Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Not too far from here,” he said, trying to shoot right on past that question before she could dig too deep on it. “This princess had lived in Tenzee her whole life, and her name was, uhm … Missoula.” That was a city in Montana, but Abi didn’t know that, right? It was a name he and her mother had considered for her and discarded because Abilene was better anyway.

  “Princess Missoula was a very pretty princess,” Braeden said, looking at how dark his fingernails looked, the thin shaft of light extending from the hallway light into Abi’s room. He could still see the grease and oil that had worked their way around the edges. He’d let her paint his fingernails a couple times and that tended to hide the grease some, though they inevitably looked like even worse a few days later, after he’d worked on engines for a spell. “And her problem,” because all these princesses had problems, Braeden had figured out, “was that she was so very pretty, and so very smart, that none of the princes of other kingdoms wanted to talk to her because they were all scared that she was smarter and prettier than they were.” Braeden was laughing madly at this on the inside, because to him it was a game of just making up shit as he went along, and he had no fucking idea how he was going to square this circle he’d just drawn around himself.

  Abi frowned, critical mind clearly whirring into action. “Princes can’t be pretty, Daddy. Only princesses.”

  “You tell that to a pissed-off drag queen,” he muttered under his breath, “see how it goes.” He thought quickly and said, “So anyhow, Princess Missoula couldn’t find any prince in all the land who wasn’t too, uhhhh … intimidated to uhm, be okay with how smart and pretty she was. Her daddy brought in prince after prince to try and impress her, but she always seemed to send the poor bastards scurrying away because she was just too, uhh … smart or pretty.”

  He felt a little twinge inside as he told the story, because it hit him suddenly that this wasn’t exactly made up out of whole cloth. It was pretty much the story of Abi’s mom, because she’d been the prom queen, all gorgeous and smart, and she’d tried to date a few guys who were in her social status, and it turned out they were real assholes about that kind of thing. Not that Braeden considered himself an intellectual giant, but hell if it bothered him that Abi’s mom had been so smart. That was lucky, he figured, especially as he got old enough to realize exactly how little he knew. It was nice to have someone tell him, in a gentle way, when he was being a dumbass. Sometimes he even missed that as much as he missed everything else about her.

  “So, what did Princess Missoula do, Daddy?” Abi asked. She had that look that told him her critic hat might have been put away for a spell, because she was leaning off the pillow, waiting to see what came next.

  “She, uh,” Braeden kind of hiccupped, a little emotion coming out as his voice cracked, “she decided that maybe a prince wasn’t the best idea for her, since they were all a bunch of, uh, tools.”

  Abi frowned. “Like the kind in your shop?”

  “No, not …” Braeden blushed a little. “They were jerks,” he said, steering around the word ‘asshole,’ even though it was a lot more appropriate for the use he had in mind, though not the audience. “Anyhow, Princess Missoula decided to look among the commoners for someone who would love her as she was, and she found a, uhm … a baker, yeah … who, while not as smart or pretty as she was, would love her as much as she deserved.”

  “And did he become king?” Abi asked, bouncing a little. That was usually the sign she was really into the story, but not a great one for his efforts to calm her down.

  “Sure,” Braeden said, “someday. After the old king died, I guess.”

  “Why did he die?”

  “Uhhhm,” Braeden said, but in his head he was saying, Oh, shit. “He just … got old, you know. That happens.”

  Abi slowed her bounce, rocking just slightly back and forth. “How does it happen, Daddy?”

  “Dying?” Braeden felt his stomach tighten. They’d had this conversation before, and every time they did he was left with the feeling that Abi just couldn’t quite get her head wrapped around death as a concept. He didn’t blame her, because he didn’t think he got it, and he had twenty years on her. “Well, it … it happens quick, see.”

  Abi sat on her bed, fiddling with her covers, and he was draped across it below her feet. She stared down for a second, then looked up at him. “Is it scary?”

