Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  Lauren grunted, her fingers finally closing around the letter opener’s handle as Molly cocked her head to listen to Lauren’s reply: “Or I could just do it for you right now.”

  Molly’s eyes widened and she brought up a hand, lightning-fast, to block Lauren’s path to her neck. It was a funny thing, survival instinct, Lauren thought as she watched the demon move her daughter’s body to protect itself. Even shit-stain, worthless demons had it.

  Lauren slammed the letter opener tip-first into Molly’s wrist, the one attached to the hand anchoring her in place, and heard a whoosh of air before the sulfur smell hit her in the face like someone had crammed a carton of rotten eggs up her nostrils, full force. Lauren dropped and caught herself, barely, knuckles of the hand clutching the letter opener hitting the ground. Molly hit her knees, the black fire roiling as the yellow eyes disappeared back to hell.

  Lauren felt her breath come back in a rush as her head bobbed forward uncontrollably as she landed. She took a breath, then another, before she heard a faint “… Mom?”

  She looked up and saw the fear and terror in Molly’s eyes, the tears already starting, and Lauren didn’t hesitate. She pulled her daughter to her and hugged her tight, ignoring the war going on around them.

  *

  Amanda was getting swarmed by an endless wave of these damned drones, a few fucking essences stacked into a human body and unleashed with blood-spitting rage on these townsfolk. The good news for Amanda was that she hadn’t caught the eye of the damned king shit of these things. The bad news was that she knew Duncan had, because she’d heard him scream something about sending the OOC back to the inferno, and doubted it was happy times on the other side of the square.

  Hell, there were no happy times anywhere in this square, except maybe for the bastards doing the damage.

  “This is not going to be easy to contain,” Guthrie muttered as she slammed a baton through the nose of a human, expelling the demon that had just caused him to eat a kid, but probably not doing him any favors in the process. There was no way Home Office was going to be anything but flaming pissed about this fuckup. This was not the simmer they’d sent him back to ensure. This was beyond a boil, and sadly, Guthrie didn’t see any way to turn the heat down after a massacre like this.

  *

  “How about you lick my snatch, Hendricks?” Erin asked him, yellow eyes full of pissed-off glee, having a grand old fucking time. Hendricks felt his skin crawl, a full-body shudder even as she squeezed him by the neck, hanging him in the air.

  The light of day was damned near exhausted, sun well past the horizon line, the lamps around the square flickering on and off like they were suffering from a power shortage. The chaos around him was fading, the numbers of Midian’s citizens flagging as some of them got their feet beneath them and took off, and a little from the fact that there seemed to be fewer demons running around than there had been a few minutes ago. Maybe they’d gone to a bar or something, Hendricks didn’t know.

  All he knew was that he was looking into the face of one right now as it squeezed the fucking life out of him, thumb pressing so hard into his windpipe he couldn’t even speak. “I … won’t …” It was a labor of all he had just to get that out.

  “But you would for another demon girl?” Erin’s smile was a sick thing, a twisted distortion of the one from the girl herself, wider and broader somehow, the demon teeth on full display, like she’d gotten a Joker smile at some point in the last day. “You’re not making me feel special, Lafayette.”

  His skin was clammy cold, the sun was setting behind his eyes, and his brain was starting to get hazy. “You’re …”

  “I can’t hear you, Hendricks,” she said, pulling him closer. Hot, stinking demon breath washed over him, like Erin hadn’t brushed her teeth in a decade. It had a faint trace of sulfur and he gagged from memory and the association. It took him back to lying on the hard ground, staked in place. Erin lowered him down and he felt his knees bump the ground. He looked up into her face, shadowed and shaded by the growing dusk, and for a moment he thought Kitty Elizabeth was standing over him again, and he felt cold as a Wisconsin winter.

  There was no fight left in his muscles, no life left in his fingertips. He felt sick, but it was a distant sort of sick, like his stomach was a million miles away and unable to respond. He stared up at Kitty—no, Erin—and she looked down on him with that same maniacal joy that Kitty Elizabeth had shown when she held him down—

  —dominated him—

  —tortured him—

  —broke him—

  —and took his will and desire and lust and everything left that had made him feel alive.

  The sound of screaming and crying faded around him with the rest of the world, and Hendricks couldn’t feel anything but the hand at his throat and his knees against the hard ground. All he could see was that face, that terrible face—

  Like the one that killed Renee …

  “I can’t hear you, Lafayette,” Erin said with that wide, glowing smile, “and no one else will, either, ever again, after you—”

  The yellow eyes went wide, and there was a burst of nauseating sulfur that triggered Hendricks’s gag reflex. Erin’s hand vanished from his throat, jerked away as she herself spun, mouth open, darkness swirling within, threatening to swallow Hendricks whole as he stood there.

  Erin hit her knees, falling to his side like she’d been kicked away. He turned as all his weight came down and he caught himself on weak hands, watching Erin drop, watching her curl up on her side. He saw the demon essence swirl out of her as her eyes returned to normal.

