Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “That will be just fine,” Chester said, offering his hands. “Won’t that be just fine, Bill?”

  “Who the hell is Bill?” the cowboy asked.

  “You want to put us in your jail?” William asked quietly, his hands still fastened atop his head. “To … imprison us? To keep us from our freedom?”

  “That’s generally what happens when you murder someone, yes,” Reeve said.

  “We did not come looking for this fight,” Chester said, the strain building within. He could hear the desperation, closer to action, with William, and feared for where the emotion might lead him. “These men attacked us.”

  “Well, we’ll sort it all out,” Reeve said, advancing on him. It had the air of a promise, and the sound of the handcuff clicking closed on his wrist, the cold bite of the metal against Chester’s flesh, was the promise fulfilled. “Down at the station.” He pulled Chester’s hand down and clicked the other cuff in place behind him, and Chester let him willingly.

  “Something is not right here,” the cowboy mumbled. “Lonsdale’s talking funnier than usual.”

  “Who the fuck is Lonsdale?” Reeve asked, his voice right in Chester’s ear.

  “Him,” Hendricks said, pointing right at William’s new host body. “He talks in this Cockney accent, always saying shit you couldn’t understand if you had a damned dictionary handy.”

  “Something is not right here,” the woman covering them with the gun agreed.

  “You mean to deprive us of our freedom,” William said and started to rise to his feet. “That is what is wrong here.”

  “That’s not a Cockney accent,” Reeve said. “More like a Queen of England type, but with a drawl—”

  “I know, that’s what I’m saying,” the cowboy spoke with measured irritation.

  “Get back on your knees,” Deputy Stan warned, keeping his pistol up, matching it to aim at William.

  “Let’s get out of the firing line,” Reeve said and jerked Chester back toward the front of the van.

  “Bill, don’t do anything foolish,” Chester warned, letting himself be led backward. “This is a temporary situation—”

  But William was not listening. He started to move, and it took no more than a lurching step forward before a gunshot rang out and William staggered from the impact of a bullet.

  “No!” Chester said, but he knew it was far, far too late.

  *

  Alison fired as soon as she saw that peckerwood move. Friend of Hendricks or not, she knew something was whacked about this guy, and when he took a bullet to the chest without falling down, it just confirmed it for her. She stroked the Glock’s trigger twice more in rapid succession and watched this Lonsdale guy jerk a couple times, like he’d had a finger stuck up his ass by surprise maybe, but he didn’t slump and he didn’t fall down, and to her, that was a real bad sign.

  *

  “We got a demon!” Arch crowed, holstering his gun after Alison’s third shot failed to drop this Lonsdale guy. It wasn’t just that, though, it was the fact that the man’s eyes turned yellow in a flash of anger, and there was a subtle ripple across his face that told Arch everything he needed to know about what lay beneath the surface of this Lonsdale’s skin.

  *

  “Bill!” Chester shouted as he was dragged back around the front of the van—their van, his and William’s. His voice sounded unduly harsh and high, ringing out over the quiet suburban street. The lawns were green and wide, rolling, no fences between the houses.

  It was peaceful.

  Idyllic.

  This was why William had wanted to come here, because it was the opposite of Queens, where everything was tightly packed, where people nearly stumbled over one another, where the houses were close enough to touch between them and the streets were crowded.

  Chester resisted the pull of Reeve against his handcuffs, even without leverage. He yanked himself free of the man’s grip and came around the side of the van in time to see what happened.

  *

  Hendricks wasn’t going to let Lonsdale, however hopped up or fucked up or whatever he was take a run at Arch, not a chance. He was already moving as the guy came forward again, but Alison was acting, too, blasting Lonsdale with shot after shot that had no effect on the man other than to stagger him, rip his clothing, and start bringing a demon face to the surface.

