James
… An eternity has passed between then and now, but the name triggers not only the horror of that one moment, but also of happier times that, until now, had been completely forgotten to him. A birthday cake with trick candles that refused to be blown out, all-night Atari marathons with friends, his mom’s sundress glowing in the afternoon sun as she used clothespins to fasten the laundry across the backyard, Papa taking him up on his lap behind the wheel of their old Chevrolet and singing “Fun, Fun, Fun”
by the Beach Boys…
He steps onto the highway and tries to lose the ancient memories. He doesn’t like the feelings they bring, and he tries to forget the initial question all together. It’s the Lookers. They’ve seen into his unguarded eyes and have stirred something inside, resurrecting his weakness.
Fine
, he thinks.
Go ahead, look. Look at what your King did to my life
. He ignores the impression they leave upon him, turning away from their offers of forgiveness—of
slavery—
and instead searches through the fiery chaos for the remaining assas—
There it is.
The link with the ring is reestablished, its power calling out to him, forming as a blip on his psychic radar and proclaiming itself to no longer be in the hands of the righteous…that it’s his for the taking once more.
He hurries for his car, ignoring the dead and dying that are scattered around him. He does not pity them, does not mourn for them. He hates them, for they are part of the diseased world that God created. And so is he, which is why he hates himself…hates himself for standing there and watching his father murder his mother without even trying to stop him. It’s why he must do what he has to do. It is his destiny.
But never before has he considered the possibility that the demons who keep him company, the ancient ones he knows are responsible for the helicopters’ vicious assault on the trapped motorists, might have been the very same entities that encouraged his father to swing that Louisville Slugger at his mom. At least not until now…
“There he is!”
He turns toward the voice and sees a couple soldiers in black that are in the process of bringing their submachine guns up. They’re navigating around the carnage, weaving between burning vehicles. They open fire.
Jonathan stretches out his hand and—
Nothing.
A bullet tears through his shoulder, and pain erupts like a volcano down his arm. Ducking behind a minivan, he leans his back against it as a metallic
tink, tink, tink
rattles the car’s frame around him. Across from him, a man hangs upside-down out of the passenger door of an older Nissan, his head and outstretched arm resting below the frame, almost touching the road. “Please,” his bloody lips part to say. His eyes plead, his body cradled tightly by twisted debris.
Jonathan lashes out with a furious kick and slams the door shut, putting an end to the man’s whining.
So the demons have left me
, he realizes.
Even hell has betrayed me now.
The energy drains from his body, seeping into the cold asphalt beneath him. All the power the ring has cultivated simply evaporates with the departure of the creatures within, and after so long a time, he is alone.
Left to himself, the supernatural abilities are gone. As are the lies that have clouded his thinking. He sees clearly now what his destiny was always meant to be, that he has been used since the beginning. The ring was never for him, the Crest of Dragons, but always meant to be in the hands of the Order, to continue the mystery of iniquity that has been unfolding for over two millennia.
But this revelation doesn’t bring with it willing surrender. Even without the ring’s power, Jonathan is perfectly capable of sending more people to hell ahead of him.
When a soldier steps past the front end of the minivan, weapon held poised against his shoulder, Jonathan reaches out and takes hold of the gun’s barrel. Pulling the weapon, he brings the soldier stumbling to him, striking him in the neck and dropping him violently to the ground. Jonathan stomps on his neck two, three times. Bending over, he rips the night vision from the corpse and pulls it down over his own head, the ability to see through the storm fleeing with the rest of his powers. He fires the submachine gun at the remaining soldiers, striking one in the face and neck, the other in the groin and abdomen.
Fully aware of his insanity, his mother’s open skull all he can see, he walks down the interstate, shooting at anyone within sight. Men, women, children, soldiers… Nothing is beyond the reach of his rage, and the conviction that everyone should perish burns hotter than the flames licking the sky around him. He reaches the two fallen soldiers and picks up their weapons, intent on continuing his rampage. He’ll walk all the way to Florida doing this if he can.
