Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “It is All Hallow’s Eve,” Chester whispered, standing back at the edge of the square, looking over the crowd, “and I will take all that you hallow.” No one heard him except for those still within, and they applauded his resolution.

  It was nearly time.

  *

  Ms. Cherry let them off at the square and then just threw her car into park a half dozen paces away, getting out and joining them, not caring that she’d blocked the road. Horns sounded behind them, and Reeve only glanced back. In retrospect, the madam had done something pretty smart there. That might even save a few lives if this thing went downhill.

  “How will we know who we’re supposed to take it to?” Casey asked, keeping his tomahawk low. Reeve glanced back at him, and the taxidermist was showing a sign of nerves that Reeve couldn’t recall seeing from the man before. He was a dirty old pervert, but his bravado had been carrying him along pretty nice until now. His head was swiveling, and he was trying to take the whole crowd in.

  Reeve did the same, in a hurry, and there was so much noise as they hit the back of the crowd that he didn’t know exactly where to look either. Their enemy could have been anywhere, after all, and—

  “To hell with these shoes,” Ms. Cherry muttered. She kicked them off and climbed barefoot up the nearest lamp post a couple feet. She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the orange glow of the setting sun that fell across her olive skin the minute she was out of the shadow of the buildings on the west side of the square. “Look for the people who are standing like stones in a river. The ones unmoved by what’s going on around them—the watchers. Like him!” She pointed out a guy in a black jacket not ten feet away from Reeve.

  Reeve frowned. Cherry had a point, and it wasn’t like he didn’t know what to do here. He eased his way through the crowd up to the guy, his sword in hand, and just leaned forward a little as he went by and poked the tip at the man’s ankle.

  The reaction was immediate: a gasp, and the guy threw his head back like he was going to howl at a moon that had barely started to rise yet. Reeve came around him in time to see the eyes go wild, demon fire sweeping through and leaving him with baby blues as the darkness fled. He realized it was Scott Karshman, and Karshman fell to his knees, gasping for air.

  “Well,” Reeve said, looking back to see Casey, Dr. Darlington and Father Nguyen following behind him, the crowd jostling, not even noticing Karshman fall, “that’s one.”

  *

  Alison was ready by the time they hit the exit ramp for Midian. Guthrie took it at about sixty, barely slowing to make the turn toward town, shooting past Fast Freddie’s and the diner as she accelerated. Alison would have applauded that, but she didn’t know where the OOC’s motives were sitting and could only hope she was telling the truth about being down with the struggle of kicking the Legion out of Midian. Because that was really all that mattered at the moment.

  The town car’s horn blared hard as Guthrie swerved into oncoming traffic and then back into her lane, weaving around an old pickup that wasn’t going nearly as fast as they needed it to. Alison was down with that offensive driving, too, because she had a feeling it was gonna be a close brush this time.

  She’d thought the cow demon was a fucking trip, crazy as hell when she’d scoped it through her rifle. She’d managed to get sights on Gideon the fire-sperm shooter, and the carny of flaming impregnation, too. Kitty Elizabeth and the stupid bikers and the Rog’tausch; she’d taken shots at all of them at various times, cool and dispassionate through her rifle’s scope. She’d seen them, seen what needed to be done, and taken it upon herself to act as exterminator, just like if they were any other kind of varmint.

  Every one of them had had nasty plans. Death, death, and more death, that was what they’d brought. And when challenged, they hadn’t hesitated to try and kill her husband and anyone else who got in the way.

  But not even one of them had veered out of their way to lay utter havoc on a gathering of children. Halloween, for fuck’s sake. It was the next thing to kid day, except for Christmas. People handing out candy to children, and this sorry fucking asshole Legion was going to get in there and profane the damned thing, and not even to execute some grander plan to end the world or assemble a juggernaut demon, or even to get their fucking rocks off.

  They were doing it for petty fucking shitty revenge.

