Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers

by SM Reine

  “Then come to bed,” Alison said, and he followed her inside. They shut the door, and she led him off, down the hall to her old room, and they went inside and turned off the light.

  + + +

  Hendricks woke early, Erin draped across his body. He woke up kind of natural, with a hard-on still pressed into her hip where she was laying on him. He grinned even though it felt a little awkward, not really sure how to extract himself from this situation and even less sure he wanted to. Although his chest kind of hurt with her on it, it wasn’t bad enough to make him want to wake up the sleeping little angel who was stirring his chest hair with her every breath.

  “What are you so tickled about?” she asked him in a voice that carried not even a hint of sleepiness. When he looked down, her eyes were still pressed tightly closed, but she had a faint smile on her face. “Are you laughing about poking me awake?” The eyes came open now, and they were alight with mirth, perfectly matching the smile.

  “Nah,” Hendricks said, then jabbed her again, eliciting a giggle from her. “Just nice to have someone here besides myself to deal with it …”

  After they’d dealt with it, they showered together, with that surprising shyness that comes with a morning after. Hendricks plunged right through it, kissing her frequently, as much to remind himself of what he’d done with her, to feel the new sensations it brought with it, as to assuage the burgeoning sense of guilt he felt. Like a betrayal of things long past. She didn’t ask him about it, and he hoped it didn’t show. Still, he kissed her and held her in the shower more than he needed to. Overcompensating, maybe. He threw himself into it with as much enthusiasm as he could, pushing away that nagging sense of doubt, of being out of place and uncomfortable.

  She dressed when they’d finished, putting on her uniform again. “Where are my panties?” she asked, searching the bed sheets. He watched her from afar, brushing his teeth at the sink. “Have you seen them?”

  “Not sure,” he replied, taking the toothbrush out of his mouth. He was trying to spit quietly, unobtrusively, not wanting to draw any attention to himself. Like he hadn’t just stared at her naked body for the last several hours, in darkness and light. And he was embarrassed about brushing his teeth and spitting in front of her. She’d had his dick in her mouth less than an hour ago and his face had been buried between her legs, but he felt a blush at making a noise to get the paste out of his mouth. For chrissakes. “Want a pair of my boxers?”

  She turned and studied him in the mirror. “Guess they’ll have to do, because I have no idea where my panties went. My belt can probably keep them up, right?” She came up behind him as he wordlessly handed her a pair of plaid boxer shorts. “Say, you’re not one of those guys that keeps panties as a trophy of his conquests, are you?” He wordlessly shook his head, trying not to spit until she walked away. “Good. I dated one of those creepers once.”

  He delicately got rid of the toothpaste and took a drink from the faucet from one of the motel’s cups. “I’ll see if I can find them later, once housekeeping takes a stab at this place. They probably just got lost in the …” He took her in his arms as she began to button her uniform top. She looked cute, bra partially exposed, wearing his boxers, tanned legs with no pants. It was an abstract sort of interest, though. He knew he didn’t have it in him to go again, not this morning. Besides, he was legitimately in pain now. “Well, you know. Anyway, I’ll look once the place gets cleaned up a bit.”

  “I guess I’ll just borrow these for a while,” Erin said with a half-smile as she pulled away from him and retrieved her pants, then started to slide them up while he watched the boxers disappear under her khaki uniform bottoms.

  “Seems only fair,” Hendricks said, deciding now was as good a time as any to drop a shoe on her. “I did borrow your car last night, after all.”

  “What?”

  + + +

  Arch walked into the sheriff’s station just before seven and caught a sympathetic smile from Erin, who was already sitting at the front desk. He looked briefly but couldn’t see any sign of where she’d hit her head. Her hair looked clean, but different, like she’d braided it back for some reason. He didn’t put too much more thought into it because Nicholas Reeve popped his head out of his office just then and waved Arch back. Arch did as he was bid.

