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  An Operative of Fate

  Voss Porter

  An Operative of Fate

  Copyright © 2018, Voss Porter

  Published by Painted Hearts Publishing

  About the Book You Have Purchased

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  An Operative of Fate

  Copyright © 2018 Voss Porter

  Publication Date: December 2018

  Author: Voss Porter

  Editor: Kira Plotts

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2018 by Painted Hearts Publishing

  Cover design by E Keith

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  One

  “There’s something about Christmas,” Miranda Day said in a singsong voice because Miranda Day was a singsong kind of a girl.

  She had three pieces of tape stuck to her fingers and her lips were pursed in concentration as she wrapped up a perfectly round, perfectly glazed red velvet cake coated in thin white cream cheese, dusted with almonds. Intricate snowflakes pulled from sugar and painted silver delicately sloped down the sides, and Miranda was careful to avoid closing them in the trademark forest green packaging emblazoned with the Knight family crest beneath the gold lettering that read Knight Bakery.

  “Christmas just reminds me there is still good in the world… It makes me believe in miracles,” she suggested.

  From the back of the bakery, Devin Knight, last of the Knight family and sole proprietor of the bakery (albeit begrudgingly so), snorted.

  Devin Knight was not the kind of woman who giggled, demurely, into her white gloves in church or the type of woman who wore Christmas-printed leggings, like her trusty assistant, Miranda. Devin Knight was prone to sarcastic snorts. Devin Knight had short, brown hair and an arm tattoo and made distinctly unladylike sounds when one full-time employee made comments that caught her by surprise.

  “Miracles, huh?” Her fingers were agile as they piped individual lines along the edges of six dozen sugar cookies shaped like candy canes. Each was wafer thin and buttery, edged in white and speckled with holly leaves and berries at the base and on the sides. Each was expertly crafted. Each was absolute culinary perfection. “I’m not sure miracles are a real thing.”

  Christmas music drifted through the indoor/outdoor speakers affixed to the exposed ceiling joists and the comforting smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, and balsam hung heavy in the air. Outside, the town of Pine Ridge was readying itself for the annual Christmas Eve parade and inside, even to a nut as tough as Devin, it was hard to avoid the holiday spirit.

  She was trying her best, however.

  “Of course miracles are a real thing.” In Devin’s estimation, Miranda Day would believe in anything, including miracles, whether it was Christmas or not. Miranda Day was doe-eyed and fresh and had probably never experienced a single real trauma in her whole life. Her parents were both still alive. They were still married, they were still employed, and they were living quite comfortably in a townhouse in a part of Florida known for pristine beaches and safety.

  Not to mention, Miranda had a steady boyfriend—someone to share her life with—she paid all of her bills on time and she had a cuddly cat named Tony. Devin had none of those things.

  Watching her close up another cake and add it to the wagon on the ground already laden with packages, she felt the teensiest tinge of jealousy.

  Okay, it’s more than the teensiest tinge of jealousy. Devin couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d ever been so optimistic, so hopeful. Her mother died when she was in elementary school. Her father struggled to raise her, rear her, and support her, both financially and emotionally. He gave up everything for her, but then he died two years back. Her grandparents were long gone. There were no uncles, no aunts, no cousins to speak of… All that remained of her lineage was suffering and pain and a bakery with her great-grandfather’s moniker on the doors.

  Doors I have to keep open, by hook or by crook.

  “How many cookies are left?” her assistant chirped, humming a few bars of Good King Wenceslas.

  “Just these.” Devin gestured to the trays all lined out before her on a stainless steel table. “It’s about six dozen.”

  “Six dozen?” Miranda turned her head in disbelief. She had on a candy cane headband with bows that shook when she moved. “You’ve made four hundred cookies in two days.”

  Devin shrugged. It should be six hundred and sixty… Her fingers were swollen and sore. The pain in her back was biting. But what could she do? The Pine Ridge Christmas Eve Parade was a big deal. Seasonal orders comprised ninety percent of all of her business from the first of November to the middle of January and a large number of those orders would be retrieved from her booth along the parade route. In addition to dispensing one-of-a-kind chocolate cookies baked from a family recipe passed from Knight-to-Knight for four generations, Miranda Day would be checking off pick-up requests and hawking pastries, dinner rolls, pies, tarts, and a sundry of dessert delicacies all trimmed in gold and red with poinsettias or dolled up with edible snowflakes, stockings, or angels. The profits would keep them afloat another three months.

  Then, maybe, Devin could rest. When her bills were paid and her creditors were appeased, maybe Devin could afford to take a day off. Certainly, she could afford an afternoon off. Couldn’t she?

  “I swear, sometimes I feel like you sleep here,” Miranda teased her, coming into the kitchen.

  Her regular uniform of a deep green apron was augmented with tinsel and clear plastic ornaments filled with colorful ribbon. Beneath it, she wore a red and white striped turtleneck monogrammed with her initials over Lycra dotted with teddy bears and sleighs. Obviously, she was responsible for all of the bakery’s decorations: the window displays of cupcakes and gingerbread houses, the Santa’s village along the far wall. Miranda Day ate, slept, and breathed Christmas.

