The Devil's Details - Ch. 11 (alpha)

Chapter Eleven

Tabitha had been reviewing the information on her next targets, trying to make her approach seem as natural as possible, but the two targets were so heavily intertwined that it seemed like she needed to be ready for the pair of them simultaneously, and to get entangled with whichever of the two presented the first opportunity. They were intimately intertwined, being that they were married, and that wasn’t even the beginning of the problems the two women presented.

The two women were named Catalina and Prisha, and they had some similarities but also a very large collection of differences. Looking at the reports together made her head hurt, so she resolved to consider the women separately, as individuals, before looking at how they overlapped and how that could be used to her advantage.

First, there was Prisha Singh, the doctor, although that was never anyone’s first impression when they looked at her. She looked of Indian descent, although her hair was a stark platinum blonde that hung down almost to her waist, something that everyone assumed had to be a very expensive dye job, but was completely natural, at least according to Veronica. She was usually dressed in leather pants, a t-shirt usually promoting some metal band (varying from the classics like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden to more modern metal bands like Ghost and Sleep Token) and a leather jacket on over it. She was usually smoking, and often drinking. She rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle that was certainly far too loud to ever be considered subtle, and despite the fact that she’d apparently being cited for it a couple of times, rarely wore her helmet, unless she had a passenger on back or was driving through areas known to be swarming with traffic cops.

Over the last few months, she’d gone bungee jumping, sky diving and freehand mountain climbing, and that was just in the stuff they had found out about in their quick cursory glance. The woman’s Instagram account practically screamed “I’m suicidal and I’m loving it!” It wasn’t like the woman had a death wish, exactly, but more than she seemed convinced of her own invulnerability, like she was daring some sort of higher cosmic power to kill her, like she believed it was impossible.

Prisha was a thrillseeker of the highest order, and she was living her life like there was no chance of her getting dealt a losing hand.

What was most surprising about Prisha, however, was her profession. She wasn’t an X-games athlete, a rock star, a high-profile artist or star of screen or stage – she was an emergency room doctor. Her entire profession was tending to those who had injured themselves living the very sort of lifestyle she was constantly engaged in. Those in her ER were always a little bit shocked that she had successfully made it through to another shift, as if they had expected her to come in between shifts, not to tend to patients, but to be a patient.

And yet, everyone who worked in her ER seemed to like her a great deal, saying she was warm and caring toward other nurses and doctors, and that she never condescended to patients for their behavior that had landed them in emergency care.

Emily and Kelly were taking turns keeping tabs on Prisha, and both of them had complained at exactly how fast the woman zipped about town on her motorbike. Originally they’d been planning on keeping tabs on her in tandem, but instead had defaulted to simply not following her in between locations but meeting her where she was going.

“This woman drives like a bat out of hell, Mistress, and that’s me saying this,” Kelly told her over the phone. “Even with the prep for all of the Day of the Dead stuff that’s going on tomorrow, she’s still driving like she stole that bike.”

“And yet, she didn’t hit anything?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Kelly said.

“And her staff says she does this all the time,” Emily chimed in on the channel. “They say she finds it fun to play in traffic, to dance on the edge of chaos any chance she gets. They were worried at first, but she’s been doing it long enough now that they’ve mostly just written it off as her showboating, like she’s got some guardian angel looking out for her. If she believes she can’t be killed, they supposed they might as well just believe her and go along with it until proven otherwise.”

“So, what, they think she’s supernaturally lucky?”

“Something like that,” Emily said. “They figure either she’ll keep getting away with it, or she’ll show up to work one day as a patient and not as a doctor.”

“Sounds like she’s going to be a wild one to pin down,” Veronica said to Tabitha. “And that’s to say nothing about the other one.”

The two women who were next on her target list, since they were married, were semi-interchangeable in who they approached first, and as chaotic as that made things, it did offer them a lot more possibilities in how to introduce themselves. But if the thrill seeker adrenaline junkie ER doctor seemed like a tough nut to crack, the alternative was far worse.

The doctor’s wife.

Catalina Delgado Castillo wasn’t exactly the most approachable of women, nor the kind of woman that you wanted to bother with idle chit chat. She’d immigrated from Spain in 2008 with little more than the change in her pocket, fleeing from the macro-economic crash that ravaged that country’s financial sector. Nearly everything and everyone Catalina had known had lost everything, and she’d seen the writing of the fall on the wall, so she’d fled with what she could carry and made her way to America, where she’d taken what little money she’d brought with her and invested in a restaurant, something that seemed like a high-risk, low-reward gamble.

