The rain was gone but the clouds remained, the dark skies overhead hinting that there’d be more later. Lerner didn’t care, really, other than he didn’t like to get wet. He’d heard on the news earlier that the entire Caledonia River Valley—what he figured was this town and maybe the whole county—was at risk of a flood, the water getting high on some dam up the river.
Lerner had other problems. He sniffed and could smell it, even this far off. He could see a motel and a gas station on the other side of the closed-off bridge over the interstate and knew that what he was smelling was closer to that end of the bridge than the one he was on.
“Emission,” Duncan said, and Lerner could hear him sniffing as well.
“What are you thinking?” Lerner asked.
Duncan shrugged. “Some type of soul-eater getting ambitious about drumming up more business. Probably a Sygraath, based on the emission.” He sniffed. “A really horny one, judging by how much is on the ground there.”
“How do you figure?” Lerner asked.
“I think it burned through a car,” Duncan said, and Lerner could still hear him sniff. “Some traces of melted metal, cloth, carpet. Given the number of bodies visible over the bridge, number of cars, it was a hell of a lot of dead to feed on.”
There were a few people past the line, a local cop from what Lerner could see, a tall black man. He had a redhaired lady and a guy in a cowboy hat with him. The wind picked up and Lerner could feel it tickle the flesh of his shell. Chilly. “What’s up with them?” he whispered to Duncan.
“Hmm,” Duncan replied, huddling beneath his navy jacket. He squinted in concentration as Lerner watched him. “Couple garden-variety humans, possibly of the demon-hunting stripe, and—” He stopped when he was looking at the woman. “Um.”
Duncan didn’t say “Um,” at least not in Lerner’s experience. “‘Um,’ what?” Lerner asked.
“She’s …” Duncan seemed like he was trying to hone in on her, closing his eyes. Lerner watched as his face squinted in concentration, like he was squeezing out a turd. His kind of demon didn’t really do it like that, though, preferring to excrete through the mouth when necessary, and only every four to five days at that. “She’s a blank. It’s like she’s not even there.”
Lerner could feel his eyes widen, which was his customary expression of surprise. “What do you mean she’s not there? I can see her.”
“I can see her, too,” Duncan admitted. “But I can’t feel her. It’s like she’s hollow, or a dead zone or something.”
“What does that mean?” Lerner asked, and he actually reached over and touched Duncan on the arm, felt the smooth fabric of the suit beneath his fingers. He could tell it was purple even in the low light. Dammit.
“I don’t know,” Duncan admitted. “I’ve never run across that before.”
Lerner watched as the cowboy and the cop started walking away to follow the redhead. What kind of being would fool Duncan? They’d been around the block, hadn’t they? They knew their shit.
Still, the redhead kept walking, and Lerner kept watching her. Duncan too, he saw out of the corner of his eye. Clearly they were onto something here. “Demon hunters,” Lerner said, “and something else. Something that’s got you confused.”
“Yep,” Duncan said. “Let’s get back to the car. See if we can find a detour to the other side of the interstate so we can get a closer look. Maybe it’ll help me figure her out.”
“Yeah, okay,” Lerner said, and they both turned to walk back to the sedan. “I don’t like the sound of this, though. You’re not getting a little addled by being here for so long, are you?”
“Dunno,” Duncan said with a shrug. Taciturn bastard. Lerner cursed him for it as they got in the car.
“I’ve often wondered about the long-term effects of being on earth to our kind—” Lerner started.
“Just drive,” Duncan said.
Didn’t even want to talk about it. Annoying son of a bitch. Lerner put the car in drive and hung a U-turn back toward town.
***
Arch wasn’t exactly stomping along, but he could feel the excess vigor in his step. He wasn’t enthused, that was for sure, but he was moving with purpose. Each slap of his shoe against the wet pavement was like a thundering wake-up call. The cool breeze blowing in his face was almost like a reminder that he was heading into the wind—metaphorically speaking. Literally, too.
Which was something he should have been doing before now.
