The Demons of King Solomon

by Aaron J. French

  “Hunter,” Betty Lou shouted, “we’re about to have company!”

  The double distraction took my eyes off the prize; a flash of movement—I flinched, felt the burning pain of demon claws slashing my face. Cop Shades smiled wide, pointy teeth flashing in the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge. A long, blackened, forked tongue licked my blood from its talons.

  “You taste delicious, mortal. Your soul will taste even better.”

  I felt blood coursing down my cheek. If I hadn’t flinched away, that shot would have taken off my head. I couldn’t look at the crack to another dimension, not if I wanted my children to have a daddy at their graduation.

  The fault’s glow made Cop Shades’ sunglasses gleam a solid red.

  My left hand surged with power—Old Glory was thirsty.

  “Hey, dickless,” I said to Cop Shades. I curled my fingers inward. “How about you come finish me off?”

  In he came. He floated toward me, hands outstretched, talons reflecting the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge above.

  The demon swung his lethal right claw at my head, but now I had his range—I bobbed back just enough and felt the breeze from talon tips that missed by a hair.

  My turn.

  A step forward, a twist of the hips, a turn of the shoulders, and I landed a left cross with the force of Thor’s hammer. Old Glory hit Cop Shades in his right eye. The sunglasses broke, the tinted lenses flying away in three pieces, the twisted wire frames falling to the ground.

  Cop Shades dropped: down goes Frazier.

  He lay on the bricks of Fort Point, unmoving.

  Then there was Bo—my middle son’s silver baseball bat arced down and turned Cop Shades’ head into silly putty.

  Down stays Frazier.

  I pressed a hand to my bleeding face as I looked around. I felt a twinge of pride at my family’s handiwork. Sunshine’s demon was a twitching pincushion, the red-shelled beast well on his way to wherever demons wind up when you kill them. Luke held his left arm with his right; he’d been hurt. His lobster demon was on the ground, though, with a head turned to shell-spotted paste—before finishing off his pa’s assailant, Bo had helped his brother. Betty Lou’s foe was nothing more than a smoldering green globule. I felt a hankering to re-watch Spinal Tap.

  My wife’s scream brought me back to the trouble at hand.

  The fault seethed like a dying red sun. Something was coming out of it. Betty Lou’s body glowed the pure white of her soul—two colors fighting against one another for dominance.

  “Help me,” she said. “I need y’all’s strength!”

  Luke, hurt arm and all, was instantly at her left side, joining hands with her. I took my wife’s right hand, our fingers locking with love and fury.

  Delicate fingers slid into my other hand; Sunshine, bow slung, blonde hair still fixed in place by an inordinate amount of hairspray.

  I felt the strength of my daughter’s soul flow into me, through me, joining mine as our combined essence coursed into my wife.

  “Yes,” Betty Lou said, snarling with delight. “Oh hell yes!”

  On her left, Luke, and on his left, Bo—a family with hands and hearts and souls locked together into one bad-ass battery of power.

  Betty Lou’s white glow increased, it pulsed, it rocked and it rolled like a machine gun strobe light, her power flowing into the fault, thickening as it did, the light becoming something so pure and intense it was almost a solid.

  And then, a bubble of red energy slipped from the fault, a bubble bigger than Bo and I combined. It rose, swelled, as if it was patiently blown by a little kid intent on blowing the world’s biggest soap bubble.

  Something inside it kicked, stretching the red membrane.

  “Betty Lou,” I said, “you better hurry up.”

  Her answering words were grunts, the kind of throat-raw sounds weightlifters use to get that last set done.

  “I’m trying, Honey… I’m trying.”

  Something else inside that red bubble moved, something wide and long… wings.

  “Woman,” I said, feeling the first real bit of fear crawl up my groin and wiggle in my belly, “finish the damn job already!”

  Her eyes squeezed shut. “Hunter, shut your damn pie hole!”

  She was giving it her all, but it was too late.

  The bubble popped, revealing what lay inside.

  Even as the energy flowed out of us, flowed through my wife, we all stared.

  Betty Lou wasn’t finished sealing the fault—we couldn’t let go, couldn’t do a damn thing until she was.

