The demon backed up to the far wall, then leapt over Joe’s head to land between me and where Becca stood, frozen with terror since the demon crawled out of her exhibit. I’m pretty sure that was never in her design pitch to the board of directors. The monster flicked out a claw and wrapped it around my neck, pulling me to my feet like I was no more than a rag doll. It held me off the ground, choking me with one claw while it held the other poised to rip my guts out. It stretched the stinger out to press ever-so-gently into Becca’s chest, right where it could skewer her heart in half a second, then stopped.
“You mentioned choissssssse, angel,” the demon hissed with a toothy grin. “Now the choice is yours. Your friend…or your one true love? Who lives, and who dies? The choice is yourssssss, morrrrrrtal.”
Joe looked from Becca to me and back again. I wracked my brain for something useful, but came up empty. The demon’s grasp tightened around my throat, and I watched as it wiggled the tip of its stinger over Becca’s heart. I was out of guns, my sword was lying ten feet away against the altar, and my Jedi powers weren’t pulling to me no matter how much I held out my hand and wished really hard.
Joe looked at me, stricken. He didn’t know what to do. Hell, even I could see the easy answer, and my idea of being on the right side of morality was tipping the girl extra after the second lap dance. I tried to speak, but couldn’t even get a croak out.
The demon turned to me. “Trying to say ssssomethingggg, human? Impppplorrrrring yourrrrr friend to sssssavvvvve the girrrrrl and let you die in herrrrr place? Howwwww foolishly noble.” At those words, something clicked in my head, and just like a really bad light bulb going on, I knew how completely and utterly screwed we were.
Chapter 13
I knew it just like I knew my name—the demon was going to kill us both no matter who Joe picked. All he was going to do was use Joe’s decision to torture him even more. I saw Joe’s eyes tighten and knew he heard the same thing.
“Foolishly noble?” Joe asked. The demon jerked a little at the iron in his voice and turned its head almost completely around without moving its body at all. I continued to not throw up, but this time the only thing holding my gorge down was the demon’s own hand, clasped tight around my throat.
“There is nothing foolish about sacrifice, monster, but if you understood that, you would not serve who you serve, and you would not belong where you belong. So now it is time for you to return there. Begone!” With his last word, Joe raised his arm and pointed his open hand at the demon. A beam of purest white light burst forth from his palm and struck the demon square in the chest. It let go of my throat and flew backward several feet. I dropped to one knee, then sprang forward and shoved Becca out the door to the exhibit. I couldn’t exactly slam it shut behind her after the destruction I wreaked on it getting into the room, but there was enough metal and wood there to give her some cover at least.
I looked back at Joe, who stood over the smoking hulk of the demon. “Get up, you filthy piece of spawn-trash.” He prodded it with his foot, and the demon writhed in pain. Smoke rose from its chest, and its arms and legs didn’t seem to be working together.
“Get up.” Joe kicked harder. The demon scrambled to its feet, ducking its head like a whipped dog. Joe’s hands still glowed with power, and his eyes still were pupilless white. “Now,” he said, and there was power beneath his words like I’d never heard. “Either you crawl back into the hole you came out of, or I destroy you. As I said, it all comes down to choice.” Joe smiled, but it was a cold smile, full of stoic authority and judgment.
“I’ll go,” the demon said, then whirled back to me, its claws flashing in the dim candlelight and flickering overhead exhibit lights. It shot out an arm long enough to do Inspector Gadget proud, with razor-sharp fingers aimed at my throat. “But not without this one!”
I expected treachery. It was a demon, after all. So when the claws came flying at my admittedly hard to miss gut, I just had to sidestep the thrust and pull the last thing I had on me that could be considered a weapon, and even that only by the TSA. I pulled my Kershaw pocketknife, flicked the blade open, and stabbed the demon through the wrist. I stuck it to the wall like a kid’s butterfly collection, then caught an elbow to the jaw and spun around to sit on the floor and look at the pretty stars.
