by SM Reine
“I don’t like the deputy,” the sleeveless one called out, keeping his distance from Arch and Hendricks. Which was good. It meant he couldn’t react immediately when Hendricks started some shit in a minute. Hendricks’ coat was dragging on the ground, billowing around him, which was also good. Plainly none of them had seen his sword yet.
“I don’t like you, either, Munson,” Arch said, struggling to get the words out.
Hollywood looked over his shades between Arch and Munson. “Little animosity here?”
“I had to let him arrest me last year,” Munson said, rubbing one of his tan, sleeveless arms. The red and black flannel shirt looked ridiculous, all the more so because of how damned hot it was outside. “Wasn’t gentle about it.”
“He arrested all of us last year, dumbass,” Kellen said. “McGuire and I,” he nodded to the one holding Hendricks, “spent six months in the lockup in Ferguson together after that little debacle.”
“Boys shoulda kept to your parole,” Arch said, not struggling to do anything but remain upright against the hold of a demon-man that looked like he weighed a hundred and twenty at most, compared to Arch’s easy two-twenty. If he’d been a man and not a demon, Hendricks would have bet the deputy could have beat the fuck out of him and twelve others like him at the same time.
“Can we kill him when it comes time?” Kellen asked Hollywood. He wore a stupid grin, and Hendricks did not like the look of it. Not at all. It reeked of impatience, and made him think that maybe Arch wouldn’t make it to whenever this ritual sacrifice was going to happen.
“No,” Hollywood said simply, and all the air went right out of that discussion. Hendricks paid a little attention to the subtle nuance of the reactions that showed; even though these demons only wore veneers of humanity, they were complete. Emotion definitely showed through on the faces, which was just another thing Hendricks didn’t understand about how these fuckers managed to look human even on the surface. Mostly. “I need them alive, and I need to do the sacrificing.”
“Well, can we rough him up some?” The sleeveless one—Munson—asked.
Hollywood seemed to ponder this question, and he took his time. About ten seconds later, he said, “No. I don’t need them flawless, but I don’t trust you boys to know human beings enough to keep from killing them in your enthusiasm.” He gave a light shrug and let the sunglasses drop back over his eyes. “You can eat them when I’m done, though.”
“Well,” Hendricks said, drawing their attention to him, “I think I’ve heard just about all I need to hear of this.”
“Oh, yeah?” Hollywood said with dark amusement. “Is that so?”
“It’s so,” Hendricks said.
Hollywood adopted an air of true interest in what Hendricks was saying, even over the distance between them. Hendricks could practically feel the condescending fake concern from the demon, and it pissed him off even more. “What are you going to do about it?” Like Hendricks was the most inconsequential insect to ever cross his path.
“Quite a bit, actually,” Hendricks said.
“Oh?” Hollywood said, with a snicker. “How?”
“I don’t know if you noticed this,” Hendricks said, not bothering to squirm, just letting Kellen hold him tight around the neck, “but you didn’t exactly hire the most capable cowhands on the ranch—metaphorically speaking, of course.”
Hollywood glared at him from behind the sunglasses, and Hendricks saw a little bit of the demon fire within. It didn’t stop him, though. Hollywood started to say something smartass back, but Hendricks bucked his head down, dropping his cowboy hat down and catching it with his left hand while dragging his right into his belt and snagging the hilt of his sword. He drew it and lobbed it, slow, hilt first, right at Arch, who was watching him.
The minute Hendricks had his right hand free of the sword, he thrust it into his cowboy hat, like he was going to pull a rabbit out of it. Which he was—again, metaphorically speaking. His hand caught the handle of the switchblade hidden in the brim for emergencies just such as this and he flipped the blade open as he pulled it clear of the hat. He felt Kellen snugging his grip tighter in preparation to hurt him, but he thrust the knife up and into the base of Kellen’s neck, dragging forth an unearthly scream that was cut short as a hot wind blew Hendricks a step forward.