  “Pa,” Bo said, “you see what I’m seeing?”

  I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  Feathered white wings unfurled, stretched out, flapped against the air hard enough that we felt a sudden, pulsating wind. The body, so taut that we saw muscles twitching beneath a grayish, mangy coat spotted with missing patches showing blistered pink skin beneath. Black lips coated with white spittle-foam curled back to reveal big, cracked, blocky yellow teeth. Eyes flared wide with madness, blazed orange with mindless fury.

  And, worst of all, sticking out of its head, that single, twisted horn, sparkling with untold levels of magical power.

  Of all the supernatch, this was one of the worst.

  A rabid unicorn.

  “Pa,” Luke said, “we gotta get it.”

  His words were as weak as my arms and legs. We’d all given our strength to Betty Lou, and we simply didn’t have any left with which to fight—if the beast came at us, we were finished.

  “Almost,” Betty Lou grunted. “Almost… have it…”

  The fault line’s red light dimmed. The split in reality contracted, pushed together like an earthquake that had changed its mind and come together again.

  The fault sealed shut like a ziplock bag, once again nothing more than old concrete.

  The red light vanished.

  But the rabid unicorn remained.

  “Family, get ready,” I said, releasing Betty Lou’s and Sunshine’s hands. Betty Lou crumpled to the ground.

  Sunshine tried to unsling her bow. She stumbled, the simple task proving too much for her weakened condition.

  Luke raised his sword, which promptly slipped out of his trembling hand and clattered against the concrete. He dropped to his knees, staring up at the flapping monstrosity before us.

  Bo stumbled to me. Father and son stood shoulder to shoulder. Out of bravery? No, out of the need to keep each other on our feet.

  The rabid unicorn rose up ten, fifteen feet. It looked down at me, red smoke curling away from orange eyes. The cracked teeth gleamed with a need for prey.

  The black lips moved, and a voice like grinding rust came out.

  “I… am… Sparklehorse!”

  Wonderful. It even had a cute name.

  With that, the powerful wings beat down. The unicorn rose up into the air, above the wall, and in seconds it was gone, only a trail of dissipating red smoke marking its path.

  Bo and I dropped to our asses, our chests heaving.

  I looked to the fault—gone. Thank God.

  Betty Lou rolled to her side.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said.

  I kissed her cheek, brushed the hair from her face.

  “Breakfast in bed for you tomorrow, darlin’,” I said. “You earned it.”

  I found enough strength to gather her into my arms.

  Bo, Luke, Sunshine, Betty Lou… my family, exhausted but unhurt.

  Another flash of eldritch energy—emerald green this time—and my heart sank. We were so worn down we couldn’t have stopped a no-legged zombie from taking us out.

  The green energy coalesced, condensed into a final form.

  A familiar form, with a lion’s head and five ridiculous goat legs.

  “You will pay for this,” Buer said, his feline eyes boring straight into me.

  “He can’t hurt us,” Luke said, forcing out the words. “He’s… just a projection.”

  The lion/g
oat demon ignored him, kept his focus locked on me.

  “You will pay for this, mortal,” he said. “I will make it my personal goal to wipe you and your family from the face of the earth.”

  A big-time demon. A President of Hell. And he now had it out for me and mine. Frightening? Absolutely. This was bad news with a capital B, but I wasn’t about to let him think we were afraid.

  “Blow it out your ass, fuzz-nuts,” I said. “Anyone ever tell you you look like the king of the jungle got face-fucked by an octopus?”

  The lion eyes flared with fury.

  Come on… it wasn’t like I could make him any more enraged, so I might as well get my licks in now, right?

  Buer opened his lion mouth and roared. Maybe he was just a projection, but that roar was so loud it hurt my ears, fanned the flames of my fear, made my soul feel like it had just been kicked in the balls.

  “Soon,” Buer said, then he pinwheeled straight for the fort wall. Five hooves rolled him into an alcove, where he vanished in a burst of green light.

  None of us said anything for a little while. We just sat there and breathed. Except for Luke, who threw up. That boy and his delicate constitution, I swear.

  Finally, Bo broke the silence.