  Hendricks had known Lonsdale in passing for a long fucking time, and of all the things he might have guessed about that shithead Brit, demon would not have been among them. He’d never shown demon face, not ever, not even the time they’d battled it out hand to hand. And if ever there’d been a time for Lonsdale to show himself, that would have been it, especially since Hendricks had beat the living hell out of him.

  Lonsdale lunged through the gunfire, his face totally consumed by enormous, jagged demon teeth and yellow eyes now, the feral look of a predator appearing as the skin blurred away. The fury of what lay beneath came to the surface, and Hendricks damned near shat a brick. He’d never seen a face quite like that before, and the fact that the bullet holes made by Alison in the man’s clothes were swirling with the same kind of flesh-toned rippling was something else new to him.

  Lonsdale came in fast, and Arch didn’t even have his sword out yet. Lonsdale was going to catch him flat-footed, with the big man still trying to holster his pistol and draw his other weapon, the one more applicable to this current fight.

  Hendricks was ready, though, as Lonsdale came flying at Arch, and although the bastard was moving at demon speed, he was still charging forward, and there was only one thing to be done for it.

  Hendricks thrust his sword past Arch, aiming hard for Lonsdale as the man came surging ahead. Lonsdale was fast, but he was enraged, focused on the nearest target, Arch, and the sword clipped him neatly across the wrist as he came in with a hard swipe.

  It was like the moment went to slow motion and took on a life of its own. Hendricks could smell the sweat, the stress, from where he stood a foot or so behind Arch’s left shoulder. The sun was up but it was fucking useless at dispelling the autumn chill in the air, as Hendricks planted his free hand on Arch’s shoulder to yank the man back while he tried to thrust forward and stop the attack.

  A grunt came hard from in front of him, and Hendricks couldn’t tell whether it was from Lonsdale or Arch as he made his move. Could have been either, a deep, throaty sound. Hendricks pushed the sword forward but it caught on something, hit something, bounced a little to the side—

  And suddenly everything was happening at once again. Arch stumbled back with Hendricks, knocking him off balance with his superior height and much heavier weight. Hendricks tried to maintain his footing but failed; he’d put too much into thrusting the sword with one hand and yanking on Arch with the other, and he spilled over onto his ass, hitting the ground and rolling, pain stinging him through his coat on his right elbow and his left asscheek, cool grass stroking his face as his hat fell in front of his eyes.

  By the time he got the hat off, he found Lonsdale on his knees in front of him … and then he saw something he’d damned sure never seen before.

  *

  Chester stood in silence as William surged forward on the attack. Bullets did not stop him, as Chester knew they would not. They bounced off the demonic alteration to his flesh like rubber pellets off the side of a house. Chester blanched at the sound of the shots. Each one was like a slap upon his own jaw, though he knew they would do no harm to William, the sound of each crack still caused him almost physical pain.

  The smell of grass, of the rubber from the tires that had burned upon the pavement as the cars had squealed up to the scene, all of those were present, filtering their way into Chester’s consciousness, burning themselves into his memory. There was a faint prickling on his skin as the breeze stirred his hair …

  And William charged forward into the cowboy and deputy Stan.

  Chester couldn’t see terribly well from in front of the van; its size obscured his view of the develop
ing situation. William was nearly to the back, not far from the Explorer with the sheriff’s markings on the side. His back was turned and he was charging them down. It all unfolded so quickly and yet so slowly.

  A hard tug on Chester’s handcuffs sent a shock of pain surging through his wrists. “Get back here!” the man named Reeve barked in his ear as he jerked him away from even watching the unfolding conflict.

  Chester did not obey, panic beating its drum in his essence, throbbing through him. Handcuffs were nothing but metal, at a thickness meant for holding humans. Whatever body he and his brethren might have inhabited at the moment, Chester was far from human, and so when he twisted on the cuffs, they tore as easily as if they had been constructed out of cooked pasta.

