Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  But it was his, dadgummit … this one little task was his, and he’d see it completed if it was the last thing he did.

  Because it just might be.

  *

  When the car bumped onto the onramp for the interstate, Molly finally shed her silence. “Where are we going?” Her brows were arched, staring intently at the road.

  “Chattanooga,” Lauren said. She was white-knuckling the wheel, shoulders hunched.

  “For the night?” Molly asked.

  “No,” Lauren said, steering the car to merge with the light traffic heading south on I-75. “For good.”

  “What?” The anger was back now, Molly’s face catching a passing headlight from oncoming traffic and her mouth going wide in an outraged O.

  “We’re out of here,” Lauren said, trying to sound casual even though her heart was hammering in her chest. “This is crazy. We’re crazy if we stay. So … we’re out. No more living in a whorehouse, no more attending funerals like this is a film festival and we want to catch as many as we can. We’re out. Done. Gone. Not going back.”

  “But Midian is home.” Molly’s whispered voice was choked with outrage. When Lauren didn’t immediately reply, Molly started to build some steam. “Grandpa died here. Grandma—this is home. This is where our home is—”

  “But we don’t live there anymore,” Lauren said, changing lanes to slide between two monstrous semi-trucks rolling their way down the road. “Do we? I don’t want to go back to our house; do you?”

  Molly flinched as though she’d been slapped. “No, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Kid, the town is crawling with demons. They’re literally swarming out of the woods now.” She gripped tight the wheel as she drove. “There’s nothing we can do about that, so … why stay?”

  “The watch is doing something about it,” Molly said, sitting up straighter in her seat. “That’s the point of us being there. To fight back with the others.”

  “They can fight back just as well without us.” Without you, she didn’t say. Whether they’d be all right without a doctor … well … The important thing was getting Molly clear of this mess.

  “But Grandma and Grandpa died there—”

  “And you think they’d want us to too?” Lauren asked. “Like … right now? Because we’ve had some near misses, and I don’t love the idea of continuing to push our luck.” She lowered her voice. “I know you remember the Summer Lights Festi—”

  “That’s low,” Molly said. “Of course I remember.”

  “I almost lost you, kid,” Lauren said, steering the car back into the right lane and slowing it down so she could focus on what she had to say. “That demon—do you know what he did to his victims? Impregnated them. I heard all about it from Hendricks a little while back. He hit a small town in Alabama and knocked up this girl with demon puppies. When they came out, they’d burned everything, killed everyone. Hendricks and Alison saw it with their own damned eyes—nothing left in the town but burnt-out buildings and a crazy girl with her dog babies.”

  “Sick,” Molly said, evincing distaste and pushing it aside quickly. “But that doesn’t mean we should—”

  “That was almost you,” Lauren said. “You almost ended up—God, how could I have been so stupid to let this go for so long?”

  “Just because you think I was about to become a one-woman demonic puppy mill—”

  “I don’t ‘think’ it, okay? I know it. That guy—Mick or Mike or whatever his fake human name was—he was going to rape you, seed you with those things, and let the town just burn. Like he’d probably done a thousand times before.”

  “I kinda doubt a thousand towns have dropped off the map in America,” Molly said sullenly, looking away.

  “I don’t,” Lauren said. “The point is … I thought I was going to—I was so scared for you that night. And when you came out of it safe and sound, I guess—I don’t know, I was so stuck on the idea of demons that I got … obsessed. Medically interested. But I screwed up because instead of following my curiosity I should have been looking out for you. And this town, Midian … it’s not a safe place for kids.”

  “I’m fine, okay—”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think Mack Wellstone is,” Lauren said. “Abilene Tarley sure as hell isn’t. Dozens of others—I mean, Jesus, you were on the fucking square, you saw what happened—kids died just like anybody else in that hell—”

  “Stop, just stop! You’re—you’re so scared all of a sudden—”

  “I’m reacting reasonably to a dangerous situation, okay?”

