by D V Wolfe
Stacks snorted to my left and we looked at him. “You’re kidding, right?” He asked, “We came up here to hit the library and last night ‘just for fun’ she drug us out to hunt a Hayman.”
“Yeah,” Noah piped up. “And we dropped in on this old friend of hers and ended up dealing with a Hellgate.”
“How is Rosetta?” Tags asked me.
“She planted some new begonias in the front of her house. Gives it a nice summer feel.”
“She always had two green thumbs,” Tags said straightening up. “Maybe I should call her.”
“And two trigger fingers to go with her green thumbs,” I said. “After that crap, you pulled in Atlanta, I don’t know if I would. Remember that she sleeps with Big Joe.”
Tags shook his head. “Imagine a grown man being jealous of a shotgun.”
I shrugged. “Moving beyond Rosetta’s sleeping habits, tell me, if you didn’t use a talking board or a summoning ritual, how did you contact downstairs and find out about this demon that’s hunting me?”
Tags leaned forward again and put a hand on his right forearm. “You remember that cult I was chasing in Arizona?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The child mutilators who were turning their kids into demon vessels.”
He nodded. “Well, I overplayed my hand a bit and I kind of….got captured.”
I ran a hand through my hair and fixed my attention on his arm. I really hoped I wasn’t going to have to waste Tags. It had been a full enough day already. “Yeah, and,” I said. I felt Noah’s shoulder bump mine and realized he’d leaned forward to listen too.
“Here ya go, darlings!” Missy was back with our drinks. We quickly ordered and sent her away again.
“Well?” I asked Tags as soon as she’d left the table.
Tags rolled his sleeve back to show us an angry red burn. I reached across the table and grabbed his arm, pulling it towards me to examine it closer.
“Easy Bane!” Tags hissed. “That’s attached.”
I poked at the burn. “This looks like Enochian.”
Tags nodded. “I looked it up. It says Gal Un Graph Tal Med Drux.”
I released his arm. “But they didn’t finish?” I could feel Stacks and Noah staring at Tags and I, but I kept my eyes on Tags.
“Wait, what does it mean?” Noah interrupted.
“It means ‘daemon’,” Stacks answered. “But that’s not the proper word for the dwelling ritual.”
Tags shook his head. “They didn’t get to finish.”
“How’d you get away?” Noah asked.
“It was the damndest spot of luck I’ve ever had. The fire alarm went off and then the sprinklers started dumping holy water on them.” Tags sighed. “If I ever find out what hunter saved my skin, I’ll buy them a steak.”
I stared at him. “Tags, when was this?”
He shrugged. “About six months ago.”
“In Carefree, Arizona?”
Tags tapped the table. “That was the name! I never could remember the name of that place.”
I nodded. That had been the one time I’d gotten the holy water ritual right. Slow realization crept over his face. Before he could say anything, I said, “So you got away. When did you realize you could contact downstairs?”
Tags stared at me for a moment and then I saw his eyes shift to Stacks and Noah before he said, “Well I can’t really contact them, I just kind of….eavesdrop.”
I sat up straighter. “Tags, are you saying, you’re a wireless antenna? For Hell?”
“I don’t know about antenna,” Tags muttered. “It seems that their Black Priest only got as far as opening the synergy or something between my old hide and the pit, but I’m still considered...uninhabitable.”
I nodded. “So you’re the Pruitt-Igoe of human bodies, huh?”
Tags grinned. “Something like that.”
“Well that’s a pretty awesome outcome. I’ll bet you can’t even be forcibly possessed now with the incomplete ritual.”
Tags cocked his head thinking. “You know, now that you say that, I was swarmed by the mother-suckers two weeks ago when I was looking into some disappearances and none of them even tried to make me seppuku myself.”
“Wow Tags,” I was impressed. Most hunters wore pentagrams or a Celtic endless knot hoping that that, and having a salt shaker in their underwear would keep the baddies at bay. Didn’t really work most of the time. “So you aren’t fit for possession and you can eavesdrop. Where’s the catch?”
“Well,” Tags said, dropping his voice even lower. “It turns out I’ve been doing a little too much listening lately.” I froze. “And they’ve started...noticing.”
“Don’t beat around the bush, Tags,” I said. “Are you a mark?” My eyes had already strayed from his face. I was now looking around the crowded restaurant. No one around us seemed particularly focused on us.
