Starling cocked her head at him, and Arch suddenly felt mighty small. “Do you need proof? Can you not find it in you to take such an extraordinary occurrence on faith?”
Arch looked back at Hendricks to find the cowboy looking back at him. “Don’t look at me for faith,” Hendricks replied quickly, his arms folded over his black t-shirt, “but that does seem like a big coincidence, this coming after those murders.”
“What kind of demon would kill people this way?” Arch asked. It was a good question to his mind. “The … Spiegoth?”
“No,” Starling said, and she paused to look away as though she were sniffing the air. “There are no Spiegoth in this town. Yet.”
“Yet?” Hendricks said, coming off the door frame. “Does that mean they will come eventually?”
Starling turned to look at the cowboy, and her answer was glacially cool. “All things will come here eventually.”
“If it wasn’t a Spiegoth that did this,” Arch said, trying to wrap his brain around the whole situation as he leaned in to rest a palm on the facade of the Sinbad motel, “what did?” He wondered if he’d recognize the demon name were she to spit one out.
“Hard to say,” Starling said after she appeared to ponder his statement for a moment. “Come with me.” She turned without another word and began to walk through the parking lot. Arch noticed for the first time that she wore cowboy boots too, and then turned to look at Hendricks, who was still poised in the doorjamb, looking like he was still deciding whether to move.
“I guess we should go with her,” Hendricks said as he met Arch’s gaze. “You know, at least see what she’s got to say.” He waited a minute before saying anything else and Arch did too, trying to figure out what protest seemed reasonable under the circumstances. “We do owe her our lives.”
“Yep,” Arch said, but he could hear the resignation in his own voice. Nodding, he turned to follow the red-haired woman across the parking lot. She did not look back to see if they were following her.
***
Lerner was about to hit the breaking point when Duncan opened his eyes and finally spoke. “Something’s going on. Something big.”
That was music to Lerner’s ears. A tapping noise in the depths of the motel’s rank air conditioner was slowly driving him batty. Even the shade of the walls was violently disagreeable at this point. “What and where?” he asked as he grabbed his keys off the dresser at the front of the room.
“Toward the freeway,” Duncan said, unfolding himself from the wood and cloth chair that was one of a matching set sitting in front of the motel’s window. He gestured vaguely, pulling his suit coat off the back of the chair. It was one of the milder ones, a deep purple one that looked almost navy in low light. Duncan seemed to have made an effort to coordinate it with his tie. Lerner let it pass.
“I’ll drive,” Lerner said, shocking neither of them. He liked to be in control. Driving gave him time to think, which probably annoyed Duncan, but who cared? Duncan, probably, but Lerner didn’t. He slapped the door with an overly enthusiastic rap of the hand as he passed through and held it for Duncan.
The rain was slackening off. This was a good thing. A sign of better days to come, hopefully.
***
It didn’t take Gideon long to get another rental. He had a bank account with a lot of money in it, the byproduct of years of taking money from the accounts of people who didn’t need it anymore. He waited until they were dead, and using that little bit of contact he had with them as they were passing him, took an ATM number here, a bank account number there, a passcode or credit card or social security number every now and again. He always got a complete sense of them as they passed through and him, so it seemed a shame to let their money go to waste when he was clearly in need.
And he was in need. In more ways than one.
The drive back to Midian was hell, a slow, dragging ride. The rain was starting to lighten up, for which he was thankful. He was still trying to figure out how best to top his last move, and it wasn’t coming to him. Feeling the twenty-eight people who had died that afternoon had been the single most thrilling and satisfying experience of his entire earthly existence.
And it had been a long existence.
He’d lingered near wars before, but it was tough to predict a battlefield and get there quickly without exposing himself to danger. During most of World War II, he’d stayed in the U.S., just feeding off the slow misery and dying that naturally happened in the cities. Things had picked up in the sixties and seventies but had started to quiet down in the nineties. New York was boring now, so passé, and even some of the hotspots hadn’t been very exciting over the last few years. Sure, New Orleans and Detroit could be counted on in a pinch, but where was the excitement in that?
