“His ass was supposed to be on patrol in town,” Reeve said, and Erin could hear his voice rise on the other end of the phone. “You see where he went?”
“Back toward the Sinbad,” she said and felt that itch beneath the skin get a little worse, her face burning. With shame or something else, she didn’t know. “That’s where Hendricks is staying.”
“Get up there and see if you can find him,” Reeve said, and she could almost feel him reigning in some much harsher words. “Call me if you do. I want to talk to that—” Reeve cut himself off, she was pretty sure.
Just as well. Knowing Reeve, she could imagine what would have come next, and it was probably not anything that would have been flattering to Arch. Or his mother.
10.
Lerner had a few ponderous thoughts clicking through his head as they came around a bend in the road. They’d followed the frontage road down the highway for miles, watching the near-empty freeway through a wood and wire fence. One lane was moving just fine, heading north. The other was empty, presumably shut down by the Tennessee Highway Patrol. The rain was coming down lightly at the moment, which allowed him to see all that.
Really, though, to Lerner, it was like a perfect metaphor for life as a human. They’d be going along, and suddenly the road would be blocked. What would they do? Well, some would pull off and eat. Some would detour and hurry like hell to find the fastest way to get back on the road. Some would just pull off and give up.
No, that analogy didn’t work. It was a shame, too; it had seemed so promising when he’d started it.
Lerner looked over at Duncan, sitting peacefully in the passenger seat, his hand resting on the handle that hung over the door. He’d never really thought about what that thing was called before. The emergency handle?
He started to voice this thought to Duncan when they came to a T in the road and his path ended at a stop sign. The car’s headlights shone into a fence and an empty pasture beyond.
“Take a right,” Duncan suggested.
“I’m not stupid, I know I take a right,” Lerner said, giving Duncan a scathing look. Duncan just shrugged.
Lerner turned his head back to the road and his headlights illuminated a police cruiser as it passed in front of them. He caught a glimpse of the driver and passenger as they went by; it was the cop and the cowboy. “Hm,” he said.
There was a pause. “Hm, what?” Duncan bit.
Lerner could feel himself smile. Duncan almost never bit on these sort of queries. “Is it serendipity that led us to the point in the road where we fortuitously picked that exact moment to argue, thus stalling us long enough to—”
“Shut up and follow them.”
***
Erin slid a key into the lock of Hendricks’s motel room door. She’d knocked and heard nobody, sitting there with the rain blowing in under the overhang and soaking her again. After that she walked in the seeping chill down to the manager’s office, idling cursing the name of Lafayette Hendricks and wondering why she’d ever thought a man named Lafayette could even be attractive. The manager had been surprisingly compliant and quick to give her a key, which she’d dutifully taken and trudged back down to Hendricks’s door. By this time, the hems of her pants were soaked again. Goddamned Lafayette Hendricks.
She pushed open the door and paused before crossing the threshold. She wondered a little idly why she was even going to these lengths; it wasn’t like Reeve would have expected her to do this. Probably. She lived in the grey space between what she thought his expectations might be and what he’d told her to do. This fit neatly in there. Somewhere.
The room was dark, and the outside light didn’t do much to help the situation. She fumbled to her left and then her right before finding a switch to flip. It made a crisp noise as it clicked up, and a light popped on in the corner.
What it illuminated wasn’t much more than she’d already seen. Some ghastly red/purple/beige hybrid design on the wall that might have been wallpaper. Maybe. Beat-up furniture and threadbare chairs. A bed that hadn’t been made. A bachelor pigsty with little in the way of possessions and even less in the way of cleaning. Didn’t this motel have a maid?
She took a step, her wet shoes soaking the carpet. She closed the door behind her, taking special notice that her car was the only one parked in the entire front row. Wherever Arch had gone, it looked like he’d taken Hendricks with him. She nudged the door to the bathroom open when she reached it just to be sure.
It looked about like it always had, too. Towels on the floor, and one of them wasn’t hers this time. Looked like Hendricks had declined housekeeping services for the day. Probably because he’d been hanging around for some reason or another. Nowhere to go, maybe.
His toiletries were pretty standard. She poked around in his toiletry bag but didn’t see anything too outrageous. An aging prescription bottle of Percocet that was ready to expire, but otherwise just the normal Tylenols and ibuprofen one might expect from a …
She picked up the bag again and rifled through it. Hendricks had ibuprofen, Tylenol and a couple other brands of over-the-counter pain relievers. She scrunched up her face as she looked at them then rattled the Percocet bottle before opening it. There were a handful left, which was odd on a prescription bottle nearing a year old. He could have just kept them in case he needed them at some point, or maybe he just forgot about them.
But why all the other pain relievers? She tried to probe her memory, see if she could recall him taking any. She came to the conclusion after a minute that he might have bought them today. He was in at least some pain, she had to concede. That bar fight didn’t look like it had gone in his favor at all, no matter what he said.
She exited the bathroom, still frowning. The place had his smell, a kind of worn scent. Maybe a little bit of a hint of something from his boots, too, but it wasn’t bad per se. Neither was it super attractive. He didn’t seem to have much in the way of cologne, either, just his deodorant, which smelled all right. It didn’t permeate the place like the smell of his boots did, though.