A mother carrying a screaming newborn jumps out of a car before him, and he mows them down without a care.
Shots are fired at him. Men in snow fatigues. The Order.
He fires back, the suppressed shots eerily silent in the blowing storm.
Instead of settling into a defensive position, however, the elite members of the Society jump aboard snowmobiles and quickly take off into the night, leaving him alone for a reason he can’t quite comprehend.
The radio strapped to a nearby corpse squawks above the wind. The package has been secured, and the remaining soldiers are to assist the injured passengers while awaiting further orders. Jonathan aims the guns into the sky and fires repeatedly, the jettisoned shells carried away by the blizzard, screaming in rebellion to the heavens.
They don’t answer.
Instead, an explosion much bigger than any prior shakes the ground and sends him stumbling against a nearby vehicle. The face of a young girl stares up at him from inside, tears sparkling in her eyes as a wall of fire comes stretching across the highway, evaporating any trace of what has truly happened here this December 24th. As the fireball races at him, setting his face against it with some semblance of silly defiance, he readies himself for hell. For the revenge he will have there…against the Order, the demons, and all who have used him only to betray him in the end.
He thinks he will start with Papa Chuck.
****
Once the soldiers on the snowmobiles began shooting at the Dark Man, Ian took off running, trying to get as far away from them as possible. He was blind with grief, with anger, and a hopelessness he never thought was possible. After a while, he became unaware that he was even moving. Time seemed to stand still as his sense of reality remained positioned in neutral. Finally, after God only knew how long and unable to go any further, he collapsed, frozen and exhausted. Had he run north of Joyce’s Saab or south? There was no way for him to tell. He was lost and alone, and he’d be dead in an hour.
Oddly enough, his brain, perhaps not appreciating the direness of his situation, brought to him a scene from
The Empire Strikes Back
. Luke collapsing in the snow. But here, now, there was no vision of Obi-Wan instructing Ian to go see Yoda, no Harrison Ford materializing just in time to stick him in warm Tauntaun guts… There was, however, a giant explosion that blinded the world. Like the sun had popped out of the interstate with a deafening boom. He turned away from the brilliance of it, shielding his face from the searing heat. The world was ending with fire before he could die from the cold. He thought that was funny, and he closed his eyes, waiting for death to take him. The briefest thought flew into his mind. One about his mother’s religion, the faith his father had blasphemed and he had rejected. But it was an incoherent medley thrown on top of an ongoing track that already had him laughing.
Sleep. He only wanted to sleep…
****
The sky lit up like mid-afternoon on a cloudless Christmas day, and the sudden contrast made Ashley shield her eyes from the glare. As her eyes adjusted and the brightness began to fade back into night, she saw an exit ramp appear up ahead. The brightness of the flash lasted only a moment, but the picture it revealed lingered, seared onto her mind’s eye. The off-ramp was clogged with cars and trucks, many of which were piled on top of each other, an eighteen-wheeler on its side and blocking the lanes. The scene was white beneath a sheet of snow. They’d been there for a while.
Ashley had no idea how long she’d been pushing the snowmobile forward, and it was the brightness of the flash that seemed to bring her back to the present. She dropped her hand to her stomach, searching for Marcus’ arms. When she felt nothing, she looked down and saw that Marcus’ arms weren’t wrapped around her any longer. Turning to look behind her, she let go of the accelerator.
Marcus wasn’t there.
She swore through her chapped lips and turned the vehicle around. Refusing to assume anything, she held back the tears while following her tracks back the way she’d come.
Her leg was numb, as was her entire body, and the commands her brain tried sending it were drastically delayed in their execution. There was no way for her to tell how much blood she’d lost, but her vision was beginning to blur, and her head was getting heavy. Twice she nodded off before snapping awake. The second time, she’d discovered that her old tracks were nowhere to be seen, that she was lost, no idea where she was. She knew that the only way she’d find Marcus now was if he wandered out in front of her and she ran him over.