  “… Hendricks?” Erin said, voice hoarse and scratchy. Her mouth looked back to ordinary, and the gap between her front teeth was between human teeth now, not demon ones.

  He stared at her, afraid to trust his eyes. He was toast, dead, about to get the life squeezed out of him at the hands of a goddamned sick, torturous demon. Who would …?

  He turned his head and looked up, and there she stood, her hair all aglow like a raging fire, watching over him like an avenging angel—hell, maybe she really was—and when she offered him a hand, he took it, and she pulled him to his feet.

  “Thanks …” Hendricks said, barely getting it out around his throat, which felt like someone had pounded it with a wooden dowel for a week after he’d had a long drink of broken glass, “… Starling.”

  Starling regarded him with care and nodded, then a second later she was gone, leaving Hendricks to fall back on his haunches there in the square, unable to find the strength to get to his feet, the sounds of battle fading with the last of the day.

  *

  Arch had been stabbing every pair of yellow eyes he could see, pushing his sword point into shoulders and elbows and buttocks and every other place he could sneak in and lay one on these suckers. The smell of sulfur was a constant now, and he’d had enough of the devils charge him that he could confidently say he’d done his part in ridding the town of this mess.

  But as he looked around him, he saw way too much death and carnage to consider his modest efforts much of a success.

  There were dead and dying people everywhere, and of the dying, most of them weren’t of the fixable variety. These demons had gone in with more viciousness than Arch would have expected from a pack of rabid wolves and with more strength than a bull elephant. There were a lot of pieces missing from a lot of folks, and his shoes had been sticking with every step, like he was walking on a movie theater floor. This was a little more slick, though, and he didn’t want to dwell on the why.

  Arch could see Guthrie snaking her way around the square to the far side, following the path she’d agreed on with Duncan to start with. The most he could say about what the OOC was doing was that she was probably lowering the final kill count, but she was leaving a trail of pretty battered people in her wake. Maybe even some dead, though Arch wasn’t watching closely and didn’t want to know. It wasn’t as though he could just drop what he was doing and have a throwdown with her
right now. That would have been suicide for both of them, given that there were still more than a few Legion drones zipping around, trying to get fresh blood.

  Arch spun to look back in the direction Alison had headed, and the crowd had cleared enough that he saw a couple funny things. One was Hendricks and Erin, the cowboy kneeling and Erin down on all fours, looking like she was working hard to come up. They were a little away from the monument at the center of the square, and he took only a little notice of them because his eyes flew immediately to what he saw beyond them about thirty or forty feet.

  Alison.

  She was walking with a purpose, heading straight for someone, and it took his eyes a second to adjust in on who she was going after. When he saw, it took him a moment more to realize who it was.

  It was the dadgummed sonofagun who started this all. Arch knew him, because he was the one who’d been there yesterday morning when this whole thing started.

  Arch stabbed his sword into the shoulder of a demon coming at him and peeled off in a hurry, breaking into a run as he headed after Alison, meaning to follow his wife to the end of this thing.

  *

  Reeve figured out pretty quick that Duncan had shit under control. He was swinging his arms and his baton hard enough to crack skulls, and he was laying people out hard. He’d put down a good six or seven demons, but twice that many more were coming for him, the OOC serving as a kind of lightning rod for these shits as they ran out of human prey, what with the crowd in the square thinned by flight and death.

  As much as Reeve wanted to wade into that and get him some, he figured that hanging on the perimeter of Duncan’s fight was the wiser course, taking a poke at a demon as it darted by, trying to get at the OOC. He expelled that motherfucking squatter from Sheila Nielsen’s body and sent her gasping to the ground as the black fire ran through her eyes. He grabbed Sheila by the back of the collar and dragged her away from the fray, trying his level best to protect while he was serving up cold fucking vengeance for these demon motherfuckers.

  He was about ready to circle like a shark again when he caught sight of something beyond Duncan’s little whirlwind of hell that got him looking. He thought he caught sight of Alison Stan, but she disappeared behind a couple parents running with their kids clutched tight to their chests, screaming as they hurried past. He saw her again as they got away from her and realized she was heading toward the edge of the square beyond, walking right toward some swarthy dude in a flannel shirt. Reeve watched her, perplexed, and then he realized exactly what he was looking at.

  It was that monkey fucker he’d cuffed before shit went haywire yesterday and started this shitstorm.

  Reeve didn’t even hesitate; Alison was just stalking toward the bastard like he was a deer in the woods, and it looked like he was prepared to meet her just the same. Reeve skirted the edge of Duncan’s fight, but something that looked like a torso came skidding out at him and took his legs from beneath him, sending him plummeting face first to the road, hard. He caught himself on both hands but felt the pavement give him a road rash on one palm and across his fingers on the other hand, elbows stinging from the impact. That rib he’d fucked up yesterday blazed with pain, and he moaned, low and long, trying to get his wits gathered about him. It took a minute.

  When he looked up again, Alison was behind the fight with Duncan, and Reeve started to push to his feet, damned sure he wasn’t going to let her get all the satisfaction of ripping apart the motherfucker who’d killed Donna.