Instead, ExArb (which was a shortened version of Exuberante Arboleda, or the lush grove) had been the talk of the town as soon as it opened. Off the success of that, she’d opened El Derribo (or The Throwdown), a high-end bar that only catered to extremely well-vetted clientele and yet also somehow looked like the darkest, dingiest dive bar ever.

From there, she was off to the races.

In only a few years, Catalina had gone from literal rags to riches and built a real estate empire across the Big Apple. These days, she had over thirty businesses, some of them high end eateries like ExArb, but she was just as comfortable with her much seedier businesses, like Sunset Paradise, a strip club that had a reputation of also being one of the most particular brothels in town. If what you wanted leaned towards the exotic, unusual or extremely particular, Sunset Paradise could deliver, if you could deliver the cash. Catalina had more than her fair share of police in her back pocket, and no matter what the more straight and narrow members of the force tried to throw at her, nothing seemed to stick.

No amount of dirt clung to Catalina.

Veronica had spent more than a little bit of time trying to figure out where the two paths had overlapped, where they’d connected and met up for the first time, but whatever meet cute the daredevil doctor and the crime boss real estate mogul had, it wasn’t something that was casually talked about.

Tabitha had deployed Charlie and Veronica after Catalina, hoping a more refined touch might glean her a bit more information than was readily available. That had been something of a bust as well, with both women reporting that Catalina was nearly a ghost when it came to moving around her empire, traveling incognito on the best of days. If Prisha moved loud and fast, Catalina moved quick and quiet. Neither woman spent a lot of time outside of their closed off empires.

“Her own people don’t entirely know how she gets from one spot to the other, Mistress,” Charlie said to her. “They know that she does it, but how? There’s rumors that maybe she’s got a series of underground tunnels that connect all her joints together, but how the hell would she get something like that built, much less keep it secret? Yeah, her empire’s mostly close together, but still, you’re talking about a lot of hidden real estate that I can’t imagine her getting built secretly.”

“She has a driver, doesn’t she?”

“She does, but the driver drops her off at one location at the beginning of the evening and then picks her up at an entirely different one at the end of her night,” Charlie sighed. “We’re assuming she calls her driver at some point in the night to tell her where to pick her up, but it’s also possible that’s scheduled in advance.”

“It’s also possible her own staff don’t recognize her some of the time, though, Mistress,” Veronica added, spreading out a wide collection of 8”x10” photos across the massive table. “You can see why?”

“Good lord, how often does this woman change her hair? Or her style? She’s practically unrecognizable between all these photos,” Tabitha said, glancing through the images. “Here she’s a blonde. Here she’s a brunette. Here she’s… is that green hair?”

“Yeah, Emily got a little jealous, saying she wasn’t sure how Catalina could get her hair that vibrant green,” Veronica said. “And this is all just within the span of a single week. She does tend to feature these open back tops, though, so she can show off all that needlework she’s had done back there.”

“You recognize any of this iconography?” Tabitha asked her lieutenant. “It’s a very Japanese sumi-e style of line work but I don’t recognize the subject matter, at least not at this distance.”

“You’ll get a kick out of this, Mistress,” Veronica said, laying down an additional photo, this one a close up shot of the woman’s bare back, allowing her to see the details. “It’s a detailed depiction of the revolt in Heaven, the angels turning into demons, the soldiers of light struggling to push out the forces of darkness back through the gates.”

“That’s quite a remarkable amount of detail,” Tabitha said, looking closely at it. “It must’ve taken forever to get all of this work done. I mean, the black ink alone has got to be three or four sessions, not to mention how long getting all these colors must’ve been. And the fine shading and cross hatching really makes a lot of this pop.”

“You like how detailed the faces are, Mistress?”

“I very much do! They’re so lifelike, it almost… seems…”

“You’re seeing it now too, aren’t you?”

“That… that can’t be…”

“And yet, who are you going to believe, common sense or your own lying eyes?”

“That’s my mother’s face right there on her back. Leading the charge of the angels in revolt. I thought you said she changed her appearance often.”

“She does, Mistress,” Tabitha replied. “She’s only had this face for the last forty or fifty years.”

“And how old is this tattoo?”

“Ten years or so, based on the amount of fading?”

“Which means whoever did this tattoo knows my mother, knows her true identity and is still in semi-recent contact with her,” Tabitha said. “I know you aren’t my mother’s keeper, Roni, but this has to limit down the possibilities of who it might be.”

