A twist of demon cocktai.., p.1
A Twist of Demon: Cocktails in Hell, page 1
a twist of demon
Cocktails in Hell
S.E. Babin
Copyright © 2023 by S.E. Babin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
*Please direct all rights inquiries to authorsebabin@sebabin.com
*If you find a typo, please send it to the same email. We’re all human (or at least we were, but I definitely still am. I think.)
For the pirates who battled stormy seas and krakens and scurvy but still chose the open seas. Arrrr.
contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Violet Returns in late June!
Also by S.E. Babin
About the Author
chapter one
A tentacle rested on the bar, shimmering blue and green against the soft fairy lights I’d commissioned months ago from a woman named Ariel. Cash was rarely king around here, so as a trade for her services, she sent in a large shift of fairies three times a week who provided a stunning, multi-colored, and shimmering ambiance for the bar, and I let them hang around and lounge after their shift, feeding and getting drunk off my patron’s emotions. It saved Ariel money because fairies ate like a high school football team, while giving my bar an ethereal and otherworldly appearance I didn’t have to shell out my hard-earned cash for. Two of my favorites–Keelie and Olive–grimaced down at the appendage and gave me a look. I shrugged and continued wiping down the bar. They weren’t here to offer an opinion, but even I didn’t love the slime currently dripping onto the highly polished oak. There weren’t enough washcloths in the world to deal with octopus drip, and even with as much as I’d seen, slime always gave me the heebers.
“Dave?” I probed gently.
The snoring octopus shifter didn’t budge.
I wasn’t anti-tentacle or anything, just anti-tentacle on top of my bar.
Hell only knew where those things had been. I once read a few passages of octopi erotica once after someone left a copy behind, and all I could think when I finished was eww and gross, and oh my gods, do not touch me with any slimy appendages.
Dave usually didn’t have his tentacles out. As patrons went, he was one of the better ones, so something must have happened for him to be passed out at my bar this early with his goodies showing.
“Dave?” I probed again, moving closer. “I’m going to need you to put that thing away.”
He shifted, a long, thin strand of drooling falling from his mouth. I cringed and made a mental note to ensure the mop water was less water and more Fabuloso tonight.
Olive and Keelie giggled above me, a high-pitched tinkling that sounded more like wind chimes than laughter. They didn’t laugh often, but when they did, it always made me happy.
Such was the power of the tiny fae. Adorable, cozy, and deadly if you pissed them off.
Exactly what I needed around here, considering the clientele I catered to.
Swan Noveltinis sat between a tourist voodoo shop called Voodoo 4 U, the kind with plastic shrunken heads and fancy smell good candles with handwritten script spells and labels like To Get Your Man’s Head Right or, my personal favorite, Girl Boss Monday through Friday. If people only knew what authentic voodoo looked like, they’d probably keep a wide berth around even the hint of it. The owner, a frightening woman named Bella, kept all the good stuff in the back, and you had to know the password to see it.
I’d met Bella once, made a quip about Twilight, and asked whether she regretted her choice of Edward versus Jacob. As payback for that stupid little joke, Belle retaliated, and my underwear left me crab-walking and red-assed for a week. Now I kept any witty quips to myself when it came to her.
The other place was a little less dark, though the owner kept to himself. I rarely saw more than a glimpse of him, and when I did it wasn’t for more than a second at a time. Virtuous Vixens was a cute little shop with fairy lights twinkling in the windows and an ever-changing display of overpriced boutique clothing. I’d never gone in. My style consisted of the sniff test and whatever detergent was on sale that month. Boutique screamed dry cleaning, and my place barely paid the bills.
I hoped that would change soon. When I decided to open a potion and bookshop smack in the middle of the New Orleans’ nightlife, I thought I might get laughed out of the place, but so far, it’s turned into a fun, novelty place people stumbled into on a regular basis. I used the word people lightly. There were few humans here, and the ones who found their way here had no idea they were sitting with many things that could swallow them in a single bite.
Many, many years ago when New Orleans became a Mecca for things that went bump in the night, a powerful sorceress put a glamour over the entire city, or so the story goes, allowing any beast or magician who wanted to live here the ability to walk around without being recognized as other, except by their paranormal kin. It turned out to be surprisingly handy, though I still freaked out a little when I saw an unwitting human trying to flirt with a vampire, having no idea her chosen paramour could drain her dry in less than a minute.
Even though it was noisy as hell all around us, Dave was still lost in beauty sleep.
“Dave!” I said one more time, a snap in my voice not present before. When he failed to stir again, I sent a helpless look over to my one and only other bartender, a massive dude named Landry. He was a gifted bartender, and I still had no idea why he worked here for the wages I could pay him. I asked him once, and his look had me slinking off to do something else. Quickly.
Landry, slinging drinks at the other end of the bar, slid a confidence potion disguised as a cosmo over to a young woman with small horns curling above her forehead. After he slid the payment into the register, he unslung the towel from his shoulders, twisted it by swinging it around between his hands, then snapped it right at Dave’s forehead.
