Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Is there a physiological component to it, y’reckon, doctor?” Casey looked right at her. “I mean, men get boners regardless, you know? The desire don’t go away unless you take the one-eyed snake by the neck and just wrestle it right out of ’em—” He illustrated the point with a hand gesture. A horrifying, horrifying hand gesture. She barely restrained herself from covering Molly’s eyes.

  “Jesus,” Lauren said. She glanced at Lucia, who was daintily picking at her French toast. “Do you have anything to say?”

  Lucia stopped, fork halfway to her mouth. “I’ve … never had funeral sex. Or wanted to.” She looked around the table like she’d gotten caught having funeral sex, then eased back in her chair and slowly pushed the fork to her lips. The bite was minuscule, maybe the size of the first knuckle of Lauren’s pinky, and she chewed it slowly.

  “Humans are funny creatures,” Ms. Cherry said sympathetically to Lauren. “We don’t all react in the same way to tragedy, to grief. We don’t all carry around the same … mores, I think you call them? We think differently, we are different, we react differently, yes? Some turn from pain, some …” She looked at Casey, slightly pointedly, and he blushed. “Some embrace it. In any case … you have grief, my dears.” She looked at Molly and brushed a hand down her hair. “Hopefully today will help you deal with it … at least a little.” She smiled sympathetically and drew her silken, somewhat see-through robe together before she swept out of the room, looking as elegant as if she’d been at a ball.

  Casey watched her go. “Got-damn!” He tossed his napkin down in the plate and stood, causing Lauren to jerk her head away rather than look at what was protruding from the flap of his boxers. “I got to go get me some of that fine lady.” And he swept out of the room in a hurry, feet tapping their way up the stairs after Ms. Cherry’s more relaxed, quiet pace. Lauren heard a giggle halfway up the stairs and a whisper, and then the pace increased for both sets of footsteps until a door slammed.

  “Ohmigod,” Molly said, her eyes wide. “Did you see—”

  “It’s like the sun during an eclipse—tell me you did not look directly at it,” Lauren said, horrified.

  “It was like Medusa,” Molly said, her eyes narrowing and her tongue protruding in disgust. “I couldn’t look away! It was like a snake rising out of one of those wicker baskets when the charmers play their song! But—I mean—it was HUGE! I don’t even want to think about one of those going in—”

  Lauren almost threw up the French toast right there. “Stop. Just … stop. Don’t think about it.”

  “How am I NOT supposed to think about it?” Molly asked, her eyes tightly squinted shut. “Oh, God, I thought about it again!” She shuddered, full body, her legs crossed tightly together. “AHH! Again!”

  “Yeah, Casey’s not a small guy,” Lucia said quietly. “You’d think … maybe he talks big because he isn’t, but … no.” She shook her head, the red ponytail snaking down her neck, brushing against her shoulders. “It’s all right though.” She looked right at Molly. “Most guys aren’t … I mean, he’s unusually large—”

  “I don’t think that helps!” Lauren said.

  “Oh, whew, I think …” Molly said. “I mean … porn stars, I can kinda get, maybe through practice and building up the, um, stretching, but … Jesus. That thing! It looked like a bodybuilder’s arm holding a cantaloupe in his hand—”

  “Please stop talking about it,” Lauren hissed. “Just … stop.”

  “It gets easier with time,” Lucia said softly. “And, yeah, practice, I guess.” She pushed her French toast away from her, too, and picked up the Coke, drinking a long pull from it. Her lips were cracked and dry, almost bloody. “Not that you need to worry about it anytime soon.” She stood up and paused, glancing at Molly almost sadly. “I hope.”

  “Uh … thanks?” Molly asked, looking up at Lucia with her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why would I need to wor—”

  “You don’t,” Lucia said, shaking her head, breaking off eye contact and heading for the door. She disappeared behind it as quietly as she’d come in.

  Molly stared after her. “Uh, Mom?”

  Lauren was wary, expecting where this was going. “Yeah?”

  “Do you think she’s kind of been slapped around or someth—”

  “Yeah.” Lauren didn’t mince the words. After a breakfast conversation that had covered funeral sex and ended in a massive erection, what was the point of denying that Lucia had almost certainly been abused at home—wherever that was for her?