The whole area was quiet, just for a second as Hendricks saw the demon gripping Arch dissolve into his own burst of blackness and fire. The big lawman staggered back to his feet across from Hendricks, the weight of the demon off his back, sword gripped tightly in one hand and shotgun back in the other.
“That’s what I was gonna do,” Hendricks said to Hollywood, who just stood glaring at him quietly, Munson at his shoulder looking ready to jump the two of them. Hendricks just put the cowboy hat back on his head and clutched the switchblade tighter in his hand, keeping it pointed at the two of them that were remaining.
Hollywood didn’t say anything for a minute, then calmly took off his glasses and folded them up, slipping them into the breast pocket of his suit. “You boys are in over your head here,” Hollywood said then cringed and looked to Arch almost apologetically. “I didn’t mean ‘boy’ in an offensive way, in your case.” He glared back at Hendricks. “In yours, I hope offense was taken.”
Hendricks looked at him with complete disbelief. “Are you shitting me?”
“I wouldn’t shit you,” Hollywood said, “at least not around here. There’s too much of it already lying on the ground. I just don’t want anyone thinking I’m racist.”
“You were just talking about killing us a minute ago,” Hendricks said.
“Oh, I’m still going to kill you—both of you,” Hollywood said with a wide grin. “Just want to make sure we understand there’s no racial animosity to it.”
Hendricks had to stop himself from asking if the douchenozzle was fucking kidding again. He hated repeating himself. Instead, he decided to probe a little toward the other thing Hollywood had said. “In over our heads, huh?”
“So over your heads,” Hollywood said with a sappy grin. “I could tear the heads from your bodies right now with minimal effort—”
The BOOM! of a shotgun going off would have drowned out whatever Hollywood was going to say next, even if it hadn’t blown him off his feet and bounced him off the car to come to rest face-down in the mud. The second round of buckshot hit Munson, and his sleeveless ass took a dive as well. Hendricks didn’t wait for them to get ambitious; he pulled the .45 out of his belt and blasted the tires of Hollywood’s sedan with a shot each, then blew out the front tire of MacGruder’s old truck for good measure. That was all the cars he could see in the drive, and he figured it’d slow these idiots down. He popped Munson in the head with a .45 round for good measure then took off at a run back toward the woods, only a step behind Arch, who’d apparently gotten to same smart idea to haul ass back to the patrol car.
“How fast can they run?” Arch asked, running a hell of a lot faster than Hendricks. Hendricks poured it on, trying to keep the distance from widening too much. The hill wasn’t too bad, but it would have been easier if Hendricks hadn’t been holding the knife and the gun. Arch had a long sword and a shotgun in his hands, though, and they didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all.
“Fast enough to catch us if they’re of a mind,” Hendricks said. “Might want to keep that shotgun handy to pepper them if they come up on us too quick.”
Arch slowed and cast a wary eye back, letting Hendricks catch him. Arch cleared the fence like a hurdler and Hendricks was a step behind him, managing to keep his footing while using the wires to step up, and when they reached the car, Arch already had it moving as Hendricks got in and slammed the door. They would have peeled out if it hadn’t been a gravel road. Instead they flung enough dust in the air to bring to Hendricks’s mind the time he’d been in Arizona when a dust storm blew through. Except that time he’d been fighting a demon in someone’s back yard when it happened. He thought about it for a second more
. It was almost exactly like that time, actually.
+ + +
It took Hollywood a few minutes to pull himself up from the mud. Not because he was hurt, but because his ten thousand dollar Savile Row suit that he bought in London had holes all over the front of it. He thought about crying, but one of his minions was still out there. It’d be a bad leadership example.
“Boss?” Sleeveless asked. Hollywood knew his name was Munson now, but he would always think of him as Sleeveless, because it was just as real of a name to the thug as Munson was. “Boss, you want me to chase after them?”
