“… and he lied to me, made me give it all to him. Then the carnival left, and he left, and I was left behind with … my baby,” Mandy finished, rubbing the flame dog again. “My babies,” she amended.
“So he worked for the carnival,” Hendricks mused. He blinked for a second. “What the hell is the moral of this story? Don’t fuck a lying carnie?”
“All men are scum who just want to get laid?” Alison suggested, looking at him with a point harder than the elbow to his ribs had been.
“You humans are all idiots,” Duncan added, playing the game.
“He made me special, you know,” Mandy said.
Hendricks let a wary eye drift over the dozen dogs of fire he could see. “Looks like he made a lot of girls ‘special’ before he left town.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He was only ever with me. The others—they—they could feel it because he was with me. Felt him with them even though they didn’t touch him, didn’t love him like I did.”
Hendricks tried to sift through that, coming up with nothing. “What the fuck is she talking about?” he asked Duncan under his breath. It was almost a stage whisper.
“Sounds like something I’ve heard rumors of but never run across,” Duncan said. “Ancient name; a species that doesn’t really walk the earth anymore. It takes a … partner,” he nodded toward Mandy, “and any women with a fertile womb within a certain distance get hit by this … I dunno, thrall? They get a dose of highly narcotic, erotic, spiritual essence hurled at them. It takes their root in their reproductive organs and, uh …” He waved at the dogs. “Nine months later …”
“He …” Alison’s voice sounded strong, then faded away before exploding out again, “he does a MASS GROUP SEXUAL MIND ASSAULT?!”
Duncan just stood there, like he was trying to evaluate his answer before speaking it aloud. “That’s as good a descriptor as any, but if you want to be technically accurate, you’d need to add in something about essence or soul to the rape charge.”
“This is fucked,” Hendricks pronounced. “This guy is coming to Midian?”
“Carnival,” Alison said. “The Summer Lights Festival is in town. He’s probably already there.”
“Yep,” Hendricks said. “Fucked.” He turned his attention back to Mandy. “You said he, uh … you know … did his thing with you … the night before he left town?”
“Yes,” Mandy said.
“If that’s a pattern,” Hendricks said, “and who knows if it actually is, then when does the carnival leave town?”
“Tonight’s the last night,” Alison said.
“Shit, fuck, damn,” Hendricks said. “What the hell time is it?”
“About time we left,” Duncan said, shooting a gaze at Mandy. “If we’re allowed to.” For this he raised his voice.
“I would let you leave,” Mandy said, rubbing the neck of her fire dog, patting it like a master taking care of their pet. “But my babies … they’re hungry. There hasn’t been a real meal here in a long time … and they can’t just nurse, you know? They’re getting a little old for that …”
“Yeah, most of us stopped using the nipple to nurse a long ways back,” Hendricks said.
“Kinda figured we were about to go headlong into that snag,” Duncan said. He clutched his baton and set his feet defensively. Hendricks gently detached himself from Alison, trying to stand on his own two feet. He wobbled a little. To his surprise, she took their uncoupling better than he had.
Hendricks hoisted the sword in front of him. “Just once, I want to go somewhere that doesn’t suck, where the people and demons aren’t trying to kill me.” He realized, truthfully, that this desire was surprisingly soul-deep, something he’d never before said out loud.
“This is not your day,” Duncan said.
“Tomorrow’s not looking so good for that, either,” Alison chimed in. She had her pistol drawn and was tracking the nearest flame dog, looking down her weapon’s sights at it.
“Well, here’s hoping the day after, then,” Hendricks said, as the first of the fiery beasts leapt at him, and all hell came crashing down around his ears.
16.
John Watkins had been coming to Melina Cherry’s brothel since he was eighteen years old. He’d been a fan of the lady herself for the longest time, because not only did she know how to run the place, she knew how to run his shaft. She’d tickled his cock in more ways than he could count, finding new methods of wringing old pleasures out of his dick all the time. John was thirty-six now, and it didn’t bother him at all that Melina had gotten up there in the years. She still knew how to run his cock.
