Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  *

  Reeve had had about enough of that ornery, salty, black-clad fucking demon hunter to last him for a decade or twelve. As if it hadn’t been bad enough facing a room of people last night that were about two steps shy of hunting down pitchforks and lighting up torches, now he had to deal with this blamed outsider coming in and stirring the shit pot Reeve was presently boiling in. And boiling was the right word, because for some damned reason the building’s heat had just kicked on, and the vent above him was pouring out hot air.

  “So it went super well, then?” Brian Longholt asked with the sarcasm he was learning to expect from that little punk. Reeve could smell the marijuana on the little bastard, and he knew for a fact that he could make a case for possession just based on how he wafted. But Reeve was playing nice, and honestly, none of them needed this right now.

  Reeve tried to keep his tone mellow as he responded. “You walk out of every town meeting knowing at least somebody’s bitching in the parking lot about how everything you just said was bullshit, but this was probably a higher proportion of that than usual.” Donna caught his eye in the front row, trying to give him a reassuring smile. Reeve forced one onto his face and pointed it back at her while he waited for the inevitable return of fire from the cowboy and the stoner.

  “I hear you’re going to be facing a recall election soon, Nick,” Bill Longholt said, quiet and serious, as the man always was. Reeve liked Bill; he was a good man. “You got a plan for how to deal with that?”

  “Other than kick County Administrator Pike right in the ass?” Reeve asked, only half joking. “Not really. Didn’t exactly see it coming until the possibility reared its ugly head last night.”

  “Are we sure he’s not a demon?” Casey Meacham asked, causing Erin Harris to swivel her head to look at him in a double take. Reeve couldn’t blame her; it did sound a little stupid.

  “He’s a politician, so I don’t rule it out,” Reeve said dryly. “But no, I don’t think he’s a demon.” He caught a flash of resentment from Lauren Darlington. “Probably.” He glanced at their resident demon, the bland guy with the t-shirt in the corner. “You think?”

  Duncan spoke after a moment’s thought. “Some demons do tend to gravitate toward places where they can exercise some power, but typically they’d want to remain out of the spotlight for fear of being discovered or revealed. A county administrator in a place like this wouldn’t be so famous as to discourage a demon from taking the office.”

  “So you’re saying none of our presidents have been demons?” Brian Longholt snarked. “Because I was pretty confident that—”

  “Just shut up,” Hendricks said, rolling his eyes. When Brian blinked in surprise at him, the cowboy unfolded his hands to spread them in a very “don’t give a damn,” gesture. “We all know which president you’re going to say, so just go ahead and stow it and save those of us in the audience who voted for him from an ugly argument, all right?”

  “I was gonna say William Henry Harrison,” Brian said, almost under his breath, like he couldn’t bear to let the moment pass without comment.

  “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” Casey said, crowing just a little.

  “Speaking of pointless discord,” Reeve said, leveling his gaze at Lauren Darlington, who was cramming the last bite of a glazed donut in her mouth, “I got a bone to pick with you about Molly.”

  *

  Lauren had the donut almost fully in her mouth, sweet sugary goodness embarrassingly perched between her lips like she was trying to—well, it didn’t look good, and she damned well knew it. She’d been trying to finish her breakfast on the go in a rush so she could better participate in the discussion, but then, like a kid daydreaming in class, Reeve had gone and called on her when she had a mouth full of dough and icing and couldn’t speak for herself. “Mmmbrummph!” she managed to get out around the donut.

  “Molly came up to me at the meeting last night,” Reeve began, apparently undeterred by her biting off more than she could chew. Lauren just sat there, mouth full, cheeks burning, and not just from the overwhelming heat that had just shifted on in the otherwise pretty comfortable sheriff’s station. “Right as I was trying to have a conversation with Braeden Tarley, who looked like he might have been otherwise amenable to listening—”

  “Who the hell is Braeden Tarley?” Hendricks asked. Lauren’s eyes darted toward the cowboy as she frantically tried to chew her food. He’d been piping up all meeting so far, kind of obnoxiously, but now she was glad he was taking a little bit of the heat off her. It gave her a chance to finish her donut without everyone watching her cheeks move.