His duffle lay on the metal folding luggage rack in the open closet area. She gave it a quick rummage, but there was nothing save for a couple old, leather-bound books and a mess of clothes. She didn’t spend much time on it and came to the conclusion that he was pretty boring in terms of his wardrobe. T-shirts and jeans, that was pretty much all he had. A couple of collared denim shirts for colder weather, with some flannels in there as well.
She was just about to put the books back in the bag when something stopped her. She hesitated and put one of them in the crook of her arm while she looked at the other. Neither was very big, maybe a little thicker than a Bible but smaller in overall cover size. She opened one of them and flipped to the front page, where her eyes felt like they were about to explode out of her head.
Disposition and Types of Unholy Creatures
She looked up, like she could just glance away for a second and come back to see the book was actually something totally normal, like The Hunger Games. In a leather-bound, super-old edition. She looked back.
It wasn’t The Hunger Games.
She thumbed through the book, noticing the old paper pages and the even older-sounding way the book was written. Lots of “thees” and “thys.”
When she got to the first illustration, that was when she really thought her eyes were going to pop out.
What the fuck was wrong with Hendricks?
***
Arch pulled the car off the road onto a moonlit country lane, the Explorer shuddering with every rut it hit. He had the window cracked just a little, cool night air circulating through the cab. The rain was coming in dribs and drabs, the windshield wipers slinging it off the glass every few minutes and giving him a clear view of the dirt road, grass growing up in the middle of it. He could hear the car whine as it bogged down on the loose soil. He squinted and saw that there was standing water in the tracks. Nope, that was not good.
“This road is all washed out,” H
endricks said from across the cab. Helpfully, Arch was sure.
“I noticed that, too,” Arch said, keeping a level tone. “The four wheel drive can handle it.” He reached down and turned a dial on the Explorer’s console, flipping it to “Snow, Grass and Gravel” mode.
They bumped along for another minute before entering a small copse of trees. The rain subsided as they went under the boughs, and appeared again on the other side as they pulled up to a trailer on blocks at the end of the road.
“A little slice of paradise,” Hendricks muttered.
Arch nodded. The trailer was an older one, metal-sided and covered with rust. There was a place in the yard where it looked like there might have been a dog staked to a chain at one point in time, the ground torn up in a circle all around it. Grass had started to sprout there again, though, so the dog probably wasn’t here anymore. Arch stopped the car and pulled the key out of the ignition, opened the door and let the overhead light blind him for just a minute.
The rain was down to just a patter now, and Arch could feel it sprinkle on his shoulders and head. The last embers of day were hidden somewhere behind the clouds, barely casting any light. A lone lamp hung from a wood pole out in the trailer’s yard. Coupled with the headlights that were still aglow from Arch’s cruiser, it shed enough light that he could see just fine.
The windows of the trailer were lit, like someone was home or had left a light on for themselves. Arch started to lead the way, but Hendricks ducked out in front of him, sword drawn. Arch started to throw the cowboy an ugly look but had to concede that might have been the right idea. “Be careful with that thing,” he said.
“I’ve yet to stick a civilian with it,” Hendricks said. His long, black coat fluttered behind him. The fluorescent light overhead gave it a greenish tinge.
They walked up the steps to the trailer together, the sound of the wood creaking into the night. Hendricks tried the door and it squealed, opening with a rattle.
Arch tried to look inside over Hendricks’s shoulder, but his view was limited to a television sitting on an old table. His fingers clutched the switchblade.
The TV had a commercial on for some local dealership in Chattanooga, barking out its incredible deals. Hendricks swept through the door in a hurry, like his life depended on clearing through it.
Arch followed as the cowboy surged into the room. The smell of cannabis filled Arch’s nose the moment he was inside.
“Clear,” Hendricks said in a clipped tone, turning his body to the left. “Kitchen clear.” Arch glanced over to see that in the direction Hendricks was facing there was indeed an empty kitchen, no lights on overhead within it.
Arch turned to look to his right and saw an empty room spread out in front of the TV. Hendricks had probably given it a once over when he came through the door, Arch decided, but it was definitely empty.
The hallway beyond the main room, however, had an open door that was moving slightly, like it just been thrown ajar.
“Hendricks,” Arch whispered, triggering the switchblade and pointing toward the door.
“I see it,” the cowboy whispered from at his elbow.
Hendricks took a step forward and the floor creaked like he’d put a thousand-pound weight on it. Arch wanted to shoot him a dirty look, but that really wasn’t his fault.
The cowboy walked on, heading toward the narrow corridor that led along the right side of the trailer. It was dark back there, threatening to swallow the man in the black coat whole. Arch tried to follow a step or two behind, waiting to see if something leapt out at them.
Hendricks had to get all the way to the bedroom before something actually did.
Something hit the cowboy in the black coat just as he was coming through the door, slamming him into the wall with shattering force. Hendricks’s sword was held high, and Arch knew he couldn’t get it down to thrust it into the figure that had hit him.
