by D V Wolfe
I sighed and laid back on the carpet beside the couch. “I heard you the first two times you said it. And again, I ask, you got a better one?” There was silence from the couch beside me. “That’s what I thought.”
I tipped my head back to look at Gabe and Stacks who were pacing and flipping pages in some of Stacks’ old tomes. “So any luck on finding out who the head honcho demon in this legion might be or who they might be working for?” One thing I’d learned about demons was that something this big had to be orchestrated by a head demon. In my experience, a group of unsupervised demons were like a late-shift fast-food crew with no manager. Find the manager, and we might be able to figure out why exactly the crew was here, screw up their plans, and then take them all down.
“There has to be a connection,” Stacks was muttering. “A demon that would use the legion symbol to call other demons to him. Maybe a demon that hated recruiting drives. He’s got to be listed somewhere.”
Gabe sighed and sat down on the floor next to my head. “There are a lot of demons that have reputations for making people off themselves. Usually via mind tricks and madness, but none of them have been associated with the legion symbol.” Gabe tossed the pink flier down on the floor next to me. I rolled over onto one side to look at it. “You said…” Gabe cleared his throat. “You said down...stairs that these dickwads put their seal on their office doors?”
I nodded. “Probably their beer koozies, t-shirts, etc. Why?”
“You...you don’t remember maybe seeing this symbol associated with a demon downstairs, do you?” Gabe’s expression was pained.
I closed my eyes and thought. I dug my fingers into the stained carpet while I opened the mental box of memories of Hell. Crackling flesh and the heat and screams. I tried to breathe slowly and remind my pounding heart that these were just memories. I exhaled and shook my head slowly. I opened my eyes. “Not on the upper decks where I was. It could be something one of the big dogs downstairs was using.”
Gabe nodded. For a second, I thought he was going to put one of his square hands on the side of my face, but he looked back down at the book in his lap and started flipping pages. “Well there are seventy-two demonic seals in here, and none of them are that symbol. Is it possible that there are more and they just weren’t recorded?” Gabe asked.
I tilted my head to look up at him. “That was rhetorical, right?”
Gabe grinned down at me, and the light in his eyes made something jerk in my stomach. I sat up, moved a few inches away from him, and pulled my knees up to my chest.
I leaned my forehead against my knees. “So this symbol is an ‘olly-olly-oxen-free’ to all demons, what, nearby? Under the same boss?” I glanced over at Stacks who shrugged. “Ok,” I continued. “And this group of demons are having Joe and Suzy Churchgoer sign a book that might be taking their souls. Apparently, a couple of the church people weren’t fooled, because we have three dead bodies that off-ed themselves but were probably actually killed by these demons. Of course, we don’t know any of this for sure, because something ganked our ghost mid-way through interrogation.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Gabe said.
We didn’t get much further than that in the next three hours. Even after we found out more and more insight from the research in Stacks’ tomes, the fact still remained; we needed the book to know anything more for sure.
“Ok,” Rosetta finally said, slumping back on the couch between Gabe and I who were still sitting on the floor, leaning back against it. “Let’s talk strategy for this mission. Bane has some kind of anger thing that can throw off the compelling spell after a time…”
“Like the Hulk,” Noah said.
“She-Hulk smash,” Gabe added with a grin. I gave them both the finger.
“Put that away or I’ll take it away,” Rosetta growled. “For the rest of us, what kind of protection against compelling could we use?”
A snore met her question and we all turned to look at Stacks who was asleep, face first on the table.
“He’s on it,” I said and leaned my head back, trying to think. I heard Noah’s familiar snore and I turned to see him curled up on the floor on the other side of the couch, his head on Gabe’s balled-up leather jacket.
“I think it’s time we all turned in,” Rosetta huffed, getting to her feet. “We’ve already got a laundry list of things to do tomorrow if we’re planning on going into this thing full-cocked.”
I snorted into my hand and I felt the couch shaking behind me. I turned my head to see Gabe struggling to hold in silent laughter. Rosetta’s reflexes were cat-like. She smacked us both on the backs of our heads. “Grow up. Both of you.” Rosetta moved down the hallway towards Stacks’ room.
“Where are you going?” I called after her.
“I put clean sheets on Stacks’ bed and I’m commandeering it. Tell him when he wakes up that if he has a problem with that, he can come talk it out with Big Joe. Goodnight y’all.” And with that, she shut Stacks’ bedroom door, and Gabe and I were left alone.
“Is it odd that she spoons a twelve-gauge at night?” Gabe asked, looking down the hall after Rosetta.
