Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) (4 page)

I banished the thought. If I didn’t want to think about Natalie, I couldn’t bear to think about my father—who, or whatever he actually might be.

The girl watched me seriously. “Well, go on, eat. I’m not about to waste good bacon by poisoning it.”

I looked down at the fork, set neatly next to the edge of my plate, a paper napkin nestled neatly beneath it. I knew it was a small thing, but it felt like picking up that fork meant deciding to go back to life. Eating definitely was something that living people did. I wasn’t sure I was ready to make that kind of commitment.

The girl sighed. She dropped her hand on top of mine. Her skin was cool and smooth. My skin tingled where she touched me. “It’s just food,” she said, her tone gentle, for once, “It’s not a contract with the devil. Eat. I want to stitch your head up before my first client comes.”

I hesitated for a moment. My stomach growled again, louder this time.

“Please,” she said.

I turned my head to look at her, but her mop of lavender curls hid her face from me.

Oh, well. Maybe she was right. It couldn’t hurt, really. Maybe it would count as my last meal. Even death row inmates got a last meal.

I slowly bit into a piece of bacon. It was perfectly crisp and salty. No turkey bacon here. This was the real thing. Fatty, and sinful, and even better than it smelled.

“Good boy,” the girl said, as if she were talking to her dog. Then, as if to reinforce the thought, she threw a piece of bacon off of her plate, into the air, where the furry force of nature made it vanish.

“I’m Win,” she said. “I figure you should know the name of the person who saved your butt… twice, I might add.” She raised her eyebrows with a glance towards the happily chomping Border collie.

“Win,” I repeated slowly.

“Like, ‘woohoo, I win’,” she said, her voice flat. Apparently, she was used to having to explain her name.

I’d been there a couple times myself. No one expected a real person to be named ‘Flint’. I nodded. “Okay, Win.”

“And you are?” she prompted, framing her chin in her hands.

I stared down at my plate again, at my hands, at the table, anywhere but her face. I didn’t want to answer that. Eating was one thing, but becoming me—becoming Flint again? I wasn’t ready for that.

Better to keep my brain fuzzy.

“Fine,” she sighed, after an awkward moment. “I’ll stitch up your head, throw out your demon, and let you be on your way—no name required.”

I nodded, still avoiding her gaze.

That was probably best, for all of us.

WIN

I
had officially lost whatever self-preservation instincts I had been born with. When my sisters found out that I was feeding and caring for a man with his very own baby demon inside of him, they were going to have some strong words for me.

Hopefully, strong words that would not reach the ears of our parents.

Unlike my guest, I didn’t want to die.

Despite his little fainting fit over seeing blood, he didn’t make so much as a whimper as I jabbed him with local anesthetics and stitched up the gash in his head. I had to shave his hair around the wound, so I could stitch it neatly. I felt a brief wave of sadness at the loss of that dark, thick hair.

He hadn’t flinched at that, either.

When he looked in the mirror I used to show him the neat line of stitches across his scalp, he grabbed my clippers without even a moment of hesitation, and went ahead and shaved the rest of his hair off, so that it was all one length. All I could do was keep him from accidentally cutting his new stitches while he was at it.

The severe cut made his face even more angular and strong looking, especially with the way he kept clenching his jaw, as if he were in pain or stressing out about something. If he spent all his time doing that, he was going to grind his teeth down to stubs. It was an incredibly masculine face. There was no softness in him—at least, not anywhere that I could see. He was like a piece of stone, with those blue eyes of his refusing to sparkle the way I knew they should.

Well, I wasn’t going to peek at his soul just so I could find out what was going on in his head. That was going to have to wait until I had to get rid of that pesky demon of his.

And that was going to have to wait until I’d had a shower, and finished with my morning clients. I stank of blood, betadine, and sweat—both my own, and that of my stranger. There was no way I was going to go through my day with that smell following me around.

I wasn’t going to let this cog in the wheels throw me completely out of rhythm, either. I was not going to let this man affect me, any more than I had ever let a man control my life. I was strong, independent, and cranky.

That demon better look out for me. It was going down.

I couldn’t help but be aware of the stranger as I took my shower. There was a man in my house. A strange man. I must have checked the locks on my bathroom door five times, before I even started to shampoo my hair.

