I slammed my fist into the demon’s gut. A plume of foul smoke rose from the wound, but it didn’t slow the creature down. The demon backhanded me, which sent me flying once more. I flipped and managed to roll to a stop, but not before the concrete skinned my knees.
Instinct kicked in. Reaching over, I grabbed the nearest weapon and yanked it out of the ground. It was only when I blocked another swing with the stop sign did I realize what it was.
The blow sent pins and needles down my left arm, but I still managed to swing again with the knuckles. I hoped the demon was lacking in the brain pan, but no such luck. He grabbed my wrist and deftly flipped me sideways. I landed on concrete again but managed to slash at the thing’s dirty jeans with the knuckles. The demon sidestepped it, landing a kick to my gut for my troubles.
He had me outgunned, and with the stupid wall of flames, my sacrifice wouldn’t even let the mother and her daughter get away. I managed to roll again and jump up, but the demon leapt at me again. I blocked another blow with the stop sign, but my speed was fading while No-Eyes came on stronger. My brain frantically took in the surroundings, looking for something, anything, to even the odds. The stop sign was my last weapon inside the circle of flames. Then I noticed the concrete troll.
A plan formed as the troll stared back at me with its single hubcap eye. It was a tiny, miniscule chance, but that was enough for me.
I dodged another swing. I could feel the wind of the spur way too close to my ear as I switched tactics. Instead of trying to hit with the brass knuckles, I tried desperately to stay alive, all the while inching closer to the Fremont Troll.
The demon stalked me with graceful strides that were almost beautiful to watch. I blocked another spur thrust. Instead of hitting with the knuckles, I blocked with them, leaving an oily trail of smoke across the thing’s hand. The demon didn’t howl this time, but pushed the attack.
A glance back showed the troll too far away. I tried one last desperate move. Faking an attack to the right, I slammed the stop sign into the demon’s face. I then crouched and flung myself backward in the air.
It was a stupid thing to do, relatively speaking. I landed on my back. Stars did the mambo around my vision. The demon, sensing an opportunity, rushed forward, the spur raised to kill.
With a scream of my own, I tucked both legs under the demon and used his own momentum to fling him over my head, right at the troll. I silently thanked Ann, who had forced me to take all those judo classes.
The demon hit the concrete troll but stood up without hesitation. I knew he wouldn’t be dazed. He crouched without a pause and prepared to leap. There’s one thing the demon didn’t know, however.
The troll hated demons.
A crack like a gunshot echoed from under the bridge. The demon paused and sniffed the air. Another crack, this one louder, echoed down the street. Then the hand of the concrete statue, shedding a year’s worth of dirt and grime, let go of the VW bug and flexed.
The demon hissed and leaped back, but the troll’s hand snaked out, swatting him out of the air like an unwanted moth.
I bared my teeth as the demon flew through the air. He landed with a sickening thud, legs and arms all splayed at unnatural angles, but I knew he was only dazed. I didn’t have much time.
With a scream of defiance, I rushed over and plunged the broken end of the stop sign deep into the demon’s back. The demon pitched forward, and my own momentum carried me down on top of him, pinning him to the ground like a beetle to a corkboard.
“Nasty, nasty little demon.” A voice boomed like an earthquake as the concrete troll shook his shaggy head. The bottom half of the statue was still stuck in the ground, but the torso could move with limited ease. The troll flexed the hand that was eternally clenched over the VW bug. The woman shrieked and tried to get as far from the moving statue as possible.
“How rude. I was sleeping,” the troll said with a long-suffering sigh. The gigantic head of the statue turned toward me, and a grin slowly pulled up on the stone face. “Why, Mr. St. James. So nice to see you again.”
“A little busy here!” I yelled. The demon squirmed under the stop sign, his right arm bent backward at the elbow as he tried to slash me with the spur.
“Hmm,” the troll murmured. The word sent vibrations through the street. “That’s a nasty little bug you have there. Who did you anger now?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I glanced up and saw both the woman and her daughter caught between staring at me and staring at the moving troll. “Cover her eyes!” I screamed at the mother. “Now!”
