Page 32 of When I Accidentally Summoned a Demon

Thankfully, most of this happened before Rick. Sometimes, I wonder if he married me because he knew my finances would be joined with us as the church dictated.

And if it weren’t for three years of my ex quietly helping himself to my accounts to cover gambling debts I didn’t know existed, while funneling the rest into alcoholism, I wouldn’t still be looking at a stack of bills every month.

Valefar spends the first twenty minutes standing very close to me and watching everything I do. When I explain what a customer is looking for, like a crystal for grief, a tincture for sleep, a candle for protection, he listens. I can tell he is filing everything away.

When the shop starts filling, and I move to the coffee bar, he follows at a careful distance. He watches me pull shots with the expression he usually reserves for small revelations.

“You make art in the cups,” he remarks.

I glance at the rosette I’ve just etched into the foam of a lavender latte. “Latte art, yeah.”

He considers this. “In Hell, beverages are not customarily decorated.”

“Noted,” I say with a smile and slide the cup across the bar.

“Is it another social custom?” he wonders.

I shrug. “More of a professional courtesy and a creative expression of courteousness.”

I put him to work carrying trays. He is extraordinary. He moves through the narrow coffee bar space, completely aware of his surroundings, which should not be possible in someone that large. He balances a full-service tray in one hand without a single wobble, ducking precisely to clear the pendant lights. Three separate people at tables stare at him the way people stare at solar eclipses—slack-jawed, forgetting how rude it is to stare so long.

By noon, a woman at the window table has asked him twice if he’d like to sit down, her hands fiddling with her hair in a strategic and flirtatious deployment. Two of my Thursday regulars—men who come in for the cold brew and each other’s company—manage to engage him in a conversation about the sweater, which somehow ends with one of them writing his number on a napkin.

My heart burns with…possession. Perhaps not jealousy. But the possessiveness is undeniable.

Valefar eyes the napkin, completely baffled but courteous. He says thank you. But he returns the napkin gently to the table. He comes back to my end of the bar.

“You were right,” he says.

“About?”

“The falling all over.” He picks up the next tray. “I would prefer it remain metaphorical.”

I bite back the smile. “Good answer, Big Guy.”

* * *

My extremely Catholic mother arrives at a quarter after six. Right on schedule.

Ugh.

She always comes in through the coffee bar entrance. She has never once, in six years of this shop existing, crossed the threshold into the main retail space. Not once.

The herbs make her nervous. The crystals make her nervous. The ritual candles make her extremely nervous, and she once asked me, with genuine concern, if I was “doing anything with goats.” I told her no. I was not doing anything with goats. She seemed only partially satisfied.

Though I have, more recently, been doing something with horns. Someone.

Today she’s in a lavender cardigan and a look I recognize from childhood—one that means she has a thing to say and has been mentally rehearsing it since breakfast.

She orders her usual herbal tea. I make it. We exchange the usual pleasantries, which take approximately forty-five seconds. Then:

“We should talk about Mass this Sunday.” She wraps her hands around her mug. “Father Martin has a beautiful new choir⁠—”

“Thanks, Mom. Not my thing.”

“Vesper—”

“Still not my thing. Moving on.” I turn back to the nearby counter.