  *

  Archibald “Arch” Stan swept his sword through the neck of the black-shadowed cat demon. He was already sweating from having dispatched a couple of the things. These were a little new to him. He’d dealt with fire dogs once before, but shadow cats? Well, it was all variations on a theme, he supposed, as he cut the head clean off the accursed demon.

  He’d been late to this party, that much was obvious by the state of the woods around him. There was a whole lot of blood in the midst of all these downed leaves, autumn in full, blazing glory out here in the woods. He recognized the smell of an intestinal tract torn open, and he tried to breathe through his mouth. He didn’t have any desire to add his lunch to the ground with all that blood and guts already spilled.

  The hellcat screamed one final time as he caught it in the neck. The scream cut off partway through as the holy blade sliced down and hit the earth, severing a leaf or two in the bargain. The cat shrieked and hissed, but it wasn’t the mouth making the noise. It was the essence of the thing, exposed to air now that he’d broken up the shell that contained it here on Earth. It let loose a stink of brimstone and sucked up into itself like a balloon that popped and shrank into nothing.

  Arch would have made that same movement—sword through a demon neck—a thousand times this morning if he’d had enough obliging targets. They didn’t seem to want to oblige though, there being only two of them when he’d showed up. The man they’d been picking at when he’d come out of the woods was plainly dead, his heart’s blood run out through his open neck a few minutes past. One of them had locked a jaw on him and ripped it hard while the other had done the same to the man’s guts. It didn’t paint a pretty picture, but it had certainly painted a picture—one that was heavy on the red.

  “Fuck,” Lafayette Hendricks said as the cowboy stepped out from behind a tree, his boots crackling on the dry, fallen leaves as a gust of blustery wind blew through, stirring Arch’s jacket and causing the cowboy’s knee-length black drover coat to whip at the tail.

  “That’s all you ever say,” Arch observed, probably a bit more irritably than he might have under normal circumstances.

  “Sorry,” Hendricks said, sounding genuinely contrite for his profanity.

  That didn’t make Arch any happier. He gave the cowboy a raised eyebrow and a flat look that held in his anger. “Don’t do me any favors, okay?”

  “Sorry,” Hendricks said again. “We, uh … we got a kid over here.”

  Arch just stared at him. “Say what?”

  “There’s a …” Hendricks jerked his head toward the tree so hard that he had to catch his cowboy hat before it came falling off. “This guy had a kid with him.”

  That caused Arch’s belly to bubble. He caught himself before he said something that might have been offensive, though no doubt the cowboy would have been amused. “Son of a gun,” he said instead.

  “Son of him, more like,” Hendricks said grimly, and stepped back around the tree.

  “Call it in,” Arch said, coming up after the cowboy, hot. “I’ll talk to—” He rounded the tree and found the boy, all decked out in camo and blaze orange, his face white as a bleached sheet. “—him.”

  “Which him?” Hendricks asked sourly. “The boy? Or your God, who I guess was totally cool with this happening?” Hendricks froze, teeth gritted together and mouth open in a grimace, eyes tightly shut. “Sorry. I’m sorry. That slipped out.” He opened his eyes again, gauging Arch for reaction.

&
nbsp; Arch didn’t react, just stared at him coldly. “You gonna call it in or not?”

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said, stepping back, coat swaying as he moved. “Yeah, I’ll call it in. You … do whatever you need to do.” And he stepped away, putting a finger up to his ear and touching the thumbswitch. “Home base, this is Cowboy. Responding to the … to the screaming and gunfire we heard up in the woods … we have a male subject … down …” He kept from saying “deceased,” Arch noticed, though based on his furtive looks at the boy, Arch wasn’t sure it would have broken through just now. “And we have a young boy … teenager, I think … we’ll be heading down in a few minutes.”

  “Roger that, Cowboy,” Brian Longholt’s voice crackled through Arch’s earpiece. He could see by Hendricks’s reaction that it had come through loud and clear for him as well. “What do you want to do about the … ‘down’ guy?” Brian was a smart guy; he’d plainly gotten the inference. “Ambulance or morgue wagon?”

