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

by Robert J. Crane

  “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?”

  The soft, melodic tone drifted from note to note in her answer. “It has already begun. It began with the rise of Ygrusibas and will march ever on from here until it reaches the hellish conclusion.”

  He blanched, even though she was handing out nuggets left and right at the moment. It was almost like he didn’t want to hear any more. Didn’t stop him from listening on anyway, though.

  “Is there any way to stop it?” Hendricks asked. He thought about Erin. About Arch. “Any way at all?”

  “There are possibilities,” the voice returned. “But they remain only that, so long as Archibald Stan remains alive.”

  Hendricks sat up on the bed, ramrod, like something had been jabbed into his back. “What? So long as Arch remains alive? What the fuck does that mean?” There was silence, no answer at all. “I’m sorry,” Hendricks said after a moment, composing himself. “What does Arch have to do with the end of the world?”

  It took a while of listening to the line crackle before she finally spoke again. “Everything. He has everything to do with it.” She sounded almost tender now, like she was delivering mortally bad news. Which, Hendricks supposed, she was.

  “Archibald Stan is the man who will bring about the end of the world.”

  Depths

  Southern Watch, Book 2

  1.

  Gideon could feel death when he listened closely to the stirring deep within. It was in the distance, maybe even miles away, but he could taste it when it came, and it was almost as good as if he were in the room while it was happening.

  ***

  Jacob Abbott had saved for his divorce for years, and the bitch had gone and thwarted him two weeks before he had filed. He still felt sick about it, going on a year later. He’d paid a big shot lawyer down in Chattanooga with installment payments, one at a time, every payday for three years. It was some fucked up shit, too, Hayley going and dying in a car wreck before he’d had the satisfaction of seeing her fat face crumple when she read the papers. He’d planned to have them served while he was there, two weeks after his youngest daughter turned eighteen. He didn’t want to miss it, after all. He’d paid for it, for fuck’s sake.

  But she’d gone and gotten herself ground up under the treads of an eighteen wheeler changing lanes on the interstate, and the goddamned lawyer had said that the retainer was non-refundable. He’d had some choice words for that cocksucker, but it still hadn’t gotten him a dime back, which was a shame because he had a funeral to pay for. That was almost as much of a kick to the balls as not getting the money back from the lawyer.

  It had turned out all right now, though. Jacob cracked open another beer, sitting in his underwear in the basement of the house they used to share. Back when Hayley was alive, he’d kept the basement as his domain, made it his own. After she died, he hadn’t bothered to take the upstairs over again. The kids stayed up there when they were in town, which wasn’t very often. Jacob just hung out in his basement after work, drank beer, ate his sour cream chips and watched SportsCenter. That suited him just fine.

  When the first pains of the heart attack struck him, Jacob didn’t have much time to ponder whether it was the beer, the cigarettes, the sour cream chips, or the last fifteen years in which the most strenuous ex
ercise had been the one time a year or less that Hayley had let him fuck her that caused it. He just knew it hurt like a motherfucker.

  It felt like someone had jabbed a flaming sword through his left arm and down into the center of his chest, and goddamn did it hurt. He wheezed and clutched at himself, gasping like he’d been run over by an eighteen wheeler. So that’s what it felt like, he thought.

  Jacob jerked like someone had run a hot poker up his ass. That caused him to swipe his hand across the end table at his left. He heard himself hit some things but barely felt them through the pain. He might have worried about what he’d knocked over, but he was too busy screaming between gasps for breath.

  He slid out of his chair, spasming, and hit the floor, the agony searing through his chest. He could smell his sour cream chips, like a little taste of home as he lay with his cheek pressed against the tattered grey and brown rug. Chips were spilled all around him, the bowl upended in front of his eyes. Any other time it would have been a welcome scent, like a substitute for someone meeting him at the door when he got home from work at the plant. He loved those damned chips, didn’t even mind when he beat off with the stuff still on his hand and it made his dick smell like them until he showered the next morning.

  Now they were just in the way. He rolled, hearing them crunch as he broke them into tiny pieces. The pain had faded just enough for him to start thinking through what he needed to do, and finding the phone so he could call 911 was right at the top of his list.

  Jacob had just enough presence of mind to realize that if the chips were on the floor, the phone probably was, too. His thoughts were spinning, the pain subsiding, creeping back to the center of his ribcage. Now it was like someone had left some embers alight in his chest.