  “You’re—you’re acting like a chickenshit. And I don’t need—”

  “You need to be safe. Secure. Not have demons coming after you to rape you and rip your flesh off and turn you into a weapon to destroy your own damned family—”

  “Well, I don’t know how much good I’d be of a weapon after they ripped my flesh off—”

  “I’m fucking terrified for you, kid, don’t you get it?” Lauren’s restraint burst, and it all came flooding out at once—the fear, the anger, the tears she’d held back while they were being chased around by those hellcats. “Every damned day. And yeah, I know, I know—learning about blowjobs and fucking and—hell, even meeting a human boy and having underaged sex with him every night at this point isn’t exactly a grave threat—”

  “Ew, Mom!”

  “—but don’t you get it? I’m freaking out over the little stuff because the big stuff—goddamn, it’s fucking daunting. Every day in Midian right now brings some fresh, sulfur-stinking hell of the sort that Dorothy Parker couldn’t even have imagined ringing her doorbell. It’s non-stop, and it’s not going to get better. Every day I have to be afraid. So forgive me for freaking out about boys and hookers talking to you about the beautiful and natural process of deep-throating a dick until it spurts in your mouth—”

  Molly made a gagging noise. “Seriously, you can stop anytime.”

  “—all salty and warm and sticky. You know what it tastes like? It tastes like—”

  “Ohgodohgodohgodmakeitstoppleeeeeeeease—”

  “—like liverwurst and ass all ground up together with a jerk of flavor like what I imagine rat piss tastes like—”

  “Jesus save me.”

  “These are the things you don’t ask,” Lauren said. “And it doesn’t really matter. At this point, I should be ecstatic if you live long enough to suck a dick or two. Hell, twelve, though preferably not all at once.”

  “This is so fucked up. Why is this so fucked up? Why are you being so fucked up?”

  “Because if you make it that long,” Lauren said, breath coming out raggedly, along with her words, “to deep-throat a few cocks—”

  “Please stop saying that!”

  “—or to have real, honest-to-God, terrible first-time sex, to feel that hurt—you know, down there—”

  “Fucking shit, Mom. This is so—this is just fucked.”

  “—and then, you know, you work your way through that shit phase until it starts to get decent, then good, and, God willing, really, really, mind-blowingly good, because you know what you like, and what works for you—”

  “I want to not be listening to this, but it’s like a car wreck on the side of the road as you pass. It’s an auditory car wreck. I can’t stop listening. There are even screams in my head.”

  “—because sex can be so, so good. So good. And even better if it’s with someone you really like or love—and I want that for you. More than anything, because if you get to it—it means you made it, kid.” Lauren felt the tension start to bleed out of her. “And after these last few days, weeks … shit … that’s all I want for you at this point. For you to make it so that you can feel that knee-quivering sensation of having the lights go out for you when you hit a big, big O with the right guy while riding his—”

  Molly buried her face in her hands. “Of all my childhood traumas, this may be the one that scars me longest.”

  “—huge dick,” Lauren said. �
��Because of course it should be huge in this imaginary dream of hope I have for you. I’ve only ever wanted the best for you, and this—I mean, a huge dick would be best. Not the first time, but you know, work your way up to it. Because it would mean you survived.” She laughed and cried a little at the same time. “And honestly … that just doesn’t seem likely to happen in Midian. Not this week. Not this month. Not this year. I don’t think anyone who stays is going to make it out of there alive, and kid—I want more for you than for you to die at the teeth of some goddamned demon hell army. I want you to be able to lose your virginity. To have a happy wedding day at some point—”

  “After I’ve taken like fifty or a hundred huge dicks in all my orifices, probably, at the rate your standards are presently decaying.”

  “—and maybe, someday, ruin sex for your kids the way I’m doing for you, right now.” Lauren sighed. “But that’s not happening if we stay in Midian. It just won’t.”

