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

by Robert J. Crane

  He looked up at her from where he was lying on his back, reaching up to hold her insides in. “For bandages, right?”

  “No, because I really want to admire your fucking awesome gym body,” she snapped. “Yes, for bandages.”

  He looked like maybe he wanted to say something back to her on that, but he stifled it. Good. She didn’t need any of his shit today, anyway. He just pulled a hand down and went to work taking his uniform top off. Once he got the second button down, it was obvious he was wearing an undershirt anyway, the fucking prude.

  ***

  Hendricks made it to the car and got in before he slumped against the window. He even waited until the door was closed to do it, falling over against the passenger window like he was going to take a nap. He wasn’t, though, he was just in so much pain he couldn’t hold himself up anymore. He let a loud grunt, like he trying to hold in the world’s biggest fart, and he laughed a little at that thought, which hurt even fucking more.

  Alison slid into the driver’s seat next to him, and he heard Lerner and Duncan squeeze into the back somehow. He turned his head a little and glimpsed Lerner’s long legs butting up against the door immediately behind him. Based on the angle, he guessed the poor bastard was sitting in a pretty fucked-up manner. He didn’t have a clue how Duncan would get in there, either.

  “Drive,” Duncan said from somewhere behind Alison. That wasn’t even a direction Hendricks could bend at the moment.

  “Your shell casings,” Hendricks mumbled as the thought occurred to him.

  “They’re gonna have to stay,” Duncan said from the backseat. Lerner had gone quiet, which was distinctly unlike him. Could he have passed out, too?

  Hendricks heard the roar of the town car’s ignition, and Alison took it into a gentle three-point turn before she gunned it up the slope of the mountain. She wasn’t taking it easy, and she drove the first curve with a grace that told him she might maybe have done this before.

  “Slow it down!” Duncan ordered from the back seat. He was quiet for a second. “We’ve got wounded here.” Hendricks had to agree with that, on every level. Then the pain he’d been pushing down caught up with him on a curve, and he really agreed with it, strongly, with everything in him as it came bursting out in a scream that followed him into the blessed blackness of unconsciousness.

  9.

  Arch was standing off to the side when they loaded Erin into the ambulance. His part was done, he figured, the paramedics tending to her along with Lauren—Dr. Darlington. He was just standing there, night coming on mingled with the smell of the burned rubber tires still lingering in the air and the engine of the overturned police car still making a ticking sound as it drained or something.

  The paramedics were talking some gobbledygook, all medical terminology that Arch didn’t fully understand about IV’s and such. Lauren was making her presence known, and Arch caught the paramedics giving each other looks that said they weren’t as impressed as they were clearly supposed to be.

  There were other personnel on scene now—Reeve was here, milling around, looking at the crash and all the mess that had come from it. He hadn’t said much once he’d heard the phrase “Federal agents in pursuit.” Arch hadn’t gotten too in-depth with it yet, and now he was just standing off to the side, staring at the paramedics loading Erin into the ambulance. He’d retrieved a spare shirt from the Explorer, an old t-shirt he kept in a gym bag, and was standing there with it clashing against his khaki uniform pants, feeling like this was the last place on earth he belonged.

  She was a real mess, Erin was. Her face was bloody, though how much of it was from anything on her face was an open question. She hadn’t regained consciousness the entire time, and from the doctor’s offhand comments on the matter, that was either to be expected or a really bad sign. Hard to say which.

  “We need to take her to Red Cedar in Chattanooga,” Lauren said, and her word sounded like the final one on the matter.

  “Ma’am, SkyRidge is closer—” One of the paramedics made the mistake of speaking up.

  “I know Red Cedar,” Lauren said, and that one had the cut of finality as well. “You will take us there, right now.” The paramedic took it a lot better than Arch would have, shutting the back doors to the ambulance as Dr. Darlington climbed in with him. Arch got the feeling that there was going to be more to it than that, but his part was over with. The flashing red lights on the top of the ambulance glared in the night as it started down the mountain road. It weaved between the two other police cruisers, the volunteer fire engine and the wrecker parked below, and Arch watched it disappear slowly into the night, brake lights flaring one last time before it rounded a bend.

