Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  No one would have given a fuck at that point if Erin was a plant.

  He listened hard to her voice as he took another easy step closer to her. Duncan was concentrating hard on her now, and took a slow, easing step sideways and forward, clearly trying not to clue her in. He was pretty casual about it, Hendricks would give the OOC that. Or as casual as he could be while wearing a red t-shirt with the Sriracha logo on it.

  Hendricks let his hand drift toward his sword. Starling would know what to do in this moment. She always did, charging in like the damned cavalry. Of course whether she would share that info was an open question.

  “We can’t let them take us down like this,” Erin said, her voice cracking again. He listened, and heard a scratchiness that didn’t sound like congestion. That was weird. “We have to find a way to fight back.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Duncan said, nodding fervently and stepping up so he was only a few feet away. His footsteps echoed in the church, crisp and clear in the momentary silence after Erin’s long speech.

  Hendricks started to draw his sword, slowly, less than an inch at a time. This was going to be tricky, trying not to clue her in. If she was a demon, she’d have super hearing, probably, which meant that as soon as she knew what he was up to … He could smell the damp, lightly chlorinated scent of the baptismal font over in the middle of the entry. If he could drag her over there, dousing her would be a painless way to expel the demon, wouldn’t it? He discarded that idea as bad, because it required him, a human, to drag a demon. Hopelessly optimistic wasn’t even the right word for that. It was more like suicidal, like thinking he could tame a tiger and drag it around by putting it in a headlock.

  No, there was only one thing for it, he thought as he pulled the sword slowly, so slowly, out of the scabbard. He had to do this just right. A little poke in the back and she’d be all good. Just a little—

  His boot scuffed slightly as he started to take another step, and Erin’s head snapped around, her eyes finding him immediately. She didn’t seem surprised or scared, just pissed off when she took in the sight of him with his sword half-drawn, caught in the act. He probably couldn’t have looked more guilty if she’d caught him with his pants around his ankles and his prick in his hands.

  “Fuck,” Duncan said mildly, and then shit went real sideways.

  Erin lashed out, spinning as she came at him. It wasn’t much consolation to know he’d been right when the back of her hand came flying at him with the speed of a Ferrari. He had a little bit of room to maneuver, which was just about all that saved him. He dodged just out of her arm’s sweep, but she caught him along the cheek with a lone finger. It should have felt like a simple flick against the skin but it was like a knife wound instead, like someone had jabbed him in the face with a stick they’d just used to stir the fire. Blood ran down his face and he hurried to draw his sword before she could get any closer, sweeping it out of the scabbard and forcing her to retreat out of the range of the blade. As she did, she yelped, and a trickle of blood ran down her cheek in the exact spot where she’d hit Hendricks.

  “Well, well, well,” Guthrie said, deploying her baton with a CHUNK! “Looks like we got a party crasher. And not a very bright one, either, seeing as she has apparently forgotten the rules in these holy places.”

  Erin’s face had changed, the cheekbones going high and pointed, her eyes going dark, her teeth extending like she’d been bitten by Tom Cruise or something. The blood dripped down her face and she touched it lightly, smearing it along the new lines of the demon’s face. “I am but a watcher,” she said, her voice a little higher and a touch angrier than it had been when she’d been imitating Erin’s. “Watching you all spin in circles, chasing your own tails.” There was malignant glee there, an angry defiance coupled with the flush of success. This demon knew how much her pals had hurt them, and here she was, reveling in it. That burned Hendricks. It burned him a lot.

  “So you people do have rules,” Arch mused, his own sword drawn. “And about churches, no less.”

  “Later, holy man,” Guthrie said, still holding up the baton. “We have bigger problems to deal with at the moment.”

  “You will all of you feel the pain of suffering,” Erin said. “You will feel the pain of vengeance.”