  “When’s the last time you slept in? Maybe didn’t get up at three in the morning?” She gave the cookies closest to her a measuring glance and made a move for the flat, cookie boxes housed on the top shelf over the industrial sink.

  “If I slept past three in the morning, who would be here to start the bread at four?” Devin deferred.

  For thirty years, her father was up at three and warming ovens by four. Before him, her grandfather had done the same. Dough needed to rise. Bakers needed to knead and the Knights were bakers, through and through.

  “But do you ever go home?” Miranda’s hands were efficient and precise as she gave three-dimensional life to flat, pressed cardboard in less than thirty seconds. “Do you ever watch Netflix? Take a nap? Do you even have an apartment?”

  “Yes, I have an apartment,” Devin passed her off. “And I’ll rest after Christmas.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Miranda countered. “You’ve been saying that for three years and I’ve ye
t to see you relax.”

  Or find a date, Devin added, cynically, to no one but herself.

  At thirty, her romantic prospects had all but dried up, not that there had been many in the first place. Pine Ridge was just like every other small town in America—quiet, safe, and closeted. There were lesbians, sure, but the few who chose to make a home in Pine Ridge weren’t really Devin’s type.

  Do I even have a type anymore? Lord, how long had it been since her last date?

  In her defense, it was not as if there were opportunities in abundance for her to whisk a lucky lady away for a weekend. The bakery was open seven days a week, which meant she was at work seven days a week, sometimes for fourteen hours at a stretch. And it wasn’t as if she could complain about making money or carrying on her family legacy. This all fell on her, like a mantle of responsibility that was suffocating.

  Those are excuses, she could hear her mother’s sweet critique.

  How long had it been since she’d heard her mother’s voice?

  She pushed at the glasses sliding down her nose.

  “Do you want me to wait and box up the rest of these?” Miranda inquired, individually placing candy canes around within the assembled box. She glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s almost five.”

  The preemptory parade festivities were already in full swing. The Methodist Men’s Choir had been performing for thirty minutes in the square. There were handbells to be played and kids to see dance, dressed up as snowmen and gender-neutral members of the nativity. Devin had been one of those wise ‘people,’ as the old ladies were fond of saying. She’d gone out, back in the nineties, wearing her mother’s good white sheet tied around her with the sash from her grandfather’s drapes, laughing and smiling and gazing in awe at the twinkling lights hung from poles in the town square.

  “No.” She put her pastry bag down and moved to wash her hands in the sink. “I’ll cool them and bring them down. There’s no reason for you to wait.”

  She shoved her hands under the lukewarm spray. Her skin was dark, like her father’s, somewhere between medium tan and olive green. Her hair was dark, too, and curly if she would ever let it grow longer than three inches. She was built; long hours pressing and rolling dough had quite an effect on her physique. But she was willowy, much slighter than her father was.

  “I still have Mrs. Floyd’s order to fill,” she finished, hanging her head to loosen the cramps inching up her neck.

  “The yeast rolls?” Miranda chuckled and carried the cookies to the wagon. Like a tangible, adult game of Tetris, she nestled them comfortably among the Christmas goodies. “We have plenty of rolls leftover from yesterday. Send her those.”

  “Those aren’t fresh.” Devin sighed. Fresh was the trademark of Knight Bakery. Anybody could serve day-old bread. They sold day-old bread at the grocery store. If it came from Knight, it had to be better.

  Miranda mumbled something under her breath but let it go. She had been on a soapbox of late, pestering her employer to take her intensity level down a notch, to go out into the world and find some measure of peace and happiness. Sure, the need for backbreaking work existed in the bakery, but they were not destitute. Devin could slow down. Devin could slow the frantic pace of her life and find something more manageable.

  Too bad she heard her father’s commanding boom any time she tried to relax. She heard his footsteps wearing a path along the floorboards. He had been relentless. When her grandfather passed on, he bequeathed the bakery to his only child and they rose from the ashes of potential ruin, weathering financial storms, to create something generations could be proud of. It was Devin’s responsibility now to push that forward and carry it into the future. She needed to be stronger, for all of them.

  Not that Miranda would understand any of that. Miranda didn’t understand the complicated relationship Devin had with her dead family and how she honored them with her own work ethic, keeping the Knight name alive and printed on boxes, handed out in the street at the annual Christmas Eve Parade. There was only Devin now, and she couldn’t let past efforts fall by the wayside.

  But who do I have to leave it to? The question that burned within her bubbled to the surface even now, even as she huffed great gulps of home and hearth and happiness, hearing the high-pitched voices of children as they sang out “Jingle Bells.”