But ever since this redhead had shown up, his loyalty had wavered. “It’s all right, baby,” Melina had assured him the first time he’d gone to bed with red, just like the other times she’d passed him off to the blond-haired girl—what was her name? Colleen? Yeah, that was it. With the blond gal, it had never taken. She was young, she was decent, but she didn’t start his fire like Melina had. That woman could have suck-started a leaf-blower. She had to be pushing fifty, and he figured he’d keep on visiting her until she was seventy, at least. She knew what he liked.
Then the redhead showed up. All it took was a test drive, Melina whispering in his ear all manner of encouragement in that throaty voice she had, all the things she whispered to him when they were together. It was a kink and a half to him; John had only ever gone for one girl at a time. Having the woman he’d been banging forever telling him to fuck a new girl, and finding that he liked the new girl on her own damned merits …
Well, it was what he’d heard some city boy call an embarrassment of riches. He wanted to spend all his money at Melina Cherry’s brothel. He wished for mail-order Viagra so he could get hard more often. He even considered going to the doctor and complaining he couldn’t get it up. Sure, it’d be damned embarrassing but worth it if he got a regular supply of those little blue pills. He didn’t normally truck with drugs, but fucking was an addiction he could get behind.
And behind it he was at the moment, buried up to his pubes in the redhead. It hadn’t taken him long to remember Melina’s name, because she practically insisted he scream it aloud in their every encounter. She had confidence when he had none, pushing a teenage boy around and pressing every one of the arousal buttons in his then-fledgling, gangling body—the one no one else but him seemed to want to touch. She could still pop his cock to boner in two seconds flat, even with her looks fading.
Names weren’t his strong suit, though, and he was always and forever forgetting the redhead’s name. Lucy? Something like that.
He was thrusting and she was moaning, just a little less sincere than Melina made it sound. God, but she got into it. Just thinking about Melina made him go faster, his hands on the redhead’s hips and thrusting inside, smooth and wet satin ringing his cock all the way down. He could feel the build as he inched closer, his eyes firmly closed. He only cracked them every now and again when he was with her, still visualizing Melina Cherry, the back of her head—
He thrust with a gasp and felt the sensation on his prick disappear. It was the most damned odd thing; one minute he could feel his pubic mound against her taint, the pressure like the curve of her insides was pushing his cock up at a forty-five degree angle. Sloping up into her, like a hungry dog begging for more. More cat. Yeah. He was digging it.
The next minute, the pressure was gone, the smooth satin pussy was gone, and he went from feeling like he was fucking a sweet, tight snatch to feeling like he was fucking empty air. He blinked his eyes in confusion and sure as shit, he was fucking empty air. The redhead was gone, no sign of her pale, freckled back where it had been only a moment earlier. His hands had been lightly resting on her hips and now they hung motionless in space. He knelt there, knees creaking on the bed, dick hanging out into nothingness, already starting to lose altitude—
“What the fuck?” John asked, waiting for the joke, waiting for the girl to pop out from the closet or beneath the
bed. He just waited, feeling slightly stupid now that he could see his sweaty, hairy, sunken chest, protruding belly and his deflating cock in the mirror that had been hidden by the redhead’s sweet flame-red tresses only a moment before. He looked at his eyes in the reflection, bulging, trying to figure out if this was a dream.
“Hello?” he called, a little louder. There was no answer.
***
Arch felt the impact on the back of his head and knew he’d been suckered. If he’d had time to think about it, he might have held a little tighter to the flashlight, but the shock of the blow knocked it clean out of his grasp, sent it rattling and rolling away, spinning in a way that made the scene seem like something out of a disco.
He knew by the throbbing in the back of his head that this wasn’t a disco, that the only dancing about to be done was him trying to dance the heck away from whatever was aiming to put a hurt on him. He tried to roll from the blow, mostly by instinct, but it was a struggle of its own to keep control of his body. The impact sent his head rattling; his shoulder hit the hard stone ground and a face full of dust was his reward for failing to land properly.
Something landed on his back with a lot of weight, and Arch felt that panic rise again from what he suspected was coming.