Joe walked over to the pinned demon and put a hand on its chest, pressing it flat into the wall. “Leave this place, monster, or I will be forced to destroy you utterly.”
“Asssssss if you coulddldd, huuuummmmmmannnnnn,” the demon hissed.
“Human?” Joe asked. “Think again, hellspawn.” His hand was pressed flat against the monster’s chest, and I watched as the muscles in his neck and shoulder bunched, then Joe, or whoever he was, pushed. Smoke rose from the demon’s flesh, and as Joe pushed, his hand sank into the thing’s chest. There was no ripping, no cutting, just pushing, and his hand slowly disappeared into the demon’s chest as though he were pushing his hand through mud. The stench was spectacular, sulfur laced with shit and blood and sweat and all the nasty nightmare smells of melting demon-flesh. The beast let out a shriek that had me screaming along with it, even with both hands clasped over my ears. After what felt like a year, probably fifteen seconds, Joe relaxed his arm and pulled his hand out of the monster’s chest.
My friend, the Catholic priest, the kindest man I know, the man least likely to ever raise a fist in anger, the man who used humane mouse traps then released the vermin out into the wild, wiped demon blood off his finger onto his jeans, leaned down right in the demon’s face, and in a voice that would give Christopher Walken nightmares, said, “Do not doubt what I can do, demon.”
The creature’s eyes went wide, and it nodded feebly. “I’ll go, but we’rrrrrrrre not finissssssshed,” the monster hissed.
“Likely never will be, fiend. But for today, we are done.” Joe waved a hand, and the altar glowed red again. Thick, black, oily smoke poured out, wrapped the demon from head to toe, and when the smoke sucked back into the cracks in the altar, the stone rectangle was restored to one solid piece, and the demon was nowhere to be seen.
He turned to me and reached out his hand, this man who wasn’t a man, my friend who was suddenly something more. I didn’t hesitate until I’d already grabbed it and he pulled me to my feet, then I looked down to see if I was on fire. I wasn’t. I also wasn’t dizzy, or nauseated, or hurting from any of the places I’d been punched during the day.
I looked at my friend, who stood there looking at me with glowing eyes. “Something you want to tell me, Joe?”
The angel smiled, and it used Joe’s face to do it. “No, Bubba, I don’t think so.”
“You always in there?”
“No. I come when His need is greatest.”
“Joe’s need?”
“No.”
“Oh. Him.” That Him. Joe’s ultimate boss. And I don’t mean the Pope.
“Yes, Him.”
“So He needed you to possess a priest and fight a demon?” I asked.
“He needed me to keep you alive, and keep Joe working. And we can’t have the Fallen just wandering around the world’s happiest place, can we?”
“I don’t get it,” I admitted.
“Mysterious ways isn’t just a catchphrase, Bubba, it’s the truth. You can’t see everything He sees and certainly not what is to come. The world needs men to stand up and throw back the darkness. Men like you, and like Joe. This man,” he pointed to the corpse of Professor Pokey, lying facedown on the floor with a Bertha-sized hole in his chest, “this man made a very bad decision. His jealousy of Dr. Knowles’ success led him to consort with the forces of darkness. And as so often happens in these cases, he was given the letter of their agreement—Becca’s exhibit was cancelled and his exhibit was scheduled as its replacement.”
“But he didn’t read the fine print where a demon was coming through from Hell to…what was she coming here for, anyway? Vacation? I mean, everybody loves a good roller coaster, but…”
“Yeah, kinda hard to miss with all those floppy boobies flying all over the place.” That’s when I remembered that in its demon form, it had at least four breasts, maybe six. In the rush to not die, I somehow missed the extra mammaries. I shuddered a little. That was a set of mammary memories that I was going to carry with me for a while.
“And what do you think a female demon would want with a supply of human men coming through the museum?”
