The Devil’s Always in the Details
Celeste stood in the same spot without so much as a flicker of emotion on her ragged face. Anyone who saw her right now wouldn’t think she was worked up at all, but then that person wouldn’t have known her very well. She was about as worked up as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs as her daddy used to say.
Celeste never thought in a million years she’d lose him. Never thought that anyone would be able to come in and drive a wedge between them – it was their final promise to each other. And now here was her great grand niece, doing just that.
For the first time in her exceptionally long life Celeste was scared that Dante would actually get in the way of her task. He could never leave her, but keeping her from keeping her end of her agreement with Asher was tantamount to stabbing her in the heart. Actually, it was worse seeing as how the second she died she would become a new plaything for Asher in the deepest bowels of hell. That was part of the deal – a deal she’d willingly agreed to all because of him in the first place.
Celeste walked over to her favorite shelf. There wasn’t much on it except for an old photo. No one would ever recognize the pretty young girl in it but the startling handsome boy bore an eerie resemblance to the young man downstairs manning her shop floor.
She gazed at the old black and white photograph. Actually, since modern photography was still a ways off it was really a daguerreotype. It was taken the first year they’d met.
She’d met Dante the summer she turned fourteen, and it was love at first sight. Well, at least it had been for her. The second her eyes fell on him at the railway station, she knew he was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with. He was something different - something special. When he smiled at her and found his way to their train car, she knew he knew it too.
It didn’t take long for her parents to fall under his spell. By the end of their voyage, her father had hired him as a stable hand, even though he’d sold all their horses paying for their train passage. Still, if anyone could make it out west, it was her father. He’d been one of the best stable managers and horse trainers in five states. When he decided to move the family westward, he’d used every penny he’d earned to pay for their tickets and have a little left over to start up his own ranch. It wasn’t much, but he always said all a man needed to succeed was two strong hands, the good Lord’s blessing and the courage to get back in the saddle when you got knocked off your horse.
Within two years he’d had his own dream ranch, along with some of the best horse stock just north of the Rio Grande. Dante was a considerable help since he had a good way with beasts and seemed to know what he was doing right from the start. Before long he was just another part of the family; always the first up along with her father, always the last to go down so he could make time for her. Her parents never discouraged the time they’d spent together, so long as all the work on the ranch came first and nothing improper went on. Dante honored both.
As Celeste grew up, he made it a point to teach her a great variety of things whenever they were alone: how to look past the surface of things to the world just beneath our own. He taught her how to interact and manipulate it. He was also the first one to show her how to wield the magic she’d been born with but was too afraid to ever use. She’d never told anyone about what she could do – not even her own parents, but Dante had known. She was pretty sure he’d known since the day he saw her at the rail station.
She was no fool, not even back then. Celeste knew he’d thought to use her for his own personal gain. But it hadn't taken her long to figure out that he was also very lonely, and something about spending time with her and her family eased that loneliness inside him just a bit. Pretty soon he’d fallen for her too and all was as it should be.
Until the day she realized she would die and he never would.
Dante hadn't meant to admit his immortality to her. She knew it the second he realized what he'd said; the look in his eyes had spoken of ageless grief and sorrow. Celeste was just one more soul in a long line of lost friends. He had meant to keep her from that pain, but it was as impossible to prevent as the sunrise.
That’s when she started setting her plan in motion. Celeste knew there were ways to delay death and she wanted to spend as much as possible with Dante. She didn’t care how she did it, all that mattered was they had more time together – as much time as she could get. She didn’t tell Dante anything about her plan; she simply went looking for ways to make it possible on her own. She looked in all manner of archaic books, spoke with some of Dante’s “special” contacts, she even started hunting out demonologists and those that dabbled in the dark arts. They were an odd crowd, but they had their uses.
It wasn’t too long after meeting some of these people that she first met Asher. He was the man with the perfect solution to her problem. He told her what he could do for her, what he would expect in return. She wasn’t keen on everything but that hardly mattered. For Dante she would have done anything, given up everything…and so she had.