  Braeden felt about dumbfounded. “Is it … no, baby. It’s not … not bad.” The lie felt toxic. Her mother hadn’t had an easy death, had she? He’d gotten the details and they made him sick. But Abi was four and the thought of her hearing any of this nauseated him worse than reading about how it happened or from hearing some paramedic tell the story without knowing he was in the bar. It was a long, involved tale about a woman in a car accident who had been pinned inside and couldn’t be easily cut out. By the end, Braeden was mainlining tequila and listening intently, feeling like he was gonna need the whole bottle and every other single one behind the bar just to cope.

  “What does it feel like?” Abi asked. Now she was shyly testing him.

  “It doesn’t hurt.” He jumped right to that lie, figuring it was the one she was most worried about. That was what kids worried about, right? Whether shots or a skinned knee, it was the pain that scared them, that backed them off whatever they were doing. “It … happens real quick and easy, like … like going to sleep.”

  She puckered those little lips. “Sometimes I don’t go to sleep very easy. You told me so. You said—”

  “I know,” Braeden said, nodding. “I know, sometimes it ain’t easy to get to sleep—”

  “I never sleep,” Abi said resolutely. “I never have, not once. I just stay in my bed all night until you come get me in the morning.”

  Braeden made a face of his own. “Baby … that just ain’t true.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it ain’t.”

  “Yes, huh.”

  “Okay,” he said, a little too tired to labor through the point. “Well … for those of us who do sleep and aren’t tiny baby vampires … it’s like that.”

  “So …” she said, hesitant, “… it’s not bad?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “So it wasn’t bad for Mommy?”

  That innocent little question hammered him like a punch to the nose in a barfight. He tried to smile, to brush off that feeling, but it wasn’t easy. “No,” he said, that lie burning his throat, “it wasn’t … bad … for Mommy.” He pushed off the bed, pulling himself up to sitting, ready to get the hell out of here and out of this conversation.

  “Daddy?”

  “What, baby girl?” He felt trapped in place again by those doe eyes, even though he wanted to leave.

  “Are you going to die someday?” So innocent. And a little worried, he thought.

  “Not for a very long time,” Braeden said, trying to come up with a smile. He figured he probably looked like a politician, grinning for a newspaper picture, or like Pike had this afternoon when he was trying to sway Braeden’s vote on this recall. What a goddamned mess. “Good night, sweetheart.” He kissed her on that soft, smooth cheek.

  He got up and almost made it to the door. “Daddy?”

  “Time to sleep, baby,” he said. She could ask him questions all night. Or at least, she’d certainly never seemed to run out of them before, even if she needed a short break to fiddle with her sheets or count her little toes or something. “You can ask me … whatever else … in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy.” She gave a sleepy little sigh and closed her eyes, smiling wide—way too wide for the subject matter they’d just talked over—and obviously pretending hard to be trying to sleep, since she apparently didn’t sleep at all, ever.

  Braeden got out of the room and into the hall, turning off the main light and letting the night-light take over, casting its weak orange glow into Abi’s room. She had one of her own in there, a Cinderella night-light that cast characters an
d scenes onto the ceiling. Between the two of them, she seemed to feel safe and could see to get up to go pee in the middle of the night if she needed to.

  When he was back in the living room he took a deep breath. Sitting there on the couch next to him was her princess Halloween costume, and he picked it up and tossed it carefully to the back of the chair just across from him so he could stretch out on the couch without accidentally putting his feet on it or tearing the seams or something. He lay down, snatching up the remote and finding ESPN. “Am I gonna die someday?” he said to himself, finding some strange amusement in that question. He’d thought himself youthfully immortal for a good long while, arrogant enough to think he could do dumbass things and not have any consequences from them. Race a car? No problem? Ride his bike without a helmet? He’d never gotten so much as a scratch.

  That changed when Abi came, to some extent, and even more when Jennifer died. Now that feeling of immortality was good and faded, and Braeden didn’t feel like chancing the odds anymore. He didn’t even ride a motorcycle these days. Too dangerous for him now that he had someone relying on him. “Hopefully not anytime soon,” he answered her question, and then he started dwelling on his other answers to her, about how death actually happened. He figured he’d fall asleep real soon, but for some reason it did not come easily tonight. Not easily at all.