  “The latter,” Hendricks said quietly. “You got a GPS position on us?”

  “Roger that,” Brian said. “I’ll get … Yuval Simon heading your way. Looks like he’s up in the rotation.” It was sad that they even had a rotation of mortuary operators that they were having to call lately. Arch grimaced, a temporary respite from the look of fury that he was pretty sure he was wearing all the time of late.

  “Ten-four. Cowboy out.” Hendricks stepped back over and nodded at the boy who was quivering against the tree. “I thought you were gonna give aid and comfort while I called it in?”

  Arch just glared at him, then let his furious look dissolve as he knelt next to the boy. “Can you hear me, son?” He waved a hand in front of the boy’s eyes.

  The boy’s gaze snapped to him, and he spoke loudly, as though his ears were ringing from rifle shots. “Yes.”

  “My name’s Arch Stan.” Arch pulled back his coat’s lapel to reveal his badge pinned on his uniform. “I’m with the Calhoun County Sheriff’s office. What’s your name?”

  “Mack,” the boy said, still loud. “Mack Wellstone.”

  “Okay, Mack,” Arch said, speaking a little louder, to match the boy’s speech, “we need to get you out of here. Can you walk?” He’d looked the boy over for injuries, but none were apparent, no hints of dark liquid against the camo pants or top, or the blaze orange vest.

  “I think so,” Mack said, looking past Arch to Hendricks. Mack frowned, but if he had a comment about the man dressed like a ranch hand who was lingering in the clearing, he didn’t give voice to it.

  “Come on then,” Arch said, offering a hand. Mack took it, and Arch helped him to his feet. The boy wobbled a bit, but he stayed standing. He really wasn’t a boy, Arch reflected. Probably only a decade or so younger than Arch himself, but Arch had experience that the boy—it was how he thought of him—hadn’t had until today.

  And Arch had it by the ton, now.

  “We were supposed to go hunting,” Mack said, staring off into the distance. This time he spoke pensively, in a normal tone of voice. Arch figured maybe he thought he was whispering, because he didn’t look like he wanted a reply. He glanced at the tree. “My dad … is he …?” He looked at Arch, searching for a reply.

  Arch knew Mack was fully aware of what had happened, so he just shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Mack took it like a champ. No, he wasn’t a boy anymore. Arch wondered how much of the disemboweling he’d seen. Hopefully not much. Arch’s words were apparently enough to convince Mack that his father was dead; there was no need to show him and remove any doubt that might have persisted.

  Doubt was a fine thing. Arch would have a killed a thousand demons for a whisker of doubt for himself this morning.

  “Come on,” Arch said, putting an arm around Mack’s shoulders to steer him out of the clearing the long way. They might have to walk an extra half-mile or so, but it’d be worth it not to show that boy his father’s body.

  *

  Hendricks trailed behind Arch and the boy a few yards, keeping his eyes skinned for trouble. It tended to find them whether they wanted it to or not, especially lately, but he’d had enough of trouble sneaking up on them long ago. He had their six, he figured, watching their backs while he and Arch escorted the boy out, taking a meandering route out of the clearing on their way back to the police Explorer.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Arch said, causing Hendricks to roll his eyes when he was sure that neither Arch nor the boy was looking at him. How the fuck exactly was it going to be okay? Hendricks wondered. He’d lost a father too, and he didn’t remember feeling it was okay, and damned sure not five minutes after his dad had died.

  “Okay,” the boy said wearily, just walking along, guided by Arch’s hand on his shoulders. “What … what were those things?”

  “Wild dogs,” Hendricks said loudly. He and Arch had been half a mile away, checking out an old cabin that was boarded up after getting a tip that it was a possible demon’s nest. They’d heard gunfire, and enough rounds in a row to be convinced it wasn’t just some good ol’ boy with a loose trigger finger trying to put down a buck. No, it had sounded more like a day in Fallujah to Hendricks, so they’d come a-runnin’, arriving a few minutes too late to save the day. The boy looked back at him quizzically. “Rabid,” he added, layering on the bullshit because he knew Arch wouldn’t lie.