The dust was everywhere, the dirt filling his nose and the back of his mouth, prompting a cough, a tickle and a liquid gush from his nose where he’d hit. It was hot blood, pain in his lip and face and shoulder, and even as he fought back against the imperious weight on his back, he knew that this was a lousy position from which to begin a fight. Not a bad one for losing a fight, though.
Arch thrust blindly with the one thing he’d managed to keep a hold on. The blade of the knife found something above him, striking a skipping blow against something that was perched on his back, applying weight and pressure to grind him into the earth.
The weight vanished with a hiss and the sound of crackling flames, and Arch had almost a half second to breathe before something else landed on him, just as hard, driving the air out of him once more and filling his ears with the sound of something—something very not human—snarling hot, foul breath past the side of his head.
***
Hendricks didn’t find much strength in his arms for swinging his sword, but he got it around anyway. He caught the first flame dog on the point of it, watched the orange fire turn dark and suck inward like some sci-fi movie version of a black hole. It provided him with just the briefest sense of satisfaction before the next one came, and he stumbled back in response to the speed of the damned thing.
He paid little attention to the crack of gunshots from his right. He could see out of the corner of his eye the effect Alison was having on the fiery dogs—not much, unfortunately. They were staggered a little here and there, and that was about it. He could use the hesitation, though, because they truly did move like dogs. Low the ground, running in a loping motion that carried them across the cracked and broken road that divided the square from the mouth of the alley where they stood. If Hobbs Green was a place the world had forgotten, Hendricks figured that these things were a very definitely good reason for that amnesia, and he found himself wishing he’d never even heard of this damned place. Very literally damned place.
The bonfire roared and rose higher, belching more of the flaming beasts out of its depths. They swept past Mandy, who had her arms raised like she was directing an orchestra or some such shit. “Shoot her!” Hendricks called out, hoping Alison would take the hint.
Shots rang out from his right, and he saw Mandy stagger, her bald head lowered from the impact. Her scalp was wrinkled, too, and had the scuff of black singeing all about it. Hendricks spared a thought to wonder how someone once presumably normal had gotten so fucked up, then he remembered the fucking fiery dog sucking her teat and figured shooting one of those out of your joyhole might just start the party on being fucking nuts. He brought his sword down across the neck of another dog, but it was utterly pointless; he’d killed two, and in the time it’d taken him to do so, a dozen more had emerged from the fire, charging in a flat run at them, a pack of burning wolves hungry for blood.
“Dear God, I hope that fucking kills her,” he had time to whisper before another dog came at him. The worst of them were still coming, still charging. Right now they were held at bay by Alison’s shooting, judicious pistol shots that made ’em squeal and bark, smoke and little gouts of flame coming out of their snouts as they flinched away for a second, more resentful of the pain than actually injured. Hendricks could sense the feral calculation behind those burning eyes, watched them hold off for reinforcements. He had a bad feeling about those growing numbers, watched a few start to peel off from the bonfire and snake sideways, and he knew for a fact that he’d have a hellfire hound nipping at his ass in just a few shakes.
Mandy’s head came back up, and the dark eyes were replaced by flames of their own. Not content to be the bitch who bred flaming hell dogs, something had twisted her shit up and there was a literal fire oozing out of her eyes like her brain had fried off in a grease fire. She didn’t look lost or dreamy anymore; she looked pissed and nuts, the black ash leotard scraped clean in all the wrong places, giving Hendricks a view of aging anatomy that seemed to fit just perfectly with his own personal vision of hell. Hell was a town like this, swarming with devil dogs and administered by some old naked lady. “If I ever get old and go evil, I hope I have the fucking sense not to let my dick and balls hang down to my knees while I’m being a fucked-up crazy person,” Hendricks said.
“I wouldn’t worry about either of those happening right now,” Alison said, in the middle of a reload. “If you make it out of here to get old, it probably won’t be with your balls intact to get saggy.” She dropped the mag out of the bottom of the Glock and didn’t even bother to fetch it, slamming the new one home without racking the slide. Slick move, Hendricks thought, and her weapon belched a shot. He spared a glance to the magazine and saw it was completely dry; she’d had the presence of mind to count her shots. On a fifteen-round magazine. He would have squeezed out a low whistle of admiration if he hadn’t been stabbing some asshole demon pup in the face.
