Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  The demon finished its grim work, and pieces went flying. The head came shooting off at Hendricks with a good bit of steam behind it, and he couldn’t dodge it quite in time. It clocked him right in the skull, knocked his hat off and dropped him to the ground, the dusky square and the violence of the attack disappearing in the flash of light and the painful skull-on-skull contact that surged through the bone around his eye.

  Hendricks felt his ass hit the grass, his sword falling out of stunned fingers. Someone tripped on his legs and it fucking hurt, but not as bad as the skull shot he’d just taken. It was like a headbutt from hell, and really, that was about what it was, hell chucking a disembodied head right into his kisser. He was just lucky it had hit bone on bone, because if it had hit him in the lips he figured would have been spitting blood and teeth, maybe even gotten knocked out.

  He had just pried his eyes open when the fingers wrapped around his neck and dragged him up to his feet. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to scramble for his switchblade until his feet were already dangling off the ground. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; the knife was gone, and so was his hat, just as out of reach as his sword.

  “Hello, Lafayette,” a harsh, grinding demon voice squeezed its way out from between Erin Harris’s lips. She was grinning like he’d never seen Erin grin, not even in all the times they’d screwed. A demon-length tongue flitted between sharp teeth, and Hendricks suddenly had a sinking feeling that he was gonna get screwed by her again pretty soon.

  *

  Alison wasn’t in the worst of it, that she was pretty sure, or else she just wasn’t seeing the worst of it, because of her height. The crowd was thinning as this thing dragged on and people either ran or got killed. She’d seen both, sometimes both at the same time. Rob Kinney had caught a demon punch from his wife right to the chest, impaling him. She reckoned based on the rumors it wasn’t the first time Sally Kinney had penetrated her husband, but from the way his eyes shut after looking at her in complete disbelief for about five seconds, it was gonna be the last.

  The slaughter had been going on for maybe thirty seconds or a minute, she couldn’t tell. If someone had told her it had been an hour, she wouldn’t have been surprised, because she’d already tripped over three corpses in her scramble to put a halt to this. She didn’t want to look down, either, because the first time she did, she saw something nauseating that she couldn’t ever unsee, no matter how many years she lived, and it just made her madder and sicker and more ready than ever to gut the fucker responsible for this.

  Alison poked Sally Kinney in the back harder than she needed to, getting her right in the shoulder as she went by, and Sally jerked, her husband’s corpse still hanging off her arm. She dropped immediately, dragged down by weight her human muscles couldn’t hold up now that the demon strength had left her, and underneath the torrent of cries and moans, Alison caught Sally Kinney’s very distinct howl of disbelief that seemed a perfect counterpoint to Rob Kinney’s look of betrayal as his wife had killed him.

  Alison didn’t have time to comfort Sally, though, and she damned sure didn’t have time to waste. She’d lost sight of Duncan in the opening fracas, and she caught a glimpse of him now as a couple demons came jumping out of the crowd to land on him. She saw his t-shirt, the red one with the Millennium Falcon schematic, get shredded under long fingernails powered by demon strength, and another cry rang out from her left. “Send the OOC back to the inferno!”

  Alison snapped her head around and saw him, standing at the edge of the square, up against the boarded up front to the old secondhand clothing store. It was the guy from yesterday morning, the one Reeve had cuffed. Patient zero in this whole contagion, the one who’d brought this shitshow to town. He was the head carnival barker of the damned as far as Alison was concerned, and she peeled off from helping Duncan without a thought. This was her chance to end this fucking disaster, or, failing that, at least put the stop to the bastard responsible for it.

  *

  Braeden Tarley had never shot another human being before, and as he fired his first round out of his revolver, he wasn’t sure whether he still had or not.

  The world around him was like a slow-motion dance of death. Abi was screaming under his arm. He had her tucked under tight, his forearm wrapped around her little ribcage as he started forward on quivering legs, his pistol out in front of him. He was looking through the back sights and they seemed comically large, like football goalposts with the front sight somewhere in the distance. Beyond that was a blur of unfocused motion, and the faint outline of a face and yellowed eyes, and Braeden squeezed the trigger without seeing much other than that.

