Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Not too many of those these days,” Brian said, adjusting the headset again. Two more pulled hairs. Ow.

  “Seems to me we had plenty of them in the square a few days ago,” Reeve said. He just sounded dead, like all his wisecracking good humor had left him. He was still here, still doing the job, but if there’d been light in the man’s eyes, someone had doused it with a fucking fireman’s hose, just pissed all over it until the candle was out.

  Brian got that too. He was feeling more than a little of it himself, and he hadn’t even been hit as hard as Reeve.

  “Do you know if Dr. Darlington is stopping by?” Reeve asked, rubbing at his freshly-shaven cheeks. Brian eyed them; there was a nick or two on the older man’s face, probably the product of shaving with a shaky hand, and for the first time in days. He had to look good for the funeral, Brian supposed.

  “Before, uh … the service, yeah,” Brian said, tap-dancing around that one. He feared to say it for some reason. Before her mother’s funeral. Before your wife’s funeral. Before …

  Before Alison’s funeral.

  There were damned sure more funerals than that. Brian’s fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Waldman, had died in the square. His pal Jacob Reading’s mother had died too, along with a dozen other people tangentially involved in his life. Midian had been kicked squarely in the balls, and they all felt it.

  But the three that he was feeling most acutely were Vera Darlington … Donna Reeve …

  And his sister.

  “Good,” Reeve said, causing Brian to jolt in shock until he realized that Reeve was talking about Dr. Darlington stopping in, not the deaths of the people they cared about. “I don’t need to be worrying about this … shit—” he waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the detention cells “—with everything else going on.”

  Brian glanced in the direction he’d waved his hand. He knew full well what the sheriff was talking about, of course. It was another little detail that he didn’t want to consider at present, that man sitting in the cell block in a catatonic state. If it had been up to Brian, going with his gut, he would have left the man in there and never spoken about him again. He wouldn’t have been able to avoid thinking about him—the bastard—but he was pretty sure he would have been content to let him rot away there, out of sight, out of mind.

  And the bastard was pretty damned surely out of his mind.

  Or, rather, a hell of a lot of minds were out of him.

  They didn’t even know his name. He was just a guy, medium height, medium build, vacant expression. Just a guy without fingerprints on record, without a mind of his own, who was sitting in a cell as he had been for the last several days, slowly starving to death with no desire to eat the food they put in front of him or drink the water they’d left for him.

  He just sat and stared, all day and all night, no difference in how he was when he was awake from how he was when he slept—if he slept.

  And although a tiny shred of guilt wiggled in his psyche … Brian was mostly okay with the fucker wasting away like that.

  Because he had, after a fashion, killed Vera Darlington. Killed Donna Reeve.

  Killed Alison.

  He’d done more than that, of course. Brian knew through hard experience, though he was fighting it on every level, that whatever was in that cell wasn’t the thing that had killed those people. He knew because a piece of what that man in the cell had carried had wormed its way into Brian’s brain, had taken over his body the way it had presumably once taken over the nameless man in the cell. It had walked him around like a man, made him talk like a man …

  But that thing was not a man, and what it had used him for …

  “Jesus,” Brian whispered.

  “It hits sometimes out of the blue, doesn’t it?” Reeve asked warily. He had charcoal-dark circles under his eyes, well earned, Brian suspected, if the sheriff’s sleep experience was anything like his own of late. “You’ll be thinking about anything but … and then it just comes down and cold-cocks the fuck out of you from nowhere.”

  “Yeah,” Brian whispered. There was a lump in his throat the size of Cleveland. Ohio, not Tennessee.

  “Anyway,” Reeve said, looking away, “glad Dr. Darlington’s coming in to deal with Johnny Doe so I don’t have to.”

  “She’s going to … uh … put in a feeding tube, I think,” Brian said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. A couple tears leaked out unintentionally. He didn’t fucking care if Reeve saw. “And an IV, again.”