  “Pa,” he said, “did we really just see a rabid unicorn?”

  I nodded. “We did, son. We did.”

  “We gonna go get it?”

  Somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lethal, diseased, winged, one-horned supernatch was on the loose. We had to track it down.

  Eventually.

  “Not right now,” I said. “We need some rest. And I promised your mother I’d make her breakfast. Come on, clan Hunterson—it’s time to go home.”

  We’d taken away Buer’s motivation for influencing the election. Without him, the election would be a whoopin’. There was no way that Republican could actually win.

  Was there?

  AGARAS

  Agaras, or Agares, is the first duke of the Power of the East. He has thirty-one legions of spirits at his command. Unlike some of his demonic colleagues, he is said to be quite willing to appear when summoned. He looks like an old man riding a crocodile (“very mildly,” according to The Lesser Key of Solomon), and has a hawk sitting on his fist. Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) describes his powers thus: “He fetch-eth backe all such as runne awaie, and maketh them runne that stand still; he overthroweth all dignities supernaturall and temporall, [and] hee maketh earth quakes.” He is also said to be good at teaching languages. The Lesser Key says that he was one of the seventy-two spirits imprisoned by Solomon in a brass vessel at the bottom of the ocean.

  THE OLD MAN DOWN THE ROAD

  R.S. BELCHER

  Sunny found the old man in the ‘glades, so deep in that her cell phone lost signal and her navigation app went mad.

  The gateway to his kingdom was adorned with alligator skulls, hung everywhere, all over the rough-hewn wooden archway that led into the mud and gravel parking lot and all along the rusted wire fences that marked where the swamp ended and the farm began.

  Her car paused at the arch as she read the sign nailed there. The letters had been burned into the wood by a shaky hand:

  Agares Alligator and Crocodile Farm

  No public shows! No trespassing!

  No goddamn kids!

  This isn’t fucking Disney World!

  PISS OFF!

  Mateo, the bartender in Miami who had given Sunny the old man’s name and a general idea of where to find him, had said he wasn’t keen on visitors.

  “He hates pretty much everyone,” he had said, sliding another shot across the bar, “but he’s really good at what you need. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  The gravel lot was mostly empty. There were a few very old, very dilapidated cars parked near a squat cinderblock building with an attached open-air shelter. The shelter had a corrugated tin roof and a cement floor, and there were some Native American men milling around inside. Most looked to be members of one of the tribes that made their homes in the Everglades; Okeechobee, maybe.

  Sunny noticed the low fences of the pen gates and a dirt trail wandering lazily down a hill off to the left. She parked in a corner next to a beat-to-shit, tan Chevy pickup truck that was covered in mud. The truck had a rear-window decal on it that looked like some coat of arms she didn’t recognize. The symbol was the cleanest part of the pickup.

  She got out and walked toward the men under the shade of the shelter’s roof. It was after three. She knew anytime now the afternoon rain would roar through for about 20 minutes and then depart, making it even more of a sauna than it already was. An old radio on a wood workbench broadcasted a scratchy AM country channel. “The Ballad of Gator McKlusky” by Jerry Reed was playing. The men were gutting big-mouth bass and dropping the chum into a large, stained, plastic trashcan. One of them, a big fella with snow-white hair, paused and looked up at her.

  “You lost? It’s a ways back to the main road if you are.”

  “No,” Sunny said. “I’m looking for the owner of the farm.”

  “If you’re trying to sell him something,” another man said, not looking up from the fish guts, “save yourself the time and the bullshit. He ain’t buying any.”

  “I’m told he can… find things,” Sunny said. “I’m looking for his help. I want to hire him.”

  “No,” the snow-haired man said, real sadness and concern in his eyes. “You really don’t.”

  A voice made of rotgut and unfiltered cigarettes called out from the deep darkness beyond the cinderblock building’s open door. “Tell her to get her ass in here and get back to feeding the damn ‘gators!”

  “He’s waiting on you in there,” the man with white hair said. “Good luck.”

  Sunny clutched her messenger bag a little tighter and did a quick recall of exactly where the stun gun and the .38 were tucked away inside. The darkness beyond the open door seemed impenetrable. She smelled thick cigarette smoke and pungent marijuana inside. She wondered if she was really this desperate, then answered her own question by stepping into the darkness.

