Covered in blood and hair was not how I liked to end the night. To be fair, I didn’t want to start my day like that, either. Neither the blood nor the hair belonged to me, but it was still gross. Not only was it not my blood but it was animal. The beast in question was a goat, a really scared goat who’d had his throat nicked instead of cut. Blood went everywhere. I helped hold it down after it lost what looked like a gallon or two down the front of my shirt. I didn’t like seeing an animal suffer and was painted red because of it. People, on the other hand, I probably wouldn’t have helped hold them down. I am not a people person, to say the least. I’m barely a person—or so say the zealots of today. Being the only legal and licensed full-blooded witch practitioner in the country, let alone in today’s society, is better than the days of the witch trials, but not by much. Sure, I haven’t been hanged or burned at the stake, but I wasn’t going to discount it as a potential ending. Three hundred years and some change wasn’t that long ago for some of us. The scent of bonfires still hung in the air, and we were just as flammable as our ancestors had been.

The pitiful goat was crusted under my nails and turned the tips of my hair into small, red dreadlocks. But it was better than what had coated me last weekend…human blood. The group had collected an ounce of blood from each family member—or so they claimed. They had hoped human blood would be more powerful than that of an animal, that it would give the spell the kind of kick it would need to work. The blood was old and smelled of sweet death. They had a two-liter bottle filled with human blood that they had collected from sixty-seven people…again, as they claimed. I doubted they had almost seventy family members kicking around to open a vein and fill the bottle. No one had that many relatives that gave a shit about them.

My gut told me one of two things had unfolded. One, someone gave more than they should have, and I didn’t take part in feeding the gods—human sacrifice. Or, the other option, they had stolen the blood from a blood bank, which has happened more times than I could count. The latter, which I suspected, might as well be a jug of water. It would have been old as the sin that got them to this point and filtered to all hell. Blood donations are spun in centrifuges to separate it into transfusable components. Red cells, platelets and plasma were separated. Spun blood was worthless to me unless I needed a transfusion, which had also happened more times than I could count. We live in dangerous times, my friends. Rather than argue where the liquid gold came from, I took them at their paper-thin word but still had to explain to the family that their blood loss wasn’t significant enough. It would not be a sacrifice if they were still standing. It wouldn’t be worth a lick in hell if someone didn’t suffer for it. Truthfully, if they had slaughtered a busload of people, I would have found some other lie to tell them. I didn’t serve up dishes fit for gods for any reason. The moment a witch started messing with the gates of hell, they found themselves on the other side of them. No. Fucking. Thanks. Been there, done that, and the only thing I brought back from hell was a T-shirt and Trauma, with a capital T.

Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t dabble in the dark arts. I wouldn’t use human blood to stave off a demon, even if it did work. That was asking for more trouble than it was worth—my soul, however tattered it may be. The family had expected me to perform a summoning and make a deal with a devil for them. Nope. I wasn’t selling my ass on the corner of hell because the head of their family had made a devil’s pact years ago. They offered me more money, and I declined, pointing out the obvious. The money wasn’t doing them any good. Why would it help me? Money didn’t spend in hell…only souls did. I wore that blood on my way out of their front door, tossed in my face as a parting gift. The last I heard of them, they had traded a firstborn for more time from the ultimate debt collector. That they had exchanged a child for money and headed to the Caribbean told me I had made the right decision. I’m sure a week on the beach would help them overcome that devastation. It’s easy to ignore the horror of what we’ve done while sitting in a cabana with a piña colada in our hand. People are, by far, the scariest of all the monsters I’ve ever faced.

And I’m asked why I’m not a people person?

Because most people suck.

I pulled into my driveway as dawn pressed down over the hills. The sky was a billion pure eyes of fading light. The grass was green, even in the hush of the approaching sun. It was as if the night and dawn had become one beautiful moment, untouched by the pending chaos of the day. I stood at the foot of my stairs and watched the sunrise as a canopy of gold. Dawn had come, and I had welcomed it. I felt it sink into my bones and chase away the midnight scares.

The sky changed from tinges of charcoal to a vibrancy that felt safe. The sun always meant shelter from the boogeymen for people in my line of work. Monsters bumped in the night. They scraped at the moon and howled each time the sun rose, hence the sacrifice I had watched. It was another desperate attempt to stave off the darkness. In all my years, it had never worked. The dark came as quickly as the sun, and with the night came the unnatural beings and beasts we feared. To be fair to the creatures that plagued my nightmares, I had been attacked more times while sitting under the blistering sun than at night. The sun was merely a false sense of security, but I’d take any kind of safety, even the fake stuff. With a witchy target on my back the size of a small car, sometimes pretending everything was going to be just fine was the only way I could get out of bed in the morning.