“No,” Hollywood said after a moment. “They’re ready for that, ready to fight. Let them go for now. It’s not even close to midnight yet, and we’ll have plenty of time between now and then to sneak up and surprise the hell out of them. Divide and conquer, you know? Hell, even if they hang out together between now and then … you know what?” Hollywood felt a sneer coming on. “Even if I had to put this whole ritual off for a day, it might be worth it to slaughter them in a way that Ygrusibas would find palatable. It’s not like the ritual is specific about how they have to die. Maybe Ygrusibas is looking for something showier, like feeding them their own intestines. Beating them to death with their own forearms, you know, something eye-catching.” Hollywood slipped out of the shredded remnants of his suit coat, almost cringing at the damage. That suit had closed a few deals for him. He looked back to the woods, where the two pains in his ass had disappeared. Now the ones who’d fucked it up were going to close a big deal for him. The biggest, really. There was some sort of symmetry in that. He turned to Sleeveless.
“So … got any other friends in town?”
+ + +
Creampuff watched through the fence as the two men got the better of four demons and ran off. Ygrusibas wanted to do something about it, but there wasn’t much Creampuff could do, really. Creampuff was feeling awfully bloated anyway, thanks to Ygrusibas and his helpful suggestions.
The smell of cow dung wasn’t something Creampuff objected to, being around it on a near-constant basis, but now it had turned different, at least in the last few hours. Creampuff could barely stand the smell of herself, but that was becoming less and less important as Ygrusibas was taking more and more control of the proceedings. Creampuff had never cared for the taste of meat before, not that she’d had much chance to eat it. But now, she was eating tons of it. Literally tons. Every other cow in the herd was dead, consumed by Creampuff, and all on the order of Ygrusibas. The skeletons were just over the hill, but now that it was done, Creampuff was stuck in the front part of the pasture, watching the goings-on, waiting for the strength of Ygrusibas to kick in, so she could finally be rid of that accursed gate, finally walk out of this confinement into the world, and—
There was a patch of grass to her right, and it looked pretty good, so she dipped her head to get at it. Ygrusibas sighed, somewhere within. This was not exactly going the way it had hoped it would.
+ + +
Arch wasn’t all that happy about running away from the MacGruder place twice in the same day. It felt like failure, like losing, and he’d never liked the taste of that—on the football field or off. “Damn,” he said, feeling the knuckles crack as he tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
“We made it out alive,” Hendricks said from the passenger seat, still breathing hard as they turned from Kilner back onto the paved road. “That counts for something. And did you catch the whiff off that Hollywood guy? I smelled power.”
“I smelled cow dung.”
“Well, yeah, that too,” Hendricks agreed. “But Hollywood was clearly the brains of that operation. And he wasn’t like the others. They were lessers—”
“Define ‘lessers,’” Arch said. One of the ‘lessers,’ as Hendricks was calling them, had nearly rung the life out of him without much effort. If these were the lessers, he didn’t want to be around for the greaters.
“Lesser demons,” Hendricks said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Arch supposed after living this stuff for years, maybe it was natural. Not to him, though. Not yet. “This Hollywood is planning some sort of a ritual that includes human sacrifice.” Now Hendricks was just musing out loud, looking out the windshield, and Arch wondered if the man even knew he was still there. “Not good, not good …”
“No,” Arch said, “human sacrifice is not good. You think that’s what happened to the MacGruders?”
“Huh?” Hendricks looked startled, like Arch had just called him back from some place of deep thought. “Oh, yeah, probably. I mean, unless it was some sort of group sacrifice, and he needed more. Yeah, he probably killed them already.” He frowned. “What kind of a ritual needs multiple sacrifices? What kind of a ritual can you pause right in the middle and go get more sacrifices?”
Part of Arch wanted to let him just muse it out until he had it figured. It was not the same part that worked for the Sheriff’s Department and needed answers to go with this annoying mystery that had washed up in his town from somewhere south of hell. “Are there a lot of these sort of rituals done?”
Hendricks gave an equivocal left-to-right bob of his head. “Some, mostly in hotspots. Demons have all sorts of rituals, praying to greater demons than themselves for fortune, luck, fame—”
“Fame?” Arch looked at Hendricks skeptically. “What does a demon want with fame?”
