Hit and Nun Read online

  Today, as we sat outside on this warm day in late August, on my tiny deck located right off my bedroom in the guesthouse we rented from our friend Knuckles, I tried to help Jeff jog his memory. Knuckles remains one of the best things to happen to myself and my demon friend Coop since I’d left the convent. I inhaled the scents of his luscious garden and tried to set aside all the bad things that could happen if we didn’t check every box and focus on this mystery message from Hell.

  My eyes zoomed in on the last of the season’s beautiful blue and purple hydrangeas lining the cedar fencing, which Knuckles so lovingly tended, and I thought pleasant thoughts.

  Since we’d moved into the guesthouse behind Knuckles’s main house, and we’d opened Inkerbelle’s Tattoos and Piercings, things had become exponentially better.

  We’d found our home here in Cobbler Cove, Oregon. We had a semblance of normalcy these days. We had friends. We had a very small profit in just under a month (mostly thanks to Knuckles and his grizzled tattoo artist friend, Goose).

  We were thriving both mentally and physically—all of us, even Livingston, as much as he hated to admit it. We did normal things like have dinner at seven every night, unless the shop was open late. We watched television with Knuckles, and sometimes Higgs and Jeff—all piled together on the couch here in the guesthouse with popcorn or the snack du jour.

  We went for long walks with Jeff and Higgs when the sun began to set and it was cool enough. We laughed. We talked. We joked. And then we got back up and we did it all over again the next day.

  And it was bliss. We’d grown so used to merely getting through each day after I’d been booted from the convent, we’d forgotten the simple pleasures of a routine.

  Now, if we could just rid me of this thing inside me—release me from its greasy black clutches—everything would be perfect.

  Which brings me back to my current dilemma. How to get Jeff to remember the message from Hell?

  Clapping my hands on my thighs, I clenched my fists and inhaled, exhaling with determination. “So, from the beginning, Jeff. You escaped through the same portal that Coop and Livingston escaped through, correct?”

  He panted, running in a circle as he tried to catch his tail, and said, “Um-hmm.” Then he stopped and looked up at me, the morning glare of sunlight making his sweet face particularly adorable. “Why the heck do I do that? Logically, I know, I’m never gonna catch my tail, but I can’t stop!” he complained in his squeaky voice as he made another dizzying circle.

  I scooped him up and sat him on my lap, stroking his spine to relax him. There was nothing Jeff liked more than a good massage.

  Instantly, his body became less rigid as he leaned into me.

  “Better?” I asked as Coop plopped down in the chair next to mine, Livingston, my favorite sassy owl, on her arm.

  “Muuuch,” he crooned with a rippling shudder that ran from his head to his hind legs.

  “So from the beginning—”

  “Aye, lass. Not again.” Livingston scoffed his disapproval in his light Irish accent. “I don’t think I can do it one more time without losin’ my ever-lovin’ mind.”

  Coop put a finger on Livingston’s beak to quiet his complaining—something he does often, by the way. “You’re being rude, Quigley Livingston. It’s important we let Jeff share his journey.”

  Livingston flapped his gray and white feathers, letting the warm breeze catch them. “His journey? This isn’t Oprah, for the love of leprechauns. Let’s not romanticize it as though he found himself at the infamous fork in the road, Coopie. He made a mess of everyting when he escaped Hell. That’s no journey, lass. That’s a bloody road trip gone sideways. And now, he’s somebody’s pet. What’s left to go on about?”

  I poked Livingston in his round belly, filled with far too many Swedish Fish, using a gentle finger. “Technically, you’re somebody’s pet, buddy. Glass houses and all,” I teased, trailing my finger over his beak.

  “Yes, yes, and I have the gilded cage to prove it. But I don’t spend every wakin’ hour tellin’ ya ’bout my journey. Besides that, the poor lad says the same ting every blinkin’ time! Nothin’ changes. I don’t know how much more I can stand.”

  I leaned over and dropped an indulgent kiss on Livingston’s round head. “Then close your ears, Mouthy McMouth.”