It was January, but it felt like March. Winter in Vancouver was usually chilly and rainy, with a hint of spring tempting us into leaving our jackets at home. The only thing dependable about Vancity weather was that you couldn’t own too many umbrellas, and the long-term forecast always included rain and clouds. If it didn’t, the weatherman was probably new to the scene. You could start your day in a thin layer of clothes and end it in boots and a raincoat. This year was no exception. The weather report called for snow in the next week or two. Looking at my flower beds, blooms poking out of the ground, I found myself irritated more than usual. They were the only thing the cold hadn’t killed, my spirit included. After too many months of doom and gloom, my tired, rained-out soul was ready for my coming holidays. Literal blood, sweat and tears earned me two weeks in Mexico. Lord have mercy on my pasty Irish skin.

Outside of a goat blood bath, it had been a typical day for me. My first lecture of the year had gone well, aside from the regular religious crazies that inevitably made their way into one of my classes. They say my soul is damned because I taught demonology and the occult. I say it was damned long before today, but no one really asked my opinion. My soul was spoken for and has been for ten years. When I was sixteen, I got into a vehicle with a drunk driver. He totaled the car. All of us died. I was dead for almost two minutes.

Since I willingly got into the vehicle and knew the driver was drunk, the devils see that as suicide. Suicides go to hell. Do not pass go, don’t even think of collecting two hundred dollars. Straight to jail—or so I was promptly informed when I woke up on the other side of the gates in a cage exactly my size. If you think the lineups for Black Friday sales are bad, try waking up in Hell, with a capital ‘H,’ on a Sunday morning, once the afterparties cleared out. Sobering up in hell was a hangover that no hair on the dog would ever rid you of. Processing souls looked like a bitch, but they ran a tighter ship than most big-box stores.

Two minutes in hell is a lifetime, then some. Time moves differently in the below, and one hundred and twenty seconds went by like years. How did I walk out, you might be wondering? A loophole—he only one to have ever existed…twins. When my mom was pregnant, she was pregnant with two. My body absorbed my twin, along with the soul. When I went to hell, I went with both souls. They couldn’t have both, or that would be cheating. If there’s one thing hell is good at, it’s following the rules to the letter. Sure, they bent the rules as much as they could, but they never outright broke them. To do anything different would bring on their end. Breaking the rules brought winged heat from above that none of us would survive. No devil or demon would dare allow this. I was released, but not before they stamped me with a return address on my back for when I die. The next time I go down, there is no loophole, no typo and no way out. I’ve been marked as property of the tarpits. My soul, whether tethered to another, has been counted. There is no way around it. I was alive and well and given another chance but marked ‘return to sender’. I didn’t fret. Most witches ended up down there, anyway.

The crisp morning air nipped at my blood-crusted hands and forced me up my front steps. Another protection spell for a cursed child had come and gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell the family that a little goat’s blood and prayer wouldn’t keep the demon from collecting his dues. The mother had sold her firstborn to a hellspawn twenty years prior for reasons that made sense at the time until it was time to pay the debt. There isn’t a way to renege on a devil’s pact. It wasn’t Wal-Mart. There were no returns, and no manager the mother could demand to speak to or blast on social media. And if there was, I bet she wouldn’t have liked what that manager had to say. The mother got her riches and now had to give up her child. If she didn’t, the entire family would be dead by the end of the week, after the devil toyed with them until it grew bored. In the end, the beast of burden would have the child and would take the family as compensation for wasting his time. It was in the fine print.

I hated nights like these, but they paid my bills and kept my skills sharp as a demon claw. The family had paid for my consultation and had asked my opinion. I told them the truth but softened it as much as I could. But there was no way to ease them into this reality. I watched the local witch coven perform the protection spell but stressed to the mother that she was wasting her time and money. The demon would come. It was her choice to go as a family or to give it what it wanted. I’m sure I’d be reading about their deaths in the paper by this weekend. Sadly, I wasn’t a popular guest at that party. It didn’t matter. There wouldn’t be anyone left to give me a bad review. Not that I cared. At twenty-six, I already felt like I was ready to retire. A few bad Yelps and I’d be that much closer. My kind burned out pretty fast. It wasn’t our own personal anguish that aged us. It was the grief of others that wore us down and charred off our souls.

I could hear my answering machine click on as I put my house key in the lock. I had turned off my ringer before I had left. I knew it would be a late night and didn’t want to risk being woken by the shrill of a phone once I finally got to sleep. The door and lock were original to the house, and although my key always stuck, I couldn’t bring myself to replace either of them. The door was painted bright red, faded in places, but still held the original protection spells from days long past. Who was I to complain about the creaky jamb or barely working lock when the darn thing kept out the boogeyman?

