“Take care, Madison. Do not underestimate this man. He is dangerous.”
“So am I, Adam son of no man, so am I.”
I looked in her eyes, and there was no fear there, just the steely resolve of a woman who has spent a lifetime dealing with powerful forces and still stood to tell the tale. I gave her a nod and left the back room, pushing through the rainbow silks into the main part of the shop.
“She’s going to need some water, and you’ll need to make sure that shotgun stays loaded,” I said to Alexander as I stretched my back, stiff from sitting on the cinderblocks for so long.
“It’s always loaded,” he said, reaching beneath the counter. His hand came up with a bottle of Aristocrat vodka. “And she don’t never drink water. You can let yourself out.” He walked past me into the back room, and I wove between the counter and the display to the front door. I flipped the sign back to OPEN and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Somewhere in New Orleans was a missing angel, a magical trumpet, and a man who wanted to kill me. I needed to find them all, and I had no idea where to look. I turned left out of the shop and headed toward Jackson Square, unsure if I was trying to clear my head or just make myself a more visible target.
7
The square surrounding the park was crowded in the mid-afternoon sun. Tourists milled about, stopping here and there to listen to buskers or to admire the art hung on the wrought iron fences by the street vendors. One enterprising band of youths combined a pair of young men beating on buckets with drumsticks with a group of four teens dancing and leaping in choreographed chaos, blending capoeira combat dance with breakdancing and hip hop dance moves. I stopped to watch them for a few minutes and dropped a five-dollar bill in a hat before I moved on.
Near the southwest corner of the park, I came upon a young man playing jazz, the sun glinting off the chrome of his trumpet’s bell and flickering into my eyes to draw my attention. He played energetic covers of rock songs with a jazz flavor, and behind him, a homeless man shuffled a little flat-footed dance in time to the music. On the ground before him sat an upside-down fedora in front of a chalkboard sign. The sign read, in big pink chalk letters, “TONIGHT - One Night Only - The Alley Club - behind The Famous Door - Thunder Travis Blows Blues – 9 PM”
I stopped cold as my brain processed the words on the sign. Behind The Famous Door. The trumpet gleaming in the sun. It all clicked together in my head in an instant. This was the man I sought. Or at least the instrument I sought. Now I just had to convince him to either accept his true form as an Archangel, or give me the trumpet so I could find Sealtiel with it.
Thunder Travis, as the sign named him, was a large young man, a Clarence Clemons-sized musician, only with a trumpet instead of a saxophone. His dark skin glistened in the sun, and tattoos ran the length of his bulging arms, sweat obscuring the details and dampening the front of his white tank top. His short dreadlocks stuck out from his head at all angles, and a long silver chain with an ankh on it hung from his neck. He wore cargo shorts and sneakers, and generally looked like a college kid out for a good time, only he was here working to make ends meet blowing jazz for tips in the middle of the afternoon.
I pulled out my phone and aimed it at the man playing the trumpet. “Dennis, are you there?”
“I’m always here, big buddy. What can I do ya for?” the unicorn head on my screen asked.
“I need you to access my phone’s camera and get me any information you can gather on the man playing the trumpet,” I said.
“You get that’s not really how facial recognition stuff works, right? I don’t just beep a few times like R2-D2 and then spit out this dude’s home phone number and address.”
“You always tell me how amazing you are, Dennis. I am merely providing you with an opportunity to prove yourself correct.”
“Sometimes I think you gave Harker asshole lessons when he was a kid,” my electronic unicorn companion muttered.
“Any of his formative years are purely the fault of Abraham and Vlad. I was merely a witness to their corruption of the young Harker. What do you know about this musician?”
“Jesus, dude, gimme at least a minute, will you? Okay, he doesn’t come up in a scan of military records from the last ten years, same for any wanted posters, ditto any TV star websites or major search engines. It looks like your dude is just a dude, playing jazz in the park trying to make a living. Sorry.”
“Is there anything else you can do to try and find out more about him?” I asked. “Driver’s license records, anything like that.”
