Stupid question. Magic.”
Shepherd made an ‘eh’ noise in the back of his throat.
“Close enough,” he said. “You feed the House, the House feeds you.”
That made Kel shudder. He had grown up with stories about Hell House.
Ruby had chewed over them like gossip, the proof that being a bastard was in a Madden’s bones.
Some of the older atrocities—the tribe slaughtered for their land, the father who came back from the war to find his pigs well-fed and his children missing toes—were folklore, but a lot of them had evidence to back up the stories.
Murder. Missing children. Madness.
“Does that mean I’m supposed to…that Dio was killing people?” he asked, changing direction mid-question.
“No,” Shepherd said confidently. Then he paused and wrinkled his nose.
“I mean, maybe. People have hobbies. That’s not something the House demands.
It doesn’t need to. Just by virtue of what it is, it attracts and corrupts that sort of thing, those sort of people.
Most Keepers don’t encourage it; that way lies pitchforks and torches.
Or, these days, abatement notices and TikTokers. ”
Kel glanced at the house. Sunlight glinted from the windows. From the attic, something wet and raggedy pressed against the window. It might have waved. Kel didn’t want to deal with that.
“So what does it want?”
“A return on its investment,” Shepherd said. “What it gives you, doubled and deposited back into its coffers. In Dio’s case, it gave him power over the dead.”
“And in mine?”
Shepherd just tilted his head to the side, raised an eyebrow, and waited. The attitude was the same one that Kel’s teachers used to get in school when they thought he should already know the answer to a question. The difference was…this time he thought he did, too.
He licked his lips. “The smoke,” he said. “It tells me people’s secrets, what they really think.”
“Think?” Shepherd asked.
“...want,” Kel acknowledged. “It tells me what people want. Most people, anyhow. Not you.”
It took a second for Shepherd to smile. When he did, it flashed across his face with easy, dismissive charm.
“What you see is what you get,” he said. “And you already knew what I wanted.”
Shepherd was right. When he lied, it did sound like the truth. Kel couldn’t swear he’d have even realized if it wasn’t for the way the smoke licked at the back of his teeth. He swallowed the spiced heat of it and left that for later.
“So what now?” he asked.
Shepherd pushed himself upright. He held up the list he’d been working his way down.
“I get to deal with this,” he said. “And traditionally, you look for a way to welch on your deal.”
Kel blinked and then laughed.
“I get everything I ever wanted, and I get to look this hot forever?” he said. “Why in God’s name would I want out of that deal?”
OK. Kel braced his forearm against the tree and rested his sweaty forehead on it. He’d put the projectile vomiting at the sound of the G-word down as one drawback.
“Here.” Shepherd offered him a bottle of water.
He hovered at Kel’s elbow, rubbing his back with a warm, heavy hand.
Kel somehow resisted the urge to respond to being vulnerable by being a jackass.
He just took the bottle, swilled the liquid around his mouth, and spat the taste of puke out of his mouth.
He swallowed, his tongue and teeth cold, and wiped his nose on his knuckles.
“I did not eat that,” he said, trying not to look at the chunks of stuff that had splattered over the twisted roots of the tree. “I don’t care how drunk I was, I did not eat wax made from rotting hobo ass.”
Shepherd snorted out a laugh and stepped back as Kel straightened up. “Try not to think about it,” he said. “It helps.”
“How quickly?” Kel asked. He grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it up to wipe his face.
The sweat that smeared over it was greasy and smelled like high tide.
As he dragged the wet fabric down his throat, he realized that Shepherd hadn’t answered.
Kel looked over at him and caught Shepherd, lower lip caught between his teeth, with his harvest-sky blue eyes focused on Kel’s chest. How shallow exactly did it make Kel that the helpless admiration made him feel better?
Rather than work that out, he yanked his shirt down. “My eyes are up here.”
“I know,” Shepherd said. He shook himself and refocused, winding back until he could pick up the thread of the conversation. “And not quickly enough, but there’s some dried ginger in the cupboard that might help.”
That didn’t sound likely. Kel still gestured for Shepherd to lead the way back into the house.
“I’ll try anything once,” he said.
It turned out it did help. Kel took a bite of the sticky, crystallised root that Shepherd had fished out of a jar.
There was a pot of tea on the table, but he didn’t want to wait.
The ginger dissolved on his tongue and warmed the bile that sloshed around queasily in his gut.
He wasn’t sure if it did anything about the nausea directly, or if it just helped that his mouth didn’t taste like skunk ass anymore.
“I stand by what I said.” Kel leaned on the back of a chair, elbows locked and shoulders shifted back. “There’s other curse words, and nobody will miss me at church.”