  8.

  “Seems like we got caught with our pants around our ankles,” Hendricks pronounced. They were all sitting around St. Whoever-the-fuck’s, Father Nguyen’s church, which he didn’t catch the name of for either lack of caring or maybe because of the urgency of their meeting, “and these bastards bent us into a pretzel and fucked us so hard we’ll never shit straight again.”

  Arch just stood there next to the pew, shaking his head. “You do have a way of describing things, don’t you?”

  “It’s colorful,” Hendricks said.

  “It’s profane and disrespectful,” Arch replied. Sometimes he got all mother hen, and Hendricks had no time for that shit. “Especially here.”

  “Yeah, I doubt your God’s ever seen anything like that before,” Hendricks cracked. “I probably just taught him a couple new words, too.”

  “Maybe we should get back on track here,” Erin said, pronouncing a little of her own displeasure in the way she was looking heat at Hendricks. That wasn’t surprising to him; Erin had been pissy to him for a little while now, and he still didn’t care. She was sounding a little rough, though, like this whole thing had gotten to her, was making her weepy or something. Or maybe she’d just taken in a little too much smoke at Reeve’s house fire.

  “What track are we getting on?” Lonsdale said, prompted by absolutely no one and paid heed to by absolutely no one. Hendricks didn’t backhand him, though not because he didn’t want to. The little shit might prove useful at some point maybe, and with as many hits as they’d taken, help was getting to be a fleeting thing.

  “Sheriff?” Arch honed in on Reeve, who was sitting quietly in a pew, just listening along. “You got anything to add here?”

  Reeve looked like hell, like shit, like a thousand other awful things Hendricks couldn’t quite imagine. Hendricks had taken genuine pleasure in giving the man a bitch of a time at the meeting this morning, and now he couldn’t imagine saying squat to him. His undershirt had probably started the day white, but it was stained black now. The sheriff’s face looked like he’d jumped into a coal bin for a swim, with lines marking where sweat droplets had rolled down the only thing breaking the tragic mask. He wasn’t wearing pants, and his boxers were in shit shape, too. He reeked of fire, enough that Hendricks was suddenly hungry for barbecue, but the knowledge that the man had lost his wife in this blaze … that was taking away any ire Hendricks had for him. Now he just felt sorry for the poor bastard. He’d lost his job, his wife, and his house all in one shot-to-the-nuts-with-a-cannon day. Hendricks could sympathize with at least one of those things. “I don’t think I’m going to be of much use in making any plans at the moment,” Reeve said, bringing a hand up and smudging the hell out of his brow. “Y’all might want to go ahead and leave me out of it for now.”

  That brought on an uncomfortable silence broken by, naturally, Guthrie-Lerner. “This is the shit that happens when I leave town for a few weeks.”

  “This is the shit that happens when you come back to town,” Duncan snapped before Hendricks could launch a reply of his own.

  “Wait, who is this?” Erin asked. She’d eyed the tall black lady when they came in, but had clearly had a few other things on her mind, trailing in the wake of Reeve like she was gonna have to catch him if he fell down. And he’d looked like he might have at any moment.

  “It’s Lerner,” Hendricks said, depriving Guthrie of the opportunity to be a huge dick.

  Guthrie’s face fell. “You never change, Hendricks; you’re a constant thorn in my side.”

  Erin gave Hendricks what felt like a very mild look of thanks before shifting attention back to Guthrie. “So … you’re a woman now?”

  Guthrie just grinned wider, and Hendricks would have sworn he saw a little of Lerner leak out. “I’m also African-American now, in case you missed it, sweetcheeks.”

  “Oddly enough, that didn’t escape my notice, no,” Erin said roughly, though she was flushing mightily. Hendricks could sympathize with that, too, because it was treading close to the racism line that tended to make every white person he’d ever met uncomfortable. Except that one big-time racist he’d met. That guy didn’t give any fucks.

  “How’s Dr. Darlington?” Reeve asked, surprising Hendricks at his ability to still string words together. “And Bill?”