“I’m scanning the Louisiana and Mississippi DMV records now, but there’s nothing. Sorry, Adam. I’ve got nothing. I’ll start a deep scan, see what I can see on Facebook and other social media stuff. I mean, it’s not like the guy is trying to stay out of sight, maybe he just doesn’t drive. I don’t know. I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Thank you,” I said, then slipped the phone into my pocket. I sat on a nearby bench and watched the crowd pass by. People of all shapes and sizes walked along the sidewalk in front of me, never looking twice at the huge man in the hooded sweatshirt sitting there watching the world. Men, women, children, all absorbed into their own little worlds, their attention often dominated by the tiny screens they held in their hands.
A man stepped up to the musician, bent down, and dropped a bill in the hat. He sat on another bench for a time watching the musician and his dancing homeless man, a dirty shuffle-stepper scuffing his worn shoes in some semblance of time to the music. The spectator sat in the shade, only his wingtip shoes catching the bright sunlight, the patent leather shining to an almost blinding gloss. He wore an expensive suit, with an Italian tie and a matching pocket square. His watch cost more than everything I wore combined, and likely didn’t smell of burning hotel. His hair was immaculate and his face shaved so smooth I wondered if one could use his cheekbones as their own razor.
He was a fiendishly handsome man, and his attention was not locked on the musician, as mine so often was, but skipped across the crowd, the musician, the sidewalk artist making a three-dimensional image on the ground in nothing but chalk, an impermanent masterpiece to be washed away with the next rain. The man’s gaze even fell on me once or twice, and he gave me a friendly nod as we locked eyes. I nodded back, acknowledging him, and returned to watching the trumpeter and his dancing hobo.
After thirty minutes or so, the man set his trumpet down on a small folding stand and took a long drink of water from a plastic bottle at his feet. Then he opened the case next to his water bottle, lay the trumpet inside, and slid the case and stand into a small backpack. He transferred the money from his hat to his pocket, then put the hat on his head. He stood, slipped his arms through the loops on the backpack, and picked up his sign. He turned to the man in the suit, gave him a slight bow, then did the same to me.
“Like the sign says, I’ll be at The Alley Club tonight at nine. Hope y’all can come join us. Bring a friend. Don’t bring too many friends, though. The place isn’t that big.” He laughed, downed the last of his water, and tossed the bottle into a nearby wastebasket. I watched the young man walk off up the sidewalk, whistling a tune as he went. His dancing homeless man stood around for a moment watching him go, then wandered off back the way I came, toward the restaurants and bars of the Quarter.
I waited until he had almost vanished from view, then stood. I noticed the well-dressed man walking ahead of me, his languid gait belied by the way his head never wavered from his target. He was following the young musician, pursuing the same quarry. I pulled my phone from my pocket and held it to my ear.
“Dennis?”
“Yeah, big guy?”
“Have you found anything on our young Mister Travis?” I asked.
“Who’s Mr. Travis?”
“The trumpet player,” I replied. “His name is Thunder Travis.”
“Do you think you could have told me that any later?” Dennis’ voice rose in my ear.
“I’m sorry,�
� I said. “I thought you were amazing.”
“I am amazing,” he retorted. “I’m also incorporeal and trapped in the internet. It’s not like I can just hop out of here on a lightning bolt and take a look around.”
“But wouldn’t that be interesting?”
“Yeah, that would be great,” replied my disgruntled disembodied friend.
There are very few times in life that I enjoy tormenting people, but for one reason or another, they always seem to center on either Dennis or Quincy Harker. Perhaps it is the fact that they are so high-strung. It is just a simple matter to wind them up a little more and watch them go around in circles.
