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

  Angel Dance

  John G. Hartness

  Contents

  What Came Before

  The Quest for Glory

  Angel Dance

  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

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

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  Falstaff Books

  About the Author

  Also by John G. Hartness

  What Came Before

  In The Cambion Cycle, Quincy Harker and The Shadow Council defeated the demon Barachiel and saved the Earth from certain destruction. In the battle, Harker’s guardian angel, Glory, had her wings severed by the demon’s sword. Only God Himself can grant an angel’s wings, and He’s been missing in action since shortly after the Great Flood.

  Now Harker and the Shadow Council must locate the eight Archangels to call the Almighty back to His throne and restore Glory’s wings. Harker and Jo Henry have located two of them, and the Council’s research shows that a third seems to be located in New Orleans.

  In the home of jambalaya and jazz, can Adam find an angel?

  The Quest for Glory

  Part 1 - Calling All Angels

  Part 2 - Devil Inside

  Part 3 - Angel Dance

  Angel Dance

  A Shadow Council Case Files Novella

  1

  The last time I walked these streets, the water reached up my chest, black fingers of cold digging into my bones, threatening to drag me down into the depths of despair and death. But Lady Death has long refused to take me in her arms, and those September days and nights were different. While so many fell beneath the roiling waters of the Gulf when the levees failed, I remained, like New Orleans herself, waterlogged and battered, but still whole at the core of me.

  I waded through years of pain and memories in those days just after Katrina battered the Crescent City. I was able to save some, to aid some, and to lay some to rest when they were thought lost. It was ugly work, but I am particularly well suited for such as that, being a hideous specimen myself. I slogged through the despair of a city, her waters pooling in my boots as I strode through neighborhood and business district searching for survivors.

  Even in those darkest hours, I felt the life of the city thrumming under my feet, the lifeblood of New Orleans pulsing in the slow, torpid thump-thump of the nearly drowned. No matter how much water God poured down her throat in the torturous hours of the hurricane’s onslaught, nothing could choke the spirit of the Louisiana gem.

  Now I was back in New Orleans, more than a decade later, not searching for signs of life, but a needle in a haystack. I was looking for a horn in the brassy city of jazz, one instrument in a mecca for musicians, and the tune I needed it to play was more important than any heard since man first set foot outside the Garden of Eden.

  There was no water filling the streets of the French Quarter this night, only jazz and the raucous sounds of tourists shouting up to or down from the balconies lining Bourbon Street. My search would begin in earnest with the dawn, but tonight I was at leisure, such as it was for me. Tonight, I walked the shadows, not a hunter, but merely an observer. I have done that often through my decades on this Earth, simply lurking in alleys and hidden corners of the cities, watching humanity rush from start to finish before me.

  I am separate from the madding crowd. I do not share their everyday concerns of living and dying. I am not completely certain you can call what I do the first, and despite many attempts, I seem to be incapable of the second. I can, however, watch. So tonight, from a table in the corner of a patio in a less-traveled part of the Quarter, I settled in to watch.

  I watched a quintet of bachelorettes weave along a sidewalk, bumping into an emaciated teen who leaned, smoking, against a lamppost. I watched the gangly boy slide the drunkest girl’s wallet from her purse and into the pocket of his unseasonable hoodie, then spin around the light pole and stride off down a side street. I watched him slide the cash into his pocket and toss the wallet into a nearby garbage can.

  I briefly considered retrieving the wallet and returning it to the woman. It would have been the chivalrous thing to do. Then I looked down at the line of stitches along my right wrist, the jagged suture line where my “father” attached the hand of a pickpocket to the arm of an axe murderer so many years ago, and I remembered how poorly it has gone for me when I have tried to interact with mundane women in the past.

  I felt no need to battle through an army of pitchfork- and torch-wielding peasants to finish my task in New Orleans, so I left the wallet where it lay. Perhaps the young woman would consider the inconvenience a life lesson and pay more attention to her surroundings. Perhaps not. Either way, the hooded Artful Dodger was out of my view, and the parade of drunken mortals careening from Hurricanes to Hand Grenades to other frozen concoctions with festively destructive names continued on in its garish parade of beads, breasts, and brightly colored masks.

  I motioned a waiter to my table to refresh my pitcher of water, passing him another folded twenty-dollar bill. I ordered no food and only water to drink, but as long as I paid a reasonable rent on the table, I sat as long as I liked. In exchange for being very little trouble and a very consistent tipper, the waiter kept the tables near me free of children or loud parties and left me largely to my own devices.

  I watched the sea of human randomness ebb and flow until nearly midnight, then stood. I nodded to the waiter and stepped over the low wrought-iron fence surrounding the patio. My size is often an annoyance, but I will admit that there is a certain directness in being able to just walk over three-foot barriers.