She signed on with Asher and began gathering her seven souls each year on her twenty-second birthday. What she’d been ignorant to know at the time was that when making a deal with the devil one had to be awfully specific. She had not specified that along with her immortality she’d wanted to remain the same age. By the time she figured her arrangement didn’t include such a caveat it was far too late. She was given immortality, but she would age every year she lived. So while Dante remained the same, a youthful twenty-something, she did not.
As each new line and wrinkle appeared on her face her insecurity grew. The day someone mistook Dante for her son was the last day she’d ever felt bad about her job. In the beginning she hadn’t liked doing it all that much. Truth be told, sometimes she felt kind of sorry for the souls that found their way into Asher’s collection. But on the day when she’d been humiliated in front of half the town, the last shred of her conscience, of what truly made her human had died.
She threw herself into meeting Asher’s quota with a newfound frenzy. First she went after all those hateful women that laughed and called her all sorts of names behind her back. She knew what they talked about whenever they saw Dante hanging around her store. The special sort of disgust these women reserved for her simply because she had a handsome young man around all the time. Those women were always the first to go. Wherever they went, whatever new town they set up shop in, those were the souls she went after with a dogged determination.
It helped considerably that Celeste knew how to talk to these women, how to find out what they most desired, what they coveted and lusted after above all else. They called her an old whore, but it was these very same women that wanted their best friend’s husbands, or who coveted their own neighbor's son. Their hypocrisy was unfathomable – their greed almost insatiable. While some lusted after younger men, others just wanted the fanciest house in town, or wanted to be prettiest of them all. It didn’t matter; she had something for each of them.
And she sold them all with such satisfaction she’d hardly called those years of her life work.
Dante wasn’t happy with her arrangement with Asher, but he’d said little over the years. Imagine her surprise then when she caught him trying to leave? That was the day Celeste knew she had to tell him everything, tell him that everything she’d done, she’d done for him. After she’d bared her soul he’d laughed in her face.
Beyond hurt and despair she called on Asher once more.
This second time around she’d been much better prepared. Her arrangement left her a lot of leeway but also kept Dante by her side for as long as she lived. He wouldn’t be going anywhere. She was his to command so long as she lived, and she didn’t plan on dying anytime soon. When she was fourteen he’d promised he’d never leave her – all she did was ensure he’d always honor his commitment to her.
The day he’d found himself bound to her was a day she’d never forget. Even now, the utter fury sent little goose pimples up and down her arm. But it was done, and there was nothing he could do about it.
As the years went by, Dante grew more and more distant, until he stopped speaking almost altogether, but it hardly mattered. Just knowing he was there, and not going anywhere was enough. She’d grown too old for anything but getting the year’s collection in when she had to and enjoying the time she spent among her treasures when she was done. Sometimes she’d have one or two to add to her own private stock – most years she didn’t.
But now, for the first time in over a century, he’d shown a flicker of interest in someone else – someone besides himself. What sort of magic did Eliza wield that she could bring Dante around in such a fashion?
She’d known that girl was trouble the second she’d laid eyes on her. She was unassuming, clumsy, and too smart for her own good. She didn’t have the body or the face that attracted all sorts of attention. At her age, her momma had been an old pro at using her assets to get whatever she wanted from people. Such dependency on her looks made her weak, an easy target. But Eliza didn’t have such assets to work with, which meant she was already smarter by half.
And yet, even without her momma’s wiles, she still managed to get the attention of that Crawford boy and get under Dante’s skin in hardly any time at all. Maybe the girl had some other kind of power or hold Celeste wasn’t aware of. It was possible some sort of energy had slipped beneath Celeste’s own radar, especially considering her power was getting more and more unreliable lately.
Whatever the reason, she was going to have to do something about her niece. There was no way she was going to let that idiot girl ruin everything for her now. Her set was almost complete, Asher would be coming to collect in less than forty-eight hours, and Dante was still hers to command. She put the old daguerreotype down and picked up a small jewelry box. It was one she only opened during times of emergencies, or whenever she had to get rid of a pest; today certainly counted seemed to count as a pest eliminating day.
Thinking about Eliza downstairs, the last shred of Celeste’s humanity, the lone single thread that kept her from true madness, finally and effectively snapped in two.
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Song Credit: Evanescence - Sweet Sacrifice
Image: Young Celeste Devillier