  “Was it really dogs?” The boy turned his head to look at Arch.

  Arch’s sour-ass expression flickered as he gave Hendricks another nasty look. He was full of those lately. Of course, he had all the reason in the world to be in a foul mood. Losing a beloved wife tended to do that to a body, Hendricks knew through hard experience. “Looked more like demon cats to me,” Arch said tightly.

  That apparently mollified the lad, because he didn’t ask again, just put his head down and kept walking. He hadn’t even brought his rifle or pack with him out of the woods; apparently he thought Hendricks and Arch were badass enough to keep trouble at bay.

  Or, more likely, he was back to the default mode of civilized humanity, assuming there was no trouble immediately at hand. Dumb thinking, Hendricks thought. There was always trouble about, even in those so-called civilized bastions of America.

  “What’d you have to do that for?” Arch asked, whispering it low to Hendricks, turning around enough to give him a drink of the fury waiting behind the big man’s eyes.

  “Most people don’t want to hear that their daddy got—” He caught an especially scathing look, and backed off from saying it flat out. “Well, they don’t want to hear the truth of how what went wrong back there … went wrong.” That was about as much as he could talk around the subject at hand, Hendricks figured, and it damned near made him dizzy trying to do it.

  Arch gave him what might have been a grudging look, but the steel in his voice hinted he wasn’t backing down an inch. “White lies are still lies, you know.”

  “Maybe we should discuss this later,” Hendricks said, glancing behind them again. The woods were quiet now. He hadn’t seen hellcats before, but he’d read about them. They didn’t tend to travel alone, which suggested to him that there might be more somewhere else in these woods. That’d turn hunting season right on its fucking head, wouldn’t it? “You know, instead of finishing that other conversation we weren’t having.”

  Arch frowned at him. “We weren’t having a conversation before.”

  “Exactly,” Hendricks said. The big man was usually brighter than this. Hendricks had figured Arch would have taken a drink or something after losing Alison, but no—the bastard was back on patrol, throwing himself into it. That was how I handled it too, he thought. Embrace the world of demon hunting or face the fact you lost what was most important to you in this world?

  Easy choice.

  “You make no kind of sense.” Arch shook his head, brushing off Hendricks. The Explorer was visible ahead at the edge of the woods. So was that looming, boarded-up cabin. Arch’s attention focused on it for a moment, and Hendrick
s could read the hunger in his eyes. He wanted to go crashing in, do what they’d come here to do, maybe poke holes in a few demons.

  “We’ve got to get the boy back to HQ,” Hendricks said, trying to defuse that bomb before it went off. All they needed was to save this kid from one patch of trouble only to go stumbling into another.

  Arch stared at the old cabin for just a few seconds too long. “All right,” he said, like he was struggling to convince himself. That was worrying, at least to someone like Hendricks who had seen this particular road up close and personal and knew where it led. “All right,” Arch said again, resigned this time. He broke eye contact with the old cabin and turned his body toward the Explorer. “But …”

  “We’ll come back, yeah,” Hendricks said. Well, fighting demons was at least a productive way of handling grief, wasn’t it? A hell of a lot better than balling up in a little ball and crying, that was for damned sure. It’d all come out sooner or later anyway. Arch could bury his feelings for now—like his wife—but unlike Alison, hopefully they wouldn’t stay down there forever, moldering in some cold and worm-laden grave.

  *

  “They’re bringing in the survivor,” Brian Longholt said, fidgeting with the radio headset he was wearing. It caught his hair a little and pulled, the only thing he really disliked about this new rig. It had shown up wrapped in a big blue ribbon that advertised Amazon’s Echo just a few days after—

  Well … a few days after.

  “Glad to hear we had a survivor,” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve said. He didn’t put much feeling into it, but then, Brian understood that—sort of. Reeve was like a man carved out of stone, especially lately. His voice had been alive before, but now it was like a harsh whisper, which Brian considered a natural side effect of having demons possess your wife and kill her, then turn loose on your town in a goddamned frenzy of violence right out of the French Revolution, or the Bolshevik Revolution … some kind of fucking revolution. There had damned sure been enough blood in the streets.