“I had the same line of thought, Mistress, and I know of only one person who is here in New York City capable of such work, although he demands a high price for his skills.”

“Who is it?”

“The Flesh Connoisseur. He’s the only one who matched all the criteria, and he has had a shop down in Brooklyn for the last two decades.”

“Human?”

“He’s a member of the Elite, so mostly human, but unaging nonetheless,” Veronica said to her. “Like the Ostrogoth you met a few weeks ago.”

“The greatest living tattoo artist?”

“Exactly,” the demoness confirmed. “He’s several hundred years old. Started out life as a pirate before he found his skill decorating human flesh. He’s done many prestigious tattoos, knows hundreds of different techniques and styles, but is very selective about whom he works for, and what he’ll accept in payment. Considering this is his work, Catalina must’ve made him a very compelling offer, especially considering the size of the piece.”

“You know where his studio is?”

“I do, Mistress,” Roni said to her.

“Then I think we should pay him a visit, don’t you?”

“Absolutely, Mistress.”

Tabitha called everyone back to join her for their little excursion. Kelly and Emily were mostly glad to be off watch for Prisha, the exhaustion of having to stay on her tail the entire time catching up to them. She informed them that this would only be a fact-finding mission, and was likely to not be too exciting, but her girls were just too eager to help out.

The man’s shop was off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, near a place called “Zap Lube,” whose sign promised a 10-minute oil change. All the buildings were fairly heavily covered in graffiti and had a very desolate area kind of feel to it. Only some of the streetlights were lit up, and about half of those that were constantly flickered, as if they were threatening to give way at the least opportune moment. There was a steel rolldown shutter beneath a sign that read “Two Riders Approaching Parlor of Tattoos” with a camera pointed down from high above and a metal callbox that Veronica made her way over to push the button on, a low-pitched buzzing echoed from the box and somewhere deep inside of the stone fortress of a building.

“I don’t do group sessions and I certainly don’t do Girl Scouts, especially not after the night I’ve had, so unless you’ve got something more compelling to talk about, piss off,” a grumbly male voice said, the intercom distorting his voice into something resembling Tom Waits.

Then, just before the man on the other end had let off the push-to-talk button, a second voice spoke from a further distance away, this one much more controlling and fuller of bass. “Let them in,” he said. “I suspect they may be able to shine a light on why you’ve had such a poor evening.”

The intercom was silence for a few seconds, and then the metal shutter started rolling upwards slowly and loudly, a freight train of old but reliable machinery working to raise the heavy barrier up and out of the way. Most metal shutters were hand pulled, but apparently The Flesh Connoisseur had upgraded and made sure his place was a vault where he could feel safe. But as the shutters grew higher, Tabitha could see the front windows of the place had been recently smashed in, although the heavy steel bars that had been in front of the glass looked like they were mostly intact. That was until they turned to look at the door, or what had used to be the door, having been kicked in, metal bars and all, into somewhere deep inside of the tattoo parlor.

About half of the inside of the parlor had been demolished in some kind of fight that seemed recent, tables and chairs knocked over, mirrors shattered, books of tattoo designs scattered around the area, mostly intact but still tipped on their side or splayed open. Also, in the center of the room, there was a smoking crater, shaped in a vaguely human-sized hole. The smoke continued to linger although seemed to be in its last stages, as if whatever had been in the space was finally nearing total extinction.

Tabitha’s girls mostly stood behind her, as if they were gazing into a toxic clean up site, unwilling to step too far into the parlor as if they were afraid they might get contaminated by the smoke. There was something uneasy in the air that made everyone more than a little nervous. Veronica, however, stood proudly next to her Mistress, trying to assess the situation.

Off to one side of the room stood two men. The first was a large, almost shambling hulk of a man, built almost like a sumo wrestler but with western features instead of eastern. He was obese and swollen, and yet also seemed like he wasn’t the kind of person who would be easy to pick off in a fight. His skin was covered in ink, almost entirely from head to toe, some portions of his face still his original skin, a very British pale shade of white. The tattoos ranged in style from very old to extremely modern, from incredible simplistic to insanely detailed, which a few patches just done in complete blackout fashion, like maybe the man had decided it was time to start over in those sections. He had long brown stringy hair down to his shoulders that seemed like it had spent a lot of time beneath a hat and a beard that reached his collarbone, scraggly and patchy, a mixture of white, brown, blonde and red hair all sort of crisscrossing with one another. The man was dressed in a massive amount of flannel and denim. Perhaps in a nod to his pirate past, the man had HOLD tattooed across his right hand set of knuckles and FAST tattooed across his left.