“I don’t know, was she going to…oh man, that is nasty.” My stomach did a few unpleasant flip-flops, and I lost hold on the steak I’d worked so hard to hold onto through the whole damn demon fight. I mean, I can handle getting my ass beat by a nasty demoness without throwing up, but the idea of that thing banging her way through the visitor’s log of the museum was more than my digestion could handle. I grabbed a jar off a shelf and filled it with recycled steak and mashed potatoes.
Several long moments later, I put the jar back on the shelf and turned back to Joe, or whoever was riding around in his skin suit. “I could have gone my whole life without that thought ever crossing my mind, thanks.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I overshare.”
That did it. That oh-so-human, oh-so-Joe confession from the angel walking around in my friend’s body, was all I could take. I sat down on the floor, laughing my ass off, until Becca and Joe joined in and we sat and stood around the ruined exhibit, laughing hysterically until tears rolled down our faces.
Epilogue
“So you’re re-hired? And the exhibit is a go?” We were in Becca’s office the next morning. The museum looked very different in the light of day, much less like the set of a horror movie and much more like the cross between a theme park and an academic center that it really was. Joe and I sat on one side of a big conference table, with Becca on the other side and Skeeter on a big monitor on the wall. He hadn’t quite forgiven me for stepping on our comm unit, but he chalked it up to me being distraught at taking a human life and was cutting me some slack.
He was right, too. I’d killed a lot of monsters, and some of them might have worn human skin from time to time, but the nutjob curator was the first straight-up human I’d ever killed, and it didn’t feel right. It didn’t matter that he was about half a second from skewering Becca like a kabob at a Fourth of July cookout, or that he literally raised hell in the middle of Florida. He was a human, and my job was to protect humans, not kill them. This was the first time I’d crossed that line, and even if I hadn’t spent most of the night talking to the cops, I didn’t see me having much in the way of restful sleep.
The cops took me in, of course, and had quite a few questions about what I was compensating for with a gun like Bertha. Joe’s statement helped, and so did Becca’s, but the call from the Director of Homeland Security at three in the morning claiming jurisdiction of the case, the museum, all evidence, and me was what really did the trick. Amy worked her magic from Washington and buried the local police precinct in so much paper it looked like a snowstorm as I walked out, with every fax machine and printer in the building running at full capacity. So I wasn’t going to prison, but I wasn’t going to get away from the image of the professor flying backward off the altar, his eyes wide with shock as a hole the size of a dinner plate appeared in his chest. He was dead before he crashed into the wall and flopped to the floor like a beached sunfish, but his eyes stared at me every time I closed my own.
“And even Marisol made it home last night!” I shook my head and dialed back into the conversation in the room. Becca was saying something that was obviously good, and I dug around in my memories until I remembered there was a missing cleaning lady named Marisol, who apparently was now home. I didn’t want to think too much about where she had been because that would lead to thinking about what she might have brought back with her, which would mean a home visit, which would likely mean another fight, and I didn’t think I had another fight in me right that minute. I filed it away in the “shit to look out for” mental file and turned my attention back to Becca.
She was looking at Joe like she had a lot of shit to say, and he had a similar look, so I put my hands on the table to stand up. Joe held up a hand, and I sat.
“Please stay, Bubba,” Joe said. “You should probably hear this, too.”
I leaned forward onto my elbows. “I always did love story time.”
Joe shook himself, popped his knuckles, and looked Becca in the eye. “I loved you,” he said, and she opened her mouth to reply. “No, let me finish. I know it’s been a long time, but after this week, I’m pretty sure you’ll believe what I’m saying.” Becca closed her mouth and leaned back in the chair, arms folded across her chest. If I read her face right, she really wanted to believe him, but there was a lot of years’ worth of baggage she was carryin’ around.
Joe started again. “I loved you, I really did. I could see us settling down somewhere with me being a high school teacher and you running a little craft shop, or art studio, or whatever you wanted to do. I didn’t care, I just wanted us to be together forever. Then one night in my senior year, everything got turned upside down.