No, Gideon needed something new. What he’d done this afternoon by spurring the accident, that had been new. That had been thrilling. That was still making him tingle in the right places. He fought to keep his hand off himself as he got a reflexive erection just thinking about it as he drove. He’d jerked off again and again as he took the rental to Cleveland to ditch it, making a bigger mess of the car. By that time, who cared? It was already fucked. And he needed to get it out of his system so he didn’t fuck up the new car.
He figured he’d have some excitement reliving this one, but then he’d be spent. The urge would start rising. The thirst for something greater would start to build, and just jerking off to the same old souls spilling the same old blood would lose its thrill. He needed a new mountain to climb. Metaphorically, of course.
He just had to find a way to kill lots of people in a massive hurry.
And it was that thought he entertained as he kept driving down the interstate, back to Midian.
***
“Where the hell are we going?” Hendricks asked as he and Arch hurried to catch up with Starling. His whole body was still aching, in spite of having taken a couple Percocet that he had from the time when he’d broken his arm. He’d been holding onto them a year or so, knowing that, given his profession, he’d need them eventually. He didn’t really like to take them unless he had to because they fucked with his body, making him sleepy and shit. He was probably at the tail end of the effect, but he still wanted to just sleep. Not much chance of that.
“This way,” Starling said, just a little ahead of them. Hendricks watched her go and marveled at her ass. It wasn’t bad, all out on display in her tight blue jeans. She hadn’t been wearing those last time, had she? He didn’t think so, but it was tough to remember. Seemed like she was mostly around in the darkness and turned up when he was in a scrape, which didn’t exactly lend him to paying attention to her choice of wardrobe.
Hendricks shot a look at Arch and adjusted his hat, tipping the brim back and out of his eyes. He liked wearing the cowboy hat, liked the feel of it, liked the fact that he used to be able to hide the switchblade in it before he’d handed that off to Arch, but it did occasionally get in the way. Arch seemed not to notice, keeping his attention on Starling ahead of them.
There was a little bit of a scent trailing in Starling’s wake, though, Hendricks had noticed. It wasn’t exactly sweet, but it wasn’t bad. Kind of nice, really. He’d been in a car with her the week before and hadn’t noticed it. It wasn’t like any perfume he’d ever caught a whiff of before. Maybe something new.
They headed on up the bridge over the interstate, following the slight grade up. Hendricks looked to his left and saw the road closed ahead, like they’d just shut the damned interstate completely down. What the fuck?
The whole damned bridge was shut down, actually, no traffic either way. Hendricks kind of boggled at it, and looked down the on-ramp again to see a shit ton of blue and red lights down on the interstate. His head involuntarily leaned forward, like he was a duck about to peck the ground. He could feel his jaw fall open.
It was damned mess of epic proportions. Ambulances, cop cars—mostly the multicolored mess of Tennessee Highway Patrol, he could tell at t
his distance, and wreckers, dragging cars away. “How did I miss this?” Hendricks asked.
“The painkillers coursing through your blood have dulled your senses,” Starling answered without turning around. Her long, red hair swept as she moved, sashaying with the natural motion of her body. “I am surprised I was able to roust you out of bed.”
Hendricks shot a look at Arch, who gave him a sidelong glare. “They’re prescription,” he told the cop.
“Yours, I hope,” Arch said.
“They’re mine,” Hendricks replied. Arch looked a little put out, but then he’d looked like that a lot lately. That should maybe have worried Hendricks more, but he was still feeling drowsy.
“Over here,” Starling said, approaching a yellow line of police tape. There was a man in a Tennessee Highway Patrol uniform covered by a rain slicker waiting there, eyeing them cautiously. Arch nodded at the man and the trooper lifted the tape so that Starling could pass, followed by Arch and then Hendricks. He didn’t say anything, just followed Starling’s ass in those tight jeans.