The woman had enough sense to pull her daughter’s face to her chest, breaking the kid’s stare. I hoped it was enough, because what I was about to do shouldn’t be seen by anyone, least of all a child.
With another yell of defiance, I plunged my fist deep into the demon’s back. Bone and muscles tore. I missed the heart and scraped my knuckles on concrete while the thing screamed and bucked like an enraged bull. The fire wall disappeared. The arm and the spur flopped like a dying fish on the street. I plunged my hand down through the demon’s back again, searching for the life source.
On the third try I finally closed my hand around the heart and squeezed as hard as I could. It burst like a ripe tomato, cutting the thing’s screams off in mid-howl. My ears rang.
“That’s two, you son of a bitch,” I hissed as the demon dissolved into a puddle of gore. The world doubled, and then tripled, as all the pain rushed in like water from a broken dam. I couldn’t breathe. My right arm was completely numb, and my shoulder throbbed to the beat of some malicious drummer.
“Good show, my boy!” the troll boomed like thunder. “That’s the way to do it.”
I sank to my knees as the street spun around me. I couldn’t capture air in my lungs. I fell to my knees in the gore and couldn’t stop my breakfast from coming up.
“You don’t look so good there, Mr. St. James,” the troll grumbled. “Mr. St. James…”
A figure ran up the hill toward me. I couldn’t see his face. The sunlight spread out like the hands of an angel, closing around my pain.
Then nothing.
CHAPTER NINE
“Mr. St. James?” a voice called from the darkness. For a moment the booming of the troll echoed through the empty auditorium of my skull.
The voice asked again, but this time it was softer. Feminine. It pulled me up out of the darkness, gave me a roadmap to the pain of consciousness. For a moment I really hated that voice.
The clanking of porcelain came first. I had worked as a dishwasher for many years in a small pizza place in San Diego, and the sound was as familiar as a childhood tune. Then other sounds filtered in. A crowd of voices in the distance. A busy intersection outside. The soft breathing of a person close by.
To say I hurt was like saying Mount Rushmore was a fifth-grade art project. Pain radiated up my side when I breathed. My shoulder throbbed, pins and needles shot through my arms, and all the various aches and pains sat on top of me like a pissed-off sumo wrestler. They also refused to let me slip back into comfortable oblivion.
So I cracked an eyelid and immediately regretted it. Sunlight made all the little jagged bits of pain gang up on me, leaving me moaning under their batons. I must’ve made a noise, because I heard a chair push back before a wet cloth pressed against my forehead.
“Mr. St. James.” I didn’t recognize the woman, but there was relief in her voice. “Your fever is gone.”
I cracked opened my eyes again and winced as my vision adjusted. My first response was surprise that I wasn’t in a hospital. The second was more questions.
“You heal quickly,” the woman continued. I turned to look at her on a neck that felt a century old. The mother from the demon attack sat across from me, her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. She wasn’t glamorous in her cheap pantsuit, but her brown eyes held a fierceness I found instantly likable. Her long blond hair resided up in a tight bun, and a thin pair of glasses perched on the tip of
her hawkish nose.
“Your friend told me you’d need these,” she said, holding up a bag of McDonald’s hamburgers.
“What friend?” I asked with a voice that sounded old as well. “The troll?” The Hunger demanded I grab those hamburgers, but I pushed it down.
A muscle twitched under her right eye. “No,” she said, “a black man. He said to bring you someplace safe and to get you red meat. But I won’t give you anything until you answer some questions.”
“Hamburger hostages,” I groaned. Jake had come to my rescue, although a bit late.
She didn’t smile at the humor. Instead she put the bag down and her eyes blazed. “Who the hell are you? What happened back there? What was that thing?”
“Wow, that’s a bushel of questions,” I said. My head spun from hunger. “I’ll try to answer what I can. First, you seem to know that my name is Nick St. James, and as far as what happened back there, I have a question of my own. Why did you say ‘what was that thing’ instead of ‘who was that?’”