  “Great,” Reeve said, though he didn’t sound like the sentiment was anywhere in the neighborhood of great. Pretty fucking far from it, actually. “Let me know when she gets here. Or when Arch and Hendricks come dragging in with their survivor. Reckon I’ll have to call the kid’s parents—or parent, maybe?” He shook his head. “Whatever’s left, I suppose.”

  “Will do,” Brian said, still brushing at the back of his eyes. They wouldn’t stop now. They never did, whenever he thought of what those demons had done to him …

  What they had made him do.

  “I’ll be in my office,” Reeve said, not looking back at him. Maybe he didn’t want to see a putatively grown man cry in front of him. Maybe, like Brian, he was feeling it enough that watching would have set him off. The sheriff wasn’t the sort of man who evinced grief in the sight of others, near as Brian could tell. Brian didn’t care anymore. What they’d done …

  “I’ve got to go to the hospital later,” Brian called after him. “Before the …”

  Reeve didn’t look back, just waved a hand like he got it. He probably got it. They all got it, after all. Grief. Hell. Demons. They were all in the thick of this together, after all. He shut his office door and left Brian sitting there, manning the radio. Calls would come in. They always did. Brian would be ready, would do his shift until it came time to leave for the hospital.

  “Fuck,” he whispered and mopped at his eyes.

  “And kid,” Reeve said, opening his door. “Way to be in here … you know, given what’s going on … what’s gone on … with your sister … with your dad in the hospital and whatnot …”

  Brian looked up at him, the world blurry through the veil of tears. “Well,” he said, “you’re here even though your wife died and you’re facing a recall vote next week.”

  Reeve just stared at him, stock still. “Someone’s gotta do this job.”

  “Yeah,” Brian agreed. Reeve just nodded and shut the door, disappearing behind the glass that said SHERIFF on it in big golden-shaded letters. “And I guess we’re the only ones who will.”

  *

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Lauren said as she walked out the door of the house. The whorehouse, she corrected, the thought of its purpose especially clear in her mind after listening to Casey doing … whatever … with Ms. Cherry. No, not whatever, Lauren told herself. She knew damned well what he was doing. Everyone in the house did, because they were not quiet, and even Molly wasn’t innocent enough to ignore the paroxysms of pleasure being shouted through the thin walls.

  “Umm, I’m coming with you,” Molly said, attaching herself to Lauren’s arm. Lauren didn’t wonder at her clinginess; they’d lost her grandmother and been rendered essentially homeless in one stroke.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have your company,” Lauren said as they navigated around the big back bumper of Casey’s truck, “but—”

  “OH GOD!” Molly burst out, eyes squinted shut and her tongue out like she was about to heave. “OH GOD, OH GOD!”

  “Like I didn’t hear enough of that being screamed before we walked out the door,” Lauren said.

  “Look!” Molly threw out a finger at the back of Casey’s truck, and Lauren’s eyes followed the natural line to a bumper sticker written in flat red: Unless you’re trying to form a human centipede, get off my ass!

  “Gross,” Lauren pronounced. She was pretty sure it was in last place for nastiness this morning though.

  “‘Gross’ is an understat
ement on the level of saying that Othello was kind of set up, The Vampire Diaries was kind of dramatic, and Batman Vs. Superman kind of sucked.”

  “Fair point.” Lauren shook her head. “You know, living in this whorehouse actually wasn’t bad until Casey showed up.”

  “I know, right?” Molly shuddered. “He literally …” She froze, then blinked. “Oh, God. He’s got me saying ‘literally’ now, Mom. He’s literally got me saying literally.”

  “There, there,” Lauren said, opening up the car door. She almost said, “At least it can’t get any worse,” but stopped herself just in time.

  *

  Erin Harris kept her silence in the nave of St. Brigid’s, looking sidelong at the door with her hand at her side, fingering the grip of her Glock 19. It was probably weird to be holding onto the grip of a pistol in the entry to a church, but she didn’t care. These were weird times, and they called for crazy measures like making sure you had a hand on your gun in church.