  “Would that I could,” he mumbled before giving his head a swivel and closing his glassy eyes—meaning, he was done with us mere mortals and we were dismissed.

  Jeff moaned as I stroked his fur, holding his face up to the sun. “So, tell me again how it happened, Jeff. And be careful. We almost got caught the last time you were trying to remember and Higgs walked in on us. I had to pretend I was playing sock puppet with you—with a Boston accent to boot. Just keep in mind, Higgs is going to be here any minute to pick you up. We can’t afford to have him catch you talking.”

  “But you’re wicked good at voices, Trix,” Jeff said.

  I sort of am pretty good at them, if I do say so myself. “How about we err on the side of safety and just not get caught. Higgs would have a heart attack if he knew you could talk.”

  Higgs didn’t like to leave Jeff alone in his apartment for fear he’d get lonely. So he brought him to work with him every day—which was terrific for the shelter. The guys staying there loved him and doted on him as much as Higgs did.

  But today he’d had a dentist appointment, and he asked us to watch Jeff—which we were pleased to do because we’d come to love him, too—even if he talked at warp speed.

  “Hiiiggs,” Jeff mumbled. “I like Higgs. He’s nice to me. He gives me good dog food. The expensive kind. He gives me scraps, too. Lots of scraps. Yummy scraps. The other day he was talking about getting me certified to become a therapy dog. He talks to me all the time. I don’t know how I feel about being a therapy dog, Trixie. I mean, look at what happened to me. How can I help other people when I can’t help myself? And then there’s my bed. It’s awesome. It has a special Tempur-Pedic mattress and a heating pad—”

  “Jeff…” I said, raising my voice an octave. I didn’t want to chastise him, but my patience had begun to wear thinner than thin.

  I offered to leave things be almost every time we went over how he’d managed to find his way to us, but Jeff is the kind of guy…er, canine, who fits the expression “like a dog with a bone” to a T. He claimed trying to remember this infernal message kept him up at night.

  Jeff leaned back against my chest and looked up at me with his big brown puppy dog eyes. “Sorry. I told you, I don’t know how to stop it. Every thought in my fool head just comes out of my mouth.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and sighed as the warm breeze blew, ruffling Jeff’s wiry fur. “I totally understand. So one more time for the cheap seats, okay?”

  He let out a soft moan, scratching at his hindquarters with his back leg. “Okay, so here goes. When Coop and Livingston escaped, they escaped through a portal to Hell none of us minions knew about until I happened upon it one day. I mean, it was right there—all open and a black hole. I don’t even remember how I found it.”

  I still don’t understand how a portal is created, or how one to Hell, of all places, ended up in our convent. I mean, a portal to Hell via a convent? I’d always been taught good would win over evil. Wasn’t the convent filled with nothing but good? How much gooder did it get than nuns and priests?

  I’d always felt protected at the convent from the outside forces working toward the world’s demise. But after the tussle that went down that night, if I didn’t already have a million doubtful questions about scripture and what I’d learned in my time as a nun, I had a whole lot more since.

  One of those questions had to do with the idea that a demon could actually walk on sacred ground. Coop had wandered around the convent after saving me as though she’d been baptized in Holy Water and sworn in as the Second Coming.

  In other words, she didn’t have a single problem treading on sacred ground, which meant we weren’t safe fr
om anything if we weren’t safe from the occupants of Hell—in a convent.

  Evil exists, and it doesn’t stop existing merely because a bunch of women wear habits, crosses and denounce the devil on the reg.

  Don’t get me wrong; no one is more grateful than I am that Coop didn’t burn to a crisp upon entering sacred ground. If Coop hadn’t come through that portal at the exact moment I was in the midst of being possessed by this evil spirit, it would have eaten my soul. But hello—she’s a demon, for pity’s sake, footloose and fancy free in, I repeat, a convent.

  I nodded for the umpteenth time at the same exact spot in the story where I always nod. “Right. The portal that led to the inside of my convent, and it doesn’t matter how you found it, Jeff. That part of the story is inconsequential.”

  “Maybe it’s not? Maybe the portal means something we don’t understand, Trix.”

