by SM Reine
She slammed into him with all the fury of someone high enough to feel no pain from the impact. Arch felt himself get whipped through the air and onto the ground, landing hard on his back. He managed to roll enough so that he didn’t get the wind knocked out of him, but he was still down, and a demon woman who was stronger than him was on top of him. He felt her fist hit him in the chest, right on the sternum. The second hit him in the ribs, causing him to fold in pain.
+ + +
Hendricks found himself four on one again, despite his best efforts. The only bright spot for him was that he was being enough of a pain in the ass to them that not one of them had gone for Erin yet. Which was fortunate, because if they had any brains, they would have played her as the hostage long ago and probably wrapped things up by now.
They were smart enough to keep bunched up on him, though, and it was keeping him from even getting a chance to pull his sword. Five times he’d had his hand on the hilt, raising it up, and they’d slammed into him, or forced him to roll, not giving him the distance to draw it out. He was about to get frustrated, and was ready to do something he knew he shouldn’t. Screw it, though, as slow as these bastards were, it was still life or death. He had his hand on the grip of his pistol and was about to pull it to fire from the hip when one of them got a hand on him.
+ + +
Arch hadn’t been hit—really hit—since his last year of college football. He’d worn pads for that, though, and in this case there was literally nothing between the crack of demon fist and his body, skin and muscle, and bone. He didn’t feel anything break, but it damned sure hurt, and he didn’t care for that, nossir. He bucked, arching his back and pushing the demon off him enough to get the switchblade around. He slashed across her face as she dodged back, toppling off him and letting him do no more than slice her across the cheek.
He started to roll to his feet but another of them slammed into his side. This one was the one he’d stalled at the door, recovered from the gunshots to the face. Arch grimaced from the impact and hit the floor again.
+ + +
Hendricks was in the grip of one of them, taking a hit to the jaw for his stupidity in not pulling the gun earlier. That was dumb. If he couldn’t pull his sword, why not at least get a hand on the gun? It could have bought him a few seconds, maybe, and that might have been just enough. But no, he had been too concerned with the attention it would draw, playing careful to avoid the law, when he really should have been playing careful the other way. The way that avoided death.
He got hit again, and he couldn’t decide whether the alcohol was helping him take the punches better by muting the pain or dulling his senses so that every hit took longer to recover from. He didn’t come to a conclusion on that, mostly because of the sudden, searing agony he felt in the region of his chest as the one that had him slapped a hand against his shirt, wrestler-style.
If a normal guy had done it, it might have stung. When the demon did it, it shredded the fabric and left him with thin lines at the points of each finger impact, like Hendricks had just been whipped there. The demon was a malevolent son of a bitch, he could see that through his pained, drunken haze. There was a big grin looking him right in the face. The slap came down again, harder this time, and Hendricks felt the blood run down his chest under his shirt.
+ + +
Arch hit the ground again, and his head ran into the wall. He was pushed tight against the wall, his face mashed against the dull white paint, the color Alison had been begging him to paint over since they moved in. His hands were empty, he dimly realized, now unsure of where the switchblade was. The demon had an arm against his neck, and all the thing’s weight was on him, holding him down, as he looked into the kitchen, toward where the demon woman had rolled after he forced her off of him.
There was a smell of powder from where he’d splintered the drywall hanging in his nose, and he felt blood coming down, too, settling on his lips with a distinctive metallic taste. He could hear his own breathing, the pounding of his heart. His right eye was mashed against the wall so he couldn’t even see straight. The aches and pains were all there, along with the sense of the elbow of the creature that was on him, ready to break his spine. That was all bad. Very, very bad. But it was nothing compared to what he saw in front of him.
Standing in the kitchen, the female demon had her hands out, wrapped around a soft—very soft, as he remembered from just a few minutes earlier—target. She had her tongue out of her mouth, hands wrapped around a body, one hooked around a throat, the other holding it up at the waist. What she was doing was suggestive, almost lascivious, like she was about to enjoy a good lick, a meal of itself. The blond hair hung limp from the head of the demon’s hostage.