  *

  Alison hadn’t been counting the seconds since hell had broken loose in the square, but she had a decent estimate and guessed that all the blood currently covering the streets and grass of the square had been let in less than two minutes’ time. It had been a frenzied mass of chaos, like a fight between wild badgers in a telephone booth, but now the streets were clearing, people running the hell away as the last of the demons on this side of the square were congregating on Duncan, trying to get him down.

  Alison had faith in Duncan. He was tough; he could take it. And even if he couldn’t, he’d distract these bastards long enough for the innocent people that had been stacked up in the square from one side to the other to get a chance to escape. They were running for the exits now, and she’d seen faces filled with terror of the primal sort, like they knew hell was coming two steps behind them.

  In the middle of it all, past a street strewn with the corpses of women and men and children, Alison was locked onto the guy who started this fucking mess. She tried not to swear so much around Arch, but it was tough sometimes, especially when she got ornery.

  And she was nothing but ornery now.

  She stalked up to him with her Glock clenched tight in one hand, her dagger in the other. He was just lingering there, staring at her, knowing she was coming for him and plainly unworried in the least. “What’s your name?” she called out, slowing down so she could give her hands a second to quit shaking. Her hands never shook, not with the rifle, and she had zero room for fear at the moment. But this … this motherfucker … had her so viscerally angry that her guts were quaking with rage, her hands quivering as she tried to pull back on the wild horses urging her to run up and cap his ass right in the fucking face until the slide locked back, to jab him in the neck a dozen times, just hoping the demon eyes would stick around so he could feel it every time she did.

  She wanted to fill the square with his blood the way this fucker had done to her people, her friends. She saw faces staring dead at the dark heavens above, faces she knew from work and around town, the faces of men who smiled at her, women who chatted with her, kids who took the lollipops she gave out at the checkout lanes sometimes.

  She saw families lying dead, people bleeding out their life’s blood around her, taking their last breaths while trying to reach out with quivering hands to touch their loved ones one last time. Michael Dougherty was crawling, his neck wide open, red sluicing down, trying to shake his eight-year-old son, who was missing … God, he was missing half his head.

  Alison looked away, unable to take even the slight dose it was sending right to her heart. They’d come here to protect these people, they’d assembled to protect this town.

  And they’d failed.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, stopping just shy of the sidewalk where he stood, this colossal bastard, this first-rate demon turd shat out of hell on tongues of the devil’s own fire. She’d taken up arms when the demons had come after her, after her husband, but she hadn’t taken it as personally as she was this—this—this fucking outrage.

  “We are Legion,” the man said simply.

  Alison stood there, letting her hand shake as she tried to do combat breathing, something Hendricks had taught her to get her heart rate under control. Because right now, she doubted she’d be able to shoot for shit, even if she emptied the mag at him from five feet away. “That’s your whole rump state’s name. I’m talking about yours, the guy who’s talking to me right now.” She looked right at him and waited, expectantly.

  He smiled faintly. “We speak as one.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Go high enough, there’s always a fucker at the top of the pyramid.”

  He stared at her with steely eyes. “My name is Chester.”

  She kicked herself for not remembering. “Chester,” she said slowly. “And your friend’s name was … William.”

  Chester lost his smile immediately. “We lost many friends—”

  “You lost William,” she said, driving that arrow deep in the fresh wound she saw.

  Chester darkened slightly, bare bones of a scowl popping up on that face of his. She hated that face, wanted to use her knife to carve it off so she could have a bonfire and burn it while she watched the flesh melt. She’d never considered herself a particularly violent person, but that reticence was fading away pretty quick. “I lost William,” Chester said, once he’d settled a bit, that dark shroud rolling down over him as he tried to cloak his emotions. “But I was not the only
one in this body who lost, and I am not the only one enraged.”

  “No,” she agreed, her breathing nearly under control, “you’re damned sure not.”

  Alison raised the Glock and fired, landing the first shot in right in Chester’s belly, driving him back a step. She fired twice more, planting them both in center mass, right inside the ten ring like her daddy taught her. His face showed signs of strain, reddening as his essence took the hits.

  Alison strode forward, up onto the curb, firing as she advanced. She didn’t get fancy, she didn’t go for head shots, because there was no advantage to be had there. The smell of burnt-off gunpowder flooded her nostrils, and she came at him slowly, enjoying every gentle, careful squeeze of the trigger. Chester took the hits with surprise, alarm racing across his face as Alison came closer and closer. She kept her cool, kept her calm, planning to demolish him with efficiency and calculation, not daring to take any chances that might let this snakey fuck slither out of the square to do any more damage.

  “Just like you taught me, Daddy,” she whispered as she fired again and again, right into his chest. She could see her father in her head, imagine him lying in the bed, like he was tethered to torturous unconsciousness by the mere possibility of Chester’s continued existence.

  Well, she’d take care of that for him.

  She was almost to him, her knife clutched carefully in her hand, ready to deal the final blow. All she needed to do was nick him, that was it, and this nightmare would be over. Chester was staggering, face vacant, writhing from the force of the rounds she’d just emptied into him as she ran the blade forward—