by K. B. Draper
Demons Shemons
By K.B. Draper
Published 2016 K.B. Draper, LLC
Copyright © 2016 K.B. Draper, LLC
Cover art by Nick Talley, Outfoxed Media
Edited by Elizabeth Andersen
www.kbdraper.com
Author’s Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission of the author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For all the demons that hide under the big bed of life … thanks for the inspiration.
Chapter 1
I have been accused of a lot of things; fortunately, to date none of them have needed a criminal defense attorney to clear up. A penicillin shot maybe, but not legal counsel. That is until today. Sheriff Loretta Linn, yes, that is her real name. And yes, I know it’s not the correct spelling of the famous country singer, but that small detail did not stop me from making several and when I say several, the last one threw us into double digits, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” references. I knew these quips were not helping my case or endearing myself to the small-town sheriff, but seriously she really wasn’t putting forth much effort to make my BFF list either, so whatevs.
“Let me get this straight. You just happened upon a truck with a cab full of blood, cocaine, and drug paraphernalia?” Sheriff Linn asked.
“Yes,” I confirmed, not hiding my frustration this go-around.
“And you’ve never been to Union City before today?”
“No. And I have to say, unless something drastically changes, I will not be leaving favorable reviews on TripAdvisor,” I quipped. She ignored me as she had the last seventy-two times I’d popped off with what I thought was very well-timed and well-executed humor.
“Tell me again, what brought you here and down that particular desolate road?”
“I’m a Louisiana woman chasing after my Mississippi man?” I answered this time, figuring it was about time to change up the Loretta Lynn references.
“You’re not helping yourself, Miss Mattox,” Sheriff Linn said, in what I have now identified as her “you’re not in any way shape or form amusing to me” tone.
“Sorry.” I shrugged dramatically, causing the handcuffs to clang on the circa 1970s metal-topped government surplus table that I was currently secured to. “I thought I would try a different answer this time being that my previous fifteen answers to that exact same question didn’t seem to satisfy you.” She ignored me. Again. I wasn’t offended. I got that a lot.
“What brought you here?” she asked.
The honest answer was “I’m a demon hunter. A Hoyo Abi, bringer of death, and I got a little message via the demon-net during a catnap at a roadside park just outside of McCall Creek last night. Therefore, I came here to kill him and send him back through the hellhole. Literally, it’s a gopher hole to hell.” I decided to stay with the, granted really poor, answer of “I’m hunting Bigfoot.”
I know it was lame, but I’d been driving overnight, listening to Art Bell reruns on the radio and, well, it just happened. In my defense, it wasn’t that far from the truth if you exchanged Bigfoot for demon. And this particular demon could be big, smelly, and unshaven for an eternity. It’s been known to happen, so who knew? Not me obviously, because I was stuck in this lovely institutional gray establishment, playing suspect versus being out there throwing down with it.
I guess that is as good an intro as any, so yeah, that’s the fun little part about my life. I, Addison Jo Mattox — AJ or Mattox, which is a holdover from the few years I spent on the Seattle PD where you are called what’s inscribed on your nameplate — am a demon hunter. Do not attempt to call me Addison Jo unless you want your face removed and attached to the bumper of your car with baling twine. There were four Addisons in my high school; they were all petite cheerleaders who said “OMG” a lot. You will never hear me say OMG and, at 5’10”, I’m not what you would call petite. As far as my interest in anything cheerleader… we will just say I’d rather be tortured by a 24-hour Kardashian marathon while getting my nether regions waxed by a blind Chinese man using Superglue and duct tape than spend five seconds holding pompons or wearing a pleated skirt. I did, however, sleep with a cheerleader once. And though her extremely enthusiastic screams of passion during some rather impressive rounds of bendy sex did boost one’s ego, the Rah Rah Rees and the overuse of the word “score” got obnoxious after round four.
Sheriff Linn tapped a meaty fingertip on my driver’s license. “Your hair is blonder in your photo.” Sheriff Linn said, interrupting my thoughts.
“I was going through a phase,” I answered. A phase called “actually trying to have a real life,” I thought to myself. My hair was darker now, brown at its roots, and what blond streaks I had now didn’t come from a salon but a la Mother Nature. I had stopped with the artificial highlights sometime after I killed my second or third demon and realized that the chemicals in my hair didn’t play well with the fluorescent green blood of demons, as it tended to turn my chemically altered hair orange.
She took longer to assess my face. Her eyes traced the path the C-shaped scar made on its way down my forehead, taking a right turn through the edge of my right eyebrow, disappearing into my hairline. The scar was a little too cliché anti-hero for my tastes, but the demon who took the potshot at my face didn’t want to stop to talk about it first. Bastard.
The sheriff met my eyes, or more accurately the black bags under my eyes. I’m sure I looked as if I hadn’t slept in a week. It had only been three days, but they had been a very long three days.
“Do you do drugs, Miss Mattox?”