The man standing next to him couldn’t have been more different, a tiny, scrawny almost scrapling of a younger man, dressed not all that differently, although every shade of flannel the smaller man had on was a shade of green. He was diminutive, but in a scrappy sort of way, slender yet muscular, without a single tattoo on his body. His hair was brown but mostly tucked beneath olive green knit cap beanie. His eyes were behind a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. He had neatly trimmed mutton chops and bore some sort of badge on his lapel, a silver shaped insignia of some kind. He looked like he was highly competent but also used to being questioned because of his age. He had one hand on his hip as he looked over Tabitha and her gaggle of women.

“Nephilim, hm?” the smaller man said. “Yeah, that tracks. I’m betting they’re here to talk about some old client of yours, George.”

“You think it’s connected?” The Flesh Connoisseur asked him.

“I think you’d be a fool not to think so.”

“Hmph.” He looked up and glared over at Tabitha. “Can’t say I’m fond of you bringing me trouble, but I’m also guessing it’s not your fault, at least directly. I’m George Westerbrook, more commonly known as The Flesh Connoisseur, and this is Thomas Clarke, Seventh Captain of the Wizard’s Green House, whom I called to bail my ass out when that thing broke into my shop.”

“Tommy, if you please. You’re here because…?”

“I’m Tabitha St. Cloud,” she replied. “I’m—”

“I know who you are, Miss St. Cloud,” Tommy said. “What sort of wizard would I be if I wasn’t aware of the Devil’s daughter being engaged in a game for her life in the heart of New York City?” He chuckled a little bit, reaching into his pocket to pull out some Carmex, spreading it on his lips. Tabitha could see the man’s hands were heavily calloused, used to doing heavy lifting for work, it seemed. “What brings you to my friend’s doorstep, so unfortunately timed near his attack.”

“How much do you know about the game I’m involved in, Mister Clarke?”

Tommy shrugged a little, moving to lean against a portion of the wall that seemed relatively undamaged as he made the small Carmex container disappear. He had a swagger to him that was both reassuring and unnerving all at once. “I know that your mother has set down some terms, and either you succeed and assume control of her nascent empire, or you fail and get destroyed in the process. Something about acquiring Nephilim, I’d wager, based on the small motley crew you’ve got tagging along with you.”

“Watch who you’re calling motley, kid, or I’ll kick your ass,” Kelly threatened.

Tommy frowned a little, as if a fly had crossed his path. “Keep them in check, Miss St. Cloud, or I’ll be forced to do it for you, and nobody wants that, not even me. I’ve barely had this job a few months, so the last thing I want is to be filling out incident reports justifying my use of force. But if it comes to that, know that I will be more than decisive in my actions.”

There was something about the way the small man spoke that made Tabitha a little nervous she was in over her head. This man was no Merlin, but he had a confidence well beyond his years, and she recognized that as the mark of someone incredibly comfortable in their abilities. If push came to shove, the man would not hesitate to use his skills with deadly precision and remarkable speed. “Easy, Kelly,” Tabitha said. “Let’s not go picking fights we don’t need to, alright?”

“If you say so, Mistress,” Kelly sighed.

“You’re right about acquiring Nephilim, Mr. Clarke,” Tabitha said. “I need to acquire seven Nephilim partners before my birthday in a few weeks’ time, and one of the Nephilim I have my eye on was a client of Mr. Westerbrook here some time ago. I was hoping to come and see what information I might glean from him about her, even if it was some time ago.”

“Mmmm,” Tommy said. “Looks like somebody very much didn’t want you to have that information, and they sent a barrow wight after my good friend George. And George called me to come save his ass, because I don’t trust anyone else to do enchantment tattoos on me still. George stands behind the quality of his work. That’s why he’s the best, and a member of The Elite.”

“Dare I ask what a barrow wight is?”

“Nasty bugger,” Tommy said. “Unaffiliated with the seven tribes, nor the heavenly or hellish hosts either. They’re something between a dead spirit that lost its way on the trip to the other side and a vortex of magical forces that went insane somewhere along the way. You don’t really hire them so much as give their scent to one and hope it’ll do the job you want it to.”

“Who’s the former client you want to know about, Miss St. Cloud?” George said. “Normally, I’m hesitant to discuss previous clients, but seeing as it’s possible this one nearly got me killed, well, I’m inclined to be a bit chattier, if you take my meaning.”