  “Stubborn, thy name is Devin Knight,” Miranda said, pulling her long blonde hair over one shoulder as she snatched up a heavy coat and gloves. She was Devin’s polar opposite, effortlessly girly with painted fingernails and perfume and soft, warm eyes rimmed in black mascara. “You are one hell of a baker, but a stubborn woman. I pity the girl who tries to come between you and your bakery.”

  The truth of her words made Devin smile a real smile and her cheeks brightened. She may be overly optimistic and believe in miracles with childlike wonder, but Miranda Day was spot on in her summation of Devin’s dedication. With a wink and a wave, though, she was soon off, scampering out heaving a great, red painted wagon behind her, the bell over the door jingling in her wake.

  And then Devin was all alone, long enough for five dozen cookies to cool and slide into green boxes beneath red bows.

  She took a deep breath.

  This was nothing like what she wanted, nothing like what she planned for. She hadn’t intended to move back home after studying culinary arts in Charleston. She wanted to be something bigger than she was, something more famous. She wanted to work in four-star restaurants in New York or Boston and put her heart and soul into the food on the plates she served. She wanted glamour and adrenaline. Where was glamour, slaving away with cakes and pies, covered in flour up to her elbows? Where was the adrenaline rush? Baking was exactly what her father had done. Baking was exactly what her grandfather had done. Knights were probably baking, sailing over from England on the Mayflower.

  Untying her apron, she hung it on a snowman peg on the back of the kitchen door. She was wearing short sleeves and jeans, unseasonably dressed but comfortable. Her hair was a rat’s nest of motion, though, and her feet were throbbing. She had a Knight Bakery sweatshirt somewhere she could put on, to watch the parade. But she couldn’t very well show up at the town’s annual Christmas Eve shindig without wearing something that screamed MERRY CHRISTMAS. That was just bad karma.

  Annoyed, Devin walked out from the kitchen and into the storefront, separated from her cooking space by a counter with an enormous rectangular window, which allowed her to feel connected to her customers even when she wasn’t. This side was exclusively Miranda’s domain. She knew and she respected the rights of ownership, but Miranda had to have something squirreled away in a drawer or a bin that Devin could pin on, tie-in, or shake. Miranda had to have some mistletoe buttons or blinking reindeer lights, holly boughs or tinsel Devin could add somewhere to convince people she was filled with the festive warmth of the holidays.

  She prodded, rifled, and perused.

  After five minutes, she was no richer.

  In a pencil cup to the right of the cash register, which was really just an iPad on a stand, she found… “A bow? Are you kidding me?” The bow would do if she could literally find nothing else. But there had to be something else. Right?

  From above the door, the bells jingled. Someone walked in, hesitantly.

  Devin didn’t look up, but instead said, decisively, “I’m sorry, we’re closed, getting ready for the parade and all…”

  Three breaths.

  “So much for southern hospitality and festive cheer,” came a sarcastic retort. “I’m looking for Devin Knight.”

  Seriously? Miranda has nothing but one, lone red bow? That was probably because she used the rest to decorate. Every square inch of the bakery’s front room was crawling with Christmas.

  “I’m Devin Knight, but I’m heading out. I’m sorry. If you can come back tomorrow—” Exasperated that the cheeriest of employees somehow didn’t have anything more cheerful than a red ribbon, Devin finally looked up. She really should have put more
thought into her outfit before she left the house but that had been at a quarter to four in the morning and a quarter to four in the morning is not—

  “I’m not coming back tomorrow. Tomorrow is Christmas,” the woman in the doorway said, a split second before the blinding pain and bright light took Devin straight down to her knees.

  Two

  Devin rubbed at her temples and opened her eyes, thoroughly perplexed as to what to do next. Obviously, she was dying. Obviously, she was having a stroke. That made perfect sense. Her grandfather died of a stroke. Her father died of a stroke. Now, she was overworked and worn thin and she was having a stroke. Bright light? Blinding pain?

  When her vision cleared, she stared upward. There, looking annoyed, a woman in an elf’s costume rolled her eyes.

  “Oh good, you’re not dead.” The timbre of her words was matter-of-fact in a way that Devin had not been expecting.

  Shouldn’t a stranger, having encountered a woman who passed out cold on the floor, be calling 911? Or screaming?

  “I hate it when they die,” the stranger remarked, as if they were doing nothing more interesting than watching paint dry.

  “When who dies?” Devin was relieved to hear her words weren’t slurred.

  She tried to move her right arm and then her left arm. They moved without any issue. She twisted her neck to one side and the other. She wriggled her toes. Her body was in good, working order.

  “Humans.” The bizarrely macabre elf shrugged. She had black hair that went nearly to her waist and small, unadorned fingers.

  “Humans?” This was a dream. Or a psychosis. Extreme exhaustion could lead to psychosis. Devin read that in a book somewhere.

  She pushed herself up on her elbows. Her body was sound. It was as sound as it had been before she looked up and—

  “Yeah, you know: flesh, blood, bone, mortality, bad TV… Humans,” the newcomer said, attempting to clarify her stance.