I threw down my best suspicious, back-alley pimp look, shooting glances over both shoulders before coming back to her, leaning forward to stage whisper, “Dude, are you, like, offering?” I looked around again. “I mean kudos to you, Sheriff. Bold career choice with the whole mixing sheriff with drug dealer. Kind of ingenious. Most dealers go all dark, street corner, but you …” I leaned back in the chair as my finger took a loop of the room, “ballsy.”
The sheriff leaned back as well, crossed her arms over her chest, which was no small feat I must say, and stared me down.
I huffed out a sigh of defeat. “No, Jesus. I don’t do drugs.” She raised an unconvinced eyebrow.
“Fine, once at a Backstreet Boys concert when I was eighteen, but seriously there was no other way to get through it. Otherwise, I down Aleve like Pez once a month to curb the girlies and that’s it. I don’t do drugs. I’m just really, really tired.”
“Because you’re out Bigfoot hunting at all hours of the night …”
“Bingo,” I answered quickly. And thank you for that supplied answer, as I’d almost forgot my alternate trade, as again I am really, really tired.
The door to our little tête-à-tête room opened and a deputy came in and whispered into the sheriff’s ear. The sheriff scowled, waved the deputy off, and then stood. She pointed a finger at my face. “Stay.”
I lifted my wrists and dropped them so the handcuffs and chain that had me doing just that clanged loudly on t
he table. “Oh, okay. But only because you asked me so nicely.”
Once the sheriff left the room, I laid my head on the cool metal of the table, hoping for just a few minutes of quiet. Something I hadn’t had much of since I got my little demon-hunting gift from an old drunken Indian in Oklahoma. Okay, fine, he wasn’t drunk. That part had been played by me but, whatever, I was seventeen and a total lightweight back then.
How in the world did that happen, you ask? Sure. We have some downtime apparently. I was there on a summer trip with my grandparents. They liked to take my younger sister and me on “educational” vacations during our summer breaks. I thought I received a fair amount of education throughout the rest of the year, but my mom said I was going. Since she controlled my wardrobe and my car, I went. To be honest, although I liked to act like the petulant teenager, I loved my grandparents and loved hanging with them and taking trips, educational or otherwise. That was up to and until the Oklahoma “Learn About the Native Americans” trip.
The OLANA trip as I now call it. Or when I’m tired, grumpy, or getting my ass kicked by a demon, I might refer to it as “the fucked-up trip that totally screwed up my whole entire life”. “Fucking trip” for short, when I’m pressed for complaining time. Anyway, we took the OLANA trip the summer before my senior year in high school. After two fun-filled days of classes, which included The Fine Art of Basket Weaving, Teepee 101, and Moccasin Making, the third day was reserved for sightseeing and shopping. The day had started out normal enough. I was wearing my moccasins, to be later known as “stupid blister-making moccasins.” We’d returned to our authentic teepee, complete with cots and a box fan, with a nice stash of turquoise-infused jewelry. I had the added bonus of collecting the name of a cute Native American boy and a secret plan to meet him later that night out by the hide-tanning tent.
I waited for my grandparents and sister to fall asleep before I snuck out. FYI, teepee flaps are, yeah, way easier to sneak out of than bedroom windows, especially with the convenient cover noise of the box fan. I quickly found Steve. I was a little disappointed in the name thing myself. It would have been a way cooler story to say, “Yeah, I threw back some corn whiskey and made out with Running Bear or Braveheart.” But Steve was cute enough and the corn whiskey was, well, kind of like licking a corncob dipped in kerosene. Fortunately, it took only a couple of shots to make me lose the feeling in my toes, and luckily my tongue as Steve was not that great a kisser. Fun had, I started back to the teepee while I still had some control of my lower extremities and before my grandparents woke to find me missing. That was when I discovered the super-fun fact that all the authentic teepees looked exactly alike. Same shape. Same size. Same buffalo, deer, and wolf symbols painted on them.
I ended up wandering in and out of the maze of endless teepees until the flicker of a campfire caught my attention. I made my way closer as the low rhythmic song seemed to beckon me forward, enchanted me. I paused when I came upon the source of the sound: a circle of Native American men sitting … well, hmmm … Okay, I’m not going to say it. Regardless, they were sitting around the campfire. The men chanted in perfect unison. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but their words were like a siren’s call to my soul. I kept to the shadows as I moved closer, needing to hear, needing to witness what was about to transpire.
One man’s voice started to rise above the others. He was draped in traditional dress made maybe of elk or buffalo hide. I didn’t know exactly as I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to the traditional clothing exhibit. I could tell, however, that he was older than the others, and much older than the boy that sat across the flames from him. I hadn’t initially seen the boy, whom I guessed to be roughly my age, among the older men until the man next to him stood and moved to a row of bowls positioned on a low table off to the side of the fire.
I’d tracked the man’s movements as he picked up the first bowl, his chants never wavering. He turned back to the fire taking fistfuls of whatever was in the bowl, some kind of ash or powder, and threw it into the flames. The fire bucked and sparked when the substance collided with it. The man moved slowly, throwing a handful at a time and continuing his chant while circling the fire. When he came full circle, he returned the bowl, selected the second, and completed the same routine. He did so again with the third and the fourth.