  Going after kids was the lowest of the low in her opinion. The others had had plans that would’ve killed children, but that would have been a by-product. This was targeting, this was the shit she scraped off her boot on a dirty curb next to the other shit already scraped off.

  Alison just steamed in silence. She had her holy dagger and a small Glock with a couple mags, and that was it. If she was lucky, that’d be all she’d need. Her rifle wouldn’t do a damned thing even if she had it, because there was no damned way she was using it in the town square while it was filled with who knew how many kids, even if she had a decent vantage.

  This was up close and personal all the way.

  And as they blew through a stop sign with another blaring of the town car horn, Alison just hoped she could get up close and personal enough with the starter of this fucking bullshit, that bastard that had been standing off with them yesterday morning around the front of that panel van. Because she wanted to gut him nice and slow for this, and watch the devil bleed out of his eyes as she sent his ass right back to hell, where he belonged.

  *

  Lauren had a squirt gun filled with holy water and a letter opener that Father Nguyen had apparently consecrated at some point in the last couple weeks, and that was it. She didn’t have her big water tanks with the industrial soaker nozzle, and she would have looked really funny carrying it across the square in any case. That might have been a dead giveaway that something was amiss, at least for the demons of Legion.

  She watched Reeve stab Scott Karshman in the back of the ankle, about as gently as she could imagine the thing being done without a scalpel and a careful, one-centimeter incision, and she had a feeling things were gonna get bad pretty quick from here. The less warning they could give, the better off they were going to be.

  Ms. Cherry had been a smart addition, she thought. The madam had done a pretty swift bit of thinking, blocking the road and then climbing the lamp post to do spotting. Lauren had a feeling that her incognito state wasn’t going to last very long, especially since they had no headsets, no voice communications, and zero coordination. It wasn’t a small detail, but they were basically just sitting here in a glut, waiting for shit to go down. All the code names in the world wouldn’t help them now, because when it all went south they’d have no way to talk to each other except by shouting across the square, which was sure to be in a panic situation if they were right about what was going to happen here.

  And now that Reeve had just vaped Scott Karshman, ridding him of demon possession, Lauren was more sure than ever that this was the place, this was time, and this was the shit that was going to go down.

  She halted a few steps back from Reeve, trying to figure out how she could be of best use. Reeve was already retreating, carefully, going sideways through the crowd as Karshman was grunting and getting back to his feet. Nguyen brushed past her in his priest black, clutching that cross mounted on the wooden dowel like it was a walking stick, almost like he was costumed for the occasion. Casey was following the sheriff, and Lauren was left to hang back, clutching the letter opener concealed in one pocket and the squirt gun in the other, keeping her head down as she scanned the crowd.

  “Aww, man, what the hell?” Karshman moaned, getting back to his feet. He looked down and moved his foot around to take a look at the spot of pain that appeared to be ailing him. “The hell is going on here?”

  “It’s Halloween, dumbass!” Keith Drumlin shouted at him, tossing a frown at Karshman. Drumlin was standing there with his kids, not even covering their ears as they listened to him call another guy a dumbass. Lauren couldn’t help blinking at the sheer redneckery
on display.

  “Fuck you, Keith!” Karshman fired back, lifting his left foot up and standing on one leg so he could peek at his little wound. “Something bit me. I feel funny.” He looked around. “What the … where are my kids?”

  Lauren felt her own blood cool at that. She was trying not to think of Molly, but the fact was … she had to be here, didn’t she? If this was where the Legion was making their move, that meant Molly was around somewhere, didn’t it?

  Lauren broke off and pushed past a couple people who were chuckling at their kids to reach the nearest lamp post. She jumped up on the little ring where the concrete brace at the base met the first metal, and perched there with her foot using the one inch or so of lip to get a leg up and scan the crowd.