  He broke free and started a charge around the van’s hood, which jutted slightly from the front passenger compartment. It was less than a plan, more than instinct. He would get to William, and together they would fight their way out of this—carefully, without harming these men or the woman. They could take the bullets, could dodge the swords. There was no need to reprise the deaths of the two demon hunters. They could knock all of these people out and escape in the van, or even flee on foot and they would not be caught.

  They would go north, or south, or in whatever direction that William wanted. Chester did not care anymore. Queens and the factory and where they lived were a distant memory already. The wide yards and open spaces of the road and of this place had convinced him. Or perhaps William had convinced him. Either way, he did not want to stay here but he would go wherever William and his brethren wanted to go. Chester could hear the other voices, alarmed, diminished by the fearful thoughts of what was happening, of the disappearance of so many of their fellows in the space of a heartbeat.

  He was past the hood when he saw it happen. It was a subtle thing, a stirring in the air. It did not remain subtle, however, and it took only a second to reach that higher level. A howling rose out of William’s new mouth, pain and fear that jarred a chord in Chester’s soul. It was the sound of agony, of terror, and it frightened Chester in a way that nothing had in many millennia.

  William looked back over his shoulder with a hard jerk, and the terror present in his cry was right there, for the reading, in his eyes. They were the true eyes, not the ones of his human host, the eyes that Chester had known from so many conversations. The fear the sight of those emotions in them stirred was like nothing that Chester could remember since the days before they entered their imprisonment in the vase.

  “Chester!” William screamed, his voice fading already as the eyes swirled with yellow light, suddenly replaced by black, swirling darkness sweeping through.

  Chester stumbled as William reached out, an outstretched hand grasping for Chester, a storm of dark twisting around him. “WILLIAM!” Chester shouted, lunging forward on hands and knees, trying to reach him before—

  The black fire disappeared within a second, William’s yellow eyes replaced by the human Lonsdale’s brown ones. William’s voice faded into a bleating cough as the demon hunter sagged.

  And the outstretched hands missed each other by inches as William’s essence, and all those precious essences of his brethren were dragged away from Chester and his own, the silence following as raw and painful to Chester as the sound of William’s last scream.

  *

  Arch saw something he’d never quite seen before as he came back up from where Hendricks had pulled him out of the way of that charging demon. He saw a demon ripped plainly right back to hell while the body he was in stayed just where it was. “What the dickens was that?” Arch asked, getting back to his feet.

  “Fuck,” said Hendricks picking himself up and dusting off. “What the fuck was that?”

  “You say it your way, I’ll say it mine,” Arch said, glancing down at the man in front of him, who looked like he was shrugging off one heck of a headache.

  “I think it was a demon leaving a human body,” Hendricks said. “Lonsdale, you in there?”

  “Oh,” the man called Lonsdale grunted, sounding far different than he had before, “you know how before, I said last time we tangled, I felt like Ron Jeremy skull-fucked me?” He brought up a hand with a prominent cut across its back where Hendricks had caught him with the sword. “Well, now I really feel that way, except it’s also true of my kingdom come.”

  “Your … what?” Arch asked.

  “That’s Lonsdale, all right,” Hendricks said. “I think he might have been possessed.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” This came from Reeve, who was standing just behind the other guy who’d been involved in the altercation. Arch hadn’t looked too hard at him before, because he’d been quiet and followed commands, but now he was just sitting on his knees, looking like he was in a state of real shock.

  “I was fucking possessed,” Lonsdale said. “And not nicely, either, like say a pretty voice in your ear talking dirty to you about sucking your Blackpool Rock. It was like a thousand harpies shrieking in my head.”

  “What’s a Blackpool Rock?” Reeve asked, exasperated. “What the hell is this guy talking about?”

  “Later,” Hendricks said, and pointed at the other guy, the one that was left alive. “We got a survivor.”

