by SM Reine
Hollywood stared in the mirror, past the brand name of the beer. It was like it didn’t even exist if he concentrated hard enough. All that was left in there was him. Him and what he was about to bring upon the world. Because he was worthy. Because he was the one. The one with the vision to do it. He looked at the flawless, even teeth staring back at him and recognized once again that there was a reason he had been passed over in the past, why he’d failed at acting and chosen to transition into producing. It was that vision which would carry him through. All that was standing between him and it was execution. And finally, he’d get what he’d deserved all along.
A starring role.
+ + +
Creampuff was quiet, now. That was a thankful thing, at least for Ygrusibas. Being winnowed in the pits of fire for the last eight or ten millennia (it was hard to keep track) was one thing. Being trapped in the body of a cow was quite another. Creampuff might have taken umbrage to that, but by this point in the summoning process, there just wasn’t that much of Creampuff left. Maybe an instinct or two, but otherwise, Ygrusibas was running just about the entire show.
Which should have been more eventful than it was. Ygrusibas was neither he nor she, but a transcendence of the mortal two genders, encompassing both. Yet somehow, it was trapped in a body that was decidedly binary. This was unfortunate but could be remedied with time and some effort. The change would require energy that was presently being expended to build up strength, though, which was a curious thing.
The gate was still an insurmountable obstacle, but Ygrusibas was not impressed. Millennia of imprisonment in the pits of fire compared to a day in the pasture? It was a welcome change, it told itself, over and over. No roasting flesh, no torment that ran soul deep. This was positively… well, boring by comparison, which might have been part of the problem. Ygrusibas had grown accustomed to torment, had survived it by plotting, by thinking of all who would suffer once it had been freed, given release from said torment. Anger and bitterness were the flames in Ygrusibas’s soul that had seen it through. With the external flames gone, the inner ones burned all the brighter, and with them came a desire to make things happen.
But none of it was happening fast enough. The body that Ygrusibas had taken was still trapped in a pasture, in a prison built just for this sort of animal. All attempts to break through the fence had resulted in a special kind of pain that Creampuff (or what was left of her) had predicted with a sort of dim-witted amusement. Ygrusibas hadn’t found it nearly so amusing, though. It was almost as bad as the pits again.
And so Ygrusibas seethed as sundown approached, casting the farmhouse in the distance in a fire-red glow that reminded Ygrusibas of where it had so recently escaped from. This did not sit well, not at all, even as the second night came on, and the demon waited for its full strength to return. Because when it did, the earth would tremble.
When it did, the world would end.
10
Alison walked out of the emergency room under her own power a little before midnight, Arch at her side. Hendricks breathed a little sigh of relief when he saw them, sitting where he was on the hood of Erin’s car, almost sober by now. He had a few things on his mind, not the least of which was Erin herself. He and Starling had gone back to the hotel to make sure the deputy was all right. She was; she’d even had a half-awake conversation with Hendricks while he’d cleaned the cut on the side of her head. It was a little thing, just a scratch, but there’d definitely be a bruise there tomorrow.
“Erin all right?” Arch asked as soon as he got within range of Hendricks.
“She’s fine,” Hendricks responded, giving Mrs. Stan a polite smile. “How do you do, ma’am?” He tipped his hat to her.
“I’m all right,” Alison said then shot a look at her husband before returning it to Hendricks. “And you are?”
“This is Lafayette Hendricks, dear,” Arch said tightly. “He’s an old friend, in town trying to settle some business.”
Hendricks couldn’t have put it much better himself. He tipped his hat again to Alison then turned back to Arch. “And there is some serious business that needs settling.”
Arch nodded, his uniform looking just a bit disheveled. Hendricks hadn’t seen his uniform disheveled even after the dust up with the demons at MacGruder’s farm. He assumed it was something of a new situation for Arch. “I never did catch your friend’s name,” Arch said, looking to Starling, who stood with her arms folded only a few feet away.