Alison’s eyes were closed, and she did not move, leaving Arch to wonder, the demon’s elbow ready to break his neck, if they had already killed his wife.
9
Hendricks felt the world get hazy around him, his breaths coming in short, sharp bursts, the feeling of the slaps to his chest making him wonder how many more he could take without his sternum breaking. It was a steady, dull ache in his chest now, with sharp stings where the flesh had been broken. The smell of sweat was thick in his nose, and it wasn’t the sweat and night smells he’d been hoping for when he’d left the bar. The demons were all around him, fanned out in a casual semi-circle, and he was at the center.
The one that was holding him had him in a tight grip, and the others were just standing back, smirking, watching. They all looked like grunge, like something he’d seen at the St. Croix County Fair when he was young. They were having a lot of fun, too, watching him as the one that had him was readying another slap, a good, hard one that would probably start the blood flowing in earnest.
It came as a little bit of a surprise to him when the arm that was holding him burst into dark flames, a quick-burning fire that didn’t sear him at all. He fell but caught himself, rolling away when the hand that had been wrapped around his throat released him, consumed by hellfire, burnt to less than ashes as the soul occupying that flesh was dragged with a scream to some unimaginable pit that Hendricks really didn’t ever want to have to imagine. Ever.
Standing in his place was that redhead, Starling, the one he’d seen jump off an overpass and disappear. That didn’t happen normally, in his experience, and the fact that she’d just sent a demon back to the bowels of hell raised his eyebrow, too. That she’d saved his bacon was a welcome byproduct. He decided to show his gratitude by taking advantage of the breathing room she’d given him to yank his sword out of the scabbard. The remaining demons were staring at her, shell-shocked, trying to figure out who she was and what she was doing. She just looked back at all of them in the semi-circle, hands at her side, like she was waiting for them to come at her.
Her eyes were dark, and since she was right in the middle of them, Hendricks would have bet that they’d be pivoting back and forth, trying to keep an eye on all of them. If they were, he couldn’t tell, because her eyes were a special sort of dark, and the parking lot of the Sinbad didn’t help, what with the distinct lack of illumination and the sun sinking below the horizon. While the demons were trying to figure out what to make of her, Hendricks stabbed out and pierced the back of the one to his right, spearing right between the ribs and into the heart of the thing. It shrieked and was swallowed in a burst of flame, sounding like an infinite scream to his ears but it probably lasted only a second or less.
He stepped closer to Starling, putting himself next to her shoulder and brandishing the sword. He operated on the principle of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and hoped that in this case it wasn’t going to bite him in the ass too hard. It really didn’t matter if it did, though, because if she hadn’t already shown up to save said ass, it wouldn’t even have been there to be bit later.
“Thanks,” he said to her, and she gave him a glance that he could only see by the subtle turn of her head, then both of them looked back at the remaining two demons, who shared a me
aningful look and turned tail, running for a car on the other side of the parking lot. One of them was leading the charge, the one wearing a Metallica T-shirt. Hendricks sort of gawked at them for a moment, almost not believing what he was seeing. “What the fuck? They’re running?”
“Cowards always run when the odds turn against their favor,” Starling said, her voice echoing in the silence next to him. He could hear the footfalls of the runners, taking off into the distance as they reached their car and started it. She turned her head to look at him now, her red hair catching the glow of the setting sun. “Are you well?”
Hendricks tried to cut through the fuzz of the booze and the beating he’d just taken to interpret her words. Kind of old-timey, obscure, but the meaning was clear. “Well enough,” he said, feeling the sting on his chest where that bastard had damned near cracked him open. “Oh, shit.”
He ran for his room door as he heard the demons’ tires squeal and tear ass out of the parking lot. Erin was still there, head against the frame, eyes rolled back in her head. “Aw, damn, Erin,” he said, dropping to his knees and slinging his sword back into the scabbard.
