Practical Demonkeeping

image. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
    “So someone let the little fart out of his jar,” Catch said. He stalked down the hill toward the Djinn .
    An engine roared and Augustus Brine’s pickup broke out of the tree line and bounced up the dirt road, throwing up a cloud of dust in its wake. Robert stood in the bed, holding onto the roll bar for support.
    Travis darted past Catch to Amanda and Jenny.
    “Still a coward, King of the Djinn ?” Catch said, pausing a second to look at the speeding truck.
    “I am still your superior,” the Djinn said.
    “Is that why you surrendered your people to the netherworld without a fight?”
    “This time you lose, Catch .”
    Catch spun to watch the truck slide around the last turn and off the road to bound across the open grass toward the candlesticks.
    “Later, Djinn ,” Catch said. He began to run toward the truck. Taking five yards at a stride the demon was over the hill and past Travis and the women in seconds.
    Augustus Brine saw the demon coming at them. “Hold on, Robert.” He wrenched the wheel to the side to throw the truck into a slide.
    Catch lowered his shoulder and rammed into the right front fender of the truck. Robert saw the impact coming and tried to decide whether to brace himself or jump. In an instant the decision was made for him as the fender crumpled under the demon and the truck went up on two wheels, then over onto its roof.
    Robert lay on the ground trying to get his wind back. He tried to move, and a searing pain shot through his arm. Broken. A thick cloud of dust hung in the air, obscuring his vision. He could hear the demon roaring behind him and the screeching sound of tearing metal.
    As the dust settled, he could just make out the shape of the upside-down truck. The demon was pinned under the hood, ripping at the metal with his claws. Augustus Brine hung by his seat belt. Robert could see him moving.
    Robert climbed to his feet, using his good arm to push himself up.
    “Gus!” he shouted.
    “The candlesticks!” came back.
    Robert looked around on the ground. There was the bag. He had almost landed on it. He started to reach for it with both hands and nearly passed out when the pain from his broken arm hit him. From his knees he was able to scoop up the bag, heavy with the candlesticks, in his good arm.
    “Hurry,” Brine shouted.
    Catch had stopped clawing at the metal. With a great roar he shoved the truck up and off of him. Standing before the truck, he threw his head back and roared with such intensity that Robert nearly dropped the candlesticks.
    Every bone in Robert’s body said flee, get the hell out of here. He stood frozen.
    “Robert, I’m stuck. Bring them to me.” Brine was struggling with the seat belt. At the sound of his voice the demon leapt to the driver’s side of the truck and clawed at the door. Brine heard the skin of the door go with the first slash. He stared at the door in terror, expecting a claw to come through the window at any second. The demon’s claws raked the support beam inside the door.
    “Gus, here. Ouch. Shit.” Robert was lying outside the passenger side window, pushing the bag with the candlesticks across the roof of the truck. “The play button, Gus. Push it.”
    Brine felt the pocket of his flannel shirt. Mavis’s recorder was still clipped there. He fumbled for the play button, found it, and pushed, just as a daggerlike claw ripped into his shoulder.
     
    A hundred miles south, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a radar technician reported a UFO. entering restricted air space from over the Pacific. When the aircraft refused to respond to radio warning, four jet fighters were scrambled to intercept. Three of the fighter pilots would report no visual contact. The fourth, upon landing, would be given a urinalysis and confined to quarters until he could be debriefed by an officer from the Air Force Department of Stress Management.
    The bogey would be officially explained as radar interference caused by unusually high swell conditions offshore.
    Of the thirty-six reports, filed in triplicate with various departments of the military complex, not one would mention an enormous white owl with an eighty-foot wingspan.
    However, after some consideration, the Pentagon would award seventeen million dollars to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a secret study on the feasibility of an owl-shaped aircraft. After two years of computer simulations and wind-tunnel prototype tests, the research team