There was a smell in the air, too, like oil on pavement, maybe from the wreckage below. It was strong, and the low hum of activity from the accident was buzzing in his ears. Part of him wanted to feel guilty. The other part already did.
He heard the thump of boots behind him and turned to see Hendricks jogging to catch up. He was passing Starling now, and she barely gave him a glance as he went by to fall into step next to Arch.
“Something on your mind?” Hendricks asked.
Arch could feel the tightness in his arms as he swung them. He was feeling the urge to hit someone, right now. “Just a little upset is all.”
“Not at me, though, right?” Hendricks asked. Arch caught the half-smile.
“Not right now,” Arch said. “Gimme a few minutes, I might come around to you. Your coming to town hasn’t exactly been a harbinger of the best of times for me.” Which was true, Arch reflected, though he wasn’t sure how much he blamed the cowboy for this. It wasn’t like Hendricks had intended to turn his world topsy-turvy. Arch frowned. “Why would it matter if I was mad at you? We have a job to do.”
“I don’t know,” Hendricks said with a shrug. “I don’t like to go into battle with tension between me and a squadmate. Makes things damned uncomfortable.”
Tension wasn’t something Arch paid much attention to, but he felt his face turn sour as he thought of Alison. “Well, do me a favor,” Arch said, “put your big boy pants on and deal with it. We’ve got bigger things to worry about than me hurting your feelings.”
“I’ll be fine,” Hendricks said, and now Arch could hear the stiffness in the cowboy’s voice. “Just trying to resolve any problems before they get serious.” They took a few more paces and hit the thin patch of grass that separated the Old Jackson Highway from the Sinbad’s parking lot. “So, what's in your craw?”
“I’m not really in a mood to be sharing feelings,” Arch said with blistering impatience.
“Not now?” Hendricks asked.
“Probably not ever,” Arch said and had to admit that was honest. Talking feelings was not his way. It was awkward enough on the rare occasions when he did it with Alison.
“Huh,” Hendricks said as they crossed the Sinbad’s wet parking lot. It was like walking in a puddle, and Arch could feel the water splashing into his socks. They were already wet, but this was just making it worse. “Seemed like back there on the bridge you made some kind of fateful decision.”
Arch didn’t give him a searing look but only because he was already focused on other things. “Just decided to start actually doing my job instead of worrying about whether my boss thinks I’m doing my job.”
Hendricks was quiet for a pause, and Arch was happy enough with that. Then the cowboy had to speak again. “Well, okay, then. What are we doing now?”
Arch felt his whole body tense again as he paused next to his Explorer and hit the button to remotely unlock it. “There’s a lead I’ve been thinking about but haven’t followed up yet.”
“No time?” Hendricks asked.
Arch looked back at him evenly, tried to keep from showing any irritation. He wasn’t really irritated at Hendricks, anyway. “No. Just wasn’t sure it was worth following up. Besides, until now it’s not like we’ve had a shortage of demons to chase.” He felt an urge to lean against his car, so he did, and then felt the water droplets resting there soak his shirt. He sighed. “Remember those demons that busted up my apartment?”
“Yeah,” Hendricks said.
“One of them was a woman who
I’d arrested before, named Amanda Severson.” He tried to brush the water off his sleeve, but it was already soaked in. “I’ve got a last known address for her, just outside of town a ways. I figure we probably killed off all her roommates, if she had any—”
“But you don’t know for sure,” Hendricks said, and the cowboy was nodding. “Not a bad idea. Especially since we’re out of leads. If nothing else, we might be able to catch a demon and get a line on what’s going on around here.”
“See, that’s what I was wondering,” Arch said, nodding along, starting to feel like this might not be as desperate of an idea as he’d feared, “the demons, they’re social enough that they know what others are up to?”
“Some of them,” Hendricks said, and the cowboy made for the passenger door. “But hey, if nothing else, we’ll punch some more sulfur-stink tickets out of town, and that’s never bad, right?”