Her eyes fluttered as he touched her cheek, and she looked at him for a second with a weak smile. “Mmm,” she mumbled, almost contentedly. “Was it good for you?” She seemed to settle back into unconsciousness after that, which left him feeling a bit cold.
He heard the crunch of gravel behind him and turned his head to see Starling standing there, looking down on them coldly. “She took a hell of a hit to the head,” he said, fingers reaching up into her hair to find the place where she’d hit the door frame, a little cut that was trailing blood down her face.
“She’s fine,” Starling said, like she was pronouncing the weather.
“Oh, you’re a doctor as well as a demon slayer, huh?” Hendricks didn’t deign to cast her a look. Gratitude only went so far, and she was treading on his patience now. Starling didn’t answer, and after another minute, a thought clicked through Hendricks’s drunken haze. “They were looking for me.”
“Yes,” Starling answered without pause.
“They knew where to find me,” Hendricks said again, looking up from Erin to see Starling looking down at him, a simple nod following that, and causing his blood, which had been running hot, ready for a fight, to go cold. “Oh, shit. Arch.”
+ + +
Arch wasn’t much for swearing, but he’d heard Reeve once use the phrase, “Up to my ass in alligators,” and thought it was pretty apt for the situation. Naked, pushed against a wall by a demon with his face mashed so he could only see out of one eye, and that one eye was fixated on his wife, who was hanging limp in the arms of a demon woman who was putting a tongue in her ear.
Arch was a man who knew his weaknesses, and one of them was his temper. Not with Alison, not ever. But his teammates had seen it on the football field from time to time, and when it came out, the common consensus he’d heard muttered is that they were glad he was on their side.
A breath of air surged into his lungs, fueled entirely by rage. He let out a yell that caused the hands that had him gripped to loosen, probably from surprise. Arch pulled his face down the drywall, causing it to peel skin from his cheek. He shifted his weight forward, demon on his back, elbow on the back of his neck, and caused the man to dip lower as Arch dropped into a football stance against the wall. The foul thing lost its balance, and Arch could feel the thing’s jeans and t-shirt fall against his naked back. He didn’t like it there, but it wasn’t going to be there for long.
Arch launched off the balls of his feet, like he was tackling the wall. He managed to drop enough of the demon between his shoulder and the drywall to pin the man in place as he slammed through, smashing the demon into the two by fours and cushioning the blow to himself. Using the demon as a buffer, he plowed on, drawing screams from it as he ran it straight through the support frames and heard them snap. Arch stopped, getting back to his feet enough to see the studs in the wall were broken and that the demon was resting on them, just ready to be impaled, if Arch could pull it off.
He came down with all his weight and slammed the demon, battering him down. There was a scream, then a hiss, as Arch pushed as hard as he’d pushed on any weight ever in his life. He heard a squealing sound, like air being let out of a tire, and realized it came from the demon, that there was a little bit of the stud poking through his chest.
The demon burst into shadowed flames, head to toe, and Arch had only a moment to revel in his good work when another of them slammed into him from behind and carried him through the shattered wall into the bathroom.
+ + +
Starling was driving, but she didn’t look too happy about it, the first real emotion he’d caught from her. They’d stashed Erin in Hendricks’s motel room, splayed out on the bed, unconscious and mumbling. She’d be fine, Hendricks was pretty sure, finer than Arch was anyway, if his suspicions were right. When Hendricks had asked if Starling had a car, she’d shrugged, so he’d grabbed Erin’s keys—which she’d gotten back from Phil grudgingly after promising she was walking straight to the motel—off her belt, and he’d run drunkenly back to the bar, Starling following along much more gracefully.
It had taken a few minutes for Starling to get the car in drive, and Hendricks was having to give her lessons on how to drive, which should have alarmed him, but didn’t. He was feeling the pull of sleep, wishing he was back in bed, freshly laid and ready to embrace the exhaustion that was tugging at him. Instead he was in pain from the damage to his chest, stiff in all the wrong places, and the woman who was next to him was not the one he’d been wanting to spend his evening with. Nothing wrong with Starling, but the woman was so cold he suspected his dick would freeze if it got anywhere near the presumed gap between her legs.