  He didn’t even hear the shot, but he saw the barrel flash right into someone. He jerked the trigger again, knowing for a fact that his pull wasn’t anything close to smooth but so goddamned scared and frantic he couldn’t stop it. The barrel flashed again, light in the dusky dark, something flickering around him like streetlights losing power.

  Braeden pulled the trigger unevenly again, still staring right down those massive gun sights. They were so small the last time he went to the range, like the size of his pinky finger with a notch between them, and now they were enormous, like two tombstones sticking out of the back of his gun, which suddenly seemed big enough to launch artillery out of.

  The world snapped back into normal motion, and Braeden felt wet warmth running down his leg. Whether it was piss or blood, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He held Abi tight and she was still screaming at the top of her lungs, not even a cogent word coming out of her.

  Braeden saw something coming at him from the left, out of the corner of his eye, but he couldn’t focus on it. It was almost like his eyes just couldn’t snap to, couldn’t get on what he was looking at. He whirled and fired, more out of panic than anything, because that was the side Abi was on, and he turned to try and play keep away from whatever the hell it was—

  His eyes snapped into focus on gnarled teeth and a face that was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. The eyes were glowing at him, bulging, like they were gonna leap right out and jump into his own. There was a stink in the air like dirty diapers and Braeden’s whole body felt like a live wire had dropped on him at some point, he was so damned rigid.

  He fired again and didn’t even feel the jerk of the revolver. He saw the light at the end of the barrel again and went to squeeze the trigger again but this time there was no flash. He’d lost count of how many shots he’d fired, and that face—

  Good God, that face!

  —was coming right at him. Braeden threw up his right arm and felt something snap as he took a hit to his forearm. It didn’t hurt, but he damned sure knew he’d been hit. It hit again, this time at his elbow, and he saw someone swatting at him with real strength. There was something wrong with the angle of his arm, and he was dimly aware that it didn’t normally hang like that. His fingers were numb and the pistol was gone out of them, and he blinked in surprise as he realized all these things—

  Jesus.

  Abi’s screams had faded to a low wailing, and Braeden turned his head to see her sliding through his left arm. Her jacket was all bunched up where gravity had started pulling her through his grip, and he could feel the bare flesh of her belly against his left hand where he was clutching onto her for dear life. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was wide open like the day they’d met, when she’d come out of her mother and greeted the world with top-of-the-lungs screaming, changing his life forever.

  Braeden tried to raise that right hand up to defend her again, but it stubbornly refused to move below the elbow. The forearm sagged, broken, out of commission, rips in his sleeve like something with claws had shredded its way through. He hadn’t felt a bit of it beyond the impact, but he was bleeding, sure enough, and now that his hand was out of the way he could see that face again—

  That fucking face!

  —and it was all yellow eyes and bared teeth, and for some reason words from Abi’s favorite bedtime book, Wh
ere the Wild Things Are, came springing out to mind. Braeden scrambled back on weak legs, holding himself between Abi and that thing, that fucking thing—

  That Demon.

  —so it couldn’t get at her. His feet were on solid concrete now, and he didn’t even remember getting to the sidewalk or the road around the square, he just remembered that he damned sure needed to get the fuck outta here, back to the truck.

  There was a smell like sulfur from somewhere behind him, and Braeden didn’t know where it came from, but it beat the hell out of the smell of shit. He looked back and saw Barney Jones, the pastor of the Methodist church with a fire axe in his hands, and he brought it down on someone’s arm, taking that sucker right off at the elbow. Braeden would have blinked in surprise, but he need to turn back to the thing that was after him, the thing that was—

  Right there.

  —following him, except there were three of them now, and if they’d ever had human faces, they were buried under the blood that surrounded the teeth and lingered under the eyes that were yellow as the bees in that book of Abi’s where they were learning the alphabet.