“Okay, here we go,” Dennis said. “Jermaine ‘Thunder’ Travis was a standout running back in high school, second-string at LSU, good enough to get a scholarship for all four years, but nowhere near good enough to play in the pros. He graduated LSU six years ago with a degree in music education, worked for three years at a high school in Baton Rouge, then moved back to New Orleans…looks like he came back to take care of a grandfather who was sick. Grandpa was the original Thunder Travis, a popular sideman in New Orleans in the fifties and sixties. He was in the house band at The Famous Door for a little while, played in the Preservation Hall band for a couple of years, then quit playing as he got older. He died about a year ago. Jermaine was his only living heir.”
“What happened to Jermaine’s parents?”
“Looks like not much record of his dad being involved. He’s listed on the birth certificate, but he’s lived in Montana since 1999. Dad is remarried, has a couple of newer model kids, looks like he sent a check every month until Jermaine turned eighteen, but no real contact. Mom…whoof, that’s a bitch. Mom died six months before Grandpa. Grandma died before Jermaine was born. No other relatives that I can find, no wife, no serious girlfriend according to social media. Looks like he’s pretty much a loner.”
“Send me the address of his grandfather’s house,” I said. If he was headed home to sleep before his gig that night, I could take an Uber and beat him there. I didn’t know why the man in the expensive suit was following him, but anyone paying that much attention to the bearer of the Horn of the Herald was probably someone I didn’t want getting to Jermaine before I did.
“Uber’s around the corner,” Dennis replied. “And it’s paid for. Don’t worry, I didn’t hack anything. Except Harker’s debit card, that is.”
“Well, if it’s Quincy’s money, it’s all the better. I believe he still owes me money from an old poker game.”
“The one where Hickok got shot?” Dennis asked.
“I’m not that old,” I replied, hanging up the phone.
“You know you can’t hang up on me!” I heard from my pocket as Dennis worked valiantly to get the last word in.
I got in the Uber, glad once again that Dennis knew to specify an SUV to accommodate my seven-foot height. The driver didn’t try to make small talk as he drove, letting me lean my head back and relax after a morning spent surrounded by people. I let the soft faux leather of the seat envelope me as I closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep, not even a doze, but I did manage a small moment of meditation, working to center myself after being battered by crowds almost since rising.
The Suburban pulled up to the curb two blocks from Jermaine’s house, as instructed, and I got out. I walked down the sidewalk toward the address Dennis listed and stepped into the shadows between two houses across the street. It was a typical city neighborhood with houses crammed as close together as any sense of privacy would allow. Jermaine rode up on a dark red bicycle about ten minutes after I began my surveillance, chaining the bike to the pipe-built railing of his front steps and walking up to enter his house. Jermaine opened the door, and a flash of light exploded from within, hurling him back through the air to slam into a panel van sitting at the curb.
The wooden door was obliterated, nothing more than a smoking hole in the front of the house, and stepping through it was a demon. Not just a little, run-of-the-mill Reaver or even a bigger, badder Torment Demon. No, this was a nine-foot-tall Demon Warrior, a soldier of Hell’s armies, complete with a flaming sword and armor so black it seemed to absorb all the light around it, making the entire world feel darker, more gray.
I sighed and stepped forward, looking around for a weapon. The last time I’d gone toe-to-toe with a demon unaided, it hadn’t ended well, but it was worse for the demon. Ripping something’s head off with your bare hands tends to ruin its day. I just hoped this demon wasn’t about to ruin mine.
8
I ran to Jermaine’s side and knelt beside his unconscious form. He lay sprawled on the grass beside the dented van with blood oozing from a small cut on the back of his head. The demon stood at the top of the steps, looking around for its prey, then its glowing red eyes locked on me. The thing was nearly two feet taller than me and broad in the shoulders. It was fully encased in what looked like obsidian plate armor with a flaming black sword in one hand. A horned helmet covered its entire face save a slit for its crimson eyes to glare through, and smoke hissed from a grate where its mouth should be, spewing sulfurous stench across the yard.
“Remove thyself from my field of battle, mortal, and I shall spare thy life.”
I stood and faced the demon. “I can’t do that, demon. This man is not yours, nor shall he be as long as I live.”