  “You don’t know that,” Molly said, but she was desperately pale again, and her reply was weaker.

  “If you take fifty to a hundred huge dicks in Midian, I mean just by virtue of the population skew, you’re going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to make that happen. I mean, we’re talking dregs here—”

  “Fuck off about the dicks, okay?” Molly said. “I’m a virgin and I intend to stay that way for the foreseeable future, all right? Enough of the dick talk!” She deflated. “Real talk now, please?”

  “Dick talk isn’t real talk?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Dicks feel pretty real. Huge ones, especially. So real when they’re—”

  “Fuck! Stop acting like a child, Mom!” Molly stared out the window. “I don’t want to die, but … Jesus. Leaving home? I mean, seriously?”

  “You saw what happened back there,” Lauren said. “Those things … how many there were?”

  “Yeah, but … that’s not … insurmountable,” Molly said. “Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t want to … surmount it,” Lauren said lamely. “Like a—”

  “If you make a huge dick mounting joke I will open this car door and bail out on the interstate, and when the State Patrol finds me, I’m going to say I was kidnapped by a crazy lady who wanted me to fuck a hundred huge dicks.”

  “We were staying in a whorehouse,” Lauren said quietly. “I feel like this might not be stretching the truth too far if we’d stayed there longer, if only by neglect.”

  “Ugh,” Molly said. “Prostitution is not like an STD; I wasn’t catching it, okay? At no point did I say, ‘Hey, you know, Lucia seems like a totally well-adjusted and put together person; why not take career advice from her?’ I was just … curious about things. Mysterious things.” She made a sour face. “Things which you have taken any mystery and allure out of, completely. Grossly, even.”

  “Seriously, the taste would gag you. Liverwurst and ass and yuck.”

  “I didn’t want to be like Lucia, all right?” Molly hunched lower in her seat. “I just wanted to know things. Maybe I felt the bite of mortality, of the town sliding … and I was curious.”

  “Mortality’s bite doesn’t have much to do with a teen being curious about sex, kid. It’s kinda written into your hormones.”

  “Whatever,” Molly said. “So …” She seemed defeated, which was maybe a worse look on her than her curiosity, her trauma—any of the other things she’d seen on her daughter’s face these last few weeks, or before that, going back to when she was a child and fell off her bike and started to cry from the wrist sprain. “What now?”

  “I have a friend in Chattanooga,” Lauren said. “From work. Elise. She’s in private practice, so she’s loaded. We can stay with her.”

  “And then?” Molly asked. “Then what?”

  “I should probably go back to work,” Lauren said, “before I get fired. And then …” She stared straight ahead, into the dark, unknowable night. The road curved ahead, around a big hill. Trees waved on either side, and there were only a sparse few lights in this section of the freeway. “… and then …”

  “Then what?” Molly asked.

  Lauren opened her mouth to answer but found she didn’t have one. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “Whatever comes next.”

  *

  It felt like defeat, that walk back from the edge of the woods, like taking the kick in the teeth and running away, which rankled Erin. There was a ripple of anger running hot under her skin that had been there since even before those fucking assholes had co-opted her body to do murder. But that hadn’t made it better, had it?

  Nope.

  No, it had only made it worse. It was a raw sort of itch, and she wondered if fighting alone would scratch it. Before the demons had hit town she’d gotten that kind of restless desire every now and again, and she’d drowned it with alcohol and fucking, which seemed like a sensible plan in a small town. Beat getting married.

  “Such a shame,” Duncan said, jarring Erin out of her reverie. When she looked at him blankly, Duncan elaborated. “The kid, I mean. He ran from one kind of trouble that he might have survived—” he made a hand motion to envelope the perimeter of cars that was set up like circled wagons on Faulkner Road “—into another kind he couldn’t hope to.”

  “You don’t know it for sure,” Erin said. She wouldn’t have laid any money on the boy making it through though. She didn’t have much to begin with, and certainly not enough to waste it on sucker bets.