“He doesn’t have any friends,” Starling said, matter-of-factly. “I am Starling.”
Arch sent a look Hendricks’s way. Really? was how Hendricks interpreted it. “And you’re a … hunter as well?”
She cocked her head at him, but her expression didn’t change. “No.”
Arch gave Hendricks another look, and Hendricks felt a little swell of pity. He hadn’t figured out Starling’s angle either, but she’d been damned helpful and damned quiet, so he hadn’t pressed her too hard about what she was up to. Yet. “What’s the move?”
“I’m dropping Alison off at her parents’ house,” Arch announced, drawing a surprised look from Alison herself. “Then we need to have a discussion with those boys out at MacGruder’s.”
“Arch,” Alison said, softly, like she didn’t want Starling and Hendricks to hear her, “what are you talking about? What about our apartment?”
“Whole place is trashed,” Arch said. “Not really in a fit state for you to sleep there tonight.”
Hendricks saw the questioning look Mrs. Stan gave her husband, then the polite gaze coupled with a smile that she turned his and Starling’s way. It wasn’t a uniquely Southern belle thing, the facade over the desire to argue, but Hendricks thought Southern women did it better than almost anyone. Most of the Yankee girls back home would just fight it out with their man in public, not even giving a fuck who saw.
“Arch,” Alison said again, this time with an unmistakable trace of steel underneath, “I really think you should come with me.” She said it politely, but the edge was there, and it was all order.
The big man brushed it off like all he heard was the text, no subtext. “No. I’m a deputy sheriff, and I’m not letting the bastards behind this get brought in by anyone else. This is my responsibility.”
Hendricks just felt sorry for them now, the both of them, because Arch didn’t give a damn, wasn’t listening, and Alison was all polite embarrassment for his sake. She turned back to Hendricks, gave him a flushed, Excuse-me-while-I-beat-some-sense-into-my-wayward-idiot-of-a-husband look and rounded on Arch to hook her arm in his and presumably move him out of earshot.
Arch resisted, though, and looked to Hendricks. “I’m gonna drop her off. Her folks are on the outskirts. Meet back at your motel in a half hour or so?”
Hendricks felt the tug of discomfort, suspecting he knew that Arch was gonna get an earful when he stepped into his car. “Sure thing,” he said and nodded at Starling, who started toward the driver’s side of Erin’s car again. “I’ll drive this time.”
Starling shrugged, handing him the keys as they crossed at the hood. She looked at Arch’s receding back, Alison’s arm crooked in his, and studied them as though she were looking at something peculiar. Neither of them was speaking, but their body language was all stiff, and not just from the fight they’d both been in. Hendricks could see it—could see it and was glad he wasn’t riding with them now.
“She is greatly unhappy with him,” Starling observed, opening her door, but never looking away from the couple as they made their way through the parking lot toward the police cruiser in the distance.
Hendricks watched them as they got into the Explorer, saw Alison open her mouth then, saw the first words start to spill out with the flagrant gestures, her hands waving, finger pointing, and he started the car. He took one last look as he turned the wheel of the subcompact and took it out of the parking space, headed toward the exit, before he’d even fastened his safety belt. “You ain’t even shitting about that.�
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+ + +
Arch didn’t really want to hear it, but he had a vague inkling that he was going to get an earful as soon as the car door was shut. It didn’t even take that long, actually, before Alison blew up at him.
“—can’t believe you’d just dump me off at my parents house after that!” She was railing good, letting him have it, and he would probably have been more moved if he wasn’t itching to just lay waste to demons, split their fleshy bellies open and send them back to hell. He had the switchblade in his pocket and he was jonesing to use it again, to turn it loose on that Hollywood bastard.
“Sorry,” Arch said, sensing an opening and cutting her off. “Those guys, the ones that broke into our apartment? They’ve got friends. They’re not gonna stop.”