  She thought she heard something outside, a squeal of car tires. Probably just her imagination. She thought she’d been hearing the squeal of car tires for months, after all.

  Father Nguyen was doing his thing, right in the middle of the altar. If the crosses had been upside down, Erin might have thought it was some sort of satanic ritual, something she would have been more enthused about attending than a mass before this whole hell crisis had come roaring into Midian, Tennessee. It would have sounded fun, flippant, outrageous and rebellious to her youthful, inexperienced ears.

  Of course, that was before she saw demons murder people, before she’d been possessed by one and committed atrocities while under its control. Before she’d come back to herself on the town square, doused in blood like it was a baptism for that rebellious occult ritual.

  Now … she had about as much interest in that as she did in sitting on a cold steel fence post without her pants on. Which was to say none. At all.

  This ritual she was watching now though … it had been dimly interesting a few hours ago, when it had started. But she’d long since lost her enthusiasm for it, and was ready for it to just be done. It felt like she was standing in the world’s longest line, and her patience was out, she was tired, she was about to have to go to a heap of funerals that she had no interest in attending …

  Father Nguyen got to his feet at the altar, and Erin blinked. Maybe he was done? Hell, that would be nice. She’d been here all damned night watching his back just in case a demon somehow made it past the tuned-up security that the Father had put in place around St. Brigid’s. Erin didn’t know how likely that was, but it wasn’t deemed worth chancing.

  “Your holy instrument, my lady,” Father Nguyen said, picking up the item from the altar. He spoke fairly quietly most of the time, but now he was loud enough that she both heard and understood him from all the way back where she was standing. St. Brigid’s was not a small country church by any means. He started down the aisle toward her through the sea of pews.

  A chill wind whipped at the garbage bags taped up over some broken stained-glass windows on one side of the church. Erin glanced at them from where she leaned in the doorway. She’d been told that she herself had done that, leaping through them to escape while possessed. She vaguely recalled it, but it had been during the period of time when she’d been so damned worn out from mentally fighting the multiple souls that had jumped into her head and sat on her will that she’d zoned out while they possessed her.

  Other times she remembered clear as a blue-sky day.

  They were uniformly the times when the demons had used her body to do terrible, terrible things to the townspeople of Midian.

  “I’ve been seeing lots of unique choices,” Father Nguyen said as he advanced toward her with the weapon in his grasp. “Casey Meacham had me consecrate a tomahawk, but this …” He shook his head. “This is unique.” He extended his hands, cradling the weapon carefully.

  “You’ve never seen a baseball bat with nails driven through it before?” She took it from him and slung it over her shoulder, taking care to avoid the tetanus shot that would be required if she accidentally poked herself with one of the jutting nails. There were about twenty of them driven through various parts of the bat, giving her a lot of room to swing the thing around and put some holes in demons.

  “Not as a blessed holy instrument, no,” Nguyen said. “I’m fairly certain they’re mostly used for doing work that is not God’s.”

  “So are most weapons, I’d imagine,” Erin said, looking at the Louisville Slugger emblem that was marred by a nail poking through. It had been her brother’s bat, but he didn’t need it anymore since he was off in the Army.

  “Indeed,” Father Nguyen said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me …” His shoulders slumped slightly. “I need to prepare for a funeral mass, and … just possibly … sleep for a few minutes beforehand.”

  “Go with God,” Erin said with a fair amount of sarcasm. Nguyen either missed it or chose to ignore the insult. Erin didn’t care either way. She hadn’t ever really been much of a faithful person, and having a demon in her head had done surprisingly little to turn things around. Shouldn’t she have been alive with the spirit or something?

  She didn’t feel alive with anything except deep cynicism and a vaguely nauseous sense that she’d been used and abused to do some shit right out of a horror movie to people she cared about. About half the survivors of the square were probably feeling about the same now, she reckoned, but she didn’t care about them either. It was every woman for herself as far as she was concerned, and the dark hole she’d felt growing within over the last few months at this crisis had only gotten deeper and darker in the last week. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night and felt like she was drowning in an ocean of darkness and couldn’t get to dry land no matter how she struggled.