  I walked the Quarter, keeping to the side streets and alleys, feeling the pulse of humanity without ever truly immersing myself in it. The heat and the crowd contributed to a miasma about the area, a foggy stink of beer, sweat, and lust that permeated every corner. I stepped in front of another teen before he could slip his hand in a businessman’s pocket. I tapped a thug on the shoulder and asked him for directions just as he reached for a knife to cut a purse strap. I stepped into the mouth of an alley at the right moment to startle a would-be mugger. These petty crimes I could deter, and did, through my very size and presence.

  It was not enough. It was not fulfilling. I needed more. The crush of so many people, so many desires, so much sound was an unbearable pressure upon me. Perhaps leaving the patio was a mistake. This close to so much that is so overwhelmingly alive, I desperately needed to feel a part of that in myself. I needed release. Violent release.

  I found it. I found it in the form of two men too greedy or confident or stupid to evaluate their situation effectively. I found it in a woman too brave or too rushed to stick to the brightly lit streets when walking back to her car, parked just one block too far from the safe spaces of the Crescent City. I found it in her muffled scream as the men converged on her just as she reached her car and thought she was safe.

  I stepped into the pool of orange light cast by the streetlamp above my head. The smaller man had a curved knife in his hand, his index finger threaded through a hole in the hilt. A karambit, it was called. He held it correctly, the blade protruding from the bottom of his clenched fist, pressed up against the woman’s throat. She was t
all, taller than her attacker, with a lovely head of curly brown hair. He was a thickly built man, bald, with tattoos crawling up his neck from the edge of his leather jacket.

  His companion hung back, watching the show and laughing. He was big, almost my height, and fat. I expected him to be slow and probably heavily armed. The big ones aren’t always stupid, and when they aren’t, they can be dangerous. But he was probably stupid. Most of the petty criminals are.

  “You should let her go,” I said from my place in the light. I wore a hoodie myself because my appearance draws unwanted attention in brightly lit places, but I took the hood down now. I wanted the attention my scarred face would bring, and the type of attention it brings was exactly the type I wanted.

  “You should go fuck yourself,” the big man said, turning toward me and putting a hand under his jacket. Armed. As I suspected. That added a new dimension to the encounter, but it didn’t present as much of a complication for me as it would for many people.

  “Not only is that not possible, it is also not polite to suggest,” I replied. “You should still let her go.”

  “Tony, take care of this sumbitch,” the small one said. “He’s making my pecker wilt with his ugly-ass face.” He reached up at the woman to paw her breasts, and she slapped him. He laughed and pressed the knife closer to her neck. “That’s a bad idea, honey. You be nice and maybe I won’t let Tony have a turn when I’m done.”

  “Tony most certainly will not be having a turn,” I said. “And you are already done.” I charged Tony, closing the distance between us in a few long strides. He got his pistol out but did not have time to fire before I bull-rushed him to the ground. I didn’t slow, just planted a shoulder in his sternum and lifted my body on impact. He flew back several feet and sprawled flat on his back, where I stepped on him en route to his partner.

  The smaller man half turned to me but kept the knife pressed to the girl’s throat. “Take another step and I’ll cut her throat,” he said with a sneer. “You think you’re so tough? Let’s see what you do against me.”

  He spun in a tight circle, his foot flashing up to catch me on the side of the jaw. I let the kick turn me around, dropping to one knee as I did. I came around, and up, with my right hand extended. I picked the bald man up by the throat and slammed him down on the hood of a nearby parked car. A car alarm blared into the night, and lights flashed on the BMW. I had apparently picked a good car to abuse.

  My adversary stabbed me in the shoulder with his karambit, and I let go of his throat. Tony was recovered enough to come at me then, and I felt a hammer blow to my right kidney. I lashed out with an elbow strike that pulped his nose, then reached over my right shoulder and flipped Tony onto his partner, setting off a fresh cacophony of noise as the impact shattered the windshield of the car and set off the airbag. The air filled with the stench of airbag chemicals and the groaning of two battered thugs.

  I looked at the men, neither of whom looked in any hurry to re-enter the fray, then I looked at my left shoulder, a small curved knife protruding from it. I pulled it free with a hiss of pain and stabbed it into the small man’s upper thigh.

  “You lost this. I wanted to return it,” I said, twisting the knife in his leg. He howled in pain, and Tony tried to roll off him. I let the big man drop to the sidewalk, then hit him in the side of the head with a sharp knee strike. His head bounced into the fender of the car, and he collapsed to the ground. The little man was moaning and rolling around the hood of the car clutching his leg. I picked him up by his belt and bounced him on the hood a few times until he passed out. The car alarm gave one last plaintive squawk as I battered it into submission with the body of the mugger, and blissful quiet once again settled over the street, only broken by the woman’s sobbing and the distant sounds of Bourbon Street revelry.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked the woman.

  “N-no,” she said.