The woman hugged herself, and some of the fire died in her eyes. “That…wasn’t human. I don’t know what it was.” She shivered.
Interesting. Usually the human mind will make any excuse to explain the impossible. Biker gangs, crack heads, you name it. Hell, most are willing to believe in little bald aliens rather than the truth.
“You won’t believe me.”
“Right now I’ll believe anything.”
“OK.” I watched her carefully. “It was a demon.” The muscle twitched under her eye again. “Fire and brimstone, straight out of the Old Testament. You still ready to believe me?”
The woman slumped back. A battle waged across the landscape of her eyes. Surprise, disbelief, shock, and then acceptance all passed in the span of a moment. She lightly touched a small metal cross hanging around her neck. My admiration went up a few more notches.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Beth,” she said in a tiny voice as she stared at the opposite wall. She clenched and unclenched the cross.
“And your daughter?”
Her eyes slowly came into focus and locked with mine. “Amanda.”
“I know this is hard to take in. But you need to focus on Amanda and how to protect her.”
“Protect her?”
“It could’ve been a random attack, but the universe usually has too much of a mean streak for that. Do you have enemies, anyone who’d want to harm you or your daughter?”
“Enemies? You mean someone sent that…that thing to attack me?”
“Maybe. I don’t know for sure.” It could’ve been a trap set for me, but I didn’t think so. It was awfully elaborate for a two-bit player like me, especially a retired two-bit player like me. “So I need to know if there’s anyone who could’ve done this.”
Beth paused for a second, and her mouth opened a bit. She then clamped it shut and shook her head. “No, I don’t know what kind of people would send something like that. I’m just a social worker.”
Anger crept into her voice, but I had to dig deeper. “But you thought of someone, there for a moment. It doesn’t mean that the person did this, but I need to know where to begin.”
“Why would you help me?” she asked.
Why indeed? Part of it was the loss of Cate and part of it was the thought of this woman and her child at the mercy of No-Eyes. Yet it was more than that. A small part of me loved the hunt, loved hitting the pavement and searching out the clues. It had been a while, but the thrill never faded.
“Because I’m the only one who can.”
Beth stared at me and began to tremble. She groaned and put her face in her hands as the shakes overtook her. I felt bad for her, but I didn’t move. I knew lots of women like her. She would see comfort as a sign of weakness, and right now she needed all the strength she could get.
For a minute she took nice even breaths before she sat up and looked me in the eyes. Tears had dried on her cheeks, but the strength had come back.
“I manage a homeless shelter, and two weeks ago Senator Joseph Helms tried to close us down,” she told me. “I’ve taken him to court, but it’s over now. He backed down.”
Senator Helms. It always seemed to be the ones in power, didn’t it? “Is there anyone else who had a stake in this? Any contractors or businessmen wanting to buy the building?”
“No, and the senator isn’t capable of murder like this.”
It was an odd thing to say about a man you barely knew, but I kept the question to myself. Instead I said, “I’ll look into it. For all we know it was a random attack. Sometimes demons go rogue and tear up the city before they’re caught and disposed of.”
“Wait. You mean there’s a group that hunts these things down? Why hasn’t anyone heard of this?”
I shrugged. “Most people will make any excuse to rationalize the supernatural. The tabloids are more accurate than you’d think.” I gestured toward her. “Can I have my hostages now?”
It took her a moment to realize what I meant, but then she stood and handed me the bag of hamburgers.
“As for the clean-up crew, that’s a bit stickier.” I ravished a hamburger, without a care about the mess it made on my T-shirt. Between mouthfuls, I continued. “There are people called Watchers, and their goal is to keep humanity ignorant of all things supernatural. They have the power to keep most of the big things invisible. But they never get involved in the battles between Heaven and Hell. They only deal with the aftermath. No, there’s only one group that hunts demons.”
Beth sat down in the small chair and raised an eyebrow at me. I smiled and pointed toward the ceiling.