“Less talk, more fight,” Duncan said, whipping a fire-red dog so hard it flew through the air as its flames guttered to black and disappeared before it hit the ground. “Maybe spare your balls to sag another day.”
“You really think we’re gonna walk out of this alive?” Hendricks asked, whipping his blade around. “They’re gonna be on our asses from the flank in less than a minute, I figure.”
He felt Alison brush his side, felt his gun slide out of his holster and watched her hoist it up, drawing it as she forced her back to his like something out of a fucking John Woo movie; she had one eye on the side of him and one on the alley behind them. “Oh ye of little faith,” she said.
“No faith, actually,” Hendricks said, with a gallows grin.
***
Arch felt the hit, felt the heat from the thing that was on him. That skitter of pure, blind terror that snaked its way over his skin, that settled around his belly. He tried to arch his back, tried to throw it off, but it was so heavy. He bent his arm and thrust the blade at it, missing clean. He wondered where it was, figured it had to be close and down on his back. Felt it writhe on him like a snake, the sound of something like elastic straining—bicycle pants, he figured a little belatedly—and then caught a flare of hard pain right in the kidney.
He took a full lungful of dirt, coughing and sputtering, ready to cough up everything he’d ever breathed. The dry dust was like he’d inhaled a sandbox, grainy and wet from his saliva, hints of blood coloring the taste. He spat as he coughed, felt a glob fall between his lips and hang there, suspended just off the ground, last stringer dangling from his lip as the pain shot through his whole back again.
It felt like someone had taken a crowbar to him, like he’d been tackled without pads around the midsection. From behind. By a tiger. If an ache was a rumble of the body’s
discontent, but this was a full-throated scream from the lower back on up, the cry of a body and a mind in panic and terror about what was fixing to happen to it. Arch thrust himself hard against the ground and tried to roll to the side. It worked, and he found himself on top of the small-framed demon riding his back.
Arch threw an elbow back and felt it land on smooth fabric. He heard it make that noise, that rubbery squeak as his foe struggled back, still pressing into his back. Arch threw his head back and slammed it into something hard, driving the apex of his skull into something a little softer. He felt warm fluid splatter in his short hair and wondered if it was demon blood or snot, then drove his head back again, uncaring.
His elbow found its own purchase, and the creature behind him went slack. Arch scrambled and drove the knife blindly backwards into its side. There was a brief moment of fear as his senses caught up to his rational thought: what if this wasn’t a demon at all?
Then the black fire burned hot in the darkness—just a flash of something darker than the cave in front of his eyes—and his world was righted again.
He was on his knees, the gravel biting into his skin under the leg of his pants, doing that slow chew into the kneecaps as he dove for the flashlight that was just out of reach. He wanted to see, needed to see, needed to spin it in a circle and vanquish the shadows around him, to have it confirm for him that all the things trying to get him in the dark were gone—
His fingertips just barely touched the black checkered grip when he got hit in the back again, and the beam that promised to be the light that would drive the darkness out of his world spun out of his grasp yet again as Arch tumbled back to the floor of the mine.
***
Hendricks was off by a few seconds, not that he was keeping count. The bonfire was belching those flame dogs still, the smell of sulfur from their fires clouding his senses and hanging thick in the air like low-hanging smog he couldn’t even see. Alison’s right-hand gun was firing him behind him now, the one she’d kept pointed down the alley. He had his doubts about how effective she’d be with it—it was his 1911, after all, that big-framed automatic—but he watched her catch two of the flaming dogs right in the middle of their big, Rottweiler-sized bodies and thought if he was gonna put his faith in an Almighty, he might direct it toward the Southern belle at his back who was pegging demons one-handed like they were a ten ring on a target at the range, not big fucking flaming demon dogs running at her with intent.
The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted Page 77