The monster laughed, a chilling, hollow sound coming through the armor from the bowels of Hell. “Then he will be mine in mere seconds, human. For that is all the longer you shall live!”
He leapt off the steps and charged me with his sword. I turned, ripped the passenger door off the panel van, and brought my makeshift shield around to intercept the charging demon. We slammed together with a mighty crash, and I managed to shove him back. My reprieve lasted less than a breath as he slashed at me with that terrifying blade. I got the door up into its path, but his fiery sword sliced through the metal like it was butter. I gaped at the two hunks of van clenched in my fists, and for the first time in many decades, thought I might actually die.
I threw the chunk of door in my left hand at the demon’s head, and he swatted it away with his sword. That exposed his left side, and I slammed into his knee with the other chunk of door, feeling a grim smile stretch across my face at the satisfying crunch that came from the joint. The impact bent his greave on that leg as well, and he was unable to straighten his leg. He spun around, dancing on one foot and the toes of his left leg, and swirled his sword in a deadly arc before him.
“It seems I underestimated you, human,” he said, his voice sounding like an earthquake mating with a forest fire, all pain and disaster and wreckage, crackling through his throat.
“I won’t give you a second chance to make that mistake, demon,” I said, lowering my shoulder and slamming into him with the remnants of my door-shield. The glass shattered all over the back of my head, and the heat from his sword caught my hoodie ablaze, but I had him at a bad angle to strike, and he could do nothing but tumble backward onto the concrete steps of what remained of Jermaine’s house.
I fell atop the demon and grabbed his right wrist with mine. Agony shot through my palm as the spikes on his gauntlet pierced all the way through the back of my hand, but I knew to let go was to most likely die. It had been many years since I had battled alone against a foe that could possibly take my life, and I didn’t intend to go easily, if at all.
The demon growled in my face, and its rotten-egg breath wrapped around my face in a foul miasma. It thrashed, and kicked, and howled, and still I sat astride it, pressing down with the van door into its chest, trying to punch it somewhere that would do more damage to the monster than to my fist, but its armor thwarted me at every turn. It bucked in one giant convulsion, and I flew off to the side, only connected now by my grip on its wrist and the spikes through my hand. The pain was immense, tearing at my palm and grinding the bones on the metal studs that protruded through the back of my hand. I rolled onto my side and gripped that right arm with
my other hand, grabbing above the wrist this time so as not to destroy my other hand.
I wrapped both hands around the creature’s forearm, planted both feet in its ribcage, and pulled with all my considerable might. The demon let out an anguished scream and thrashed about on the grass, starting small fires and scarring the sidewalk with its intense heat. I felt its other fist slam into my shin once, twice, again and again, the spikes on that gauntlet ripping deep furrows in my calf and lower leg. I bent forward, relaxing the tension for an instant, then snapped back, giving one huge yank, and with a shriek of pain and rage, and a squeal of rending plate mail, I pulled the demon’s arm off at the shoulder.
Black blood spurted from the wound, and every blade of grass that blood touched smoked and died away down to the dirt in an instant. The gouts of demon blood sizzled on the sidewalk and melted part of one of my shoes, burning my toes and sending yet more pain through my battered body. I got to my knees, turned the demon’s hand around in my bloodied grip, and plunged the obsidian blade into its wielder’s chest. The blade pierced the breastplate with a crunk, and the demon let out a howl of rage and pain that shattered every car and house window on the block.
The demon stared up at me, its red eyes growing dim, and as the light winked out, I heard it hiss, “I will remember you.” Then its eyes went black, and the demon’s body turned to nothing more than black soot and ash. I knelt on the grass, somehow still holding the gleaming black demon sword, and looked over at Jermaine. He was unconscious, probably concussed, and would need medical attention quickly. And that’s without even beginning to address the damage I had endured. I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my phone. The screen was shattered, but as I pressed a button on the side, it lit up in a few places.
Angel Dance: A Shadow Council Case Files Novella: Quest for Glory Part 3 Page 5
