Angel Dance: A Shadow Council Case Files Novella: Quest for Glory Part 3

by John G. Hartness

  “Martin” glowed with a red and purple aura for a brief moment, then red light blazed from his form. When the dazzle cleared, the well-dressed businessman was gone. Standing in his place was a humanoid form, only larger, nearing my own seven-foot height. His skin was the darkest ebony, with short horns extending from his forehead. His mouth stretched preternaturally wide, almost from ear-to-ear, with fangs extending down past his lower lip. He wore chain mail and carried a curved sword in one hand. A long narrow tail hung down nearly to the floor, until he twitched it up over one shoulder to point the needle-sharp spike on the end of it straight at me.

  “That was a mistake, mortal,” he said, and his forked tongue flicked out across his fangs.

  “Again, you have some misconceptions about me, demon,” I replied.

  “What would those be?”

  “You assume that I didn’t mean to expose you for what you truly are. Then you assume that I am mortal.” I waded forward against the crush of humanity rushing for the exits and got almost within grappling distance of the demon before throwing my first punch.

  He ducked, far too fast for my impeded punch to score a hit, and slashed across my forearm with his tail. The sea of onrushing humanity split apart around us, and I found myself with a clear space to fight. The demon grinned at me and ran his tail spike in front of his face. We locked eyes as the creature licked my blood from its tail and grinned at me.

  “Are you ready to die, human? Will you die screaming like the little bitch you are, or can you hold on to some shred of dignity like the old man?” the demon asked. There was no question in my mind that he meant Oliver, and the grin that stretched across its disgusting face said that he expected me to die horribly.

  For the second time in as many nights, I found myself fighting a stronger opponent in unfamiliar territory with insufficient weapons. Perhaps Evangeline was right. It seemed I needed to re-evaluate my life choices.

  Then the demon charged, and the time for thinking was past.

  15

  How does one battle a demon in a crowded bar? There are no rulebooks on this type of combat, and no amount of travel to ancient masters of meditation can prepare one for having a mammoth demon warrior attack with flailing sword and razor-sharp tail. Sparring with the world’s oldest and most decorated vampire, who also happens to possess centuries of battlefield experience does prove useful, however.

  The demon charged straight in, the bullrush of a monster accustomed to being the strongest and most fearsome creature in every battle. In that sense, the terrifying unstoppable force met the horrific immovable object because all I did was plant my feet and throw an elbow at the beast’s onrushing forehead.

  The point of my elbow crashed into “Martin’s” head with a sickening crunch, and I spun on my heel at the impact. “Martin” dropped like a stone, falling flat on his face to the hardwood floor. I shook my numb right arm, then pounced on my momentarily downed foe. I drove a knee into his spine, hearing another set of grotesque crunches as I broke at least four ribs. I wrapped my left arm around the demon’s throat and pulled upward, bending his body almost to ninety degrees. I drew back my right fist for what I hoped would be a killing blow, then bellowed as hot agony shredded my wrist and hand.

  I looked up to see the monster’s tail spike protruding through my wrist, my thick blood coursing down my forearm. It withdrew the spike, causing fresh fire to run through me, then it jabbed the spike at my face, forcing me to launch myself sideways off the demon’s back. I skittered back on my rear, narrowly avoiding losing an eye to the tail’s jabs, and pulled a table in front of one fierce thrust. The tail slammed into the dark wood surface of the table and stuck, allowing me a moment’s grace to scramble to my feet.

  “Martin” had regained his footing as well, looking considerably the worse for wear. Mere seconds into our battle, and he was clutching his ribs, had blood streaming down his face where my elbow split his forehead to the bone, and had a round table stuck on the end of his tail, effectively negating that weapon.

  I was in better shape, but still far from whole. My elbow throbbed from the impact with the demon’s skull, and my right hand was essentially useless and was dripping blood all over the floor, making my footing treacherous. Nevertheless, I persisted. I stomped toward the demon, picking up a splintered chair leg as I went. Armed with my makeshift club, I squared off against the monster.

  “I will accept your surrender at any point,” I growled to the demon. Quincy tells me often that I need to improve my mid-fight banter, but I often find myself clinging to my shreds of humanity by the most tenuous of threads, making conversation difficult.

  “I will eat your heart with pralines, monster,” the demon hissed back. It dragged the table around in front of itself, planted a foot on the edge, and yanked its tail free. Thus unencumbered, it charged me again, vaulting over the table and covering the twenty feet between us in two leaping strides.