  Maybe it did. And I said as much. “Maybe it does. But we can’t get bogged down with that detail right now.”

  “Okay,” Jeff said. “So yeah, a portal. I didn’t know that’s what you called it. It just looked like a big black hole. Being adventurous in nature, I decided to see what was on the other side. I’m tellin’ you, Trixie, the second I stepped through that thing, it closed up tighter than a clamshell. Just poof—gone.”

  I continued to massage his back, feeling the tension in his muscles as he retold the story. “Right. So you escaped, but you don’t know if anyone followed behind you the way you followed Coop and Quigley—or whether you all even escaped through the portal at the same time, correct?”

  Which scared the ever-lovin’ stuffin’ out of me. What if Jeff wasn’t the only demon to escape Hell? What if far more malevolent forces had escaped along with him, and they’d inhabited the bodies of more road kill like Livingston had—or worse, innocent people like me?

  Not everyone has a Coop to save them the way I did.

  And what if Jeff didn’t escape at the exact time as Coop and Livingston? His puppy age of around a year says it’s feasible. That’s how long it’s been since I was booted out of the convent, but what if that portal is some sort of time warp, or what if Jeff’s confused about when he arrived…and does it even matter?

  What if I’ve been watching too many sci-fi-related shows on Netflix and they’re all in my head, swirling around with crazy conspiracy theories that don’t really exist?

  “Righty-O. You are correct. After I landed in your convent, it all gets kinda blurry—sort of like a dream, you know? Bits and pieces all broken up in weird fragments is all I remember. I don’t know if I had a body during that time. I don’t even know how the heck I got to where I got. I do remember following Coop’s scent and trying to keep track of her and Livingston. But then I don’t remember anything else until I woke up next to something warm and fuzzy—something that felt like home,” he said on a wistful sigh.

  “That would have been your mother, Jeff. You managed to find your way to a newborn litter of puppies. Likely, one of them didn’t survive and you used the opportunity to hop inside its body. You’re mother must have been a stray.”

  “Are you saying my mother was a dog?” he asked on his infectious high-pitched giggle.

  Sometimes, Jeff was like a twelve-year-old boy right before his voice changes and he begins the long, hard road to manhood. Which begged the question, what was Jeff before he was a dog and how did he end up in Hell? But alas, he couldn’t remember that, either.

  I laughed, too, because Jeff’s laugh was nothing if not contagious. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. So what happened next?”

  “Well, then I couldn’t see much because my eyes were still closed and I wasn’t weaned yet.” He paused and sighed again. “Ahhh, the good old days, when I didn’t have a worry in the world—”

  “But then you realized where you came from and…?” I coaxed as I looked at the time on my phone. Higgs was going to be here very soon—we had to get to the point.

  “Yeah,” Jeff drawled. “I don’t know why, all of a sudden, I remembered everything that happened the night I got to the convent. I think it was a dream or something. Or maybe I got a whiff of something that smelled like Coop… Yes! That was it! It was the scent of her hair—smells like honeysuckle. There was a whole patch of it by the barn where we were born. We used to play by it all the time. Musta jarred my memory or somethin’… You know, like déjà vu?”

  This was the part of his tale that always made me sad. Jeff had brothers and sisters. Okay, not technically, but in this life anyway—all scooped up by a rescue and taken off to find loving families to adopt them. Except Jeff. He’d managed to escape.

  However, the scent of honeysuckle was a new memory. Maybe this will actually pan out. It just might take a long time.

  Dropping a kiss on his head, I decided maybe it was time to let this story be for a while. “How about we stop for today, Jeff? I don’t want you upset when Higgs gets here. You know how he is when he thinks something’s wrong with you. You’ll be at the vet with a thermometer up your watoosie lickety-split.”

  His head hung from his shoulders for a moment before he lifted it, his eyes looking off into the distance. “It’s okay, Trixie. They were nice rescue ladies. I bet the gang got great homes—my mom, too.”

  I lifted my face to the warm breeze and nodded. “I’m sure they did. I’d lay bets on it, and if you knew where the barn was located, I’d find them somehow and prove it to you.”