  Arch looked at the guy; he was on the short side, heavily tanned, and a little stocky. “Hey,” Arch said, barking the command as he went for his sword. The guy looked dazed, staring at Lonsdale the demon hunter prostrate on the ground like he was about to cry over him. “You need to put your hands back behind your head and—”

  He stopped mid-sentence, because he realized that the guy he was talking to, that was looking so longingly at Lonsdale, had broken handcuffs still hanging from his wrists, the chains dangling and catching the sun’s light as they hung there.

  *

  Chester was not prone to sentiment. Not now, not ever. But he could feel the strange tear at his heartstrings, something William—Bill, he would have to remember—accused him of not even having. Yet he felt those heartstrings, in that moment, that tear at his chest, that hole where it felt as though something very great had been torn out. He took a hard breath, and another. There was a low buzz around him, as though a bee had wandered through this wide-open neighborhood with its rolling lawns and glistening blades of grass, still wet with dew.

  “—you need to put your hands up,” the man named Reeve said behind him, and he ignored it. Words broke through as he remembered—remembered William. Bill.

  “That’s a demon, he broke those handcuffs like they were nothing.”

  The vase that had been hell for William had been perfect for him. Chester could adapt; William couldn’t, even though he professed the opposite. William’s rigidity to circumstance had been all the more ironic given how hard he tried to push for change. But inevitably, when it happened—

  “He’s just standing there, not doing a damned thing.”

  —he was always left standing there, wondering how to adapt. The time they’d been discovered in Hutchinson, Kansas, found out in the dead of night by a group of home invaders, Chester had been moving in an instant after they’d scared the bastards off with a solid beating or two. William had been left clinging to the uncertainty, to their rental house, even though he had been steadfastly pushing to leave for six years—

  “I bet that doesn’t last long.”

  —and now he was in the pits, surely, he and all of his raucous, aggravating, hypocritical, loud-voiced, push-for-change-but-scream-like-children-when-it-came-time-to-cope-with-it followers, burning with the rest of those sent back.

  “Sir, please place your hands behind your head.”

  William was not coming back.

  “You really think that’s going to work? He’s a demon.”

  William was in torment.

  “Fine, let’s just vape this bastard and be done with it.”

  Forever.

  “Do you know what you have done?” Chester asked quietly. The sound of footsteps behind him paused
as he spoke. “Do you have any idea?” His voice was hushed and muted, quiet in the day, the sound of a car passing by on the main road the only noise.

  “Sir,” Reeve said from behind him, “you need to get down on your knees and cross your hands behind your head before this gets out of control—”

  “This is already out of control,” Chester said, the heat of anger bubbling up as he imagined William and his brethren, burning in anguish. “Out of your control. But not out of mine.”

  “He’s gonna—” Deputy Stan started to say.

  Chester slung a hand backward clumsily. He knew the man named Reeve was behind him, could hear him breathing. He hit him squarely in the chest and the lawman was flung backward. He landed with a hard “Oof!” on the lawn, and Chester felt the rich satisfaction of knowing that he’d transferred some of the pain coursing through him into someone else.

  “Shit,” the cowboy said.

  “Shit is what you say when you crash your car and damage the fender,” Chester said, looking up at the demon hunters before him. They’d done something so vile, so horrible, so objectionable—he needed to kill them. “They have not invented a curse in your pathetic bug languages that expresses what horror you have just visited upon this place, upon … William.”

  The cowboy and the black lawman both had their swords out and were splitting from each other, both preparing to circle around him. Chester knew that the third, Reeve, was probably out of the fight for now, but he was surely armed, as was the woman still covering behind the car, her pistol aimed at him. They could not stop him, but they could slow him enough to keep him from ripping the skin from the demon hunters.

  And keep him from avenging William before he joined him.

  “This doesn’t have to get any worse,” Deputy Stan said.

  Chester fixed on him, staring him down, etching every line of his face down into memory. He heard the angry barks of his constituents, furious, wanting to rip this man apart in a way they had not ever. “This cannot get any worse,” Chester said simply.