  There were a thousand noises around him—conversations, firemen doing things he didn’t have any idea about, Ed Fries trying to examine the scene for whatever clues he could come up with. Arch was aware of them, but not one of them made an impact, stuck. His mind was like Teflon, slippery, not absorbing a thing beyond that ambulance heading down the mountain road and a growing discomfort for what was coming. It let out its first wail now that it was out of sight, a piercing sound that cut through the conversation and all else like the sounding of a horn or like a train passing through on a quiet night.

  “Arch,” Sheriff Reeve said, jerking his attention back to the man. His face was lined in shadow on one side, and the red light of the nearby fire engine gave the other half an otherworldly tinge. Arch could feel the world drawing in like the night was constricting to envelope him. “What the hell happened here?

  ***

  When Hendricks woke up, he was in a dark room that smelled like faint perfume, the kind that made him think of old ladies. Not quite nursing home old, but old, not something he’d ever smelled in a bar or dancing close to a pretty young thing. It was heavy and sweet, almost cloying, something that brought to mind blue-haired grannies and fuzzy sweaters and other stuff he couldn’t readily attribute to any clear memory of his own.

  There was something else underlying that smell, too, something heavier and deeper, like grease and something frying. Maybe dinner, once upon a time. Hendricks peered into the darkness as he came to realize his eyes were open. There was only a faint bit of light in the room, shining through some blinds just above his head. Thin lines of white light made him think it was either a fluorescent or the blinds were doing a magnificent job of holding back sunlight. He doubted it was the latter, even though he was having a hard time figuring out how long he’d been out.

  He swallowed and found his mouth dry and sticky. Smacking his lips together brought new pain from his face where he’d been struck. This had happened before, but damn if he hadn’t gotten his shit kicked more times than he could count since coming to this small town. Before, demon hunting had been a hazardous occupation but not one that was quite as much of a bloodsport as it had turned into lately. He’d gone for fringe demons, causing trouble and nesting. He didn’t even see the fringe demons in this town; there were too damned many main-eventers. Big threats, big chaos, and apparently all in town for the convention from hell. This hadn’t been how a hotspot worked, at least not the ones he’d been to.

  This was something new.

  “You awake?” Alison’s voice cut in through the dark, causing him to shift his head to look at where her voice had come from. He was rewarded with the dormant pain in his side flaring back to glorious, horrible life and reminding him that his ribs were fucked, fucked and fucked again. No lube, with a desert-dry cooch.

  “I’m awake.” Every breath brought pain, every one of them, and pain brought with it a desire to breathe, which caused more pain and made him want to scream a stream of curses into the air around him.

  With that, a light clicked on, a lamp next to the bed he was lying in came to life, showing Alison Stan’s hair hanging in long, stringy strands on both sides of her face. She looked thin and tired, like the night had taken its toll on her as well. She pulled her hand away from the lamp and he caught a glimpse of black smudges on
her fingers from where she’d been firing the rifle.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “My parents’ house,” she replied without emotion. He was getting used to that from her. He tried to remember when he’d first met her. She hadn’t been lifeless then; she’d been ready to tear Arch a new asshole. He hadn’t seen that side of her lately; she’d been pretty inscrutable. He wouldn’t have wanted to play Texas hold ’em against her the way she was now, and he wondered what could cause that kind of change in a person.

  “We’re here alone?” Hendricks asked, just keeping himself still for a moment. He didn’t even want to think about moving, though he knew that was coming.

  “No,” she said, just as sedate as ever.

  “They don’t care you brought a wounded guy in a cowboy hat home with you?” he asked, shifting in bed.

  “You don’t have your hat,” she said simply, just as lifeless.

  Hendricks froze. “Still, injured guy in a black coat who’s not your husband. Gotta raise a few questions.”