  It was a bigger crowd than she would have figured for this town, for this moment in their history. There had to be a couple hundred people here, and at least half of them were kids, she thought. There were some others in the brew, too, a few obvious plants of Legion, she thought, but there were also some non-parents that were watching with worried looks, like Chauncey Watson, who had his back to the front window of Surrey’s and his arms folded in front of him, his old jacket looking like a relic out of the seventies, if not earlier. He had a couple people with him and they were chatting, showing undisguised looks of concern. One of them was a tall black man that she thought might have been the pastor at the Methodist church—Jones, if she remembered right. She didn’t exactly frequent his establishment. She’d heard the others talking about him, though, as a potential member of the watch, and it looked like he might have come with Chauncey and a couple others to support their local sheriff in their own way. She saw a tall guy with a baseball cap on and thought it might have been Mike McInness, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Lauren turned her attention to the middle of the crowd, where there was a raised dais set up in the middle of the square, just in front of the monument. This thing was put on by County Administrator Pike, yet there was no sign of Pike—nor of Ed Fries, come to think of it. The dais was empty, like high noon before a gunfight. She half expected a tumbleweed to blow across it.

  And then, as she started to look away, Lauren caught the flash of long brown hair near the dais. She focused in, saw the girl turn her head, looking around, cold, calculating, scanning the crowd not like a person here to have a good time, but like …

  Like a person looking for targets.

  Lauren dropped from the lamp post and landed hard, twisting her ankle slightly and ignoring it as she started across the square toward the middle. She limped a little, just pushing past the pain, trying to get through the crowd to the center. Trying to get to …

  Molly.

  *

  Braeden was waiting for somebody to say something, for Pike to stick his head up and make a little speech, as he was probably bound to do given he’d gone to the trouble of setting this whole shindig up. That was fine with Braeden because so far it was looking reasonably successful to him. People were here, people were excited, and the sense of life in this place was infectious. He’d been to Surrey’s Diner a few days ago and the square had been dead at midday. Not a good look for the place, not that there weren’t already enough boarded-up windows to give it that effect anyway most days. Midian didn’t need to lose what little vitality it had left.

  He wanted to see this place come up like a boxer knocked down in the eighth round. Like Rocky in the last movie, rising back up with that look in his eyes, telling his opponent, Your ass ain’t knocking me down. Braeden wasn’t much for princess tales, though he watched them obviously, but to him Midian getting back to its feet was a Cinderella story right up there with an underdog winning the World Series. Against the Yankees.

  “Daddy, when do we get the candy?” Abi asked, practically vibrating. She stopped and waved, the little pumpkin bucket causing her coat sleeve to slide up as she let it run up her wrist. Braeden looked and saw she was waving to Brenda Matthews, and Braeden nodded stiffly at her. She had a real unpleasant expression, her mouth a thin line, worried and watching, keeping her kid on a short leash in front of her.

  “Soon, baby,” Braeden said, feeling himself continue to relax. It was a festive atmosphere in the square, and just then the lamps all came on, shedding their light around. How could anything bad happen here?

  *

  Guthrie brought the car to a screaming stop one intersection away from the square, and Hendricks was about ready to thank a God he didn’t believe in and maybe even add a “Hallelujah!” for good measure. Things had gotten pretty bad when they’d gotten off the interstate, and a couple times he had wondered if Guthrie had intended to just kill them now rather than let them get in a rumble with this Legion demon in the square, because her driving suggested that saving lives was about the last damn thing on her mind.

  “I would have thought being in a shell-cracking car accident would have made you a safer driver,” Hendricks said as he got out of the car, which Guthrie had just left in the middle of the street. She wasn’t the only one who’d done this, to be fair; double and triple parking made the block leading up to the square pretty goddamned impassable by anything other than foot traffic.

  “It wasn’t the car crash that did it,” Guthrie said tersely, slamming her door behind her. “It was really the falling off the mountain that made that shit happen.” She started striding toward the square with a purpose, and that purpose was starting shit, because she had her baton in hand. She wasn’t sparing the horses here, either, leaping up on top of a Jeep Cherokee with a single bound and peering out into the square beyond.