“Catalina Delgado Castillo,” Tabitha said. “This would’ve been about—”

“Nine years, seven months and fifteen days ago,” George said, finishing with remarkable specificity. “I have a photographic memory when it comes to clients and the work I’ve done for them. I remember the woman and the work in question. What do you want to know?”

“Was the artwork you did for her magical in nature?”

“Of course it bloody well was,” George grumbled, moving to sit down in one of the chairs. “It was a depiction of the revolution in Heaven, so yeah, a person doesn’t typically ask for that sort of thing without having some very specific layered spells they want to go in it. She brought in an outside consultant for the magicwork, said it was designed to keep her protected from angelic interference.”

“Who was the consultant?”

“Captain Bull of the Wizard’s Green House.”

“Someone you’d know?” Tabitha asked Tommy.

“Mmm,” he said with a wry grin. “I’d be happy to ask him about what kind of spellwork it was, except I can’t, on account of he’s dead and I’m his replacement.”

“Natural causes?” she asked optimistically.

Tommy shot her a dirty look. “No wizard worth a captainship dies of natural causes, Miss St. Cloud, but I’ll write that off as lack of knowledge instead of intentional slight. Captain Bull died containing a zombie invasion when an old relic went off when a couple of kids thought they were just playing with an old relic.”

“He wouldn’t have given you much in the way of details either, love,” George said. “He told me it was designed to make sure seraphimic activity couldn’t impact her, a sort of shield against angels. He knew she was a Nephilim and so he could understand the paranoia. It’s a complicated life the Nephilim live, always endangering the mortals around them.”

“How did you know what Lucifer’s face looked like? I’ve seen her recently, and you captured her likeness quite strikingly,” Tabitha said.

“I’ve… well, I’ve done some work for Lucifer before, and I figured if I was going to be putting a depiction of her on a Nephilim’s flesh, I could use her most recent likeness.”

“It was remarkable how excellent you were at capturing my mother’s essence. I recognized her immediately. Can you tell me anything about the woman,” Tabitha asked. “I mean, the Nephilim herself. The one who had the tattoo done. What did you learn about her? How did she pay?”

“She had a Castilian accent, and had recently arrived from Spain,” George said. “She’d brought with her a rather rare gem known colloquially as a Thief’s Heart, and she offered it in trade to me for the inkwork. She’d already bartered some other deal with Captain Bull before she arrived here.”

“What was she like?”

“She’s extremely confident, bold, daring,” George replied. “But she’s also got a soft side to her, a tendency to love a soft and romantic story. She asked me to tell her stories while I was working on her, considering it took almost three days of twelve hours a day work to get everything done, so Bull and I took turns spinning tales of our exploits over the centuries, keeping her excited about what we’d seen, what we’d done.” He paused for a moment. “She wants her life to mean something, so she descended into the world of crime, in inflict her will upon it, bend the arc of it and improve it, so she leaves it better than how she found it.”

Tabitha nodded. “That’s good. I can use that. I can work with that. I have one final question before you before we take our leave of you – do you also do piercings? I’ve taken to the idea of giving each of my partners paired nipple piercings, something I can use to track them, no matter where they are or where they go. I could use the services of you two to make such things yes?”

George grinned. “I’m an expert not only in ink work but in all sorts of modifications of the flesh. I could so such a thing, and it’s a small enough spell work for a Captain of any Wizard’s House. How would you pay us for our services?”

“If I fail, I’ll be dead and your work will die with you, so you’re gambling, because if I fail, I can pay you nothing, give you nothing,” Tabitha said, with intense confidence. “But when I succeed, I’m set to inherit quite a sizable portion of lands and other possessions in Hell, of which I can offer you something appropriate of equal or even greater value, which you can claim this time next month. So, you have to ask yourselves, gentlemen, is the gamble of a few hours of work worth the chance to be owed a favor by the Devil’s Daughter herself?”

“I’ll raise the stakes a bit then, Lucifer kin,” The Flesh Connoisseur said to her. “You’ll owe me a favor, and you let me put a bit of ink on you now. You can tell me what you’d like and where you’d like it, but allow me the freedom to stylize it how I would like to show of my skills upon the delicious canvas that is the Devil’s Daughter’s flesh.”

“How good is your demonic?” Tabitha asked with a smirk. “Could you give me something here,” she said, touching her mons through the skirt, “that has concealed in demonic script, ‘you are where you belong, on your knees before your queen’ if I asked?”

“My demonic is impeccable.”

“Then I accept your terms.”

“You have the time, Tommy boy?”

Tommy smirked and shrugged a little bit. “I can spare a few hours if you can, George.”

“Let me turn on the autoclave.