“Not as far as I can tell,” Tags said. “Just weird circumstances, like the fact that a lot of info about you has been said out in the open.” He shook his head. “It’s just weird. Like they knew I was listening.”
I knew why they were talking about me. My time was running out. I assumed Ashley’s citizens were currently in hell’s holding cells and the demons wanted to move them to the big house. The fact was if I didn’t save enough innocents, both the celestial and infernal courts were going to let them.
“Tags,” I said. “Did you hear anything about the demon in St. Louis? Is it the one gunning for me?”
“I don’t know. I did hear there was a big to-do about to happen in St. Louis and it’s a big leaguer…” Tags trailed off and then as realization dawned on him, he went white.
“No Bane,” Tags said. “No, no, no! Gary would kill me if I let you go.”
I said softly, “Tags, Gary isn’t here anymore.”
Tags slouched back in his chair. “You know what I fucking mean, Bane.”
Chatter at the table near us paused. Tags turned to look at the family. The kids’ mouths’ were hanging open, chicken nugget mush starting to tumble back onto their plates. The mother was glaring at Tags and the dad was hiding a grin behind his napkin.
“ ‘Scuse my French,” Tags said.
He leaned back in, “Bane, there’s no way in..” he paused and looked back at the family. “There’s no way in Rosetta’s Foundation that you’d be able to exorcise that s.o.b.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, playing dumb, hoping that Tags had heard something I could use. I wished all I had to do was exorcise him.
“Because!” Tags half-shouted and then lowered his voice. “Because that’s no pissant demon they’re sending to St. Louis.”
“He’s a big fish, huh?” I asked. In my head I was seeing souls like dollar signs.
“I heard something about him and the Dukes of Hell.”
“Is that like a biker gang?” I asked.
“Biker gangs are bedtime stories compared to these guys. No, from what I hear, some idiot in St. Louis is calling him.”
“Summoning him? By name?” I asked. I knew that the high-up demons downstairs were named, but all the summoning rituals I’d ever seen just called a demon, not one in particular.
“Yeah. Bane, the best thing you can do is turn that truck of yours in the opposite direction of St. Louis.”
“Tags,” Stacks piped up. “Did you hear the demon’s name?”
I looked at Stacks. “Does it matter?”
“I dunno Bane, does it matter if you kill a Lamia with a brass or a silver knife?”
“Well now you’re just being childish,” I said.
“I did hear one name. I don’t know if it’s the one coming for Bane, but I heard the name...Berith.” Tags said. His last word came out in a whisper.
There was a sudden draft in the room and the baby who had been asleep in a car seat thing at the next table suddenly woke up screaming and crying.
“Nice going,” I said to Tags.
“Bane,” Stacks said, looking over at me.
“Yeah?”
“We need to go back to Messina.”
I wasn’t going to lose my temper and snap his chicken bone neck in the restaurant. At the very most, I’d knock him unconscious and leave him in a ditch.
“No time Stacks, I need to get to St. Louis. I can take you and Noah to the bus station in the morning. Greyhound still goes to Messina.”
“And then what?” Stacks asked. “Go fight the demon? With what? Maybe you can run him over with Lucy.”
I was silent for a moment. “Why do we need to go back to Messina, Stacks?”
“My annotated edition of The Lesser Key of Solomon.”
I felt my eyebrows come together. “The grimoire?”
Stacks nodded. Missy approached and began dropping plates of burgers and fries in front of each of us.
“Y’all need anything else?” She almost giggled.
“Just the check,” I said. “Now, if you don’t mind.”
Tags looked down at his burger and then at me. “But we just got our food.”
I glanced over at Noah who was already stuffing french fries in his mouth and then back to Stacks who was looking longingly at his burger.
“Alright, four to-go boxes please, Missy. Along with the check.”
We dropped Tags back at his Scout which was still slightly damp. I took pity on him and gave him the burlaps from Lucy’s toolbox to sit on until his seat dried, and he followed us out of the truck stop lot and onto the highway. I tried to talk Tags out of coming with us but he was hellbent on seeing this through. Tags knew a lot of lore, or at least where to find it, so I’d finally relented.
Within minutes of finishing their burgers and fries, Noah was asleep with his head back on the seat and his mouth open, snoring. I glanced over and saw Stacks wasn’t far behind him.