  “He runs a diesel engine repair shop here in town,” Reeve said, and Lauren could see him barely holding back his contempt for Hendricks in his answer. She suspected that holding it all in probably wasn’t too good for the man’s health, but she didn’t have either the inclination or a mouth free of donut to be able to give voice to that opinion. “Young guy, probably one of the more successful examples of someone turning his life around after a rough start. It would have been nice to have him on our side.”

  “Did anyone else actually come over to our side?” Father Nguyen spoke up from his place at the counter.

  “They did, and we’ll get to that in a minute,” Reeve said, turning his attention back to Lauren. “Please keep Molly away from the next meeting, if we have one.”

  Lauren swallowed the last bite heavily, still feeling red in the face. “Sorry. She just has questions.”

  “Maybe Hendricks can answer them,” Reeve suggested, almost earnestly enough to get away with it. He pointed the notes in his hand toward the cowboy, top edge first. “He’s the expert in demons, after all. I don’t even know who Martha Shelly is.”

  Lauren took a second to decode that. “You mean Martin Shkreli, don’t you?”

  “I don’t mean a damned thing, it was your daughter that was asking me if he was a demon or not,” Reeve said with a classic buffoon’s exaggerated shrug. He looked back to Duncan.

  Duncan gave it a moment’s thought. “He could be. I wouldn’t know without either reading him or striking him with a holy implement.”

  “If it comes to it,” Lauren said, “I vote for the latter.”

  “Great, we’ll add him to the list of people to do that to,” Reeve said.

  “Along with—” Brian started.

  “No,” Hendricks cut him off.

  “I was going to say Fred Phelps,” Brian finished, surly as hell at being stomped on again.

  “No, you weren’t,” Alison said with a roll of her eyes. She paused halfway through her eye roll and paled for a second. “Ugh.”

  “Brian, while you’re adding your two cents,” Reeve said, focusing on the young man, “did you and Casey get that Rog’tausch or whatever it was disposed of?”

  Lauren turned to look at Brian Longholt, and she could tell by the stricken look on his face that he hadn’t. Even though it was wrong, she felt a sense of relief, like her part in being called out during the meeting was over, and whew.

  *

  “Uh, yeah,” Brian said after a suitable pause, after the first dumbstruck moment passed him by. It was almost like he’d zoned out for a five count after Reeve had drawn attention to him, and blinking stupidly wasn’t doing him any favors. “No, we, uh, haven’t gotten rid of the, uh, bones yet.”

  Sheriff Reeve just stood there, staring at him, and Brian got that feeling in his stomach like he’d had on the first day of school every year. Hell, he’d probably had it on the second and third and fourth days, too, but it was the lesser version of the same—the sense that he had no idea what was about to happen, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  Reeve held his tongue for another few crucial seconds, allowing the tension to twist and ratchet in Brian’s gut. For all the sense of ornery arguing he did with most of the authority figures in his life, he still felt a need to quail away from the guy in uniform. It wasn’t something he was proud of, and he was pretty sure if it came down to
it, he could get into a hell of an argument with the sheriff. But his instinct was not to, like his uniform was some kind of mind-warping thing that shut him down, like Duncan’s badge or something. “You had one job,” Reeve said, his face twitching a little.

  Brian looked over at Casey, who looked dully back at him. Casey hadn’t exactly offered to spearhead this whole disposal of the last big bad they’d faced, after all, he’d just been stuck with it because the bones of the thing were still sitting in terrariums in his taxidermy shop. “I was trying to figure out the best place to put them,” Brian said at last.

  “Who gives a shit?” Reeve didn’t sound like he was buying it, and that made Brian tense even further; he knew for a fact that the sheriff wasn’t going to buy his explanation for what was taking so long. Well, not on its face, anyway.

  “Look,” Brian said, steadying himself for fire, “we’re talking about disposing of a big, bad demon corpse here—”

  “Yeah, and I’m asking why it ain’t done yet,” Reeve said.