  “Bill’s on his way to the hospital still, I expect,” Arch said. He stopped short of saying something else, which Hendricks predicted was along the lines of, “Assuming he’s still alive.”

  “Alison, Brian, and Addy are on the way, too,” Hendricks said, heading toward helpful and away from actively causing chaos and dickery. He felt like Guthrie would probably take up his slack in that department. “They have to be getting close by now, don’t they?”

  “Probably,” Arch said. The man was tense. He was always tense, but now it was even more obvious to Hendricks. “I doubt we’ll hear from them for a while, seeing as they’ll be getting Brian some help, too, when they get there.”

  “And the doctor?” Reeve asked again. His eyes were a little clearer now, though it was obvious by the redness that tears had probably been shed, and Hendricks wouldn’t have considered the man human if they’d all come from the fire and smoke.

  “Father Nguyen and Casey are bringing her here right now,” Erin said, the strain just cracking her voice. “I guess … I guess they got her mother, and Molly’s … well, she’s …”

  “Possessed,” Arch finished for her. “Molly’s possessed by these things.”

  “Well, goddamn,” Reeve said mildly, more like he was amazed than angry. “They really did hit us right where we lived, didn’t they.” There was no accusation there, just a statement of fact.

  “They damned sure did,” Hendricks said, feeling the malice take hard hold. “And I’m wondering when we’re going to hit back.”

  “I’d be inclined to agree,” Arch said. “Clearly they snaked their way around us, following us back to our homes from the station, watching and figuring out how best to hit us right where it hurt. It stands to reason that they’re probably not finished yet.” He looked around. “Right?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know what these things are doing,” Erin said, sounding almost helpless, “but … how else could they possibly hit us? I mean, they came in like a damned hammer last time. Not one of us is even home at this point because—I mean they nailed us right there, and …”

  Hendricks picked up a little something funny, like someone tickled long nails right across the back of his head as he started to tune Erin out. She was starting to go on, talking about future plans and how vulnerable they were, and something bothered him about that �
��

  Why hadn’t these bastards hit Erin? She’d left the station at the same time as the rest of them, hadn’t she? They’d come at him, Arch and the Longholts, Reeve, Duncan … everyone who’d left the station, they’d picked off, even that shithead Lonsdale.

  But not Erin?

  Hendricks frowned, watching her talk. She was amping up her delivery, kind of launching into a speech. Her voice still had that funny twinge to it. Then there was the fact that speechifying wasn’t really her thing, especially lately, when she’d been surly and downcast. He looked over at Duncan, who was staring straight at her, arms folded in front of him, no sign of anything on his face, just nodding along as he listened.

  He’d pick up on it if Erin was possessed … wouldn’t he?

  Hendricks just stood there, trying to figure out how to handle his little inkling suspicion. It wasn’t exactly a fun thing to be pondering, and it wasn’t like he and Erin didn’t have enough shit between them right now without adding to it. He was trying not to be a dick, dammit, and yet here was this, this nasty, lingering suspicion just hanging right over his head like a black cloud. Why would this Legion go hard after every single other person in the watch but just let Erin skate? That defied all logic, and meandered right into nuttytown.

  Duncan looked up, catching a glimpse of Hendricks or reading his soul or something. Either way, he stared right at Hendricks, and Hendricks stared right back. Hendricks stood just behind Erin, where she was in the aisle, and tried to signal with his eyes while he had Duncan’s attention. The OOC had read things off his mind before, hadn’t he? He darted his eyes toward Erin three times in quick succession, and finally, Duncan nodded once.

  Hendricks took an easy half-step toward her. He couldn’t be sure, after all, but damn. If she was possessed by one of these demons, he didn’t want to tip her off. For fuck’s sake, it was actually a pretty brilliant idea, just seeding one of their own people with a demon and slipping them right into their midst. After an ass-kicking like they’d just gotten, who would even be thinking about that? Hendricks hadn’t even really been hit and he was numb with shock. If they’d pulled off what they’d intended, Arch’s whole family of in-laws would probably have ended up dead and Hendricks himself would have kicked the bucket—again. Duncan, too, probably.