And why should having a man in my house throw me for such a loop? Did I really need to shave my legs, just because of the increase of local testosterone? I was going to wear jeans all day, anyway. It wasn’t like anyone would know whether I had shaved or not.

I growled and shaved my legs.

I wasn’t going to wear my best underwear, though, I decided. I had to draw the line somewhere.

Granny panties, it would be.

I finished pulling on my boots, just as the chime from the clinic door rang. I swore as I glanced at my clock. I grabbed my brush and ran it through my hair a couple times before bolting from my room.

The bell rang again.

I nearly bumped into my stranger as I hurried to answer it. He loomed in the hallway, a shadowy, slumped figure. I bit back a yelp.

He shifted uneasily, his shoulders bunching under the fabric of what I assumed was his undershirt—though it appeared to just be a plain, white t-shirt. He’d obviously made an effort to wash out any blood that had soaked through the long-sleeved shirt he had been wearing. The shirt was slightly damp and wrinkled in places.

“Is there anything I can do to help around here?” His voice was tentative and awkward.

I hesitated. I wasn’t in the habit of leaving my clients in the hands of a perfect stranger I had literally picked up off of the street. But, I didn’t love the idea of the same stranger hanging out in my house all day, doing who the hell knew what.

The door rang again, echoed by the pealing ring of the phone in the waiting room.

“Can you take calls, while I’m in with my patient?” I asked. I wouldn’t normally have asked anyone, but I was desperate. My entire day would flow better, if I didn’t have to depend on my decrepit answering service. It wasn’t really that much to ask, I told myself. And it would help a lot.

Hopefully, he wasn’t going to ask to be paid, like my other secretaries had. There wasn’t enough in my accounts to pay myself, let alone anyone else. I’d already used up good supplies for stitching up his head. Supplies that I couldn’t really afford to replace.

If I looked at it that way, he owed me.

He answered the phone with a deep, professional-sounding voice. Not his first rodeo, I figured. I tried to let that thought comfort me, as I yanked the door open and smiled at my first patient. He was a beautiful miniature horse colt, Mad Dash, who I’d actually helped come into the world. At thirty-inches tall at the shoulders, he was a smoky buckskin in color, and full of attitude. Now nearly two years old, I was going to help make sure we didn’t bring anymore of him into the world. Dash was scheduled to be gelded. Hopefully, that would keep him on the right side of the law. Stallions, particularly miniature horse stallions, could be, and usually were, bastards. The only truly vicious stallion I’d ever met had been about Dash’s size.

His owner, Ms. Abel, smiled at me, her face turning into a complex mass of soft crepe-y wrinkles, like an old apple-headed doll, which was somehow still charming. Her black eyes glistened with good humor as I greeted her. She stroked Dash’s neck. He snorted and shot me a jaded look.

“Are you ready for us?” she asked. She leaned forward and whispered, rather loudly, “I didn’t tell him he was getting gelded today. He thinks this is just a little check-up visit.”

She winked at me, her thin lips curling up in a conspiratorial grin.

I winked back. “He won’t know what hit him,” I said. “He won’t even miss them.”

Ms. Abel chuckled rather evilly.

I stuck my head back through the door of the clinic. “Hey,” I said, taking in the size of the man behind the desk. Ms. Abel was old, and I was short. I didn’t think Dash was going to pull any funny business, but I’d learned early on not to make assumptions of safety around animals. He’d offered to help me out, right? “I could use an extra pair of hands, if you’re up for it. Meet me outside, okay?”

He nodded. I guessed he was fine with it. His face gave nothing away. His expression was still flat, like someone had poked him too hard and deflated his soul. It was like looking at the emotional equivalent of a zombie. It was unsettling, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen something like that.

I shivered. The last time I’d seen that, I’d been too late.

*~*~*

APPARENTLY, CLAMPING OFF the testicles of anything—even a happily drugged and sleeping miniature horse—was nothing short of a horror show for the average male who hadn’t attended vet school. It had been so long since I’d been around a ‘normal’ guy that I hadn’t even taken it into consideration.

The stranger turned ghostly white as I made the first incision and pulled a testicle out. I quickly cut it. I thought he was going to pass out as the testicle hit the grass at his feet and bounced. He swayed a little. I could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard.

I set to the removal of testicle number two.

“Done,” I announced, glancing at my watch. “Five minutes total. In and out. Bam! That’s what I’m talking about!” I did a little happy dance.