The thing that hit him was a guy in denim shirt, as near as Arch could tell in the darkness. He hurried into the room to follow and something hit him in the ribs as he came through the door. He instinctively jerked the switchblade around and buried it into the flesh of the figure that had run into him.
A low stink of brimstone filled the room. A hiss of air and a dark flash illuminated a small bedroom, no more than eight feet squared. Black shadows lit around the edges by fire crawled over the shape that had hit Arch as the demon was ripped back into hell.
Arch started to fight his way forward to stab the demon that Hendricks was struggling with, sword still aloft, but another demon hit him in the side with a shoulder charge.
He knew it was a demon by the eyes. Even in the dark it was obvious, the glow. Like a red iris inlaid over blackness.
The demon had a shoulder buried in his ribs, and Arch could feel the ache from where it had hit him—same place as the last one had. He dropped his elbow on its head, landing it on a scruffy bearded jaw. He had a vague impression of long, raven hair that was curled. The smell of pot was thicker here than it had been out in the main room.
He could hear Hendricks fighting behind him now. Arch had fully turned to deal with his threat and tried to throw the demon off of him, but to no avail. He dropped another elbow and heard a grunt, but his arm with the switchblade in it was trapped low, beneath him. A strong demon arm had pinned his arm to his side, unable to move.
Arch drilled the demon with another elbow to the head, wondering if it was having any effect. He remembered the last time he’d wrestled a demon in close proximity. It hadn’t been the most fun thing in the world, and he was doubtless overmatched.
The memory of his last time fighting one of these things triggered a thought. Arch sunk lower, dropping into a football stance. The demon still had a shoulder in his ribs and resisted.
Arch pushed down, hammering with his elbow, all he had available to fight with. Had it been a human, he would broken its jaw by now. The demon only grunted. Arch pushed down harder, buckling the demon into a ninety-degree angle. It tried to shove back, but its leverage was limited.
Arch hit it with a knee that caused it to make a grunt of pain. He could feel the balance shift and pushed forward like he was up against a practice dummy back in his football days.
The demon’s footing was lost, and Arch came crashing down on him. He buried his knife in its ribs, over and over again until the black fire crawled over it and it disappeared with only a hissing sound.
Arch fell to the floor, the demon no longer holding him up. His hand reached out to touch a sliding closet door, and he struggled to his feet and turned around.
Hendricks was still grappling with the demon on one side of the bed. Grunts of exertion came from both of them, and the thump and bump of them against the walls of the trailer rattled the whole place.
Arch grimaced, catching his breath, and then sprang off the closet door and entered the fray.
***
Lerner and Duncan were watching the trailer shake on its foundation. “Looks like somebody’s getting fucked in there,” Lerner said. “Hard.”
Duncan just shook his head. “It’s a fight. Those two demon hunters up against two Acuspidas.” He paused, and Lerner watched him think. “Make that one Acuspida.”
“Sounds like our boys are making progress,” Lerner said and turned back to the wheel. “How shall we handle this? Clearly the woman is not with them.”
“Clearly.”
“Someone who shows up as a dead zone to you sounds like it’s within our area of interest, yes?” Lerner asked.
“It is,” Duncan said, a little reserved.
“You don’t seem concerned,” Lerner said. He kept his hands pressed tight to the wheel.
Duncan shrugged just a little. “If we’re trying to find out about the woman, we might have to ask them some pointed questions. Not sure we want to raise the stink messing with a local lawman would cause.”
Lerner nodded. He had a point. “What if we could just get the cowboy alone for a while? Ask him some que
stions independently of the police officer?” Lerner thought about it for a minute. “You don’t think the entire department is in on the hunt, do you?” Duncan just shook his head. “Of course not,” Lerner said, and relief flowed through him. “That sort of shit doesn’t happen, a whole department hunting demons.” He laughed, but it was weak.
That sort of scenario was exactly what they were here to prevent. Humans turning en masse against their kind was bad for the status quo, bad for those who were living peacefully—or relatively so—on the earth. Big disruptions, huge body counts, these were the sorts of things that tended to attract attention.
And attention, for a demon, was a big no-no.
“What do you think they know about the Sygraath that’s jerking off to traffic accidents?” Lerner asked, frowning.
Duncan shrugged again. His jacket looked black in the dark. “Probably less than us.”
Lerner nodded, pondering it. “Have you ever seen a Sygraath jump the tracks like this? You know, start slaughtering people instead of waiting out their deaths?”
“Yeah,” Duncan said. “Sometimes when they get desperate or blood drunk, they do crazy things.” Lerner heard him sniff lightly. “After World War I, a bunch of them went mad and started doing things like this. They went through a kind of withdrawal after some of the major battles and couldn’t handle coming down from the high. Tough to go from an orgy of slaughter to a few deaths per day.”
“Huh.” Lerner fixed his eyes on the trailer. The shaking had stopped. “If we’re going to have a conversation with one of these boys—”
“Just the cowboy,” Duncan said.
“If we’re going to have a conversation with this cowboy, we probably ought to set ourselves up for it,” Lerner said. “Get in the shadows, if you know what I mean.” He waited to see what Duncan would say to that. Turned out he didn’t say anything, but he gave Lerner a hell of a nasty look.
The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted Page 32