“Here we are,” Starling said and stopped about a quarter of the way up the bridge on the shoulder. The ground was still damp beneath them, but at least there wasn’t a flow of water running down the bridge.
Hendricks looked over and saw that all the police presence was down below, buzzing around like bees on a damned honeycomb. He could see a few stretchers covered over with white sheets and it stopped him. He knew all too well what that meant. “Damn,” he breathed.
“What is this?” Arch asked, drawing Hendricks to look back onto the bridge instead of over the edge to the catastrophe below. He took a few steps closer to them. Starling was standing upright but looking down. Arch was bent over, his fingers extended toward the ground as he reached down to touch the road.
“Do not do that.” Starling was bent double in a second. She caught his shoulder, pulling Arch back up.
Hendricks got over to them and looked down at a little puddle of black goo that looked like oil had fallen on the ground. He cocked his head and started to ask Starling what was so important when he saw it.
The goo was burned into the pavement.
“What the fuck?” Hendricks asked.
“It’s oil,” Arch said, frowning. Hendricks could hear it in the cop’s voice.
“No, it’s not,” Hendricks said. “It burned into the pavement before it stopped.” He squinted to look closer. “It’s like an acid or something.”
“It is an emission,” Starling said.
“Seems like that’d be the sort of thing a carburetor is supposed to catch,” Hendricks said. He tried to put amusement into the way he said it, not really sure if it came out like it was intended.
“It is an ejaculatory emission from a male demon who feeds on the death of humans for his own emotional and physical gratification,” Starling said, and by the time she got to the end of what she was saying, her utter passivity was disturbing as hell to Hendricks. “A Sygraath.”
There was a beat of quiet as Hendricks waited to see if Starling would say she was joking. He was pretty sure she wasn’t the joking type, but …
“Excuse me?” Arch asked.
“Was something I said unclear?” Starling was looking at Arch with a hint of curiosity, her head cocked at him.
“I think it was the part about a demon ejaculating,” Hendricks threw in. He looked at Arch and shrugged. “Demons … uh … do that?”
Starling gave him a cool look, her head tilted at him. “Demons are fully capable of sexual activity and enjoyment and frequently partake in said activities with both their own kind and humans.”
Hendricks looked up to see Arch holding his head, like he had a headache. Leave it to the puritan to get shut down when they needed to discuss something important. “So … you said this guy—demon—Sygraath—feeds on death. But he had an emission—like, an orgasm emission, like a cumshot—here?” He waited for Starling’s subtle nod. “So he was here … uh … beating off?”
“So it would seem,” Starling said.
“And he killed these people,” Arch said, finally getting his head back in the game. Hendricks had been ready to clap him on the back to get him out of it. “Killed them so he could get his … kinky thrill?”
“That appears the natural conclusion,” Starling replied, to Hendricks’s mind still amazingly neutral, especially since she’d just posited a scenario in which a demon had killed people in order to get off. Then again, he wasn’t sure he’d seen her express a single emotion yet.
Hendricks felt his stomach churn at the thought of that, and he took an involuntary step back from the demon’s ejaculate. “So this guy jerked off right here on the side of the road? Like, out exposed, where everyone could see him?”
Starling shook her head, and her hair still looked lively, fire-red in the dull light. “He was most probably in a car. I would speculate that his emission burned through the automobile and came to rest here on the pavement before it lost its heat and settled.” She looked from him to Arch. “It is, however, still highly toxic to humans.”
“So,” Hendricks asked, something tickling the back of his mind, “if you said that demons regularly have sex with humans, but his spunk is fatal to us … how does that work?”
Starling cocked her head at him, and he realized it was her expression of choice. “You of all people should know that demons do not all care about whether their actions harm humans.” Hendricks felt his gut clench tight when she said it, and he said nothing as she went on. “However, not all demons have such adverse effects in their sexual activities. Just some types.”