I shrugged. “Is it odd that Stacks finds it comforting to crap when his bathroom is wired up to explode?”
“Point taken,” Gabe said. He turned to look at me and I started to panic-sweat. What if he was going to bring up the fight? I couldn’t deal with that right now.
“I’ll get the lights,” I said. “You can have the couch.”
Gabe shook his head. “You take it. You’ve had a long couple of days and I can see you’re sore.”
I wanted to argue, but that would mean talking more. And talking more with Gabe right now could lead right back to the fight we’d had. And neither of us could storm off from a hunt. So then, we’d have to talk things out...and God help me, the thought of that was more painful than all the stiff muscles, cuts, and bruises I currently had.
“Thanks,” I said. I turned off the lights and carefully stepped around him in the dark, feeling my way back to the couch. I stubbed my toe on a stool and I felt a warm hand reach out to steady me before I fell.
“Careful,” Gabe said. “If you wake up Stacks, you’ll have to fight him for the couch.”
“I think I can take him,” I said.
“I know you can take him,” Gabe answered as I moved away and climbed onto the sofa. “It’s a pissed off and armed Rosetta, deprived of her beauty sleep, I don’t think you could take.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’d kick my ass.” I settled in and I heard Gabe lay down in front of the couch.
We were quiet for a moment and then I heard Gabe shift around. “Bane?”
“G’night, Gabe,” I said before he could say anything else. I turned on the couch to face the back cushions, putting my back to him.
“Goodnight,” Gabe said from the floor. I closed my eyes, hoping he wouldn’t try again. I couldn’t. Not now. Not when there were so many other things to worry about. After about twenty minutes of waiting, hoping he wouldn’t say anything else, I heard his breathing even out and the soft sounds of him sleeping. I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Don’t think. Just do. Just sleep. And I did.
Somewhere around four in the morning, Stacks woke up and banged around the room. Gabe was able to catch him before he stumbled down the hall to his room and after a low conversation, he was able to get Stacks to sleep in his recliner.
Everyone was stiff and cranky when the sun peeked in around the cardboard-covered windows.
“It’s like living in a tomb in here,” Rosetta huffed, stomping into the kitchen and pulling the cardboard off the window.
“What the hell are you doing?” Stacks snapped, lunging out of his recliner and stumbling around the folding table and stools towards the kitchen. I laid on my back and listened to the two of them bickering about surveillance and “natural light” and the terms “harpy” and “sewer rat” were tossed around.
“That was a mistake,”
I heard Gabe’s low voice rumble from the carpet next to me.
“Which one?” I asked. “What Stacks called her or what she called him?”
“Calling Rosetta a harpy,” Gabe said. “He’s in a room that she knows better than he does. Meaning she knows where all the knives are. Stacks probably can’t remember if he even has knives in there.”
“This should be good,” I said. Why couldn’t all my interactions with Gabe be as casual as this one? We were just enjoying ourselves, listening to Rosetta spar with Stacks. Why did things with Gabe have to be so complicated?
Spar had been a generous term. When Stacks came out of the kitchen, I swear he looked a foot shorter. He was sulking as he started clearing off the folding table.
“How’d it go?” I asked him.
He gave me a death glare. “I’ve been usurped in my own home.”
“Rosetta likes to call it, ‘aggressive care’,” I said.
“Whatever she calls it, she says she’s making breakfast and we have to clean off the table,” Stacks muttered.
“Did she say ‘we’ or did she say you?” I asked.
Now he gave me the finger.
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, we got back to work. Stacks had stopped sulking and was digging through a new stack of books from his room, trying to find anything about how to resist being “compelled”. Noah was clicking around on the internet, trying to research it, Rosetta was studying Barbara’s hymnal, and Gabe was back to reading through Ars Goetia.
“Anything in that book on breaking the compelling spell of a demon?” I asked Gabe.
Gabe sighed. “No, I mean there’s a mention of a ‘gift of Solomon’ that can make them incapacitated.” I turned and locked eyes with Noah. “But God knows what that is,” Gabe finished.
“Actually,” I said. “That’s good news.”
“Wanna share with the class?” Gabe asked.
I was getting to my feet. Maybe if we added it to hex bags, it would be protection as well as a means to kill the bastards. Finally, something. Something we could move forward with.
“Bane?” Gabe asked behind me. He hadn’t been in St. Louis and we hadn’t really had a chance to go over all the finer points of everything we figured out on that hunt.
“I’ll explain in a minute,” I called back to him as I went down the front steps.
“Bane,” Gabe said. “You don’t have any shoes on!”
I rounded the steps and climbed up Lucy’s tailgate. “I’m fine. This will just take a second.”