“I was walking home from the library, and I passed the art building. A young woman came out of one of the side exits and walked in front of me for a while. She was maybe twenty yards ahead of me, but when I turned around the corner of Tillman Hall, she was gone. I looked around, but she was gone without a trace. I didn’t think anything of it, figured she had gone into Tillman to use the bathroom or something, and kept walking. Well, when I got past the big steps in the front of the building, I heard something coming from the bushes by the building. I was a curious young guy, so I turned into that little courtyard to see what was making the noise. It sounded like a raccoon or something rustling in a garbage bag, but when I got back there away from everything, what I saw changed my life.
“The girl was there, but she was lying on the ground, her art supplies strewn all across the ground. She had a long white scarf, and that was laying beside her, unspooled from her neck and the tail flapping in the March breeze. It was dark back in that alcove, and it took a minute to register that she wasn’t moving and that her throat had been torn out. I looked more closely, and there was blood everywhere, like if Jackson Pollack was the set decorator for Carrie. Standing over the girl was something I’d never seen before. It was about three feet tall, with arms longer than its body, and it was covered in thick black hair. At first I thought she’d been attacked by some kind of escaped gorilla or chimp, but then it looked up at me.”
“And showed you a mouth full of pointed teeth and a hand holding a hat dripping with the dead girl’s blood,” I said.
“Exactly,” Joe said.
“Wait, what?” Becca looked from Joe to me and back again. “What was it? And how did you know about it? Did you fight it later or something?”
“It was a redcap,” I said. “A nasty little fae bastard with a taste for human flesh, particularly young female flesh. They hang out in shadows and pick off solitary walkers. They’re cowards but have teeth like needles and are really strong for their size. Joe got lucky the thing didn’t rip his throat out, too.”
“It was more than luck,” Joe corrected me. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he went on. “The redcap growled low in his throat, and that’s a sound I’ve never forgotten. I heard that growl and knew that I was going to die beside that administration building that night. But just as the goblin leapt at me, a pistol shot rang out, and it dropped like a stone at my feet.”
“A Hunter with cold iron bullets. Wait a minute, you were in college? Was this Pop?” My father had never mentioned killing any dark fae in Upstate South Carolina, but he didn’t exactly keep a blog.
“No,” Joe said. “It was quite a few years later that I found out how closely our fates would be entwined, Bubba. The man who killed this redcap wasn’t a Hunter; he was a Guardian.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” I said.
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br /> “To you, maybe,” Becca said. “But to the Muggles in the room, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense! What’s a Hunter? What’s a Guardian? And how or why does somebody become one?”
“I think you want the singular of Muggle, sweetie,” said Skeeter from the monitor. “We’re all Hogwarts-certified, so to speak. But to answer the question at hand, a Hunter is like Bubba—somebody who goes from town to town within a certain region of the country hunting down things that go bump in the night.”
“And shooting them,” I added. “Or stabbing, decapitating, exploding, dismembering, disemboweling, or defenestrating them. I like defenestrating. That’s one of my favorites.”
“You’re just proud you know a word with five syllables,” Skeeter said.
I counted de-fe-ne-stra-tion out on my fingers, then nodded at the screen. “You ain’t wrong,” I said.
“A Guardian—” Skeeter did what he did about half the time, which was pretend like I hadn’t said anything. That felt like forgiveness, so I decided we were okay again. “—is someone assigned to a particular place for a certain time to protect one or more people. If the Church feels that someone has potential, they may be assigned a Guardian to make sure they live to adulthood.”
“Yeah, I had one at Georgia. No matter how hard I tried, he wouldn’t do my Physics homework,” I said.
“Sometimes they are assigned not on potential but on the sheer amount of destruction that one young person can wreak if left untended. But in Joe’s case, it probably had something to do with his potential to become a liaison between a Hunter and the Church,” Skeeter said. I wasn’t sure if that was a shot or not, but I assumed it was and flipped his image the bird.
Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 9