  “Is that your car?” I pointed to one just past the now-defunct BMW that I had defiled with the bodies of Tony and his little friend.

  “Y-yeah.”

  “Do you have someone at home to help take care of you? You shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

  “My sister is there.” Good. She was coherent, mostly, and seemed capable enough to drive home.

  “Do you want to call the police? These men tried to rape, and possibly kill, you.”

  “N-no. I just want to go home.”

  “Then you should do that. Can you get there safely by yourself?” She looked up at me, and the fear in her eyes told me that even if the answer wasn’t a resounding “yes,” that I would not be the person she asked to escort her to safety.

  I didn’t mind. She wasn’t chasing me from the village with torches and pitchforks, so that was at least a minor improvement. She got in her car and drove off. I leaned down to Tony’s friend, nominally the brains of the operation, such as they were, and said to him, “I think you should consider another line of work. This one seems too dangerous for you.”

  Then I pulled up my hoodie and walked off into the night, the beast within satiated once again. For now.

  2

  Morning in the Quarter is a strange time, stranger even than the late nights. I walked the damp sidewalks, bright sun hammering my eyes through the dark glasses I wore, dodging the shopkeepers with their brilliant green garden hoses, water snakes cascading cleanliness across the face of the city, sending the sad remnants of last night’s revelry pouring down the storm drains in a river of spilled beer, puke, and broken strands of beads cast aside like virtue after last call. My tattered work boots left giant wet footprints on the brick steps in front of the Sisters of the Sword Convent, an innocuous unmarked building wedged back in an alley behind a strip club and a high-end steakhouse, the dichotomy of a white linen restaurant sharing airspace with a club where the women wore less than a napkin not lost on me.

  I knocked on the thick oaken door, the surface worn smooth with the touch of centuries’ worth of supplicants. I waited, then checked my watch for the time. It was early enough for the sisters to still be at lauds, so I waited. Thirty minutes later, I knocked again, and moments later, a novice in jeans and a gray wimple answered the door.

  “May I…help you?” She paused as she looked up, then up again, to see my face was normal. She was a slight woman, short in stature by normal standards, and I must have seemed a true giant in her eyes.

  I spoke softly, as not to terrify the poor girl. My voice is a low growl at best, a grating roar at its worst, and I had no desire to be responsible for the scarring of one of the novitiate. “I am looking for Sister Evangeline. She is an old friend.”

  A shadow passed across the child’s face, as though she were unsure how to proceed. “Um…Sister Evangeline isn’t…here right now. She’s…”

  “She is hunting?” I asked. Sister Evangeline was a Templar, a historical militant arm of the Church. Modern-day Templars are tasked with defending a specific part of the world from supernatural threats. They are often referred to as Monster Hunters. Evangeline was the Hunter for the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans.

  The novice relaxed considerably when she understood that I already knew what Evangeline was and that she would not betray her confidence by speaking freely with me. “Yes, sir. She is hunting. There is a…creature of some sort in the swamps up by Lake Maurepas. She been gone a couple days, oughta be back before long. It never takes Sister Evangeline very long to bag her…um, critter.” The young nun blushed a little as she realized she may have said more than was entirely proper to a stranger. I smiled as gently as my mangled features allowed in an attempt to put her somewhat at ease.

  “Thank you. I will return in a few days’ time. If she returns before I come back, please ask her to call Adam.” I handed her a card with my name on it, Adam Franks, and a number.

  “I will, Mr. Franks. Have a nice day,” she said, stepping back into the convent and closing the door.

  I turned from the door and mused for a moment on the subject of nam
es. Adam Franks is not my name, no more than Lucas Card is Vlad’s, although it is what we are known by in these times. I have been called many things in my time walking this Earth, but I have had few names. Adam is what my father called me, but that was just another example of his overweening hubris. He did not think himself God, but he certainly aspired to godhood. That is what drove him to create life from a pile of lifeless parts, or to reinstall life into formerly lively parts, to be more precise.

  When I was awakened, for I was never born in any true sense of the word, my father’s first words were not, as popular culture has decreed, “It’s alive!” No, the first utterance to pass from his lips to my ears was “I’ve done it.” I was alive, or aware, for two days before he ever addressed me as “Adam.” I have worn many names through the intervening decades, but only two words have ever truly felt like they were my name: “Adam” and “monster.”

  I stepped back out of the alley into the sun and put up the hood of my sweatshirt. More tourists filled the sidewalks now, and I chose to avoid the stares of the adults and the innocently horrible pointing and screeching of the children.

  Without Evangeline and her knowledge of the city’s seedy underbelly, I had to take a moment to reconsider my plan of investigation. Somewhere in New Orleans was a horn, a needle in the gilded jazz-infused haystack. This horn was not simply a musical instrument; it was an Implement of the Archangel Sealtiel, the herald of the End Times. I needed to find this horn, and without any magical ability of my own, I needed a guide.