Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I think she’s starting to get it,” Guthrie said. “But don’t worry, kiddo—now that you’ve all seen the problem, I’m sure you’ll—I dunno, assemble the army, saddle up the cavalry—whatever it is you loons do.”

  “We’re with you, by the way,” Duncan said. “Because Guthrie won’t say it. We are.”

  “Hell no, I wouldn’t say it.” Guthrie looked mildly affronted. “Why would I voice support for riding into a battle with hundreds of these things with meat suits as our backup? We’d be better off with a glarhnsanng at our backs.”

  Duncan didn’t blink. “These things … they’re the clearest, most present danger, and to have them all together like this? A formula for speeding up the entropy around here. If you mean to take them out … we’ll help, because this is right, square in the middle of our mission.”

  “Shit,” Guthrie said mildly. “Committing us to action again. You twat. Or rather, lack of twat.”

  “Great,” Erin said, looking for Reeve in the middle of all this. He needed to know about this, and fast. Not like he didn’t already see the way things were going, probably, having witnessed the shitstorm that just blew through with those hellcats, but still. If the OOCs were onboard, this thing was plainly the big crisis of the moment—if they could even narrow it down to just one in Midian right now.

  *

  “You know what the sad fucking thing is?” Hendricks asked Starling as he meandered away from his awkward as hell discussion with the doctor and her soon-to-be terminally fucked daughter. “I think that girl used to be normal. This is what happens when you stay in a shitbox town that’s going straight to hell.”

  Starling just did that thing where she cocked her head at him, like she didn’t understand his use of the word ‘shitbox.’

  “I have a hard time understanding exactly what you understand,” Hendricks said, shaking his head. “Honestly, before we started screwing, I would have wondered if you even knew what fucking was.” She stared at him. “I mean, your other persona clearly does, but—”

  “What she knows, I know,” Starling said.

  “Well then, Lucia must be real dumb not to understand some of the basic things people have said to you over the last few weeks.”

  Starling stirred, looking at the ground. “What she knows, I know … but I don’t understand everything she knows.”

  “Well, now we’re making some progress,” Hendricks said. “So, you take a body for a drive, but you don’t quite … get everything? The comprehension part of it? Is it a little like you’re overlaying your personality on top of hers?” He felt a mild discomfort. “Does she even know you’re doing anything with her? Because she didn’t seem to know your name the time I asked her—”

  “She knows who I am,” Starling said simply.

  “Then why didn’t she—” He stopped himself. “Yeah. Why would she say anything? ‘Yeah, Mister, I’ve got a random angel being stuck in my body.’ Like there ain’t enough crazy shit already going on around here.”

  Starling just stared at him.

  “Well, I suppose it’s about time to call it a night,” Hendricks said. The search was off, which was probably disappointing to a few people, but he found it kinda hard to get exercised about it. Yeah, it sucked that Mack kid was out there, alone, probably dead or dying, but—

  “He is an innocent, isn’t he?” Starling asked.

  Hendricks chewed on that one for a second, even though he knew who she was talking about right away. “Mack? Yeah. I’d say so.”

  “Why did you leave the child to roam the woods?” Starling asked.

  “You know why,” Hendricks said, feeling a little stung by that question.

  “Prudence,” Starling said.

  “How about ‘not getting everyone killed to chase a kid halfway to hell and gone through the woods’?” He scuffed a boot against the pavement and it scraped loudly. “You saw what’s out there.”

  “Slightly less than a thousand of the creatures you call hellcats … and a scared child,” she said tonelessly.

  “Fuck,” Hendricks said, squeezing his right hand tight. “Is he going to make it through to the morning?”

  She didn’t even blink. “No.”

  “How far away is he?” Now Hendricks’s interest was raised. Starling had always shown a talent for appearing and disappearing close to his sorry ass, but the idea that she could track others? Never occurred to him.

  “Far,” she said.

  “Like … minutes away? Or farther?”

  “Out of your reach,” Starling said.

  “That mean he’s treed? Like a fox?”

  She didn’t reply to that.

  “Fuck,” Hendricks said again. Now he was questioning this decision. “I gotta—”

  “There is nothing you can do,” she said and seized him by the shoulder. It wasn’t rough—not any rougher than she’d been in the bedroom, at least—but there was a commanding amount of force applied to his shoulder. He didn’t quite know how to take it; if it had been a dude doing it, he would have decked the motherfucker.

  With Starling, though …

  “There is nothing you can do,” she said again.

  “Then why’d you ask why I did it?”

  “Because I am curious about you,” she said, and strangely, that admission prompted a stirring below his belt. It didn’t take much thinking to figure out why—it had been a while since a woman had shown a real interest in him.

  “I could say the same about you,” Hendricks said.

  Her hand was still planted on his pec, like she was afraid he’d charge past and go after little Mack. “It is curious to me … how easily you fit into the role of hero.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Every time I think you might be wending toward a compliment, you take a left turn into something that feels like a passive-aggressive insult.”

  She cocked her at that too. “You are a hero.”

  There was a sinking feeling in his stomach. “I’m not feeling too much like one right this second, given I might have just condemned that boy to die.”

  She processed that for a moment more and said, “But if you had all gone, you would have all died.”

  She sounded so certain that it eased his mind, just a little. “You sure about that?”

  The answer came back unreserved. “Yes.”