Alison was quiet for a beat. She got like that, every so often. If you knew her, it wasn’t hard to imagine her as the salutatorian of her class, but it was easy to pass her off at first blush as just some ditz. Arch might have made that mistake himself if he hadn’t known her since grade school. She didn’t cultivate a thoughtful persona and was prone to gushing. “You’re saying they aren’t going to let off coming after us until … what? You’re dead?”
“Seems likely,” Arch said, backing the Explorer out of the space and putting it in drive. He eased through the hospital parking lot, as though expecting a demon to come jumping out from behind a parked car. None did, and he reached the edge of the lot and took the cruiser out onto the highway.
“So you’re going to go after them and stop it?” He knew she was staring at him, and he didn’t want to fuel any fears she might have. “You and that cowboy? And his …” He could see her frown out of the corner of his eye. “… girlfriend or whatever?” She seemed to think about it. “That wasn’t his girlfriend. I’d swear they were just strangers, standing next to each other like they were.” Arch grunted and Alison leaned toward him. “Why aren’t you taking Reeve and the boys with you? Why are you working with some hired-hand cowboy that no one knows?” She let the silence of his unanswered question hang there between them, and he couldn’t think up anything fast enough. “What are you not telling me, Arch?”
“These guys are bad news,” Arch said. “Badder than anything Reeve would suspect.”
“And you gotta deal with them?” Alison said, skeptical. The headlights bounced down the highway, illuminating it under the cloudy Tennessee night. “Why not the state police? Or the FBI, if Reeve isn’t up for it?”
Arch shook his head. “This is a local problem now. Not something they’d handle.” He wanted to tell her more, but how would he even start to explain it, let alone give her the depth of reassurance she’d need after he broke it to her that he was going after demons? “It’ll be okay. This cowboy, he’s good. Real good. Used to be in the Marine Corps, and he knows these scumbags. How they think. What they’ll do.” He gave her a cautious smile. “We’ll get ’em wrapped up, and then you and I can get back to the business of living our lives.” He couldn’t quite smile at this because somewhere deep he knew he was lying, that there was no going back after what he’d learned the last couple days. It was like his whole world had opened up, like something had showed itself to him that he’d always known was lurking out there under the surface. Like he’d been waiting for someone to tell him what Hendricks had finally come out and said.
Demons walked among humans. They were out there, they were scheming, and human beings were nothing but prey for them.
He gave Alison another tense smile as the Explorer kicked into a higher gear. He looked at the speedometer, and realized he was going seventy in a fifty-five. He flipped on the lights and gunned the accelerator even more. He’d killed four of them by himself, some with his hands and what he’d had nearby, and Hendricks had said that just didn’t happen. He wanted to do it again, and soon. And when he was done with them, well…
…he wasn’t sure he really wanted to be done.
+ + +
Hendricks opened the door to the motel and let himself in. He checked on Erin, whom he had covered up with a blanket. She was sleeping and had turned a little to face the window. She did not stir as he came in, and he brushed the hair out of her eyes. She was so peaceful he didn’t want to disturb her. Her little frame had curled up, almost in the fetal position, only not quite there, like she wanted to hug her knees to her chest. The air conditioner was working better tonight, keeping the heat in the room to a minimum, and the smell of the musty air it put out filled the small room.
Hendricks walked to the sink and took off his coat, laying it across a chair by the closet. “Come in,” he said to Starling, who was lingering just inside the door, looking over the room like it was some curiosity to be examined. “Shut the door behind you, please?” She did and then stood back and watched him in the mirror as he hung that hat up on the hook on the closet door then peeled his ripped and bloody shirt off. He’d kept his coat closed while Arch and the sheriff had been around, hoping they were too distracted to comment on it. It wasn’t as hot tonight, anyway. Which was a way of saying it was still hot, just maybe not as hot as it had been. It had worked, plainly, because neither bothered to get him to open it, which was good. Because even before he’d taken the shirt off, it was plain that things were not as they were supposed to be.