  He stepped into Reeve’s office, the dark wood paneling a leftover from the last major renovation of the sheriff’s station. Reeve had an old-fashioned gun cabinet in the corner of the room, filled to the brim with rifles. Those were pretty common in Calhoun County, though. His father in-law had one almost exactly like it for all his guns. It wasn’t exactly the last word in safety, but it was a nice feature for a lawman’s office to have. It certainly looked more presentable than modern gun safes, with their scoured metal surfaces.

  “So,” Reeve said once they were both settled. “You want me to have Erin get you some coffee?”

  “I’m fine,” Arch said, settling into the padding of the seat. He was only as loose as he was because he was tired. Otherwise he’d have been about as bristly as a cat running over a floor of electrified chicken wire.

  “Is that your usual stoicism?” Reeve asked, putting his hands back behind his head. “Or are you calmed down because the situation has been dealt with?”

  Arch had spent the second half of the night trying to figure out what to say here. It really hinged on one thing—how much leeway Reeve was going to be willing to give him. “What have you heard?” he asked.

  “Well,” Reeve started, drawling a little, “I’ve got the members of the Blenkman family—you know them, MacGruder’s neighbors—saying that Bric Munson and another couple of his ilk came over to their house and broke in, took them hostage. Said it was some sort of Satanic ritual, that the guys were all drugged out on something.” Reeve watched him carefully, and Arch knew he was being watched. It wasn’t even a game between them now; Reeve was just going to say what he needed to say. “It’s a funny thing. They claim they saw some scary stuff, but that some guy in a cowboy hat and our old football hero Arch Stan saved their lives.” He wasn’t giving much away about his own thoughts, just sticking with the story. “Course they got scared and ran home after seeing what they described as,” he picked up a witness report on a standard form that was lying on his desk and read from it, “the biggest man any of them had ever seen, armed with a flamethrower.” He set it back down and a kind of skepticism came over him. “You believe that shit?”

  “I believe what I saw,” Arch said. “And there was a whole lot of flame flying around, I reckon.”

  Reeve puckered his lips, twisting them in contemplation. “Uh huh. I take it MacGruder’s dead?”

  Arch didn’t hesitate on that one. “I think it’s a safe bet Munson and his boys killed him and his wife, yes. Though there wasn’t much sign of them from what I saw.”

  Reeve gave that a moment of thought. “Too many ways to make a body disappear in Calhoun County. Throw ’em in the Caledonia River, bury ’em in the woods, throw ’em in one of the mine shafts up on Mount Horeb, or down in a cave.” He shook his head. “Lots of ways to get rid of bodies ‘round here.” He looked back at Arch. “Do you suppose we’ll ever find these boys that broke into your house, attacked your pretty young wife?”

  Arch could tell he was being tested, and he wasn’t sure what the right answer was in Reeve’s mind, not for a certainty. But there was the honest answer, and he went with it. “No, sir. I don’t suspect we’ll ever find them, not at all.”

  Reeve just gave a slow nod as he leaned back in his chair. “Good. I reckon things are better that way.”

  + + +

  Arch caught up with Hendricks about midday at the diner out by the interstate. Even deputies had to eat, and if his path took him past the place where he suspected Hendricks would have to show his face sooner or later, and it happened to be close to the interstate, where he could fill the county’s coffers by writing tickets on speeding out-of-towners, well, it was all the better so far
as the sheriff would be concerned. Though Arch suspected he wouldn’t ask about that. He suspected he wouldn’t ask about much of anything, now, after their conversation this morning. He had a sense of Reeve that he hadn’t had before, and he could only describe it as something he would have found deeply disquieting only a few days earlier. Now he was trying to muster any outrage at all and failing.

  “How do,” Hendricks said as Arch slid in across from him. The diner crowd was buzzing a little. Thursday at noon, a few of the locals were hanging around. Plenty of interstate traffic to go along with that, too.

  “Making it just fine,” Arch said as he held up a finger to the waitress from across the room.

  Hendricks watched. “So, is this a thing with you? You just hold up a finger in whatever establishment you go to, and they just bring you whatever’s popular, even if they don’t know you?”