  It took a second for her eyes to adjust. Strangely, all the noise from the outside, the radio, the men’s voices, even the sounds of the swamp, ended when she passed through the door. The room was a hot mess. It looked like it was used as a combination bar, office, and bedroom. Every part was cluttered. Papers and bills overflowed the large, old, oak desk in the corner. She noted there was no computer, just an old, heavy manual typewriter that belonged in an antique shop window. The “bar” was some warped, bare plywood nailed together crudely, crowned with a pile of half-empty liquor bottles. Two cheap stools stood beside it. There was an unmade bed in another corner. The floor around the bed had dirty clothing as carpeting. There was a low, round coffee table with a huge hookah, and a bunch of threadbare pillows and cushions forming an island around it.

  A man reclined among the cushions, puffing on one of the pipe’s hoses. He was gaunt, wiry with compact muscles moving under his powerful forearms stained with old, faded tattoos of strange symbols. His face was more carved than organic, furrowed with lines and crags. His nose was hawk-like, his eyes hot pitch. Everything about his features spoke of cruelty and impatience. His long, greasy, dirty, gray hair swooped back from a widow’s peak and fell down his shoulders. It matched his gray beard and mustache. He was dressed in an olive-drab Henley shirt, old jeans, and steel-toed cowboy boots made of rattlesnake hide.

  “Sit,” the old man said. His voice was sandpaper on the air, but Sunny found herself responding at once. She sat opposite him in the circle of pillows. They looked at each other. He said nothing, just gazed at her with pitiless eyes.

  “Some people in Miami told me about you,” she began. “They said you’re the one who found that thirteen-year-old who got abducted from Hadley Park. They said she was all the way across the county, sold to human traffickers, but you found her, brought her home.” The old man stayed silent, his gaze
unwavering. Sunny tried again. “I want to hire you to find someone.”

  The old man suddenly had a pocket knife in his hand. He flicked the lock-blade open with a snap of his wrist and tossed the knife to Sunny, seemingly unconcerned with the blade hitting her. She caught it and avoided getting cut, but looked at the knife like it was venomous snake.

  “Cut yourself,” he said. “I need your blood.”

  “Look, Mr. Agares,” Sunny began.

  “Just Agares.”

  “That Latino?”

  “It’s Latin,” Agares said, “close enough.”

  “Well, Agares, I grew up in Little Havana, all that Santeria and Palo Mayombe witchcraft shit, I don’t buy any of it, so…”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you buy into or not,” Agares said. “I find people and I find things, better than anyone else on this goddamned planet. But it costs.”

  “I have money,” She said, pulling at the envelope full of tips she’d saved for over 5 years. The old man’s voice stopped her.

  “Money don’t mean shit. My price is blood and honesty. Both are a damn sight rarer in this world than cash.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Sunny said.

  “Then get the fuck out.” Agares took another long hit on the pipe’s hose. Sunny started to rise then sat back down. She examined the pocket knife’s narrow blade, frowned and tossed it back to Agares, who plucked it right out of the air while exhaling a thick cloud of Marijuana smoke.

  “The blade’s filthy,” she said. Agares squinted at the knife. He cleared his throat loudly and spat on the blade, polishing it dry with his dirty shirt. He handed the knife to Sunny this time.

  “Clean now,” he said. “You doing this, or am I getting stoned and eating Fruity Pebbles?”

  “Why should I bleed for you?”

  Agares sighed.

  “You lost your virginity at a very early age. You didn’t like it, either. You got lost once at the Dadeland Mall when you were seven. You were so scared, you pissed your pants. When you were 13, you lost your brother, who was pretty much the only real family you ever had. You lost the love of your life at 23. She couldn’t stand your drinking and your abuse and your bullshit anymore, so she left. She never returns your calls, especially the drunken ones you make to her every New Year’s Eve. Oh, and you lost your cellphone at a bar in Hialeah 3 years ago. It slipped under the truck next to your car when you stumbled in the parking lot because you were drunk off your ass.”