“Half the cast of every show on reality TV are demons,” Hendricks answered. “More if you’re watching MTV.”
Arch thought that one over for a minute. “Makes sense.”
“Anyway,” Hendricks went on, “there’s lots of reasons for a demon to do a ritual. They do them all the time. Most are innocuous and involve pretty innocent components. Maybe cadaver parts at worst, greenery at best. Something involving human sacrifice, though …” He frowned, deeply. “Doesn’t sound too good. That’s pretty far out of my league, though.”
“Of course it is,” Arch said, and he knew he was strained because he was being sarcastic, “because we couldn’t have all the answers just conveniently at hand.”
“It would make things a little more boring,” Hendricks said with a smile. “I have someone I can call for help, but she’s a little tough to get ahold of. I’ve also got a couple books I can read through, see if there might be any specifics in there.”
“What about this Hollywood guy and the other two demons?” Arch tried to keep his eye on the ball.
“I only saw one other.”
“There were two before,” Arch said. “Munson wasn’t there when I showed up the first time, Krauther was the one who answered the door.” He paused. “I wonder where he was.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Hendricks said. “I’m concerned about that Hollywood guy. I don’t think he’s a lesser.”
Arch didn’t care for that assessment, either. “Can you kill a … what would he be then, a greater?”
“Might be,” Hendricks said. “Might be worse.”
Nope. Arch didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“Fifteen,” came Erin’s voice out of his car radio, “this is Dispatch.”
Arch wanted to curse but didn’t. Instead he thumbed the mike. “This is Fifteen, go ahead, Dispatch.”
“We have reports of a black SUV weaving around out near the interstate. What’s your twenty, over?” Harris’s voice was alert.
“I’m heading that way right now,” Arch replied. “Fifteen out.” He hung up the mike without another word. He knew a moment later it was brusque, especially for him, but he had other things on his mind.
Hendricks waited about five seconds before speaking. “Was that that Erin girl we ran into at the bar last night?”
Arch looked at him sidewise. They’d just been set upon by a pack of demons who were sacrificing human beings and the cowboy wanted to make time? “Yeah.”
Hendricks just nodded, like he was assimilating that piece of information for later. He waited another minute before he spoke again. “She got a boy
friend?”
Arch sent him a look that was beyond pointed. “You serious?”
Hendricks shrugged, trying to deflect it. “This is what I do, you know.”
“Like a job you go home from every day?” Arch asked, still letting loose the heat. “It’s life and death for the rest of us. At least it seems like it was for MacGruder and his wife.”
“Isn’t your job life and death?” Hendricks asked, and Arch didn’t look at him. “Pretty sure I’ve heard of cops killed in the line of duty.”
“Not around here,” Arch said tightly.
“You could die any time,” Hendricks said, voice sounding awfully far away. “Life’s a serious business, if you want to be serious about it all the time. You could be walking down the street in New Orleans with your wife and get set upon by demons, killed, and tossed into the harbor.” He gave Arch a sidelong look of his own. “Yeah, killing demons can be serious. I’ve been pretty serious about it for a long time. Made it more than a job, I made it into something I was called to do.” He rubbed his face, like there was some way to get the tired look off of it. “Been wondering lately if I’ve been a little too serious about it.”
Arch waited, thinking over what had just been said. “That didn’t actually happen to you, did it?” He didn’t look at Hendricks, but could see him in his peripheral vision. “That thing in New Orleans?”
Hendricks took a minute to answer, and he wasn’t convincing. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Arch decided to let it go. “I gotta drop you off and go look for some dumb sonofagun that’s not able to find a designated driver to keep his stupid self from weaving all over the road. What’s the next move?”
“I’ll do some research,” Hendricks said. “Demon rituals usually happen under cover of night.” He chewed his lip as he thought. “I’m not loving the thought of assaulting the farm again, especially not at night, when those guys are at their strongest.”
“If we don’t stop them,” Arch said, “they’re gonna grab some other poor bastard and throw them into the hot seat we were supposed to be in tonight, right?”