“This is… not bad,” Starling said, presumably making a pronouncement about the experience of driving rather than her performance at it. She had her hands where he’d told her to put them, at ten and two. Or rather, where he’d helped her position them, because she didn’t know what he meant when he said, “At ten and two.” Her hands had been cold like they’d been sitting in the freezer, which just gave him more grounds for the suspicion that she’d chill his cock if he ever got it near her. Erin was warm, though. And unconscious, which he was quick to blame himself for (and might have been even more of a douser to his libido than Starling).
They sped along the highway toward Midian’s downtown, Starling tugging the wheel a little more than was necessary. It was causing the car to—not quite swerve, but close. “Whoa,” Hendricks said. “Take it easy.” She gave him an inquiring look, and he knew she had no clue what he was saying. “With the wheel. Don’t jerk it so much to correct. Be gentle with it.” Starling corrected the next time in a much smoother manner, and he nodded approval. “How did you know they were coming for me?”
“Word spreads,” she said coolly, as she did everything else.
“Well, thanks for the help,” he said, trying to push the gratitude before the next thing he was going to say. “But didn’t it occur to you to mention that they might also be going after Arch?”
She didn’t look up from the road before speaking. “My concern was you, not anyone else. In this, I fulfilled my aims.”
“Don’t think I’m not appreciative,” Hendricks said, “but I’m not the only one in this particular fight.” He paused as they came into the town, Starling riding the brakes harder than she needed to before they came upon a stop sign. “Mind telling me what this is all about? You show up before, all mysterious, and—” He looked back as a red and blue light flashed through the cab. “Shit. Pull over.” He looked back and waved her to the side of the road. “Pull over.”
“Why?” She gazed at him with wonder, like she was genuinely curious.
He stared back at her. “Because that’s what we do when a cop pulls up behind us with lights on.”
She stared back, impassive, as she guided the car to the shoulder. “I thought we were
going to save the other police officer?”
Hendricks took a breath. “Yeah, that was the sentiment. Unfortunately, I don’t know where he lives.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him but had no time to say anything else before there was a knock at the window. Starling stared for a moment at the door before Hendricks gestured toward the mechanism and Starling rolled it down.
“You must be Sheriff Reeve,” Hendricks said, before the man could say a word. He was older, balding, a little paunchy. Hendricks hadn’t talked to Arch about his job much, but the way the man wore his seniority, he had the feel of a guy in charge. Hendricks hadn’t even caught the name from Arch; it had been plastered all over campaign posters in the town square that had yet to be removed.
“Yeah,” Reeve said, leaning over just slightly to look at Hendricks. “And?”
“Sorry,” Hendricks said. “We were just on our way to see Arch.”
Reeve gave them a perplexed look, narrowed eyes and all. “And you’re doing this in one of my deputies’ cars because?”
“We’re just visiting town,” Hendricks said, trying to lay it on smooth, “and I was drinking with Erin over at Fast Freddie’s. Well, she had a little too much, so she’s sleeping it off over at my motel. I gotta go talk to Arch, though, I was supposed to meet up with him after his shift was done at three and I think we missed connecting because I ended up hanging out with Erin—” Hendricks was talking as fast as he could, trying to show he was a little wasted. It played into the next part of his plan.
“That’s a real fine story,” Reeve said, and Hendricks could tell he was weighing all the stuff that had just come out. There was definitely a heavy air of doubt, like the man didn’t want to accept what was being said at face value. Hendricks suspected he had the run of the man, though; loyalty would mean something to him, and dropping the names of two of his deputies would at least give Hendricks some breathing room. Maybe. “But you were still doing fifty in a thirty-five.” He gazed from Hendricks to Starling. “And swerving. Ma’am, have you had anything to drink?”