“Hey, Stacks,” I said, trying to rouse him.
“Yeah,” he said on a yawn.
“What’s so important about getting the grimoire?”
Stacks rubbed his eyes behind his glasses as he said, “Bane, what’s the first thing you do when you’re going up against something you need to hunt down?”
I shrugged. “I grab what’s going to kill it and then I go look for it.”
“What if you don’t know what’s going to kill it?”
“Well if you’re going to be a condescending mother fucker you can just keep it to yourself,” I muttered.
“I mean you do research right?” Stacks said. “You find out what will kill it and then you go get it and then you hunt it down.”
I nodded. “That’s why we came to Indianapolis.”
“Right, but now we need more. We have a name now. The Lesser Key of Solomon names the high up demons. Ber- ...he’ll be in there. At this point, we can use every scrap of intel we can find just to try to make it out of this alive, let alone take him down.” He was right, as much as I loathed to admit it. Stacks was being more rational than me at the moment. And it sucked.
I grunted in agreement. I wasn’t going to admit it out loud though. “We don’t know that’s it’s Ber…”
“Don’t say it!” Stacks hissed.
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, we don’t know that it’s him. Tags said he just heard that name.”
Stacks shrugged. “It’s more than we had before.”
“Well, at this point, we have a bit of lore that’s been in your pants about a cypress branch dosed with God’s tears and some gift of maybe...Jesus. We know there’s something called Soulman's Spice that causes demon hay fever and with Tags we have a wireless antenna to downstairs. Oh and a name that might be in….” Something was clicking into place in my head.
“Hey Stacks,” I said. “You think Soulman's Spice might be in that grimoire too?”
I felt him straighten on the seat next to me. “Drive faster, Bane.”
Traffic was light as we came into Messina and I checked my rearview mirror to see that Tags had taken the exit with us. The sky was overcast, threatening a late afternoon rain to follow the morning’s rain and we’d had to turn our headlights on.
We wound through the city to Messina Estates and overshot the entrance in favor of a mudder’s trail that ran alongside it and into a wooded area. Tags followed us, the lights of the Scout bobbing up and down as he hit every rained-out pothole in the trail. I cut Lucy’s lights as we coasted into a small clearing and came to a stop.
Stacks tried to nudge Noah awake.
“Fuck off,” Noah groaned and turned his face away. The snoring resumed.
“Noah!” I barked, “Get that ten-gauge! They’re coming right for us!” Noah’s eyes shot open and he almost went through Lucy’s door.
“Nice,” Stacks said. “I’ll have to remember that one.” We piled out and stood next to Tags.
“Where the hell are we?” Tags asked.
I scratched the back of my neck and looked over at Stacks. “We had to take a detour. Stacks lives in that trailer park we just passed, but the three of us had a little brush with Johnny Law earlier before we left town.”
“A little brush?” Noah asked. “We were arrested. Your truck was impounded.”
Tags looked impressed. “They were able to get her to start?”
I shook my head. “No they were going to tow her. Lucky for me the only guy with a tow truck in this town is also the best customer of the local dive bar.”
Stacks and I led the way through the woods to the back of the trailer park. So far, so good.
No sirens or boys in blue or cop cars sitting like guard dogs waiting to be tripped over.
We crept around the side of the trailer in the slot next to Stacks’ and stopped short. The lights were on inside Stacks’ trailer. We could see them blazing through the hole in his door.
And there was a pink Cadillac convertible, sitting on the hard-packed dirt, in front of the trailer.
17
“Why does that car look familiar?” Noah asked.
“I almost wish it was the cops,” I said.
Stacks turned to glare at me. “You know who’s squatting in my trailer right now?”
“You know her too,” I said. “She’s about four and a half feet tall and has a black belt in Southern Baptist bitchslapping.”
“Shit. Rosetta?” Stacks asked. I nodded. “I agree,” he said with a sigh. “I wish it was the cops, too.”
Tags bumped into us from behind and I felt Noah’s bony chin dig into my shoulder. “What? Are your brakes out, Tags?” I muttered. I turned to look at Noah. The kid was built like a ten-speed bike. His dirty t-shirt was wearing him. I should have given him my burger too.
“Well, why the hell are we standing around out here like idiots?” Tags’ whisper might as well have been a scream.