I heard the trailer door shut and Gabe’s heavy boots on the steps.
“Man if this truck could talk,” Gabe said as he leaned on the side of the bed.
“I think she’d do a lot of screaming in terror, actually,” I said, popping open the toolbox.
“So how is it you just happen to know what this ‘Gift of Solomon’ is?” Gabe asked.
“Long story,” I said, finding the old mayo jar Rosetta had given me. I dug it out and cradled it to my chest. “Funny story actually,” I said, swinging a leg over the truck bed and sitting down to swing the other over. “It involves me stuffing shit up Festus’ nose. And then he vomited,” I said, unable to suppress the grin. “It was all in this book Stacks found at the library in Indianapolis. He did the translation. It’s Solomon’s Spice.”
“The more you know,” Gabe said. “And you think if we, what, rub ourselves with this stuff or put it in hex bags or something, we could deflect the demons’ compelling spells?”
I clutched the jar between both hands. “I hope so.” Gabe was blocking my way to jump down and I raised an eyebrow at him. He nodded at the jar.
“So this spice is magic mayo?” Gabe asked.
“Only the best condiments for these assholes. Let me get down,” I said. Without a pause, Gabe grabbed me and lifted me down.
“Hey, hey, hey,” I said.
“Just shut up, Bane,” Gabe said with a grin. When he set me down I realized there was something under my feet and it wasn’t ground. It was leather with a steel toe.
“Sorry,” I said, looking down. “Seems I landed on your feet.” I started to move but Gabe held me by the shoulders.
“Just hold still,” Gabe said as he started walking us back towards the house. “You know what kind of bullshit Stacks keeps in his yard. I don’t think we have time in our schedule to play fifty-two-piece-Bane-pick-up before the plan goes off.”
I rolled my eyes. “This just means that if you step on one of his tripwires, we’re both going up. Shoes or no shoes don’t enter into it.”
“Well, besides the explosives, have you looked at this yard? Broken bottles, tetanus-covered nails, barbed wire…” Gabe began.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I get your point.”
“So you think it will work?” Gabe asked, nodding down at the jar in my hands.
I was having a hard time breathing normally, but I tried to keep up the appearance that I wasn’t rattled. “At this point, it’s my best guess. Still, walking into a den of demons and possibly humans turned demon-lackeys, armed with only guesses and assumptions, does feel a lot like walking out of the house with no underwear on and a hole in your pants.”
“Just had to bring that up, didn’t you?” Gabe chuckled.
“I tried to tell you,” I muttered. “But did you listen?” What the hell was I doing? Shut up, Bane. Don’t bring up shit like that.
Gabe got us to the stairs and stopped. I started to move to the wooden step but Gabe still held me by the shoulders. I’d tried to forget how tall Gabe was. And broad. And bearded.
“Thanks for the...ride,” I said, looking down at his feet.
“Bane,” Gabe said, his voice soft.
I looked up at his face and my stomach jerked again. No. “Gabe,” I said on a sigh. I had to nip this in the bud.
“Will you two get your hind ends in here so that we can get some work done?” Rosetta barked from the front door. Gabe let me go and I hurried up the stairs, Gabe stomping along behind me. I set the mayo jar on the table.
“Alright, troops assemble,” I said. “Let’s make some bad decisions.”
13
We spent the rest of the day hunting down cypress wood, making stakes, brewing the god’s tears elixir, and putting the whole thing together. Rosetta made the hex bags with the Solomon’s Spice but when I tried one on, it made it hard for me to breathe.
“Sorry,” Rosetta said. “I didn’t want to go half-measure on their potency and risk us becoming these demon’s personal bathroom attendants. It’s got a few odds and ends in there that might be messing with your...allergies.”
I tugged the thing off and handed it back to her. “No worries. I’ll be fine. I’ll just get angry and I should be able to throw them off.”
“She-Hulk smash!” Noah said. I heard Gabe chuckle and I turned back to look at the two of them. They were both grinning from ear to ear.
“Noah needs a new tie for his suit,” I said, giving him a sarcastic smile. Noah’s grin vanished.
We’d done all the preparations we could, including Stacks and I stealing a car for Gabe and I to drive. We were supposed to have stolen two, but Rosetta had flatly refused to drive a stolen car. Her idea of what was and wasn’t a sin sometimes baffled me. Regardless, the battered white Taurus was parked outside next to Rosetta’s Cadillac and I’d moved Lucy further up the Jeep trail to make sure she couldn’t be seen from the road. Lucy had been in that neighborhood too much to not draw unwanted attention.