  I stepped to the right and swung the chair leg at its knees with my left hand. I heard a resounding crack, like small-arms fire, as I connected, and “Martin” went sailing into the far wall. A pulling sensation along my face followed by a line of fire drawn along my cheek told me the tail had scored another hit even before I reached up and drew my fingers away red.

  The demon fetched up against the wall in a heap, but righted itself instantly. I looked down at the shattered club in my fist and dropped it. My right arm was almost usable again, my healing sped along by whatever strange magics kept me alive and ambulatory long after my component parts should have decayed.

  I felt the pain subside, replaced by a familiar fury. This monster didn’t belong here. This monster was too small and puny to challenge me. This monster must die! A red haze suffused my vision, and I attacked, lowering my shoulder and charging the demon. I slammed into the monster, pancaking him into the plaster wall, then fire erupted in my neck and abdomen, and I staggered back.

  I looked down, and saw the demon’s ebon blade protruding from my stomach. I had impaled myself in my fury, not the first time rage and pain had obscured the dangers of my actions. I felt another ripping in my flesh, this time in the junction of my neck and shoulder, and turned my head right to see the tail spike pulling out of my mangled flesh.

  The demon stepped forward, driving the sword through the meat of my left shoulder. The tail flashed forward, jabbing through my neck sideways, the point coming out in a pointed parody of the neck bolts Boris Karloff wore in the film depiction of me. My grinning opponent yanked both the sword and spike free at the same moment, and I fell. I collapsed backward, my knees bending in a painful outward splay, and my head impacting the floor with a hollow thunk that was certainly a commentary on my empty-headed frontal assault on a demon.

  I knew better. I wasn’t the wild-eyed monster I once was. I knew how to attack a superior enemy, how to distract the demon, how to feint, how to draw it into fighting me on my terms. But in the moment, when I saw an opportunity to destroy Oliver’s killer, I lost my way.

  The demon stood over me, a wicked grin splitting its midnight-black countenance. Its eyes flickered red with the fires of the Pits shining from within the monster’s darkened, condemned soul, and its smile was the stuff of toothy nightmares.

  “Time to die, creature,” the demon said with a low chuckle. “I’ll eat your spleen, then I’ll hunt down that magical bitch you’ve got tucked away in the swamp somewhere. When I’m finished with her, I’ll have all the time in the world to hunt down the Horn of the Herald without interference.”

  It raised the black sword high overhead, my blood running down to spill off the cross guard, and as the blade started to fall, I whispered one thing.

  “I’m sorry, Oliver. I failed you, my friend.”

  Then the sword flashed down, and as the tip cut though my shirt and touched the medal lying on my chest, a white light shone forth with the force of a supernova, and I was suddenly wrapped in a gold-and-purple cocoon of light and power. The demonic blade shattered
against my shield, and I felt the healing light course through me. My wounds were flashed closed, and I felt the power trapped in the amulet knit my shattered bones and stitch torn tendons back together.

  New strength flowed through me, and I felt power the likes of which I hadn’t known since that storm-filled night of my birth so many years ago. I sat bolt upright, hearing two voices mingled in my ears. One, my father’s demented, prideful screeching, “I’ve done it!” The other, a softer, subtler voice with the slightest lisp and the scent of the Gulf in every word saying, “Live, my friend. Live!”

  Victor Frankenstein animated me in a thunderstorm many decades ago, and for that, I will never forgive him. My friend Oliver Rambeoux resurrected me in the middle of a battle on an autumn night in New Orleans, and for that, I will always be grateful. I stood, glaring down at the demon lying sprawled on the floor of the small jazz club, and in his eyes, I saw a most familiar and welcome sight. I saw the thing that had filled most every eye to land upon me for more than a century. I saw it, and for the first time, I welcomed it.

  In the demon’s eyes, looking up at me as he held the hilt of his broken obsidian blade, I saw fear.

  I picked the monster up by his throat and hefted him up over my head. I slammed him into a nearby table, turning it to splinters. I hauled the demon to his feet, then spun him around and slammed him face-first into a wall. I drove his horned head into the surface of the bar, then pounded his ribs with knee strikes until his ribs were ground glass. I shattered the monster’s spine with a brutal double-fisted hammer strike that drove him to the ground and left a horn snapped off in the front of the bar.

  I rolled his limp form over with an ungentle nudge of my boot, then I hauled the demon up to look me in the eye. Its head lolled on a shattered neck, and it was barely able to speak through its shattered jaw, but I didn’t care. I wanted this thing to look me in the eye as I dispatched it.

  “Are you ready to return to Hell, demon?” I growled.

  “Yes, send me home, fool,” it said with a grin. “You can’t kill me, so just send me back to the fires where I shall be re-forged into a stronger weapon for my Lord to use against you foolish mortals! Nothing you can do will ever truly hurt me!”