  She wanted to blame it all on Lafayette Hendricks, and really, part of her thought it’d be simpler if she could. But that part warred with the reality, which was that her hometown had been doomed to a showdown with the forces of fucking evil before the cowboy had even showed his perfectly sculpted abs around these parts, and they’d probably have been a hell of a lot worse off at this point if he hadn’t come.

  That burned. A lot.

  She’d had fun with him. He was a pretty good lay once they’d gotten past that first time. She could tell he was a little rusty—well, she’d suspected, anyway, later verified by his own confession: Hendricks hadn’t fucked anyone but her in years. She couldn’t say the same, not that it had seemed to matter to him at the time.

  But now he had gone his own way, she was heading hers, and she couldn’t help but feel this miserable sense of anger and rejection. They’d left her behind after all, when he and Alison and Duncan had blown town, hid out in the country in a house with no plumbing or air conditioning or anything else. While she was sitting in a hospital recovering from a car crash that should have killed her, the four of them had gone off and had a grand adventure. Resentfully, she knew that wasn’t the case, but it was still like a thorn in her heart she couldn’t extract, the feeling that Hendricks had left her behind.

  Not that she’d thought they’d get married or anything. God, she wasn’t that over the moon for him. He was sullen, moody, a pain in the ass, and that fucking bag of his smelled like toxic waste from all his dirty laundry.

  No, she hadn’t thought they’d get married. But she didn’t think they would flame out over her saving his life and damned near losing her own in the process. She didn’t figure she would have been so goddamned angry over something she understood—that he had to leave town when he did, and that he couldn’t have come for her—but she was. She was so fucking furious, and had been for as long as they’d been working together again. The anger she’d felt toward him was almost as heavy as the fury those fucking irate demons had felt toward the townsfolk of Midian when they’d taken over her body. They’d used that too, her anger, and she’d felt a righteous fury when they’d done those horrible thin
gs with her hands. Totally misplaced righteous fury, but it had been there nonetheless.

  Shit.

  She slung the baseball bat off her shoulder, careful not to nick herself in the face as she did. Yeah, she wanted to throw some hurt with this thing, pop a few demon motherfuckers. She probably wouldn’t even be thinking about Lafayette Hendricks’s face when she was nailing—haha, she thought, that was kinda funny—those demon cockwaffles …

  Probably.

  *

  Jason Pike had been the County Administrator for Calhoun County for a few years, and he couldn’t imagine a more satisfying job, or more thrilling place to be right now. After all, this was the opening act of some pretty grand shit right here; they’d had a complete and total catastrophe in the square in Midian just last week—something he’d orchestrated himself—and now who knew what they were heading for next?

  Oh, sure, it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies—or maybe entrails and blood sacrifices. The square event was supposed to be like a ringing of the dinner bell for all the demons in the area. Pike had planned it to be a slaughter, but it was supposed to be more of a demon buffet rather than a chance for some ages-old legion of demons to air whatever grievances they had with local law enforcement.

  Pike shook his head. He was sitting in his office, in Culver, about forty minutes from Midian, looking out the window on the woods out back. The County Administrator’s office was on the second story, and as far as views went, he had the best in the county. He’d seen to that. A man at the top ought to have a few perks, after all, oughtn’t he?

  And Jason Pike was at the top of this county, that much was sure.

  He had a pretty comfortable chair too. The last county administrator had skimped in that department, bought some ragged old thing that would have been okay for a meeting room in the council hall, but wasn’t fucking fit for a County Administrator to rest his ass on all the live-long day while he was working to solve problems. Well, solve some and create others. He’d fixed that shit right off, bought a several-hundred-dollar seat, overstuffed and padded, that did the trick nicely. He spun in it now, leaned back, thought about putting his feet up.