“You mean angels,” she said flatly.
“You could say that. They’ve had many names over the centuries, but ‘angel’ is as good as any. Most of what I know is based on rumor. The Warriors of Heaven don’t socialize much. It’d ruin the mystery.”
Beth shook her head, and her hand went to her cross again. “OK, that’s enough. I can’t…I can’t deal with any more of this. Either the world is crazy or you’re crazy, but either way, it’s too much crazy.”
“Is it?” I asked. I nodded at the cross around her neck while finishing up the second hamburger. “You’re religious. Why is the notion of angels and demons so crazy to you? The hidden world is always there. You just have to open your eyes to it, that’s all.”
Beth dropped her hand from her cross and stood. The coldness dropped over her eyes again, and she asked, “OK, well, can I get you anything?”
I finished off my third hamburger and sighed. The pain faded as my metabolism kicked in. “The burgers are good for now. Did my friend say where he was going?”
Beth shook her head. “He helped take you to my car and then told me to bring you here instead of to the hospital. He said he had to track down a lead and that he’d call later.”
Good old Jake. I’d hear an earful of grumbling about it, but he was always loyal in a pinch.
“OK.” I paused. “For now you need to get your daughter somewhere safe. Maybe a church or—” The clanking of dishes came to me again. I stopped as I remembered something she had said earlier. “Beth, are we at your shelter right now?”
She nodded and hugged her chest. I didn’t want to break her, but she had to prepare herself. “Is it a church-based shelter?” I asked.
“The Arms of St. Padre Pio. Why?”
“That’s good. I need you to stay here for the next few days. Both the name and the purpose make it holy ground. Meanwhile I’ll try to find out who sent that thing and why.”
“That’s kind of you, Mr. St. James, but I don’t have much money to pay you.”
“Don’t worry about payment. I want this thing gone as much as you do.”
She looked at me, and her eyes were haunted. “Thank you.” She walked stiffly to the door, all the while hugging herself. Before she exited the room, however, she stopped.
“Mr. St. James…”
“Yes?”
�
��Back there, under the bridge. I was frightened more than any time in my life.” She swallowed hard. “The concept of angels and demons, while strange and old-fashioned, I can handle…eventually. But when we were back there, I thought I saw the Fremont Troll…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
I smiled. “If you get enough people to love and believe in an object, sometimes it gets infused with an old spirit. But don’t worry. He only wakes up every couple of years or so.”
Beth gave a little gasp and disappeared through the doorway. I kicked myself. Sometimes my mouth rushes out the door before my brain finishes making breakfast. I should’ve lied and told her Old Jätte Finn was nothing more than a neuron sparking in the wrong place. But no, I had to go and break her.
I sighed. Another hamburger devoured and I began feeling human again. My mind went back to her words. Nothing is ever “just” what it seems. That included my hostess and her homeless shelter. I needed to try and find the missing pieces before someone else died.
After ten minutes I swung my legs around the metal frame of the bed and took inventory. Ribs were bruised but not broken. Arms had feeling to them, a double plus. My shoulder still ached from the demon slash the other morning. My body healed faster than normal, which made the ache worrisome. Demon poison could make my life interesting. And my hat was gone. Again. I wondered if the demon had an address I could send a bill to.
That brought a low chuckle. Feeling better, I tried to stand, but someone picked that exact moment to replace the room with a spinning teacup ride. I plopped back down with a groan.
After another hamburger, I tried again. About a dozen joints popped and groaned, but the protein helped. I wasn’t going to tango any time soon, but I had enough strength to walk out under my own power.
As I approached the exit, a small yellow head peeked in from the doorway. One blue eye looked at me from around the doorjamb.
I smiled and hoped it didn’t come off as too much of a grimace. “Hey,” I said, “don’t be scared. Come on in.”
The little girl cautiously stepped into the room. She wore white jeans and a pink shirt with a cartoon rabbit on the front. The baby fat still clung to her chubby face, and her long blond hair swung as she stood with her hands behind her back.
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