A phone call this close to the witching hour meant two things—either someone was dead, and I was on their list of regrettable contacts, or someone needed something I wouldn’t want to give. Neither sounded fun at almost six in the morning. I closed the door, locked it and reset my alarm system. The door may have kept out the creatures in the shadows, but it did little to keep out the bad guys with a soul and a pulse. I owned a gun and have home security for those types of monsters.

“Ailis…err, Dr. Kyteler, it’s Miguel.” The recording started on my machine.

My heart plummeted, crashing into the new butterflies in my stomach, and I instantly wanted to vomit. I paused and decided whether I would pick up the phone. Miguel, my long-ago friend, mentor and lover, among other things, was either going to tell me someone was dead or he needed a favor. At the crack of dawn, I wagered the latter. I had missed two text messages from him already. Neither said someone was dead. Both I had ignored. When I cut someone out of my life, I did my best to follow through and sever all ties. But hearing him say my name, one of the few who had ever pronounced it correctly, had made my breath catch in my throat and dig up long-buried emotions. Most people called me ‘Alias’ or ‘Ail-is.’ They butchered my last name as well. My name, for the record, is ‘Ay-lish,’ an Irish name. My last name, Kyteler, pronounced ‘Kettler’, had an even longer history than my first.

“Miguel, I’m here,” I answered.

I didn’t bother hiding the suspicion in my voice or my deeply rooted contempt for the man. It was either bad news or worse news. Either way, him being the one to deliver it bothered me more than if it were someone else on the phone. Grudges are capricious creatures. One this strong could only be explained away by the other emotions I felt for him. A person can’t hate this profoundly without there being love.

“What do you want, Miguel?” I asked, trying hard to keep the bitterness from my voice. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing his voice still hurt today as much as it had the last time I had heard it.

“I need a favor.” Four simple words that were as complicated as the secret to life. In case you’re wondering, there is no secret to life. We all die in the end—some earlier than most, if we’re lucky.

“The last time I did you a favor, I ended up in a Mexican prison,” I replied. I would have preferred the news that someone was dead over this.

“To be fair, Ailis, you killed two dozen people,” he answered with a hint of laughter in his voice. I could almost picture the grin on his face. The urge to want to slap that smile off made my hand squeeze into a fist, cracking the dried blood around my knuckles.

“How was I supposed to know he was the head of a vampire line?” I felt defensive. I was young, scared and stab happy with the monsters at the time. To be honest, I was still pretty stabby when it came to monsters. Stab first, and ask questions later. Anything short of that, and I was the one with the headstone. “He attacked me. I had no other choice.”

What Miguel had said was true. I did kill just over twenty, but they weren’t really people, per se. The dead man in question, a vampire, had attacked two people in the lounge of my hotel. I staked him, and he lit up like the Fourth of July. Subsequently, his demise caused the death of his weaker ilk. His freshly made clutch had gone up in ashes. They weren’t strong enough to survive his death. Vampires have short lifespans for a reason, especially the freshly dead. They weren’t meant to be here. They were a curse from hell—a joke, if you will, cast by demons. And the stupid ones never made it far in their new undead life. They dropped like flies in honey.

I like to call it karma. If you want to be a monster, you get to die like one. I didn’t mourn those deaths, but I did have a lot of questions to answer when the badges showed up. I had been arrested and spent two days in prison on a slab of cold concrete, being called a devil worshiper. The name-calling didn’t bother me. They weren’t very creative. I tried to explain the difference between believing in the devils and worshiping them. It fell on deaf ears. Keep in mind, this was during a time when the world had just started to wake up to what had really been lurking in the shadows for as long as time existed. Devils have been walking the earth and have been living in the houses next to us for as long as we started living indoors. To be fair, vampires had been a myth to the general public up until I roasted one of them in plain sight. Mankind couldn’t ignore it once it hit social media—flames, screaming and all that crispy jazz. I could understand why they thought I was a murderer, but common sense should have told them that people weren’t generally combustible or turned to fine ash within seconds. It takes hours to burn a human body to ash, and even then, there were chunks of bone and teeth still found in the dust.

But that was the way mankind kept sane. Ignore it until it blocks your view of your television, then lean around it. Most of mankind didn’t have the capacity to really appreciate who they shared this world with. Those who chose not to believe or tried to turn a blind eye to hell were usually the first to go down when the demons came up. You can’t hold up a cross to a vampire and expect it to work when you have no faith in the power behind it. Without true conviction, you might as well say goodbye now. That’s like not believing in winter and being confused when you slide down your driveway on a patch of ice. Not believing in it didn’t make the snow stop falling any more than it kept the demons from crawling out from under your bed.