The stranger stared at the scalpel in my hands. It just had the tiniest bit of blood on it. Nothing, really.

I thought he was going to throw up. He was starting to look a little green.

Instead, he thrust the lead rope back to Ms. Abel, who chuckled as he retreated back to the clinic.

“I think you need a new assistant,” she chirped. “That one’s a bit too squeamish.”

“He’s just temporary,” I responded, looking in the direction of his swiftly-retreating form. I felt a little bad for the guy. If anyone was having a worse morning than I was, it had to be him.

Dash started waking up already. I was glad I had finished the procedure so quickly. The little horse snorted uneasily, trying to scramble to his feet. The anesthetic I’d given him made him stagger around like he was drunk. I gave him something to lean on—namely me--as he got his sea legs back.

All in all, the horse was taking the procedure a lot better than the man, and he was the one that had lost his nuts.

Ms. Abel payed in cash, bless her ancient heart. I wished all my clients were so good about taking care of their bills. Most of my patients seemed to think I was running a charity clinic—payment optional. If my clients paid at the time of treatment, I wouldn’t be so far into the red.

Maybe I should stop being a nice person, and send a collections agency after them, but I liked my clients. I didn’t want to lose any of them. And I’d never gotten to feeling comfortable asking people for money, even if I had earned it.

Vets don’t make money in general, nice vets apparently drowned in debt and overdrawn account notices. No wonder I was on the verge of losing my farm and clinic.

Nice people get eaten first.

I showed my stranger how to enter the payment into the computer. Just in case, I miraculously ended up with another paying customer.

“I see why you keep him around,” Ms. Abel said in that overly-loud whisper of hers, nodding her white head towards the clinic as I helped her load Dash into her trailer. “He’s awfully pretty. And so tall! It’s nice to have some extra eye-candy around.”

I glanced back, thinking about the man behind my desk. Yep, he was pretty, all right. He was also being devoured by a demon, and had tried to kill himself. Oh, and me.

I didn’t need that kind of pretty in my life.

That kind of pretty wasn’t good for anyone.

My next couple patients were small animals—a pet rabbit having her annual check-up, and a litter of puppies from the same breeder that I’d purchased Jazz from, who were ready for their first set of shots.

As it turned out, these pups weren’t just from the same breeder, but they had the exact same parents as Jazz, too. Looking at them filled me with a warm kind of nostalgia for her puppy stage.

At this age, the tiny Border collies were mostly fluffy balls of black and white energy. They squirmed and pounced on each other as I tried to sort them out. It was like trying to sort very large crickets. They made squeaking, inquisitive sounds as they wiggled in all directions.

I paused to rub the ears of the young male I was working with. He was growling and tugging at the cuff of my shirt as I palpated his abdomen. No doubt imagining that it was a particularly naughty—and small—species of sheep.

“You’re so cute,” I squeaked in that voice that only appeared around babies—of any species. I looked up at his owner with a smile. “I can’t believe Jazz was ever this small.”

Mr. M—who had a long name that nobody could pronounce properly—grinned at me. He was a stocky middle-aged man who carried a pipe between his teeth, though I had never seen him actually smoke. “Sounds like you need another puppy.”

I grinned back, even as I firmly removed the puppy’s teeth from my coat. “Jazz keeps me busy enough. I don’t think I’m ready to potty-train another energy factory any time soon.” Trying to catch a whirlwind before it piddled on the floor was like trying to carry water in my fists.

“I usual charge a good penny for a litter from this pair, but I’d let you have your pick for nothing, since you’ve given us so much help over the years,” he said, his eyes sparkling evilly. He waggled his bushy eyebrows. “You know you want one. They’re like potato chips. Having just one is plain wrong.”

I tried not to let him see how tempted I was.

“I’ll let you know,” I prevaricated. “They have to stay with their mother for another few weeks anyway.”

Mr. M chuckled as he packed the puppies back up in their kennel.

He knew a sucker when he saw one.

Jazz sniffed at the puppies suspiciously as Mr. M carried the crate back through the door. I watched her; curious to see how she would react. After a moment, her tail fanned out and began to whip around in familiar ‘insanely-happy’ dog mode.

“See?” Mr. M said. “She knows they’re her brothers and sisters. You know, I always say that two dogs are easier than one.”