The Spirit in St. Louis

by Mark Everett Stone

  The remains of the team swiveled toward our leader, and we waited patiently while he took his sweet time answering. “This demon that killed the guard is an old one. Very powerful. A named one.”

  I felt mice with icy feet run up and down my spine. The average demon (it constantly surprised me that I was jaded enough to use asinine phrases like ‘the average demon’) don’t have names. They’re either malevolent spirits or a species of infernal creatures we’ve come to assign to categories like ‘Type One’ or ‘Type Two.’ For a demon to actually possess a name means that it is more powerful than most and was able to travel to our plane of existence as flesh and/or spirit. If it came as spirit only, it would possess an unlucky host and cause mischief that way. If it came in the flesh, it was time to pucker up, bend over, and kiss your hind parts goodbye.

  “Go on, already!” hollered Waldo suddenly, scaring five years off most of us. “What is it?”

  Not one to be rushed, Brute merely gave the Magician the executive stink-eye and said, “I think this is a demon called Ornias.”

  We let that rattle around our noggins like a BB in a boxcar until Growler said, “Say what?”

  “In an old text called ‘The Testament of Solomon,’ there’s mention of a demon named Ornias.”

  “The what of what?” This came from Mouth. Her pretty face was screwed up tight in puzzlement.

  “An ancient text attributed to King Solomon,” I answered. That earned me a skeptical look from our fearless leader. “What? I’ve been studying; I came across a reference.”

  Brute nodded. “Good. Keep studying. It might just save your life.” He took a deep breath. It was like watching a whale surface. “In the Testament, Ornias caused all manner of trouble, mostly to young, effeminate men. He’d leave burn marks on their bodies in the shape of human hands. Solomon eventually defeated the demon using the Ring of Solomon, also called the Seal of Solomon, and forced Ornias to help build the great temple in Jerusalem.” He held up the bronze circlet in his hand. “This, I believe, is the Seal of Solomon. This is what Ornias wants. He wants to destroy it before it can be used against demonkind once again.”

  Holy crap on a cracker! I’d done a lot of research on Supernaturals, especially on a certain Finnish quasi-deity, but this was breaking new ground for me. My vendetta against Iku-Turso consumed most of my free time—when I wasn’t womanizing or drinking heroic amounts of vodka—so knowledge of artifacts like the Seal fell to the wayside. Now I had come to regret such a narrow focus.

  A giant finger poked me in the sternum. “You still with us, Hakala?”

  I followed that finger to the hand to a wrist as thick as a Louisville Slugger to an arm large as my right leg all the way to Brute’s eyes half hidden beneath the shelf of his brow. “Yeah, I’m always here, boss.”

  A small nod flew my way. “Good.” To the rest of the team, he said, “Fall back to the lobby. I think Ornias isn’t done with us yet, and we’ll need the room to maneuver. Waldo, what about that pile of bones?”

  “Kal’s T. rex horsie won’t be a problem, I put a stasis on it, and if the demon tries to lift it, I’ll know. We’ll have plenty of warning and now I know how to counter the big beast.” Waldo spat a gob of phlegm and tobacco on the floor.

  “Good. Now on my six.” With that our leader stomped off toward the lobby, what was left of it, the team following like good little soldiers.

  “What are we doing here, boss?” asked Growler as we gathered around the Information desk.

  Brute kept his gaze shifting all around. “We’re waiting,” he took a deep breath, “for a demon.”

  Two hours later we were still waiting. There’s only so long a human can remain on high alert before the tension bleeds out of the air and the body relaxes. Weeks of training in Coronado put steel in our spines, but metal only lasts so long before it oxidizes. The loss of focus begins with the droopy eyelids and thirst. You take one sip of water, then two, then three, and before you know it, your canteen is empty. The problem with drinking all that water is that it eventually has to make an exit. Ten ounces of water takes anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour to reach the bladder. Then it’s time for the pee-pee dance.