  “What about me?” a soft voice said from my left. I looked, and standing in front of the stage was the homeless man from the end of the bar. He held Jermaine’s trumpet in his hands, and there was a pale white light surrounding him.

  “Can I hurt you, Ezariem, Lieutenant of the Seventh Army, Baronet of the Pits? Can I hurt you, my poor, beaten, broken cousin?” The man’s voice was soothing, like the mist after a summer thunderstorm, and the expression on his face was beatific. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he raised the trumpet to his lips, and he began to play.

  The melody was soft and low, almost inaudible. I saw the magic as it flowed from the Horn, wrapping around the demon in my grasp and gently prying loose my fingers. Blue, white, and golden light surrounded the demon, Ezariem, and he floated in midair, rotating slowly like a glowing top. He spun faster, picking up speed and glowing brighter with every revolution. He spun faster, and as he spun, he began to scream. He screamed in terror, then in agony, then in the silent shrieking of someone undergoing so much torment that their voice is simply shattered. He spun, and screamed, and glowed, and flared brighter, and shrieked higher, and spun faster until, with a silent explosion of multi-hued dust, he vanished.

  I turned to the homeless trumpeter, who now stood before me a six-foot-tall woman in white robes with huge golden wings sprouting from her shoulders, and was amazed to find tears still pouring down her face.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked, wanting very much to reach out to her, but also terrified of defiling this glorious creature with my touch.

  “He was my kin,” she said, and the sound of her voice at the same time filled me with peace as I had never felt, and the horrible anguish of loss that I had never escaped.

  “I am sorry you had to hurt him,” I said. “But I am grateful for the assistance. Sealtiel, I presume?”

  “I am Sealtiel,” she confirmed. “I am the Herald, and if I am needed, then these must indeed be dark times.”

  “You are needed. You are all needed,” I said.

  “Then I will come.” She turned and walked over to the bar, where Jermaine cowered. “You may come out now, Jermaine. You are safe.”

  The big man’s head poked up from under the bar. He looked around and shook his head at the destruction, then took another look at Sealtiel. “Steve? Is that you?”

  “Yes,” the angel replied. “You knew me as Homeless Steve, or Stevie Shoes, and you were always kind to me. That is appreciated, Jermaine. I must go, and I must take the Horn of the Herald with me.” She motioned to the trumpet she carried, and Jermaine nodded.

  “I always thought there was something special about that horn, man. I mean, ma’am. I mean, Your Angelness. What am I supposed to call you?”

  “You may call me Steve, if that is easier.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, Steve, I always knew I wasn’t as good on any other horn. There was just something about that one, ya know?”

  Sealtiel looked at the trumpet in her hands and smiled. “I do know. But I would not leave you without an instrument.” She gestured to the stage, where a new trumpet sat on Jermaine’s stand, gleaming in the spotlight from one of the few unsheltered bulbs in the building. “I think you will find it satisfactory.”

  “Wow, um, thanks!” Jermaine said. He vaulted the bar and almost slipped in a puddle of demon goo.

  “That will not do,” Sealtiel said. “The people here were kind, unlike many I have encountered.” She waved a hand, and the bar was restored to its former state, with no sign of the devastation the demon and I had wreaked upon it. I was beginning to understand why Quincy often traveled with a guardian angel. If nothing else, they were good for cleanup.

  The angel stepped over to me, her eyes fixed on the medal around my neck. “Curious,” she said, reaching out to touch the Purple Heart. “Do you know what this is?”

  “I thought it was just a memento from a friend. I now believe it to be much more.”

  “Yes, much more indeed.” She looked up into my eyes. “Shall we go? I believe my brothers are in need of me.” Then she turned and walked out of the bar, her wings fading with each step until she took the form of an ordinary, if very pretty, human woman.

  I turned to Jermaine. “Now that the demon is gone, you should be safe. If you need me, just dial ‘Adam’ in your phone.”

  He looked confused. “How did you get in my contacts list?”

  “I have a friend,” I said, and walked out into the street after my angel to meet the sunrise over the Crescent City.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks as always to Melissa Gilbert for all her help, and for trying in vain to teach me where the commas go.

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  About the Author

  John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the best-selling author of EPIC-Award-winning series The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, a comedic urban fantasy series that answers the eternal question “Why aren’t there more fat vampires?” In July of 2016. John was honored with the Manly Wade Wellman Award by the NC Speculative Fiction Foundation for Best Novel by a North Carolina writer in 2015 for the first Quincy Harker novella, Raising Hell.