  “And I’d help,” Coop offered, sipping the last of her orange juice.

  “But I couldn’t read back then,” Jeff replied. “So I have no idea where the barn was, and BTW, Oregon’s a pretty big state. I don’t know how far away where my soul landed was from the convent.”

  I nodded my head in sympathy. “There is that. So what happened next?”

  “After they all got caught by the rescue, I decided to follow the scent because it was so familiar. Little by little, things started coming back to me, like my memories of everyone talkin’ about Coop’s escape. So I tracked her for days, lived off the land, took some handouts along the way, somehow avoided getting caught until I got to Cobbler Cove. By then I could read, and Coop’s scent kept getting stronger and stronger. But the whole time I was hoofin’ it across Oregon, something kept nagging at me. One night, just before I got to Portland, I was sleeping in a Christmas tree field and I had a dream, and the dream reminded me that somebody saw me escape. It was like they knew I was going to come looking for Coop. Like they knew I’d see you, Trixie. Like they knew you guys were all together. And that’s when they told me to give you a message…”

  And this was the part that sent shivers up along my spine and down over my arms. “But you don’t remember who it was? You don’t remember if it was a demon or maybe even the devil himself?”

  I gulped nervously, trying to keep my voice calm. The very idea it might have been Satan had me up at night.

  He exhaled long and slow, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “Nope.”

  “Maybe it really was just a dream, Jeff the Dog?” Coop asked as she pulled her dusky red hair up into a bun, her slender fingers twisting the elastic band around the thick strands. “Maybe you didn’t really get a message at all?”

  “Ya know…” he started, then stopped and gave his head a shake, making his ears flap. “Nope. I’m pretty sure that happened, but every time I get to the part where the person is about to tell me what the message is, I wake up. That dream is what helped me remember what happened just before I stepped through that portal, Coop. I know I’m right. That part really did happen. Swear.”

  Coop reached over and ran a hand over his head, giving him an odd look. This week, she was working on her sympathetic expressions. They still came off a little pained, but she was getting there—and it was better than her grimace of a smile by a long shot. That still looked like she’d eaten something bad.

  “You’re a good boy, Jeff the Dog. A very good boy. Would you like a cookie?” she asked, driving a hand into the poc
ket of her black leather pants and pulling out a bone-shaped treat.

  “I’d rather have a steak.”

  “But they’re the soft ones,” she enticed, waving it under his nose.

  He scoffed. “Made out of oats and dandelion shoots.”

  “Higgs just doesn’t want you to get fat. You heard what the vet said,” I reminded him with a smile, chucking him under the chin.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he groused. “More exercise, fewer hot dogs. Does Higgs have to listen to everything that crazy old coot tells him? I might look like a dog, but I still have the taste buds of a man, and this man wants a steak. A big, juicy, rare steak.”

  Coop tapped his paw. “You be grateful, Jeff. Higgs just wants you to live a long, healthy, enriched life. He takes very good care of you. Everyone should be so lucky to have a Higgs.”

  Coop had fallen in deep like not only with Knuckles but with Higgs. As she watched the way he cared for the men who inhabited his facility, as she watched his dedication to helping feed the homeless, saw him help them with rehabilitation and finding jobs and purpose within the community, her admiration grew.

  And I had to admit, mine had, too. We’d come a long way since I’d accused him of murdering our last landlord, Fergus McDuff. We’d definitely become friends in the short time since we’d arrived in Cobbler Cove, and that was really nice.

  “Coop’s right, Jeff. Higgs only wants what’s best for you, bud,” I reminded.

  “What does Higgs want?” His voice, now not only welcome but familiar, sounded through Knuckles’s small backyard.

  “Higgs wants to feed Jeff a big steak,” Jeff called out, making me pinch him lightly.

  “Knock it off, troublemaker!” I whisper-yelled.

  As Higgs came around the corner of the main house, he smiled at us. Tall and powerful, his strides ate up the small area from the main house to our little haven.

  His dark hair, trimmed just above his ears, gleamed in the sun. One bulky, tattooed arm swung at his side while the other hand held a cup carrier from our favorite coffee place, Betty’s.