  At first you try to hold it in. Just a little discomfort, right? Wrong. That discomfort becomes an ache, then a leg-crossing pain that has you bent over, walking funny until you head for the nearest bathroom or most convenient bush.

  By the end of the second hour we were traveling to the bathroom in pairs. As it turned out, it was I who escorted Mouth.

  “Oh, god,” she moaned from her stall in the men’s room. “This is better than sex!”

  Relief flooded my torso as I whizzed in the urinal. Yeah, pretty darn good, but not better than sex and I told her so.

  “It’s so easy for you men,” she replied over the tinkling sounds. “You just whip it out and let go anywhere you want. You don’t have to cop a squat.”

  “Is this the basis for penis envy?”

  “It’s the basis for getting your [CENSORED] ass kicked for bringing up that giant doofus Freud.”

  “I sense anger issues.” Shake once, twice and tuck it away. Damn my bladder felt so much better.

  “I sense that you better be nice to me, Kalevi Hakala, the Ferocious Finn, lest I take you down a peg or three in front of all your dickwad male friends.”

  The smile on my face froze. I crossed my arms, leaning against the cool porcelain of a sink. “You know I’ve got no friends, Mouth. None that survive the Bureau, that is.”

  She paused. “What about Canton?”

  “He’s no longer Bureau.” I missed Canton something terrible. Possibly the best Agent I’d ever met, he was liquid death with a knife, tough as they came, sharp as a straight razor. Losing him to civilian life hurt more than I could say, but I was happy he was out of harm’s way. “You know what it’s like, Mouth. We’re like firefighters—we eat and sleep at Warehouse—but unlike firefighters, we stay there fulltime. I only get to see Canton during vacations and he’s plenty busy working for his father’s company in New York.” I shook my head. “This isn’t a job for making friends.”

  The rasp of a zipper and the heavy rustle of Bureau armor filled the bathroom. “I know, Kal. This isn’t the kind of business for anything except death.” Her pretty face was set in a frown as she exited the stall.

  Really, this conversation was getting a bit morose. “You know what I can’t wrap my head around?”

  Mouth lifted an eyebrow.

  “What I can’t understand is why we’re sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, this Ornias character knows we’re on to him. Demons like him, the named ones, aren’t like the usual bundles of hate and evil. Even the bigger, nastier demons aren’t that bright, but Ornias isn’t acting like that.”

  She chewed on that for a moment. “Sounds right. So what?”

  “So, why would he attack us his own self? Why put his precious hide in jeopardy if the Seal of Solomon can control him? He’s got to be scared, but for some reason he wants the Seal bad enough to reanimate Sue and try to kill us all.”

  “Think about it,” she said. “The Seal is one of the few things he can’t fight against, and if he gets his hands on it, he becomes stronger as a result.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t feel right. There’s no reason for him to steal the Seal, or even come close to it. He could lounge around on another continent causing mischief and not have to worry about it. So why go to all this trouble to get it? Why didn’t he steal it yesterday when he killed that guard?”

  It took her a moment. Finally she said, “Maybe he was sent to retrieve it?”

  Sounded plausible. “That makes sense, but then you have to ask—” I began.

  “By whom?” she finished.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kal

  Present Day

  Dream Weaver

  It was the buzzing that woke me, an annoyin
g whine that threatened to bust my eardrums and drool my brains out the hole.

  “Kal, wake up.”

  “God’s blood, Ghost,” I moaned thickly. “You’re such a killjoy.”

  “I would rather be a killjoy than see you killed.”

  Unsteady on my feet. The world tilted this way and that, but I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass. That flashback to the Field Museum in Chicago with Brute and the team had the quality of the dreams I had in Omaha a year ago. Alex told me it was a manifestation of my magic, a message from my subconscious trying to tell me something important.

  Strange to think that if not for Iku-Turso, I would have been a Magician. I was fifteen when it entered my life, killing my sister. Her spirit bonded to me, siphoning off my magic to enhance her own. She became my rage and that made me one of the most effective Agents in Bureau history. Now I was a man with an atrophied magical ability that proved to be sporadic at best. Alex and Jeanie said I’d never be a real Magician, that I’d never master any spell except Zippo and that was okay. However, they also theorized that my ability could manifest in strange ways.