  “My daddy’s home,” she said. “Momma’s in Atlanta overnight. My brother’s downstairs, but I don’t think he’s been up to find out you’re here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Hendricks ran a hand—the one not on the side where he had the broken ribs—over his face, rubbing at it and finding a couple of places north of his eyes where he had bruises. “What is he, twelve?”

  “Twenty-three,” she said. “Got done with college, moved back home because he couldn’t find work.”

  “Must be rough,” he said, not really feeling all that sympathetic. Leaving home at eighteen had left him pretty cold to these stories he’d heard, though he knew people ooh’d and talked about how sad it was. He felt something else turn him colder. “How’s Erin?”

  “Don’t know,” Alison said. There was a measurable drag on her words, like even she was feeling the weight now. “I haven’t heard from Arch.”

  “She was in bad shape,” Hendricks said, thinking out loud. He hadn’t seen her, but that kind of crash … he’d heard a little of what that lady doctor had said on the scene after she’d left him. Erin had still been alive when they’d left—which had been a damned cowardly thing for him to do, he realized in retrospect. He hadn’t been thinking clearly the whole time after the crash, after that demon did his part to put the hurting on him.

  She’d saved him. She’d maybe gotten herself killed to do it, but she’d saved him.

  Maybe.

  He forced himself up, causing more than a little pain in the process. Alison just watched him, a hint of alarm behind those dull eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “We gotta go,” he said.

  “Go where?” she asked.

  He stared at the door, looked at it forlornly, knowing that he was about to have to do something that would damned sure piss off someone he didn’t want to piss off—if they found out about it. “We have to go see someone.”

  “We don’t even know which hospital she went to,” Alison said, low and kind of comforting. “Or if she’s—”

  “I know, and we’re not going there—yet.” Hendricks straightened himself up and got his feet over the edge of the bed. “We need to go talk to someone. Need to go get something.” He moved slowly, hoping the small moves would keep him from drawing screaming pain from any one of his countless injuries. “It’s for Erin.” And for me, he didn’t say.

  Alison just looked at him, and he could tell she was sizing him up, figuring out if he was delusional. “Where are we going?” He liked how she just sort of got on board for the plan.

  “We need to go see Wren Spellman,” Hendricks said, shifting again so he could put both feet on the ground. This he did without causing too much pain, again. He knew at least some was coming, and he was readying himself for it. He’d have to force his way through, because this—this was too important to even think about waiting on.

  “That guy that Lerner is always bitching about?” Alison asked, and he caught a faint furrowing of lines in her brow. “The one who’s selling all these demons runes so they can hide from him and Duncan?”

  “One and the same,” Hendricks said, and he started to stand. Alison was up on her feet in a hot second and helped him. “We need to go see him, and now. Then we need to figure out where Erin is and get to her immediately.”

  “Why?” Alison asked. “What can this Spellman do for her that’s so important?”

  Hendricks steadied himself and felt the pain start the minute he tried to take his first step. Alison had an arm slipped around his, but she wasn’t giving much support. She probably couldn’t, because he was damned heavy. It didn’t matter; he could have walked to Spellman’s house in the country right now if he had to. “Save her life,” Hendricks said. “Spellman can save her life.”

  ***

  Lerner was lying still on the bed in the hotel room. Duncan was nearby, on his own bed. Not lying down, though. He was sitting up, staring at Lerner like the black flames were going to consume him at any moment. That motel smell was hanging in the air. It lived there, after all, something like a sense that the place had been scrubbed but that some dirt each guest left behind was going to linger, forever, in the smell. It was a weird thing, but it was true of every motel Lerner had ever stayed in.

  Duncan was like a stone. Like a stone sitting on the bed, absorbing all the energy in the room. More like a black hole, Lerner supposed. It sounded better, given what Lerner knew about astronomy. It had gone on far, far too long. Better to call it out than let it fester. “Stop being so damned grim,” he said.