“Well, if it doesn’t get us closer to solving this problem, I’m not sure it’s the best use of our time.”
Hendricks seemed to think about that for a minute. “Well, let’s ask—” The cowboy’s head swiveled around, and it took Arch a second to realize he was looking around for someone. Someone with red hair who was nowhere in sight. Arch heard Hendricks swear and ignored it, just like always. What the cowboy said on a regular basis would have gotten Arch’s mouth slapped until his jaw was broken when he was a kid. “She does that all the damned time,” Hendricks said.
“Would have been nice to get a little direction from her,” Arch said. “Seems like she knows what’s going on here better than we do.”
Hendricks frowned. “Seems like a lot of people do. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Arch shrugged and headed around the front of the Explorer to the driver’s side. “Could be worse.”
“Oh?” Arch heard Hendricks say as he opened the door and got in the car, careful not to hit the door of the grey sedan parked next to the Explorer. It hadn’t been here when he’d driven up, he was pretty sure of that. “How so?” Hendricks asked.
“We could be as in the dark as my boss,” Arch said. “Or Erin.” Or Alison, he didn’t say. But he thought it.
***
Gideon was back in the motel. He was wheezing, lying on the bed, his gut out and heavy on him. It felt like it was squeezing his essence out from the sheer weight his midsection, but it felt like that all the time. The TV was on in the background, where some local weather forecaster was predicting more rain. Gideon thought about the sky on his drive back from Cleveland and didn’t exactly die of shock at that.
The feeling of what had happened to him on the overpass that afternoon was still lingering. He was too exhausted to do anything about it right now—like relive it for pleasure—but it was a kind of euphoric afterglow that he could get used to. His head was filled with lightness, and so was that spot in his chest where he imagined a heart might be if he’d had one.
He was still thinking ahead, though, reaching his feelers out. This feeling wouldn’t last, after all, and he’d need to be on to the next one soon enough. That was a problem, though, because he couldn’t feel the next one anywhere on the horizon. And he was trying. Stretching his mind out, expanding the radius.
There had to be something out there. Anything. A coronary. This was the south; weren’t people fat here? He knew he’d read that somewhere. Someone had to be dying of a heart attack soon.
He stretched his mind along toward the hospital, like fingers dancing over a bedspread trying to get to a nightstand just out of reach. He did finally feel it, could get a basic sense of the souls there, but there was nothing moving. He knew they were there, but that was it.
No one was dying.
He took a ragged breath and rolled to his side on the scratchy motel comforter. It smelled like stale cigarettes even though he was in a non-smoking room. It had never been dry like this in any of the cities he’d lived in. It had occasionally been like this in the days when he traveled between cities, back when he did it by bus or even horseback, a hundred years ago.
The problem was the damned county was just too sparsely populated. He didn’t know how many people were within his reach, but he knew the two biggest cities nearby, Knoxville and Chattanooga, were just too damned far away. They weren’t even close to within his grasp.
He felt the first throbbing of pain in his head as he pondered this possibility. He could hear a noise outside, the first sounds of rain starting to come down again. Gideon crossed to the window and looked out at the parking lot. The cop car was gone, for which he was thankful. The sole lamp illuminating the parking lot showed nothing but a flooded puddle over the entirety of the pavement.
Gideon narrowed his eyes as he looked at it, something scratching at the back of his mind. He let the curtain fall back into place and grabbed the convenience binder that some maid had left on the dresser. He opened it up to the local map that they’d thoughtfully enclosed on page five.
Gideon scanned over it until he found what he was looking for and started to crack a smile. Maybe. Just maybe. If that was really set up the way he thought it was, it would surely let him kill people. A whole lot of people. Maybe more than anything else he could devise, short of a nuclear bomb.
But first he’d need to take a car ride to see if what he was envisioning was even feasible.
***
Erin was back in her car because the rain was fucking coming down AGAIN. The THP was sorting shit out anyway, and that colonel was already off the scene, presumably to file a report with his superiors. Erin watched the wreckers moving the cars out one by one, like they were deconstructing twisted metal sculptures. She shuddered when she thought about this particular statuary represented.