  Strange ways. My entire life was ruled by strange ways, my path through this world a twisty one, my sanity barely held together with spit, bailing wire, and the love for my wife and child. No matter how you sliced it, I was more screwed up than Congress.

  What was my magic trying to tell me now?

  Not a clue.

  The black goo on the floor provided no answers, just the twisted wreckage of my Bowie knife. I quashed a brief stab of sorrow over the loss of the blade, a gift from my father, now melted down to a few short inches of blackened metal, as if it had been dipped in a jar of sulfuric acid.

  “I am sorry, Kal.” The words made sense, but there was no emotion behind them.

  “If this had been a person, then you could offer up a ‘sorry,’ Ghost,” I said tightly. “I can always replace the knife.” I hefted the wooden handle with its stub of blade. “No use crying over metal. Now, we have a job to do. Show me the stairs.”

  “You can take the elevator.”

  “Not with that spell shape inside.”

  “Not a worry, Kal.”

  My curiosity bump tingling, I headed back to the freight elevator where Ghost recreated the spell Shape on the DRAFTlite and indicated which silver rune to deface in order to negate the spell.

  “Why didn’t we do this earlier?” The black paint peeled away from the keen edge of my K-bar, a backup for the Bowie. The eight-inch blade felt too short and not near heavy enough. Still, it eradicated enough paint to expose a patch of silver the size of my palm, erasing one of the runes.

  “I had no idea the spell was still active, or maybe it had a motion-sensing component that automatically activated it.”

  “So erasing it before wouldn’t have helped?”

  “Likely not.”

  Awesome.

  I hit the button for the thirtieth floor and sat in one of the rune-covered black leather chairs.

  “What are you doing, Kal?”

  “Going to take a nap?”

  “How can you sleep at a time like this?”

  The question was how could I not sleep? My joints ached and my body hurt awful from my fight with the succubus. Not to mention having the mother of all headaches, the kind with the diamond splinter of pain between the eyes that radiated to the back of your skull. I groaned as I eased back, reclining as far as I could.

  Used to be I could drink, screw, and party all night and head off to work bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but these days it took a little bit extra to get my motor running in the morning. Like a gallon of coffee and a jelly donut. No sprinkles.

  Sucks getting old.

  “Ghost, my talent is trying to tell me something and I’m going to let it. We’ll hit the top floor and work our way from there, but first I’m going to get some shut-eye.”

  “Do you really think you will sleep?”

  Sure I was keyed up a bit, but I had a feeling I should trust my talent, go with the flow, and it wouldn’t steer me wrong. “Call it a hunch, old spook, but I think I can. Keep an electric eye out for your clones and brief the team on what’s going on. Have them meet us on the thirtieth floor if they’re not already there. Wake me three minutes after we reach the thirtieth, okay?”

  “Okay, Kal. Will do. I just hope the rest of the team is in the building. They could be in a different dimension, much as you were.”

  “Ghost, never bet against an Agent. Something tells me they made it back. Now please shut your cyber-trap and let me do my thing.”

  He shut it and I lay back, closing my eyes. Sure enough, I quickly passed through from awake to dreaming.

  “By whom?” she finished.

  We looked at each other for a long moment. “I don’t like this, Mouth. This feels wrong. Hinky doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  “What do you think this hinky demon is up to, then, Mr. Smart guy?” Her smile held more than just a little challenge. Mouth was one of those combative types who had zero qualms about saying ‘screw it’ in any situation and the combat expertise to back it up. If I asked her to follow me to Hell to kick the Devil’s ass, she’d probably smile and start loading her gun.

  “Sue was a big ploy,” I said, tugging at my lower lip. “Overwhelming force, but one that could be countered by a single person.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s the demon’s next play? He tried a frickin’ T. rex, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Try something different, I’d imagine.”