  “They know me here,” Arch said. “I come in for lunch at least three times a week. Always order the same thing, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Hendricks nodded his head. “You didn’t talk to Erin, did you?”

  “No,” Arch said. Light was shining in through the big plate glass window to his left, and a pickup truck cruising by caught the glare. “Why?”

  Hendricks gave a half-smile. “She was okay with getting falling down drunk and getting hit in the head, but I think I made her mad when I told her I borrowed her car.”

  Arch raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s grand theft auto.”

  “Your life was in the balance.” Hendricks took a bite of a fry. There was no ketchup anywhere on his plate.

  “Well, in that case,” Arch said, “all is forgiven.”

  Hendricks was watching him, looking for irony. “Really?”

  “On my end it is, but I’m not the one who’d be pressing charges,” Arch said. He looked around, to see if anyone was taking any interest in their talk. There was no booth behind him, and the one at Hendricks’s back had a retiree from the paper mill that Arch knew. Man was deaf as a post. “The sheriff swept everything under the rug because he thinks I had some vendetta with Munson and Krauther. Those sacrifices told him we saved them, and he was already inclined to look the other way if I ran them to ground.” He paused. “Literally to ground, in this case. Or six feet under it.”

  Hendricks stopped chewing. “He thinks you killed them?”

  Arch looked around once more. “Yeah. Doesn’t seem too bothered by it, either.”

  Hendricks started chewing again, but more delicately this time. “Questions abound about that. Is it because he’s loyal, or because he knows what type of scum those guys were, or—”

  “Or, or, or,” Arch said, cutting him off. “Could be any, or all, or some other reason buried deep in the man’s soul. No way to tell, really, at least not without having a conversation with the man that I don’t want to have.”

  “Huh,” Hendricks said. “Guess that works out for you, though.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Arch said. Though he was finding it hard not to. “So you’re hanging around for a while longer?”

  “Not sure quite yet,” Hendricks said, taking a look out the window as a Mack truck went by, heading to the truck stop just across the interstate. “I’m waiting for things to settle a little more, to get a read. Not sure if it’s time for me to ride the wind on outta here yet.”

  Arch nodded, reading all that as pure poetry rather than literal truth. “What do you suppose happened to your girl Starling?”

  Hendricks tightened up at that. Arch would have found it amusing, but he was a little too worn out for humor. “She’s not my girl,” he said. “And if you talk to Erin about her, please mention that she’s your friend.”

  Arch gave a slight incline of his head. “She really saved the day last night. Saved the night, I guess. Anyway, I’d have no problem calling her a friend after that, at least until she shows me differently.”

  “That’s good,” Hendricks said. “You go with that, if Erin asks. If she wasn’t happy about me borrowing her car, I can’t imagine she’ll be too happy with me having another woman driving it.”

  Arch stared back at Hendricks. “Is Erin just another girl to you?”

  Hendricks gave it a moment’s thought. “No. Why?”

  “Just curious.” A burger was set in front of Arch by the waitress just then, a big old plate of fries with them, and he grabbed the ketchup and started to tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out on his plate. “Wouldn’t want to see her get hurt, that’s all.”

  “I’m not aiming to hurt her,” Hendricks said, watching Arch make a pile of red on his plate. The first fry always tasted the best, with the tang of the ketchup, the salt. Bliss. “Doesn’t always stop it from happening, but it’s not my intent.”

  “Good,” Arch said, picking up his burger. “I’m gonna keep your knife for a while longer. Call it evidence seizure, if you have to.”

  “That’s fine,” Hendricks said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “I think I feel better with you holding it than letting it sit in my hat. At least while this place is a hotspot.” He looked around and gave a vague smile. “Normally, when a place goes hotspot, it’s crawling with demons and demons hunters within days.” His eyes walked around the room. “Half the people in this place would be familiar faces to me, people I’d run across down the trail.” His eyes came back to Arch’s, and the cowboy hat dipped to hide them. “I don’t know any of these folks.”