  “You’ve got a crack,” Duncan said tonelessly.

  “I know I’ve got a crack,” Lerner said, “because I’m the one with the crack. This is not the end.” Necessarily, he didn’t add.

  “But neither is it good,” Duncan said. “It’s not like you have a body that heals itself.”

  That was true, Lerner had to concede. Once cracked, you were always going to be at a higher risk of breaking open, and that only led one place. And it was not a good place. “I’m not busted open just yet,” he said. “Maybe we can epoxy me closed.”

  “Epoxy?” Duncan asked, a note of disbelief in the way he said.

  “Something,” Lerner said. “You know, I watch these medical shows—”

  “I don’t think you can epoxy a shell.”

  “I don’t think it’s ever been tried,” Lerner said. “It’s above my hip, in an area that doesn’t flex much—”

  “And if it flexes just once and breaks the epoxy hold, you’re dragged back to hell in a wash of flame.”

  “Which might happen anyway,” Lerner said. “Better than sitting here for the rest of eternity, staring at the ceiling and watching Dr. Phil during the long-ass days.”

  Duncan was quiet for a bit after that. “You could always try and prevail on the home office—”

  “I think we both know how that would go,” Lerner said. It wasn’t the sort of thing one asked for. It was the sort of thing you wrote a report about and hoped they didn’t notice. Which was probably a faint hope, in any case. It wasn’t like nobody read those things. They read every one and you hoped they got the right impression out of them.

  Duncan was quiet again. “Epoxy?”

  “Go to the store and pick some out,” Lerner said.

  “I let Alison keep the car, remember?” Duncan asked.

  Shit. Lerner had forgotten. “What, are your legs cracked? You can’t walk to the store? Rogerson’s or whatever it’s called? I’ve seen it on the highway that runs through town.”

  Duncan kind of paused. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  Lerner chuckled. “Believe me, I’m not going anywhere ’til you get back. And I ain’t moving, either. So hurry, will you?” He fumbled with a hand outstretched toward the nightstand. “I get tired of Dr. Phil pretty fast, and I suspect this motel has a low limit on the number of channels.”

  ***

  Lauren felt the bump as the ambulance turned onto th
e interstate. The sound of the engine accelerating was muted, probably because of good insulation in the back cabin. The paramedic was keeping a decent eye on things, so Lauren just sat back in the jump seat watching Deputy Harris’s vitals. She didn’t know the girl very well but that didn’t matter. She was from Midian and she wasn’t on the list; that was enough to keep Lauren fighting hard for her.

  Like it would have made any difference if it had even been Arch Stan on the gurney. She’d still be here, still trying to keep him alive, too. That ass.

  The monitors beeped and beeped and beeped, a steady rhythm indicating the deputy’s pulse and oxygen were still in the acceptable range—for now. Lauren had her doubts how long that would last. Harris almost certainly needed surgery, but she needed to stabilize first. They had her head wrapped up in a collar to prevent spinal damage because that shit would put a kink in the rest of the girl’s life. And she really was still just a girl, Lauren thought, still a teenager, right? Right. Whole life potentially still in front of her.

  “Lucky thing there was only one person in the sheriff’s car,” the paramedic said, breaking Lauren out of her thoughts.

  “There wasn’t,” she said, still looking at the monitor. Wait, what? There was another person in there, wasn’t there? Shit, how did she forget that? “There was a federal agent in the car with her. And some other guy got hurt riding with the other deputy.” Had she seriously gotten so focused on Harris that she’d forgotten she’d treated two other patients at the scene? And they’d both left, against medical advice—and any sane thinking. Both of them, gone. She hadn’t even realized it. Where the fuck was the common-sense emergency room doctor on that one?

  The paramedic let a low whistle. “Guess they were lucky if they both walked away, huh?”

  She didn’t respond. The guy in the black coat had barely been able to walk. The federal agent had been lying on the ground, unable to move when she first examined him. But they’d both gotten up and left the scene to pursue the fugitives? The suspects?