There was heavy bruising in the middle of his chest, across his pectorals, and it had hurt when he’d spread his arms to take off his coat. Even more when he’d taken off the shirt. He gently touched the center of the mess, where five different spots oozed blood that had been staunched by the cloth. When he ripped it free, they came loose again and started bleeding once more. He grabbed Kleenex from the dispenser on the counter and blotted at them, trying to stop the flow.
“You are wounded,” Starling said, now just behind him.
“You don’t miss much, do you?” Hendricks said, blanching at the pain as he looked back at her in the mirror. “Seems like you state the obvious a lot.”
“I say what I see,” Starling replied.
“And not much else,” Hendricks agreed. He turned to face her, still holding the tissue tight against his chest. “So who are you?”
There was no register of emotion from her. “Starling.”
“Well, that’s a name,” Hendricks said. “But unless you’re about to grow a set of wings and go flapping around the room, it doesn’t tell me shit about who you really are, what you’re really here for.”
She cocked her head at him. “Wings?”
He started to raise an eyebrow at her but stopped. He couldn’t decide if she was being deliberately dense or just evasive. Better to avoid the sarcasm and just try a different tack. “So, why are you here?”
“To keep you from getting killed,” she said simply, like it was obvious. “And to bring you a message.”
He stared her down. “Same one as last time?
She nodded. “You do not even know why you are here. Not yet.”
He leaned against the wall, more for support than to look cool, though he kind of hoped he did. “So, why don’t you tell me?”
“I cannot,” she said with a simple shake of the head.
“Of course not,” Hendricks said and shuffled over to his duffel, digging into the side, where he kept the first aid kit. “Because that might be helpful, giving me knowledge I can use to help in the job I’m doing.”
“The task you have before you is not the task you are called to perform,” she said, a little singsong-y about it. He stared at her in the mirror as he carefully removed a long bandage and some medical tape from the kit, along with a few sterile swabs that he tore from their packaging. “You came because she told you to come, because she sensed the emanations of this place and thought it important, more important than any of the other locations she could have sent you to. She was correct,” Starling said drily, “but not for the reasons she thinks, and not for the ones she has told you.”
“Uh huh,” Hendricks said, and ran the first swab across his chest, feeling th
e alcohol burn as he did it. “You realize if you hadn’t saved my ass earlier tonight, I’d be madder than hell at you for being so damned irritating in drip-feeding me this vague bullshit?” He placed a piece of gauze over the first of the wounds and taped it in place. “I mean, I’m a demon hunter by trade. This is what I do. Telling me there are unholy in a town is winding me up and turning me loose, no other instruction required, because I’ll find them, I’ll open their guts to the sunshine, and I’ll repeat until the hotspot simmers down and I’m off to the next demon scramble.”
He turned around and faced her. “But you start giving me this, ‘You’re not here for what you think you are’ crap and muddying the waters for me? Then you won’t tell me why I’m really here?” He took a step toward her. “Let me tell you something. I’m here to kill demons. It’s what I do. If you think I’m here for some other reason, I’m gonna have to politely tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stood there, shirtless, for just another minute staring into Starling’s cold eyes before he went back to the sink. She did not react at all, not to anything he said.
He waited about five minutes, patching each of the wounds in turn then wrapping his whole chest in a bandage around his ribs. Once he had finished he pulled a fresh shirt from his duffel and put it on, a white one this time. He turned to say something else to Starling, but the room was empty save for Erin, asleep on the bed.
+ + +
Arch wasn’t on familiar enough terms with his in-laws to just open the door and walk in even though he suspected it was unlocked. They hadn’t phoned ahead, after all, so he waited until the lights came on in the front window and Mr. Longholt opened the door. Arch still thought of him as Mr. Longholt even though he’d known the man for nearly ten years and had always been told to call him Bill. Longholt smiled at the sight of them on his front porch, though there was a faintly perplexed look on his face. Mr. Longholt was a good man.