The morgue wagons were loading up the last even now, and she could see the bodies going into the bags in the rain, the steady fall of water wetting the ones still under white sheets. Red spotted the white, like paint splashed on pure canvasses. It had been unnerving enough when they’d just been shapeless things, but now that they were being drenched, they were looking like corpses under sheets again.
Erin hadn’t seen any human dead bodies before. Until today, and suddenly she’d seen a mountain of them. The acrid taste of stomach acid reminding her she hadn’t eaten was coupled in her stomach with the rumbling, churning feeling of disquiet. Part of her wanted to leave, maybe run up to the gas station or the diner up the ramp on Old Jackson Highway and satiate it.
But that other part of her—the one that remembered she was in the middle of her big chance—that part kept her ass anchored to the seat of the patrol car.
She tried not to think about Hendricks and the redhead, but it was defying her ability to keep it out. Like she was slamming the door on it in her head, but the thought was some abusive gorilla-sized offender, and it kept breaking though.
Well, okay, it wasn’t really like that, but it wasn’t good.
The thing that itched her the worst of all was that even though she knew she’d screwed up with Hendricks, even though she’d had it out with him, told him to go fuck himself, and was certain—to a T—that she’d massively fucked up by ever taking up with the cowboy—it STILL bothered her that he was wandering around a crime scene with some strange redhead.
And Arch. What the fuck was going on with him? Wasn’t he supposed to be on patrol somewhere?
Erin was steaming and trying to figure out whether to just say fuck it and get something to eat when the radio crackled. “Fifteen, this is dispatch, what’s your twenty, over?”
She started to reach for her shoulder mike. Fifteen was Arch’s badge number, his call sign, and the voice was the sheriff’s wife. Erin didn’t say anything, though, and the same message was repeated twice more without a word of reply.
***
Hendricks was watching out the window with his good eye while Arch drove the Explorer. He had no idea where they were going, exactly, though it felt like they might have been following the interstate on a frontage road. He thought about asking, but A
rch seemed more than a little touchy. Not that Hendricks could blame him; the sheriff’s deputy had gone from a calm life one week to in-over-his-fucking-head the next.
Hendricks looked over and saw Arch with his cell phone in hand, the face plate lit up and buzzing. The deputy didn’t make a move to answer it, though, and after a moment the light faded and then died.
Hendricks thought about letting it pass without saying anything, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Who was that? Your wife?”
“No,” Arch said, and his voice was subdued. “My boss.”
“The sheriff?” Hendricks asked, feeling a little bloom of nervousness. “Why wouldn’t he try and reach you on your radio?”
Arch didn’t react, just stared stone-faced at the front windshield. “Because I turned it off.”
***
Erin’s cell phone lit up in the falling dark and she scrambled for it, hitting the talk button almost before the caller ID told her it was Reeve on the line.
“Where the fuck are you?” Reeve barked.
Classy fucker. “Still out at the wreck,” she said.
“Okay,” Reeve’s voice calmed down a little. “Thought the wife was having some trouble getting radio commands out. Did you hear that call for Arch a minute ago?”
“Yep,” Erin said, and there was that itch again. She felt a desire to twitch, to bleed off some nervous energy somehow. “I heard it.”
“Well, he’s usually pretty quick to respond,” Reeve said. “He’s like our constant in that regard. You seen him?”
“Yeah,” Erin said, and for a moment she pondered lying for him. Then she just figured fuck it. “He was up on the overpass here a few minutes ago with that cowboy friend of his and another woman—some redhead I’ve never seen before.”
There was a full ten seconds of dead air. “Excuse me?” Reeve’s voice was extra polite, extra condescending.
“You heard me,” Erin said. It was probably the equivalent of spraying the man in the face with a cold hose, but fuck him too. “He was here, not twenty minutes ago. Looking over the scene.”
The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted Page 31