  Abi’s scream found voice again as Braeden stumbled on a curb. He didn’t even have time to wonder Who the fuck put a curb there? before he twisted, landing hard on his back and keeping Abi from smacking the pavement. He took it all on the right side of his ass and all the way up to the shoulder blade, and the distant pain was enough to loosen his grip on his daughter just a little.

  When they landed, she bounced against him, turning so that her forehead bopped Braeden right in the sternum. He felt it, but not as bad as she did, her face scrunching up to cry. Before it had been all red-faced screams, but now it was the welling tears of pain. He felt it, knew it was coming—

  I’m sorry, baby doll.

  —and something about it reminded him of Jennifer, the way she’d done that same tear-up-before-crying routine one night when he’d thought they were gonna break up but they didn’t. It was the first time he saw her cry, but it wasn’t near the last.

  Abi looked up at him, the glistening droplets of water forming in the corners of her eyes, her face perfectly poised like it always did when she was about to cry, and then—

  Dear God.

  —it stopped, pain giving way to fear, that lurch of rolling uncertainty that followed a sudden drop. She didn’t have time to be scared, not fully, but it flashed across her face in that instant, cradled in his arms—

  His baby.

  —and pressed against his chest, just like when she was born, just like her mother had done so many times before that, sitting in that perfect place that he’d saved for the two girls in his life—

  Oh, Abilene.

  —and he felt the first hard jerk against his arms, tugging. And the scream that Abi let out was pain, pure pain firing every nerve in her little body as awareness crashed in around her and she cried in fear and pain—

  Oh, God, no.

  —Braeden held on, held on tight, his own panic and pain setting in, jerking fast like all his muscles went into knots, and his left arm felt the pressure of resistance as Abi tried to hold on tight as she could, as her armpits made contact with him, something ripping at her, trying to tug her out of his grasp—

  Like a reverse birth, dragging her out of his arms, out of the world.

  —and he held on tighter, because he had to, he was—

  Her daddy.

  —outmatched, and he had no strength left in his right arm but he brought it around anyway limply, trying to get hold of her anyway he could. The look on her face as they were tearing her away from him was agonized—

  Tearing her apart.

  —and he screamed, “ABI!” at the top of his lungs but he couldn’t even hear himself in the middle of the tempest in the town square. His daughter’s face was white as fresh linens, her little lips frozen open and crying—

  I was supposed to protect you. I promised your mother I would …

  Braeden lost her then as she slipped away, just like her momma, except this time he watched her die in front of his eyes, to those yellow eyes, and those nasty teeth, and he couldn’t look away, not for one second, as for the second time in Braeden Tarley’s life he lost the most important girl in his whole world.

  12.

  Reeve was losing his goddamned mind, losing track of what was going on around him, and shit was slipping away fast into the realm of un-fucking-salvageable. He was stuck in the corner of the square, a roar of people stampeding back the way he’d come in, a herd thinning by the moment as unspeakable violence was unleashed. Reeve was watching children die by the dozen, adults being torn to pieces by hellspawn, and it was all he could do to keep from throwing up while he was stabbing wildly at every demon he could lay steel on.

  He watched a little boy that was probably no older than his eldest grandson, seven or so, get shredded in the teeth of Ryan Flanigan, and Reeve stabbed out as hard as he could, but it was way too goddamned late by the time he got Flanigan in the side. He was dimly aware that he might have caused more damage than he’d intended to, not holding back much as he stabbed, but he had no time to worry or think about that.

  Ms. Cherry was still on the lamp post, shouting at people to get their asses over toward her, past her, but he could barely hear her over the clamor. He blinked a couple times when he saw her up there, and then she pointed to something and he lost focus on her.