  “So what’s more effective than a gigantic, near unstoppable fossil?”

  “Two?”

  Every now and then the penny drops, the light bulb flashes on overhead, and the dusty corners of my mind clean themselves out. “More than that,” I blurted out. “Much more than that.” I grabbed her hand and dragged her out of the restroom.

  My feet blurred as I about near yanked Mouth’s arm out of its socket, but there was no time to waste because if my sneaking suspicions were correct, we were about to land feet first in fecal matter.

  “Boss!” I yelled, putting my lungs into it. Wasted effort because even the mildest exclamation would’ve bounced all the way through the main lobby like a Ping-Pong ball. “We’ve been giving it too much time!” I pounded to a halt.

  At his puzzled look, I explained, “We’ve been sitting here with our thumbs up our butts giving Ornias time to work up some serious whammy.”

  “Hold on there, Tex,” groused Waldo. “That dino was pretty serious.”

  “But it was a one off,” I said, looking each team member in the eye, “and one that didn’t work because Waldo took the spell off it, but what if he can do the same kinda spell to a whole bunch of things?” I looked around. “How much crap is stored in the museum vaults?”

  My answer came quick enough.

  The first wave came from both sides, boiling out through the entrances to the other halls. Faster than I would have thought possible, the linen-wrapped monstrosities ran at us full-tilt in a flood of brown, desiccated flesh and ancient bandages.

  We worked as one, unloading with our weapons, everything from shotguns to the Lahti, but as with Sue, bullets didn’t affect them much.

  I found the Bowie in my hand and hacked, taking off an arm at the shoulder. It fell to the floor, but the mummy pressed on. It smelled faintly of dust and spices. Before it could latch on, I took its head and kicked it away in time to meet the next one.

  With every shot, Growler took out a mummy, the shotgun in his hands bursting them like water balloons hitting pavement. One shot, one (well) kill. As for Waldo, he’d stare at a mummy and it would fall down, once again a museum exhibit. “I can’t get them all,” he shouted, dropping another. “Each one has been spelled.”

  I felt dead hands wrap around my throat and I grabbed the thin, stick-like fingers and twisted hard, breaking them off at the palms. Linen and bones tore easily and I spun, decapitating the creature bef
ore it could try another tack, like biting. Being bitten to death by three-thousand-year-old corpses didn’t sound like a fun way to spend an evening.

  Having abandoned her near-useless pistol, Mouth gave a good account of herself from atop the information desk, kicking heads off and ripping off arms, while Brute used raw force to simply punch both fists through chest cavities before ripping the mummies in half. He was covered from head to toe in mummy dust and sweat.

  It looked like we had the best of things as the fighting continued. I used the Bowie to decapitate another mummy and saw that there were fewer than ten left. That’s when I began to be really concerned. Ornias wasn’t about to end this hoedown with mummies.

  Then the lions struck.

  Growler was the first to go down, neck snapping as a paw the size of an Ultimate Frisbee hit him hard enough to twist his head three-quarters of the way around his body. He fell without a sound.

  Brute fell back on his butt as nine feet of maneless Tsavo lion hit him hard, jaws agape and going for the throat. The boss managed to get one armored forearm up, and the lion decided that was good enough, too, and bit down hard. Brute screamed.

  Then the other Tsavo lion jumped me.

  Kenya, 1898: the British were building a railway bridge near the Tsavo River and several natives along with Indian workers mysteriously disappeared. It turned out to be the work of two male lions gone rogue. The final death toll before Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson killed the lions was 135 victims. Of course the Field Museum purchased the stuffed man-eaters.

  I ducked, barely avoiding a huge paw that swiped at me as the lion flew overhead. It landed in a crouch and spun, ready to leap again. The smart thing to do would be to run like a striped-assed ape and seek shelter, but I wasn’t about to leave the team and I needed to be clear-headed, so letting the rage take over was out. What I needed to do was use my brains. One look at teeth the size of my pinky finger made that a less than comforting thought.