  “See anything?” Duncan asked, his own baton in hand. He stopped next to the Jeep, head on a level with Guthrie’s shoes, and stared out into the square himself.

  “Feel anything?” Arch offered, and Hendricks thought it might have been the big man’s version of a joke. It fell flat, of course, like most of his attempts at humor did.

  “No,” Duncan said, “but I can’t feel these things.”

  “I think I see ’em,” Guthrie said, her lips a thin, thin line. “Like islands of pissed-off in the middle of a sea of happy.” She glanced down at Alison, Arch, and Hendricks, all lingering a step or two behind Duncan.

  “And …?” Alison asked. She had her knife clutched tight, clearly anticipating the crap coming down.

  Guthrie didn’t emote much, but it almost looked like she swallowed dramatically. “And … I think we’re gonna need a bigger watch.”

  *

  Arch was not exactly feeling the thrill when Guthrie made her pronouncement. He was already hovering on the edge, trying to figure out what the next move was, ready to charge into a sea of innocent people that were clearly sitting in the midst of the world’s biggest trap. The problem was, he couldn’t see the jaws, not like Guthrie apparently had, saying they were outnumbered in her own sort of way.

  Well, the watch had been outnumbered by demons in this town for quite a while, and though they’d certainly taken their share of shots to the chin lately, Arch didn’t consider himself the sort to just lay down and let bad things happen, no matter what the odds against them were. “We need to get in there,” he said, resolute as he’d ever been.

  “But where in there?” Alison asked. She was a fair bit shorter than him, of course, and was standing up on her tippy toes, trying to see through. She’d been a raw nerve the whole ride, madder than mad, madder than he could recall ever seeing her, but trying to hold it all in.

  “I see a few,” Duncan said and exchanged a look with Guthrie.

  “I got eyes on a few more,” Guthrie said, shrugging. “I go this way, you go that?” She pointed right, then left.

  “Okay,” Duncan said and he headed off to the left.

  “I’m going with you,” Alison said, veering off after him into the crowd. It was a pretty decent-sized bunch, but it was thin enough that when Duncan started pushing his way through, he didn’t have to work too hard at it, and Alison just trailed along in his wake, hands burie
d under her coat, ready for action.

  He thought about going with her, after her, or at least grabbing a kiss before they parted, but she ran off after Duncan and Guthrie grabbed his attention before he could dwell on it. “Where the fuck is the cowboy going?” Guthrie asked, craning her neck to look. She was a fair sight shorter than him too, though taller than Alison.

  Arch got his answer the moment he looked right over the heads of the crowd and caught the same thing Hendricks had. “Erin,” he said when he saw the flash of blond hair hanging in the middle of a knot of people on the back side of the monument, away from the dais set up on the east side of the square. He watched the cowboy hat moving straight along toward her like he was being pulled on a string. “Do we go after him?” he asked. He looked back to Guthrie to find her cutting through the crowd, heading in the direction she’d told Duncan she was going, not waiting for him to decide.

  After a second’s thought, Arch came to the conclusion that spreading out and snapping off as many of these Legion demons as he could was a lot more important than involving himself in whatever Hendricks was trying to do. Probably ambush Erin and free her up. With a shake of his head, Arch took off after Guthrie, figuring the veteran demon hunter could probably handle Erin all on his own.

  *

  Braeden waved at Sam Allen, who was about twenty feet away from him behind a couple groups of teenagers in some pretty half-assed costumes, like they’d just come out the door wearing any old thing for the candy. Sam waved back, smiling thinly, his wife a step behind him and their ten-year-old hanging next to ’em. Braeden remembered the words they’d exchanged at the meeting, and he was gladder than ever he’d backed Pike when it came down to it. The only demons in Midian were the kids dressed like devils.