  Lonsdale the demon hunter came screaming into the fray behind him, his sword up over his head, and brought it down on Lisa Melman, splitting her damned head clean in two, driving out the demon but killing the woman, too. Reeve was about to say something when another demon, this one in the form of Dave Klapper, drove a hand right through the back of Lonsdale’s head, splattering his goddamned code-speaking brain as he smashed the Brit’s skull. Dave Klapper took a hard hit to the side of the head from a shining brass cross mounted on a long wooden rod, and thumped to the ground out of sight under Lonsdale’s empty-headed corpse.

  “Nicely done, Father Nguyen,” Reeve said, not sure whether to be grateful or sorry that Lonsdale had been killed, especially given what he’d done to Lisa Melman. But there wasn’t time to think about it. There’d be a time for grieving later, and he knew he’d be drinking his fill of it. For now he spun back around in time to see Casey bring down the sharp end of his tomahawk across Miguel Gallardo’s hand, poking straight through tendon and bone and causing the man to scream as he expelled a demon.

  The crowd was thinning ahead, through slaughter and retreat, and Reeve could see Duncan with about a mountain of demons on him; five circling him and striking, weaving in and out like sharks, and in the second he took to pause and reflect on it, four more came out of the crowd at the OOC.

  That decided it for Reeve, and he headed straight for Duncan, hoping somehow maybe if he could help the expert demon, Duncan just might be able to help him stop this shit once and for all.

  *

  Lauren was sick watching Molly possessed, like seeing her perform in a school play turned into a slasher monster movie. Her daughter’s mouth was dripping red, glistening, gushing it under the flickering lamplight as the scene of hellish chaos unfolded.

  Lauren had nothing handy but her squirt gun filled with holy water, and she spritzed Mark Beckwith in the face as he came at her with demon eyes, not even turning to look at the man as he screamed and burst into flames. She didn’t dare look to see if the demon was excised, because she was too busy staring at Molly, unable to tear her eyes away as Molly hefted a two-year-old and killed her with one bite in a scream of venomous glee.

  “Molly!” Lauren shouted, not intending to tip her hand as she approached but unable to hold it in any more. Part of her was just churning, knowing her daughter was in there somewhere, was inside that thing, watching it commandeer her body and tear apart innocent people.

  Molly looked right at her, grinning, blood dribbling down her chin, yellow demon eyes glowing like headlamps but fainter. Molly leapt right at h
er, coming down only a couple feet away. She swept in behind Lauren before Lauren could even get a squirt off, and suddenly there was a hard yanking pressure on her wrist and Molly had her hand bent up behind her back. The squirt gun tumbled loose to the ground with a faint clatter that was barely audible under the anarchy as Molly spun Lauren back around and then slammed her against a light pole that winked out as Lauren felt the pressure of the metal against her back.

  “Hi, Mom,” Molly said in a guttural voice, far removed from the normal sweetness or even the occasional snark that she directed at her mother. There was nothing of that here, nothing familiar, nothing decent.

  All that was left was a demon, staring into her eyes.

  Molly breathed out at her, and blood drooled out down her chin in a little wave, like a tide crashing out and splattering down the front of her dress and all along the flat bit of her upper chest that was exposed. “Do you like what you see? What I’ve become?”

  “You’re not … Molly,” Lauren barely got out around the hand clamping her throat. This was all a game to them, to these things. It was revenge in the most painful possible way, infliction of pain for the sake of it. Lauren’s right hand was still numb from the hit she’d taken at the start of this, but she could feel her fingers again, and she snaked them into her pocket as she dangled in her daughter’s grasp.

  “But Mommy,” Molly said, mockingly, keeping Lauren pinned in the air, just enough pressure on her collarbone to keep her from getting choked out but not nearly enough to stop her from feeling lightheaded. As if the numbness in her fingers hadn’t been enough to work around … “How can you say that? We’re family.” Her daughter cackled in way that reminded Lauren of a witch from an old movie. “You know what would make you feel better?” Lauren felt the letter opener there, just inside her pocket, waiting, as Molly sprang the answer on her. “How about some killing—you and me, together? It’d be like a family reunion, and then, when we’re done … you can watch me slit my own throat.”