  Arch looked around once. “Most are locals. Others look like interstate travelers, some truckers, maybe.” He stared at the brim of Hendricks’s cowboy hat. “Ain’t no one dressed like you, that’s for sure.”

  The faint smile came back to Hendricks’s face, but it was mighty grim. “This isn’t good. Demons are still coming into town. I caught signs of more of them migrating when I walked across the overpass this morning. Residual traces of sulfur smell, brimstone. They’re coming, and the hunters aren’t. This place, near as I can tell, is last in line.”

  “But you’re here.” Arch set his burger down. He didn’t like where this was going.

  “Me and me alone,” Hendricks said. “But that’s the rub. Like I said, this place oughta be crawling with hunters, but they’re not showing and the demons are coming all the same.”

  Arch thought back, back to when they’d first met. “Didn’t you tell me that some hotspots are just … destroyed? Burnt out cinders on a map when they’re done?”

  “I did indeed.” Hendricks wasn’t looking too coy right now. He didn’t look sick, either, exactly, but to Arch he didn’t seem far off. “So now you see the problem. Demons rolling into town, and we’re a bit scarce on demon hunters. Because they keep trouble in check, and one guy,” he pointed to himself, “all due respect to me and my mad skills, I can’t keep watch on this whole town. Not by myself. And I damned sure can’t handle an army of them alone.”

  Arch felt down in his pocket for the switchblade. It was still there and reassuring that it was. “Not alone.” He looked out the window, at the dusty highway, the green hills and mountains of Tennessee beyond. Wondered how many of them were out there, hiding out, all across Calhoun County. “I’m gonna need a sword.”

  Hendricks smiled. “I might be able to help with that.”

  + + +

  He shouldn’t have been happy to have a partner of sorts, but he was. For a man who’d worked his ass off to spend the last five years isolated and alone, it was a strange sort of relief to Hendricks when Arch had bought in so quickly. A sword wouldn’t be too much of a problem. She’d probably be glad to have another demon hunter on the team, even if it was just for as long as the hotspot lasted.

  His room’s phone was ringing when Hendricks got back to the motel. He answered it and heard the familiar buzz at the other end of the line, the low sound of something crackling. Regardless of when she called, or where she caught him, it was always there, ever present. He thought of it as the sound of power. He’ figured that probably wasn’t far off. “Hey. It�
�s me.”

  “Ygrusibas was called forth, wasn’t he?” Her voice was light, melodic. It didn’t match her look, not at all, but he was almost relieved he didn’t have to see her, not now. The shades were still pulled in the motel room and as he sat there on the edge of the bed, in the dark, he found he couldn’t picture her. Which was probably just as well.

  “He was,” Hendricks said. They didn’t need to exchange names. Never had. She knew who he was, and he knew her. Had since the day they’d met five years ago. “We put a halt to it.”

  There was a quiet, a pause. “You and Archibald Stan.” There was something ominous about the way she said it.

  “Yes. But he goes by Arch.” He felt a bead of sweat roll down his face, and he knew it wasn’t just the heat.

  There was another pause, this one longer. “You need to stay there.”

  “The hotspot’s still going, then?” Hendricks asked. Not that he expected a full and complete response, but sometimes he’d pan out a nugget or two in the search, things he wasn’t expecting. Half the fun of a conversation with her was trying to get one of those, anyway. He had a suspicion that this time that the luck probably wasn’t going to go his way. She’d already used Arch’s name, after all. That was pretty abnormal since she never talked about anyone else but him and whatever demon he might be hunting.

  “It will continue from here on out,” she said. “All the way until the end.”

  Hendricks listened, waiting for more. When nothing else came, he asked. “The end of the world?” He felt a heavy sort of dread in his voice, which was surprising for a man who’d been living on borrowed time for so long.

  “Yes.” The answer was simple, understated. Just like everything she said.

  Hendricks tried to figure out the best way to approach it, to say what he meant, and he finally just came out with it. “When’s it going to start?”