The fire began to grow dark with the last bowl’s contents. Its flames were a dark blue-gray now, as the smoke billowed from its depths in thick waves. It cast an eerie scene, more so when the chants stopped abruptly and were replaced by the slow pounding of a drum. The eldest man moved to kneel at the edge of the flames. He closed his eyes, his hands reaching up as he looked heavenward. His voice was silent but his mouth was moving as if he were talking directly to the Gods. His voice slowly lifted just enough that I was able to catch phrases of an unrecognizable language. I could only assume it was an ancient tongue not yet lost. I edged closer, hiding behind a large basket outside the nearest teepee. I wanted, no, needed to hear the man’s words even though I knew they were not ones I would be able to understand.
The two men on either side of the teenager stood, taking the boy by the elbows and leading him to the edge of the flames. I could see only the boy’s back now, as they sat him directly across the fire from the praying man.
I remember wondering if I was getting an insider’s view of some coming of age, boy to man, ritual, and vowing that if they brought in a goat or any other animal I was sooo out of there. In some sense, I had been correct that night, minus the livestock. It was a ritual, a transition of one life to another, but it wasn’t that of manhood.
The drumbeat grew in intensity, and the smoke from the fire responded by dancing and swirling, powered by something more than just the air. My heart lunged with the final powerful strike of the drum and the smoke that shot up in the darkened sky, twisting as it ascended. Then, with a single beat of the drum, the smoke returned in a fiery descent.
The older man’s body jolted as the smoke entered him through his eyes, nose, and mouth with a violent strike. I gasped loudly. But thankfully the wind, which had picked up and was whipping viciously within the circle of men, covered my intrusion. I clamped a hand over my mouth and watched as the smoke shot out of the man in a burst of bright light, its tentacles now flickering and sparking with golden flames.
I had only one thought at the time, “That freaky ass thing just stole his soul.” The smoke held the pulsing golden light above the flames, swirling and twisting around the light as if it was the only thing holding it together; containing it.
I jolted when the low “doooom … doooom” of the drum punched through the night’s thick air, its beat coming once to every eight beats of my heart. The men’s rhythmic chants started as soft whispers, gaining in strength and cadence with every strike of the drum. One of the men moved behind the elder, catching him as his body went limp, lifeless. He gently guided the man down, taking care to cover him with a blanket—Indian or otherwise. I didn’t pay attention as I was transfixed by the light that continued to spark and whirl within its smoky restraints. My heart raced, matching the drumbeat’s quickening pace.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a voice whispered in my ear.
I screamed as I launched myself forward, all in one motion of sheer epic freak-out. I fell ass over elbows over the basket, which caused me to tumble into a drunken backward somersault. I slammed into one of the seated men who fell forward, effectively causing me and my half-mooning ass to go full-retrograde over him in a twisted heap. I fell hard. Flat on my back in the circle, with the wind knocked out of me, I gasped for air as my last conscious thought of “Oh, fuck” passed through my brain and I watched the smoke and golden-light twisted mass racing toward my face.
I don’t really remember anything after that, at least not until I woke with five men and the boy leaning over me. They sat me up at the risk I’d hurl on their shoes, gave me a really good hangover cure- I still need to get that recipe by the way- and laid on the news th
at I, AJ Mattox, white girl from Missouri, had tumbled straight into the middle of an ancient spirit ritual. The rite of passage in which the old man, whom I now know to be the chief of the Choctaw tribe, was passing the “Hunter Spirit,” that golden light thing I mistakenly thought was his soul, to his grandson, Dyani.
Instead, no. I had rolled in and wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, stole the show. And by the show I mean the Hunter Spirit, which has assisted the Choctaw tribe in fighting demons and protecting their people as well as everyone else in the world for the last several centuries. And as for Dyani, which means deer or something; I just call him Danny, got downgraded to faithful companion. His new role and main responsibility is to help keep me safe, or at minimum alive, so we can fix my little blunder at the next Hunter’s Moon, the next time the spirit can be handed back. Fun fact: That only comes about every fifteen or so years.
There was a bunch of stuff in the middle that happened, but that’s pretty much the start of how and why I’m here, trying to explain how I didn’t have anything to do with the murder and cocaine situation in the middle of a national forest.
I rolled my head to the side as I heard muted mumblings from down the hall. A man was talking to the sheriff. Their words were just out of my range, but I did make out “I have it handled” when the sheriff’s voice rose heatedly.
Something about the exchange had my head coming up from the desk. I didn’t know who the man was, but he had my hackles up, and by hackles I mean The Hunter, who was coming alive within me. The Hunter whom I affectionately, and sometimes not so affectionately, call Norm for no good reason except that I thought it was fun to go old-school Cheers on him every time he decided to enter the scene. Except for this time. This time was not a good time. We didn’t need to add crazy possessed person to the suspect title that the friendly sheriff already tagged me with today.