  Brian opened his mouth and faltered, then stumbled back-asswards into an answer that would satisfy most of the room. “Because of the goddamned EPA,” he answered, and that was pretty close to the truth, if phrased in a way that he thought would appeal to his audience.

  Reeve frowned, lines deepening between his brows. “Excuse me?”

  “We don’t know if the … Rog’tausch is toxic or not,” Brian said, not really embarrassed to admit it so much as embarrassed that he was having to couch his concerns in a way that felt foreign to him.

  “It’s a demon corpse,” Reeve said.

  “It could be emitting radiation, chemicals, toxicity … anything,” Brian said. “If we dump it and the EPA finds out …” He shrugged and did not allow himself to think about how that didn’t sound half bad.

  Reeve melted into a state somewhere between annoyance and resignation, one of his eyeballs fluttering and the other shooting skyward. “Goddammit. You might just have a point there.” He looked to Duncan. “Is that thing toxic?”

  Duncan’s answer was immediate and sarcastic. “Do I look like a portable chemical and radiological testing lab to you?”

  “Well, are there any toxic or radioactive demons?” Arch asked, stepping in and becoming Brian’s knight in shining khaki.

  “Possibly,” Duncan said with a shrug. “There are definitely toxic ones. Radioactive … maybe. It’s not like they measure rads in the underworld. It’s pretty much, ‘Hey, does that burn like acid? Why yes, yes, it does. Let’s not mess with that demon, then, except maybe at a distance. Stick a baton on a ten foot pole and give him a poke from way back there.’”

  “Brian brings up a decent point about the EPA,” Lauren Darlington said. “If you think you have trouble with the voters over a recall election, try and imagine how much worse it would be with the EPA up your ass like a ham-handed proctologist.” Brian watched his dad shudder silently and Reeve make a face. Even Arch cocked an eyebrow at that one. Casey Meacham, on the other hand, seemed to be smiling faintly. “I might be able to take a bone sample from the Rog’tausch and see if we can get it tested in the lab down at Red Cedar. If it comes back negative, you can split the pieces up and bury them all over hell and gone.”

  “What if it comes back positive?” Reeve asked.

  “Then any of us who handled the pieces that survive the live-action series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are probably going to die of cancer,” Lauren said, completely serious. “But since surviving this demon invasion is a long shot, I’m not too worried about it.”

  “Cute,” Reeve said, giving her an icy look.

  Lauren just smiled and snuck a glance at Brian. He caught it and gave her a grateful one in return.

  *

  “One last thing,” Reeve said, looking down at his sheet. “Halloween is tomorrow.”

  Arch stood there thinking that one over for a minute. He’d just about forgotten it, truthfully, and would have been happier still if he could forget it for even longer. All Hallow’s Eve wasn’t exactly his favorite holiday, even absent their current crisis.

  “Good God, already?” Casey said, staring off into space. “Man, time just flies. It ain’t gonna be too much longer and we’ll all be down at Moody’s Roadhouse singing, ‘Oh, by gosh by golly, check out the camel toe on Holly’—”

  “You’re a real pervert, Casey,” Erin said from next to him as the whole room just sat there in silence.

  “Thankee kindly,” Casey said.

  “Wasn’t a compliment,” Erin said, inching away from Casey by sliding down the desk a little.

  Arch caught another shared look between Reeve and his wife. He’d caught a few of them throughout the meeting, and he considered them a good sign. Reeve had been confronted first with demons and now with the distrust of many of one-time constituents; at least his biggest supporter was on board.

  “Halloween, people,” Reeve said, more patient than Arch would have been in his shoes. “Kids in the streets. This is something we need to think about.”

  “I don’t mean to settle you down in the middle of what I’m sure is about to be a grand old worry fest,” Duncan said, “but I wouldn’t worry too much about Halloween.”

  Arch felt a couple eyes fall on him, and he sighed, figuring he might as well ask the question, since it was on his mind anyway. “Isn’t Halloween traditionally something of a demon-related holiday?”

  Duncan frowned. “No.”