  A gunshot rang out and Erin staggered a step, bobbing forward as she was struck from behind. She half-turned to look, and Reeve was there, holding a gun, a small one. It looked like a back-up pistol at best, the kind of thing you’d tuck away and hope never to use. “We’ve felt it,” Reeve said, looking hard at her. “We all felt it, some more than others. But you … you’re gonna feel the pain of getting your ass wiped out like a bunch of cockroaches.” His face twisted, angry and hateful. “You’re a bunch of plague rats, and you’ve had your goddamned day.” He pulled the trigger again, and Erin staggered from a shot to the face. “We are gonna wipe your ass out, you mark my words on that.”

  Erin stood there only a second, and then leapt up into the air, soaring through the gap between Reeve and Guthrie, who had been circling around to try and catch her unawares. Erin smashed through the stained-glass window that ran the whole side of the church and was gone in a second, disappearing out into the night.

  The church doors burst open and in came Father Nguyen, running, Casey Meacham leading Lauren Darlington a half-dozen paces behind. “What happened?” Nguyen asked breathlessly. “I heard gunfire.”

  “Our villain snuck a demon into Erin,” Hendricks said before anyone else could respond. He stared at the darkness through the enormous hole in the stained-glass.

  “Who?” Nguyen asked.

  “Deputy Harris,” Duncan answered for him. “She tried to … well, she gave Hendricks a good poking.”

  “I remember when it used to be the other way around,” Guthrie cracked.

  Hendricks hand went straight to his cheek. They were right, she’d gotten him, little more than a good scratch as she grazed him. But he’d seen that wound visited right back on her. “Why didn’t that expel the demon?” he asked. “That—whatever it was—”

  “Holy effect,” Guthrie answered, swerving in front of Duncan to respond first, the fucking know-it-all. “Stung her possessor like hell. It’s the least a church can do to a demon. With the appropriate blessings, they can turn up the juice and really make these places intolerable for our kind.”

  “And I’m going to have to do exactly that,” Nguyen said, almost sadly. “I was hoping to avoid it, but I think creating a sanctorum in St. Brigid’s is now at the top of my list of things to do.” He looked at the broken window, and sniffed slightly, probably detecting the aroma of gunshots, Hendricks figured.

  “What do we do about Erin?” Hendricks asked, figuring he’d have to be the one to bring it up. “She’s demon possessed, so—”

  “So is Molly,” Dr. Darlington said as she came up the aisle, Casey Meacham at her side. “They … they took my …” Her lip quivered. “They took her.”

  “They’re trying to take everything,” Reeve said and none of his earlier dottiness was present anywhere on the man. Seeing his deputy turn on them seemed to have snapped him out of whatever half-ass catatonic state he was in. “They will damned sure do it if we just keep sitting back and letting them.”

  “How do we find them, though?” Arch asked. “They could be anyone. Anywhere. They could be next door, or ten miles out in the county. We go house to house, they can pretend they’re not even demons, the way they work.” He gestured toward the middle of the aisle. “We had one standing right here and no one even figured it out until—” He glanced at Hendricks. “How’d you know?”

  “Because they didn’t attack her, apparently,” Hendricks said. “It was kind of a stupid mistake, and I doubt they’ll make it again.”

  “They know us,” Arch said. “They know our families because they’re taking our friends and neighbors. They can guess our weaknesses because they’re sucking up all the knowledge they need from those people to guess what
matters most to us.”

  “They killed my mom,” Dr. Darlington said, almost ghostly. “They stole my daughter.”

  “They killed my wife,” Reeve said, still resolute. He was clutching that pistol in his hand so hard Hendricks worried it might go off, because he couldn’t see whether the sheriff had his finger near the trigger.

  “The law is likely to blame you for that, by the way,” Duncan said, drawing every eye. “Think about it. They could possess your new sheriff and act like he’s going to arrest you on suspicion of killing your own family members. As soon as you comply, he has you in the back of a police car, unarmed, and they could just parade through every single person you’ve ever known and murder them right in front of your eyes while you’re cuffed and in a cage. Just add suffering and they get everything they want.”

  “Don’t trust anybody,” Arch whispered.