I winced at the loud cracking sound, but Dave jerked awake, eyes wide, and a red stinging welt forming quickly on his face.
“Wha–?” he said, gaze whipping around. Landry gave him a dead look before nodding to me and walking back to his end of the bar.
I pointed. Dave’s brow furrowed before all the cylinders started firing, then gasped and jerked his tentacles back, tucking them wherever those slime-filled appendages went when not actively being used. Color bloomed across his cheeks. “Sorry, Violet,” he murmured. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
Kellie and Olive sighed in relief and re-situated themselves among their brethren, bringing the glow back up from cool to warm. I gave them a thumbs up and focused on Dave. “You gotta keep those things in, Dave. It disturbs the populace.”
He gave me a sheepish smile. “Sorry again. Work has been a real bear and with the upcoming coronation, the outgoing queen is working us like dogs. Sleep has been hard to come by.” Dave would never be considered handsome. Odd, yes. Handsome, nope. The only handsome creatures coming from the sea were royalty, which I avoided like the plague. I once caught sight of one of the queen’s sons. Dude looked like Jason Momoa and Ryan Gosling had a baby, and the urge to take a bite out of him had me heading the opposite direction in a hurry. If I’d been this good for this long, hormones weren’t going to be the thing that did me in.
“First one is on the house,” I said, pushing the menu over to him. “What are you having?” Dave hadn’t been at the bar for five minutes before he fell deep into slumber. I wasn’t without empathy. The queen of the Underseas was known for being quite the taskmaster. I wouldn’t know. I’d never met her. One thing I knew how to do was stay far away from anyone powerful enough to know my parents. I stayed firmly in the middle, trapped between the lower class paranorms and those who had just enough power to defend themselves and worked a regular 9 to 5.
Dave’s bulging eyes skimmed down the menu before landing on the drink he always ordered. “Number twenty.” He pushed the menu away.
The Hydration Special. It never failed to crack me up every time he ordered it. Dave lived under water, in the murky body of water known as Lake Pontchartrain. I wouldn’t even dip my toes in it, much less call it home. Granted, it’s cleaner than it used to be, but by no means would I ever consider it pristine. Shaking my head, I got to work on Dave’s drink. This one wasn’t magical, merely a blend of fresh spring water, mint, and a raspberry-flavored hydration pack. It had to taste better than the water he was used to. His eyes lit up when I passed it over, and a smile curled my lips. What a strange little weirdo.
Tonight was relatively slow. The middle of the week wasn’t known for being all that rowdy, especially outside of the holiday season. Dave sipped happily on his drink, while Keelie and the other fairies whispered among themselves, their swaying skirts a hypnotic wave over the top of us. Two other paranorms sat huddled together in the corner by one of the few windows. They were too far away to
On the other side of the bar where Landry served sat a few others. All regulars and they came here for Landry, not for me. I was lucky to get a hello if I happened to pass by. If they came in and saw he wasn’t working, they’d grunt unhappily and head right back out the door. Maybe they thought I’d poison their drinks or something. I’d asked Landry about it once, and he’d merely shrugged and said maybe he made better drinks than me.
Lies. All lies. Landry wasn’t human, but that’s all I knew about him. His energy field was an odd mix of pink and purple interspersed with bright royal blue, and he was grumpy. Like all the time. He usually communicated in grunts and monosyllables, but he got the job done, and the customers were happy. The best thing about him was he never bitched about the pay I could barely afford, so he was employee of the month every month material. It didn’t hurt he was drop-dead gorgeous, either. Pretty and not all that concerned about money? Part of me initially wondered if he was a criminal, but an extremely thorough background cleared him. Still suspicious, but I couldn’t say much. I was hiding just as much as him. Probably more.
The only negative about him was Landry couldn’t make the drinks the same because he wasn’t like me. From what I could tell, our magic had no similarities, which forced him to use premade potions I came in early to make each morning. He had to be better at the mundane mixing than I was, or his regulars were just extremely loyal. Or they hated me more than they liked him. Or they just wanted to ogle him for a few hours. I couldn’t blame them.
As long as they paid their tabs, I didn’t care.
The blonde came in every Wednesday and Friday, sometimes with a man who wore an odd bowler hat. She was tall, lean, and stunning, all things I could never claim. I was short, curvy, and freckled. And most of the time, a little on the grumpy side. She smiled only for Landry but never acted inappropriately toward him. The man ordered the same drink every single time. A simple whiskey on the rocks, no frills, no potions. The woman’s ordering was all over the place. Both paranorms. I’d never seen the man’s type of energy field before, but I suspected the woman was a succubus. Hers was similar to a few I’d met over the years. As long as she didn’t munch on the patrons, she was welcome. Only the fairies were allowed to munch a little and that’s because we had a contract.
