The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  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 meaningful 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 sur
e, 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?”

  Starling cocked her head at him, still serious. “No.”

  Hendricks could tell she was ready to say something else, but he stopped her. “She’s my designated driver.”

  “Uh huh,” Reeve said, staring down at them. “Tell you what,” he seemed to decide. “We’ll head on over to Arch’s, see what he has to say about all this.”

  “That sounds great,” Hendricks said with a smile. “You mind leading the way? I’m pretty wasted and she doesn’t know this town for shit.”

  Reeve gave him something just short of a leer—trying to keep the politeness on until he knew for fact that Hendricks was a lying scumbag. “All right,” was the measured response that came back, but the implication it carried was, Fuck you. Try and run and I will own your ass for all time.

  Hendricks gestured for Starling to roll up the window and start the engine. They waited in silence as the red-and-blue lights flashed past them, going slow, and after a moment Starling brought the car back on the road to follow the police cruiser.

  ***

  Arch rolled into the bathroom, managing to turn the tables on the demon that was on him like a duck on a June bug, slamming the thing’s head into the bathroom sink. It bared its teeth at him, demon teeth, like pointed canines you’d see on a vampire in a movie. He brought its head down toward him in a sudden jerk after holding it back for just a moment, and let it clip the top of its head on the sink. He heard the cracking of the ceramic countertop, the demon’s face looked dazed, and he drove it back toward him again with so much force that the lip of the counter broke with the impact and the demon went limp for a moment.

  It was all Arch needed to get a leg up and shove the thing, hard, into the shower curtain, where it got entangled. He got to his feet and pulled the shattered bowl of the sink out of the small pedestal, holding it like an awkward baseball bat, water spraying out of the plumbing at him. He took the whole thing and swung like a champ at the demon just getting up from the tub. He aimed at the neck, figuring it was the weakest part of the whole body. The sink shattered upon impact, raining fragments into Arch’s unprotected skin. He was rewarded with a hiss like the one he’d heard before, then the room was lit up by a flare of orange light. The thing disappeared in a burst of dark flame, leaving behind the smell of sulfur and brimstone.

  The sink was ruined but Arch didn’t give a damn. He looked for a weapon and came up with the shower rod, since the sink was too fragmented to do him much good. The rod was already ripped out of the wall from where the demon had torn it down in landing, and he readied himself for the last of them, the woman, whom he could hear out in the kitchen still, and he saw red thinking about what she might be doing to Alison. If Alison was even still alive. He felt a lurch in his stomach and started toward the door. As he passed the gargantuan hole in the wall,
he looked out and saw the switchblade just waiting on the carpet up ahead.

  “Did you get him?” came a female voice, kind of husky, and he couldn’t remember her name. Severson? Amanda, maybe?

  “Yeah,” Arch said, lowering his voice, making himself cough. “I got him.” He wanted to be wearing clothes, but this wasn’t the moment, not with what was at stake. All hell had broken loose upon his house, his home, and he could feel the rage covering all the aches and pains that ought to be wearing on him. He wondered if anyone would have called the Sheriff’s Department yet. One of his neighbors was elderly, the woman below him. Doubtful she’d hear much of anything but Wheel of Fortune at this time of night. The ones on the other side of his kitchen were younger, though, and from out of town originally. They might call 911 if they heard what was happening in his place.

  “Let’s get them out of here, then,” came the voice of the female demon. He was almost certain her name was Amanda. He remembered the mug shot. “Hollywood’s waiting.”

  Arch pondered his course. “Gimme a hand,” he said, rough and low. He heard movement out in the kitchen, footsteps coming toward him along with something being gently set down on the floor outside. He hoped it was Alison. He hoped Amanda wasn’t giving much thought to his request, that she was dumb. He was betting on that, actually. Smart people generally didn’t become common criminals, after all. If they went to crime at all, they generally became uncommon ones.

  He saw her turn the corner at the door and come in, not even bothering to be cautious. He wondered if she was high right now, strung out on something that could make a demon dulled and slow. She twitched in surprise when she saw him, but he was already coming at her, driving the end of the shower rod into her midsection. It didn’t pierce the skin, probably because it was too dull, but then, he hadn’t meant it to. Arch ran her as hard as he could forward, and she fell back, pushed into the bedroom door that was directly opposite the bathroom.