  “Oh, we know it for sure, sweet cheeks,” Guthrie chimed in. Getting used to Lerner as a black lady was tough, but whenever she piped up like this, it got easier to accept. “A tween versus hundreds of snarling v’k’thw’sh? Even your ex—” Guthrie jerked her head to indicate Hendricks, who was walking along with Starling at his side, engaged in some kind of deep conversation “—could figure out who wins in that scenario.”

  “We’ve just been calling them hellcats,” Erin said. “Or I have.”

  Duncan kind of blinked at her. “Hellcats works.”

  “Rolls off you peoples’ tongues easier,” Guthrie said.

  “Why are they here now?” Erin asked, and then chastised herself as she caught the pitying look from Guthrie. “Just the hotspot?”

  “‘Just the hotspot,’” Guthrie said mockingly. “Sweet knees, the hotspot is not ‘just’ anything; for demons it’s everything. It’s the sweet call of momma singing you home on a Sunday afternoon.”

  Erin gave him a little sneer. “I kinda doubt you’ve got a momma that sang you home on Sunday or any other day.”

  “Just trying to talk to you on your level, kiddo,” Guthrie said with a savage smile. “A hotspot’s a big draw, especially for these barely sentient types like your so-called hellcats. They can feel the thrum of that shit on the other side of the planet. Hell, these probably swam the Atlantic to get here, because they’re normally indigenous to Africa and I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to try and round them up for importation.”

  “What is it about a hotspot that calls you demons?” Erin asked.

  Duncan, less of an asshat, took it on himself to answer. “It’s just something hard-wired into who we are. Like a dog whistle, we can hear it—or feel it, more accurately. It’s a pulse in the soul, or essence, or whatever you want to call it. It’s instinctive.”

  “So you feel it too?” Erin asked.

  “A little,” Duncan admitted. “Not like these things though. Like I said, it’s an instinctive thing, and for those of us a little more evolved than animals—”

  “Which doesn’t include your species, obviously,” Guthrie said matter-of-factly.

  “—it’s less of a main event and more of a sideshow we can choose to ignore,” Duncan said, giving Guthrie a reproachful look.

  “Like the sex drive of men, it’s constant,” Guthrie said with a smirk. “Women? Not so much, maybe, but just like guys are always thinking about the same thing, low-functioning demon intelligences are always looking for hotspots. They’re the equivale
nt of getting laid.”

  “It’s always an illuminating conversation with you, Lerner, or Guthrie, whatever you’re calling yourself between vapes,” Erin said.

  Guthrie just grinned. “Nice pushback, kid. You’re learning. I could almost get to like you, even after that time you got me thrown back to hell.”

  “Really?” Erin shrugged. “I guess, like a woman’s sex drive, I’m just not feeling it.” She gave Guthrie a nasty grin which was met by a guffaw that sounded otherworldly. “So, these things … how do we get rid of them?”

  “Same as any other demon,” Duncan said. “There’s just … you know, more of them.”

  “You’re not kidding,” Erin said. “What else are these things going do? I mean, with that many of them running through the countryside?”

  Duncan looked more than a little uncomfortable at that question. “Well … they usually aren’t together in such high numbers. These … hellcats … they’re pack hunters, but packs are like—”

  “Five,” Guthrie said. “Usually no more than five. It’s a small, social unit. I’ve often pondered—”

  “Shut up,” Duncan said. “No one cares about your ponderings. The point is—this is unusual, to say the least. In a group of five, hellcats can raise some pretty big havoc. Attack farms, wreck cars …” He nodded to the police cruiser that looked like it had been shredded from the inside out, pieces of metal and glass strewn across the asphalt. “A few hundred though …”

  “Shit,” Erin said, shaking her head. Of course they had another cataclysm ramping up. Why would they get a break for a day or two during a demon invasion, after all?”