Her head now weighed a million pounds, and she could no longer keep it up. It dipped down again, pulling her body with it until she was lying across the handlebars. But she managed to keep the accelerator engaged, continuing to send the snowmobile on a southeast heading back toward the highway. Five minutes later, her body finally surrendered, and she fell off the moving vehicle, landing unconscious in the snow.
****
Jacob’s cell phone rings just as the car pulls onto the runway and parks beside the jet.
“What is it?” he asks. The answer he gets lifts him forward off the leather seat. “Good. Let me know when it’s arrived.” He ends the call.
Leaning back, he closes his eyes and, for the first time since losing the ring, allows himself to relax. The legendary ring of Solomon is back in their hands. The plan is still in play. He dials Stephen. “We have it. It’s on its way back now. I don’t want anyone touching it. I want it sealed away. This doesn’t happen again.”
He listens for a moment. “Pity. I was looking forward to the meal. Yes, I suppose he’ll be occupied with other matters. Send the president our regards, and make sure he reschedules. This man is ours.” He subconsciously runs a hand through his silver hair. “We need the other two pieces, Stephen. Time is running out for us. We haven’t come all this way to simply surrender our successes to the next generation. Not after coming so close.” He hangs up and steps out of the car. His bodyguards fall in behind him as he boards the plane. To the pilot, he says, “We have a new destination.”
The pilot, regardless of his Christmas plans, knows better than to argue with this man. “Where to, sir?”
“Vatican City.”
Epilogue
The book was beginning to feel old and worn in his hands, a testament to his obsession with it. It wasn’t that old, the book. He’d purchased it new from a bookstore less than a year ago, but he’d already read it so many times that the physical composition of the book was being put to the test early. As often as the pages had been turned, however, the book, if encrypted with some secret message at all, had remained locked to him, keeping its secret to itself. That the story could be anything other than Jewish folklore was, on one hand, utterly ridiculous. And yet he found himself drawn to it every night, its words teasing him with the promise of a hidden truth he need only find in order to understand.
Ian set the apocryphal
Book of Tobit
down on the bedside table and flicked the lamp off. Lying there in the dark, he couldn’t keep his mind from rehearsing passages from both the
Testament of Solomon
and the
Book of Tobit
. The stories had taken up permanent residence within his mind, and he wouldn’t be able to evict them even if he’d wished to. The stories of Solomon’s ring, of the demons that built the Temple, of the archangel’s presentation of the signet…
And I Solomon having heard this, and having glorified the Lord, ordered her hair to be bound, and that she should be hung up in front of the Temple of God; that all the children of Israel, as they passed, might see it, and glorify the Lord God of Israel, who had given me this authority, with wisdom and power from God, by means of this signet.
By means of this signet…
He had come across the two texts after typing “the Crest of Dragons” into an internet search bar. Turned out, the title was used by a demon in a pseudepigraphal work entitled,
Testament of Solomon.
And I Solomon sent my servant, and found it to be as the demon told me. And I sealed him with my ring, and praised the Lord God. So I said to him: “What art thou called?” And the demon said: “I am the crest of dragons.” And I bade him make bricks in the Temple. He had human hands.
He had human hands. Those four words disturbed Ian greatly, though he had never been able to figure out why. Was it a metaphor? Was there a reason the Dark Man had taken that specific name for himself when there were so many others recorded within the legend? The Dark Man’s words about destroying the world were also taken from the
Testament
, but from another demon’s dialogue.
Ian didn’t know much of anything about demon possession, at least outside of what he’d seen in the movies, but he had a nagging suspicion that the driver of the Camaro had been under the influence of such an evil…if not the very personalities described by Solomon so long ago. For when the driver had spoken, he’d used plural possessive pronouns like “ours” and referred to himself as “we.”
Give it to us
…