  “I never do,” Guthrie said. Hendricks believed her.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Hendricks said, and lifted his hand up, holding it steady in front of him. With a touch, blade to the back of his wrist, he opened a cut no more than a centimeter wide. “I trust the blood to tell the truth.”

  Arch stared at him, eyes smoky, then nodded. “The truth is in the blood.” And he did the same, running his sword blade along the back of his hand just a touch. Dark liquid welled up, then dripped onto the tile floor.

  “Blood will out,” Reeve said, and took his own blade and did the same.

  “Hell, yeah,” Casey Meacham said, pulling out a tomahawk and poking himself with the hard, pointed back edge. “Oops.” He dug it in a couple centimeters, and the blood came oozing out a lot faster than it had for any of the others.

  “Uhhh,” Father Nguyen said, “would everyone please stop bleeding in my church?” He chucked a thumb behind him. “You could just drink holy water, or dip a foot in the baptismal font.”

  “Probably shouldn’t do the former after the latter, though,” Hendricks said, “just for sanitary reasons.”

  Nguyen shook his head, then fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a little glass bottle. With care, he pulled the stopper and dumped a little in his hand, then smeared it down his own face. “See?” He turned around and flicked a little in Dr. Darlington’s face, and she blinked as the water hit her.

  “I’ll have a shot of that, luv,” Lonsdale said, weaseling his way forward. “Not cuts for this lad, please.”

  Guthrie whipped her baton around and smacked him across the hand. “Too late.”

  “Anthony Blunt!” Lonsdale stuck the back of his hand in his mouth. “That fucking hurts!”

  “Yeah, but you’re not a demon,” Guthrie said with a shrug. She looked around. “I trust no one wants us to crack open our shells and prove we’re not possessed?”

  “I’m leaning toward not minding if you did,” Duncan said, and Hendricks could just feel the tension.

  “You don’t count,” Guthrie shot right back.

  “So that’s all of us,” Hendricks said. “And … we’re down quite a few people here.”

  “Yep,” Arch said, nodding solemnly. “We’ve got some who are going to be out for a bit.”

  “And others who aren’t coming back at all,” Reeve said, and goddamn, did he almost make Hendricks want to cry. He just looked so damned sad.

  “We’ve got no plan,” Duncan said, “and I can’t track them.”

  “Obviously,” Guthrie said, “or Home Office wouldn’t have let these douches slip under the radar for all these years.”

  “So … what do we do?” Darlington asked, as vulnerable as Hendricks could recall ever seeing her.

  “We gotta hunt ’em,” Casey Meacham said, stepping into the center of the little circle, his hand dripping blood out of his self-inflicted wound. “We gotta get out there like bloodhounds and sniff around,” he took series of sniffing breaths through his nose, flaring his nostrils comically wide, “put our noses to the ground.” He started to bend over, but then dipped and came right back up. “Shit. I’m feeling a little lightheaded.”

  “You’re bleeding a lot, you idiot,” Darlington said, seeming to come out of her torpor slightly. “Let me stitch you up,” she said a little grudgingly.

  “Even if we wanted to hunt these things like he says,” Reeve asked, “where would we start?”

  Hendricks got the idea at the same time as Arch, apparently, because the big man’s eyes lit up, and he spoke first. “With bait.”

  *

  Brian didn’t say much on the car ride to the hospital. What was there to say? Demons had possessed his body and used it against his will to shoot his own father in the head. Now his dad was racing ahead of them in an ambulance, probably dead by now, and he was stuck bleeding over the back seat of his sister’s car in silence, unable to walk without help, and with the sick worry of not knowing, for sure, whether he’d committed patricide.

  It wasn’t enough that he just had to dwell on that, either. Sometimes being smart was a curse, and this was one of those times, because he’d had all manner of probabilities and possibilities run through his head along the ride, and he didn’t feel comfortable discussing a single one of them with his sister and mother, neither of whom were speaking and neither of whom did he dare speak to right now.