  Everyone waited a second, and then Hendricks spoke. “Was anyone else expecting more of an explanation than we just got?” A loose round of murmurs of assent broke loose.

  “It’s not,” Duncan said. “There’s not even any history there for us, just the significance you meatbags attach to it. Different demons with different belief systems have their own holidays, and none of them coincide with Halloween.”

  “There’s still going to be kids in the streets, I expect,” Reeve said. “Even with all that’s happened.”

  “Well, I’d expect there’s going to be a lot of adults in the streets as well,” Duncan said with a shrug. “If this hotspot was closer to the tipping point of disorder, you maybe could expect some preying on the part of demons, but since it’s not—”

  “What the hell hotspot are you at?” Addy Longholt said, bristling. “This place is entirely in chaos.”

  “It’s really not, comparatively speaking,” Duncan said flatly.

  “What my demon friend means to say,” Hendricks jumped in, and for once he sounded conciliatory instead of like he was ready to add some gas to the fire, “is that there’s not a total societal breakdown here yet. Midian’s not a free-for-all zone without any law and order. People are still living here, still going about their jobs, still abiding by the law for the most part. Demons, even when they’re killing, are mostly doing it very quietly, not blatantly and in the open.”

  “Except for when that giant demon went crashing through the streets of town,” Brian snarked.

  “It was kind of an isolated incident,” Duncan said. “It’s certainly been noisy around here, but nothing big and bold and obviously, blatantly destructive has happened right in the public eye other than that.”

  “So we still haven’t hit the ‘tipping point of disorder,’” Bill said, patting his wife on the back gently.

  “No, which surprises me,” Duncan said. “We—I—predicted it weeks ago based on how quickly this place heated up.”

  That hung for a second. “Why hasn’t it, then?” Lauren Darlington finally asked.

  “Us, probably,” Duncan said. “Demons who have come here have been opposed in a way they wouldn’t have been, given the fact there’s only one professional demon hunter in town at the moment. The early showings suggested things would spiral faster, and although some ugly stuff—”

  “Shit,” Hendricks said.

  “—has happened,” Duncan went on, shooting him a frown, “it’s not been all chaos, all the time in the way that hotspots tend to go before a town
turns to ground zero. So, anyway, I think Halloween will probably be fine, as long as there are adults everywhere. Most demons won’t want to risk the chance of all-out wrath. I’d expect a backlash on November 1st, though. Pent-up desires coming to the surface and all that.”

  “You make it sound like no one’s got the balls to come out on Halloween night,” Brian Longholt said, frowning.

  “Maybe some onesie-twosie demons, working independently,” Duncan said with another shrug. “But in order to face down all the adults in the streets during a trick-or-treating of the sort I’ve seen, it’d take—to use your criteria—a demon with balls bigger than the small-timers we’ve got operating here right now. Maybe if Kitty Elizabeth or some of the other royals riding her coattails were still in town, I’d worry. As it is, nobody’s here that draws enough water to concern me.”

  “Every other time some giant douche has come to town, it’s blindsided you, hasn’t it?” Hendricks asked, much less pointedly than when he’d been needling Reeve. A quick glance told Arch that Reeve had noticed it, too, and was scowling. “I mean, you and Lerner didn’t even know about Hollywood and Ygrusibas, and Gideon with the acid-jizz took you by surprise—”

  “Says the demon hunter who was living next door to him,” Duncan poked right back.

  “—not to mention the guy with the fire-dog impregnation powers on the Ferris wheel,” Hendricks said.

  “Wait, the what?” Lauren Darlington asked. “I thought he was just a rapey carnie demon!”

  “And the Rog’tausch,” Hendricks said, shrugging while Duncan stared at him neutrally. “I mean, some big nasty could be here right now and you probably wouldn’t even know about it given how many of those runes Spellman seems to be selling. Talk about the must-have demon accessory for the year—”

  “You have a point,” Duncan said nodding. “Yes, there could be something nasty hiding around here, something with a terrible plan to kill all your children. I doubt it, because they probably would have shown some sign, but it could be so.”