I finished wiping down the bar and slung the towel over my shoulder. Half an hour until closing time. The thought of soaking in my old copper tub sent a tingle down my spine. It came with the old house I’d purchased a few years ago, and I had it restored until it gleamed. The old owners thought it wasn’t worth anything, but I wasn’t about to throw out a beauty like that. Now it sat in my tiny bathroom right underneath the stained-glass window I’d rescued from a damaged church after a tropical storm blew through.
That tub and I had good times together. A little sigh escaped me as I checked the clock again, only to see not even a minute had passed. I brushed past Landry on my way to the back to make sure everything was ready for closing. My eyes locked with the blonde. A hard expression locked on her face as she stared. I blinked, wondering what I’d ever done to her before her gaze flicked away and landed on my bartender again. Weird. Shrugging it off, I pushed through the doors to the back and headed over to the potion cabinet to make sure everything was secure.
This area wasn’t the prettiest, but it did the job. Concrete gray floors kept the temperature several degrees cooler. I kept only stainless steel and glass worktables because of the ingredients I dealt with and used only stainless tools. A massive cabinet loomed in the back. If you stood far enough away, you’d think it was merely a storage cabinet. The second you moved to within five feet, the runes inscribed on the door gave off a get away from me vibe most people couldn’t stand. Landry always gave the cabinet a wide berth, a faint sneer of distaste curling his lips every time he had to go back here to collect anything from the massive walk-in fridge a few feet to the right. There was no need for a lock, at least of the mundane kind. If the rune combination didn’t do the trick, the magical biometric system would. And if some evil genius managed to bypass that one, they’d never get past the prick of blood required to access it.
As far as I knew, there’d never been another of me, not exactly, and there sure as hell wouldn’t be one in the future. Some kids overlooked the curse of being one of a kind. It never made me feel special or wanted. All it did was ruin my life. Every single day I paid the price of my parents’ sins, forcing me to live a life I never wanted. It wasn’t an awful life. I’d be lying if I said that, but it wasn’t the life I ever wanted to live. There was 75% of me I could never admit to. I could never access my full potential, never live the live I might have been destined to. The moment I tried, I’d die horribly.
My foster father, Az, had been very clear about it my entire life. If I ever accessed the parts of myself he’d hidden deep inside, I wouldn’t live to see the morning. Imagine me as a teenager, raging with hormones and unreleased magic, trying to control my urge for freedom. I owed my dad a never-ending supply of beer and apologies.
Since the go away magic was keyed to me, I stepped right through and laid my hand against the outer stainless-steel coating of the cabinet. Warmth sank in, followed by freezing cold, as it took my measure. Once satisfied, the door clicked open and the smell of herbs and dirt wafted out. A content sigh escaped me as I pulled it all the way open, smiling at the gnarled ancient wood and the tiny fairy lights of the mundane variety, blinking softly over all the tools of my trade. I’d rather store all my supplies in wood, but a massive carved cabinet made from a long-extinct tree might have raised some eyebrows with the health inspectors, so I had to disguise it from the outside.
It had a glamour I could activate when necessary, but I only used it when I was forced to. I suspected the cabinet had an odd form of sentience as well. So far, I hadn’t been able to prove it, but there’d been a few times when the glamour activated on its own, and when I’d turned, someone had stepped into the employee’s area when they weren’t supposed to be there. It felt like the cabinet had become a guardian of the tools inside. Over the many years I’d walked this earth, I’d gathered ancient, sometimes extinct herbs, spices, ingredients, liquids, fungi, spores, and even parts of animals humans had never heard of to aid me in my work. I used only glass to store them, though I was even picky about that. It had to be thick-walled glass, and if something was light-sensitive, the glass also had to be amber.
When I’d lived in other countries, I had more freedom and kept a menagerie of live animals who provided me with feathers or fur or the occasional egg if they felt like being generous. Today so many people had cell phones, I couldn’t chance being caught on a cell phone video working with animals no one had ever seen in nature before.
This had to be enough for me. My life depended on it.
I took care of as many closing chores as I could. Landry would shut the bar down and clean up there, leaving me to finish everything back here. We didn’t sell food yet, something I hoped to remedy over the next few months. Right now it was only peanuts and Chex mix, poured right from the bag into the bowl. I had a popcorn machine for the longest time until a rowdy group of shifters took it out when I made the mistake of hiring a rock band on a full moon and allowing werewolves into the bar.
Some of the regulars were still pissed about it.
I dumped the mop water out into the sink and rinsed the rest of the grey water out of the bucket before tucking it and the mop back into the storage closet. The noise outside had filtered to only the sound of Landry clinking glasses together as he put things away. I grabbed my purse and cardigan, shrugging it on while also double checking to ensure I had my belt on. Forgetting it could mean the difference between life and death, so I never forgot. I also made sure I never forgot the potions inside. My hands brushed over the ancient, well-oiled leather, and my nails tapped against a few of the glass bottles. Satisfied, I pulled my long red hair out from underneath my sweater and slung my purse on bandolier style, patting it as it settled against my hip.