“Okay, I’ve heard enough,” Arch said, and there was a raw sort of disgust in the cop’s voice. His body was held at an angle, like he was about ready to haul off and hit someone. It made Hendricks glad he was standing a few steps away. “So we’ve got a murdering bunch of demons slaughtering their way through town, we’ve got some pervert demon who’s …” he lowered his voice, “… pleasuring himself while causing massive accidents.” His face was stern, angry. “This is out of control.”
“Agreed,” Hendricks said, and wandered over to look over the edge of the bridge at the chaos below again. “I’ve got work to do.”
“Both of us do,” Arch said from behind him. “We need to find these things and start putting an end to them now.”
Hendricks looked back. “Don’t you have a shift to finish?”
Arch let out a short exhalation through his nose that reminded Hendricks of a bull snorting. “I’m supposed to serve and protect, remember? Far as I’m concerned, fixing this list of problems is priority one. Pointless patrols through the community and traffic cop duty can wait. Let’s go burn this scum.”
Hendricks nodded and shot a look at Starling, who waited next to Arch. “You got any ideas where we can start looking?”
Starling walked toward him with slow steps, until she was standing beside him and looking over the bridge at his side. Her expression flickered as she looked down on the scene below, like the muscles in her face were twitching. “There are … possibilities,” she said.
“All right,” Arch said and turned to walk away. He was walking back toward the motel, and Hendricks could already see there was an itch in the deputy’s britches, a definite urgency to his step.
“Come along,” Starling said. She started back toward the motel as well. Hendricks just followed her.
***
Erin saw Hendricks look over the bridge from where she stood below. It was getting damned chilly, and she was occasionally stamping her feet, just trying to keep warm. She didn’t like to admit it, but she was a freeze baby and hated the winters in Tennessee. This was like a slice of autumn and it was way too damned early.
Still, the amount of chill she felt was doubled when she saw Hendricks look down and survey the scene. It was hard to miss his big cowboy hat, even if she hadn’t recognized his face. She could see a couple other people with him—Arch, that was obvious. Even if the big bl
ack lawman hadn’t stood out in a crowd because of his height and build, his skin color coupled with the uniform he wore would have given him away.
She wondered what the hell Arch was doing bringing Hendricks to a crime scene, and then she saw the redhead with them and it made her even more uneasy. The redhead was of a reasonable height, and when she sashayed up next to Hendricks, Erin felt her stomach drop. The woman was a looker, without a doubt. Pale as death itself, but pretty; high cheekbones, a well-sculpted face.
Erin wondered who she was. It definitely wasn’t Arch’s wife. Alison was all too familiar to her. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, so it seemed unlikely she was with the THP. Not in that tank top. And why would she be hanging out with Arch and Hendricks right in the middle of a crime scene?
None of it made a damned lick of sense, not one damned lick.
Arch disappeared behind the bridge’s concrete safety rail, hidden away from her sight. But Hendricks and the redhead stayed there until Hendricks came closer, looking over the edge of the bridge. The redhead joined him a moment later.
She didn’t know if it was the burn of jealousy she felt, exactly, but there was a definite what-the-fuck factor to the emotions that were following her swirling thoughts. It wasn’t like Hendricks was in town to work. He didn’t have a job, she knew that. He didn’t even have a damned car. He was like a bum, except he had money and smelled way better, most of the time.
Erin saw the redhead turn, and start off down the bridge, and Hendricks was just a step or two behind her. Any closer and if she tripped he’d fall right into her twat.
Which, for all she knew, he already had.
***
Lerner was waiting at the far end of the closed-off bridge, behind a police cordon. He usually didn’t let those sort of things stop him, but there was a whole assload of Tennessee state cops in the area, and he wasn’t looking for entanglements with the human world’s version of a justice system at the moment. He had enough other shit to worry about, frankly, without antagonizing the Tennessee Highway patrolman standing guard just a few feet away from him.
The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted Page 30