  Because while a demon might have been controlling his actions, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his own family were thinking that Brian had shot his own father. That maybe he could have fought the demon back, somehow, himself.

  He hadn’t told them yet that it wasn’t just one demon, it was at least five, and that while one of them steered him, the other four forced him back, kept him under control, assaulted him in his own mind. He was pretty sure none of that mattered, anyway, because it didn’t change the irrefutable fact: his father had been shot in the head, and he had been the one to pull the trigger.

  He was pretty sure the cops would see it that way, too. Maybe not with Reeve in charge, since he now knew what was what, but Brian doubted the new sheriff in town would just let an easy, open and shut murder case sail by without closing that sucker right on his face. They’d have everything they needed—witnesses who had no alternative story, fingerprints and DNA evidence all over the gun, and no alibi at all. What would he even say? I was in the room, with the gun in my hand, the blood on my clothes, sure, but I didn’t do it! For realsies! Even with his own tendency to try and look for every alternative explanation, Brian himself would have convicted his own ass if he were on the jury.

  And even if by some miracle he was acquitted … he still had the image burned into his brain of shooting his own father in the head. It was like he could see it happening in slow motion when he closed his eyes: the gun rising up to just under his father’s jaw, the crack of shot being fired, the shock and betrayal on his father’s face …

  Brian felt the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach from all the uncertainty and it was almost as bad as the screaming pain from his knee.

  He was clutching his leg but it didn’t help. Squeezing it some seemed to, but it wasn’t bleeding too hard, just a steady trickle. Arch could have done a lot worse than what he’d done, and it didn’t seem like he’d hit any major veins or arteries, but it was still a slow trickle that hadn’t stopped in nearly an hour. Some preliminary scabbing might have been happening near the edges of the wound, but the center was pretty much still wide, no matter how much he tried to press the sides together to speed things along.

  And maybe saddest of all, Brian kept thinking he’d probably have to get a tetanus shot since he’d been cut on metal. That was always a tetanus shot, right?

  ARGHHHHH! Why did his brain keep bringing this stupid thing up? Who gave a fuck if he needed a tetanus shot? He wasn’t a kid anymore, why would his head get stuck in this groove, this rut, this continuous, stupid string of thought, like it had nothing better to fixate on? His father could be dead, and this, THIS was what was on his mind?

  He rubbed a bloody hand across his forehead as he lay across the back seat o
f his mother’s Lincoln. Surprisingly Alison was driving, or perhaps unsurprisingly. They were slowing, now, taking another turn onto a surface road. They’d been off the freeway for a while, so they had to be getting close to the hospital. Soon, they’d know for sure. And that would be good, to know for sure. Because the wait was killing Brian.

  *

  Lauren took her time, took it easy, working on Casey’s hand by first irrigating the wound, then readying butterfly bandages. Stitches might have been better in this situation, with the blood still welling out of the fairly deep wound, but it was arguable, and she didn’t trust her hands not to shake.

  The church was quiet, with Reeve sitting near the entry and Father Nguyen murmuring some sort of chant as he paced around the walls of the church, speaking in Latin. The priest had leaped right to work as soon as things had been settled, and he’d been moving ever since.

  “You got to get me back up and in the fight,” Casey said, almost mewling. She looked right into his eyes and saw some bravado there, the machismo of a man who maybe hadn’t lost anything personally important to him yet. She felt a pang of guilt for criticizing him so harshly in her mind, but it was hard for her not to weigh out the scale with what she’d lost and make comparisons to those around her. Reeve was the only one who would probably understand, and he was just sitting quietly with gun and sword guarding the entry to the church, in case any of these demons brought trouble back before Father Nguyen had put his protections in place.

  “I don’t think they’re coming right now,” Lauren said, washing away some of the blood. She had rubbing alcohol and a first aid kit, which wasn’t a lot to work with, but her medical training had already taken over and she was doing this without even thinking. Which was fortunate, because she wasn’t sure she was too able to think clearly at the moment, either. “I think Hendricks and Arch were right.”