  His stomach still churned with unease. “Well, all right then.” He turned and stared back into the woods nonetheless. This was the shit side of regret, always wondering whether you’re making the right call in tough situations. But this quasi-divine—not that Hendricks believed much in the divine, but still—this being that seemed to know shit that he didn’t know about—she said he was in the right on this one, no matter how shitty it felt to walk away from a person in need. How much shittier would it have been to walk most of the watch into an ambush?

  It was probably the right call. He could imagine them working their way through the woods, twigs and leaves crackling beneath their feet as they shone their lights the next twenty, the next thirty feet ahead. They’d be calling, “Maaaaack!” in loud, echoing voices over the hills and hollows in these woods, stringing themselves out in long lines to cover the most ground. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even hear the approach of those things until it was too late.

  Hendricks’s stomach twisted like a hellcat had run one of those shadowy claws over it, and he shuddered, imagining his intestines spilling out into his hands, trying to push them back in, slimy and slick, the stink of rotten food and shit roaring up his nostrils unstoppably while he fell to his knees.

  Yeah, staying out of those woods was wise, at least for now. He’d settled it in his head, and started to turn to Starling to say so, but … hell if she wasn’t gone, leaving him standing in the same spot without a damned thing to do.

  “What’s the matter?” Erin Harris called out at him from behind her car. She was watching with a smirk. “Your imaginary girlfriend disappear again?”

  “Guess so,” Hendrick
s said, her comment causing his cheeks to burn a little now that he’d left most of the warring emotions over calling off the search behind. “It’s all right though. I imagine she’ll appear again later tonight, on my dick. Better than a booty call.” He smiled, guessing this was going to go over like a lead balloon.

  Erin froze for just a second, and he watched his smartass bomb strike home. She probably was being an asshole, making that comment when she didn’t even know the two of them were knocking boots. Erin was good for one of those every now and again. She turned away, either because she was trying to be the bigger person or because she didn’t have anything smart to say. Hendricks didn’t give a fuck about trying to figure out which. He just headed for his purloined SUV to get back to the Sinbad motel.

  Because Starling probably would show up later for some dick, and he wanted to be ready.

  Interlude

  Two Years Earlier

  Raymond Creasy had that look about him that screamed bad boy. Twenty-two, denim shirt over his tanned muscles—she’d seen him with it off, and those tattoos, purrrrrrr—and how he wore those jeans. Mmm. It was enough to give Lucia a yearning to get closer, and get closer she did.

  He was the best thing about her new digs. New mom, new dad—not even close to same as the old—new neighborhood, new school, new friends. She’d been fostered because no one in her family wanted to take her in. Her grandma was too old, and her aunt was busy raising eight kids of her own as a single mother.

  So here she was in her own little new world, mom and dad dead and her staying with Michael and Karen. But two doors down was Ray Creasy, and he liked to drink beer and work on cars with his shirt off. He had his own house that he was renting, he drove a badass Chevelle from the seventies—she didn’t know much about cars, but it was hot, like him—and here she was on a Saturday night without permission, sitting in the Chevelle on an old dirt road, sipping beer with Ray in the back seat and listening to the crickets outside.

  “You sure this is okay?” she asked. “Don’t cops get mad when you got an open beer in the car?” She sipped again. It was tangy, Michelob Golden. She suppressed the desire to spit it out the window. She’d been working on it slowly for a while and it was starting to get better.

  “You’re from the Georgia side of Chattanooga, aren’t you?” Ray asked. He looked pretty damned amused about it, like he knew something she didn’t. He lifted the beer and guzzled it, draining the rest of it in one. He damned sure liked those things; every time she saw him he had one. Amazing he managed to keep a six-pack of abs given how much he drank. Her dad had taken down a six-pack a night and was working on storing his own keg on his belly before he’d died.

  “Yeah.” A flash of insecurity made the car heat up for Lucia. He could tell that? She felt out of place again, like he knew she was Georgian and was judging her for it, but also like he could smell her virginity in the small space between them, another thing for him to not like about her.

  Fuck, what was there to like about her? She looked away. She was stupid, ugly, her mouth was too big—

  “There’s no open container law in Tennessee.” He touched her chin, turning her face back to him. “They call it the ‘Hold my beer’ law. You just hand your beer over to the person in the passenger seat and boom—no problem here, officer.”

  “Yeah, but I ain’t legal to drink,” Lucia said.

  “So you’d get an underage ticket—who gives a shit?” Ray laughed. “I’d pay it for you.”

  That sounded pretty fair to her. She took another sip of the beer, but ended up letting about half of it wash out of her mouth and back into the can. Her tongue rubbed against the sharp edge of the can’s mouth; felt like she was going to cut herself.

  She lowered the can and found Ray right there, tight against her. His shoulder was pressed to her left arm, his hand on her bare knee. Lucia was wearing short shorts, and his fingers rubbed against her smooth skin where she’d shaved her legs for this date. Her foster parents didn’t know where she was; she hadn’t taken her cell phone along because she didn’t want to hear the steady buzz of it going off, and it was easier to say, “Oh, I just forgot,” than to try and explain why their worried calls went to voicemail for the next two or three hours.

  He was warm against her, and he pushed his lips against hers before she almost had a chance to swallow that foul-tasting beer. He shoved his tongue in her mouth quickly, parting her lips just as she got the last of it down. She kept from choking on it and looking like the stupid idiot she was, accepting his tongue as gratefully as she could given the surprise of it showing up and probing all the way back to her tonsils. She forced her eyes shut until he finished, leaving her with the taste of beer and a little excess slobber dripping down her chin.

  “Ahhh,” Ray said as she opened her eyes, and she heard something rattling. She looked down and saw him fumbling with his belt, unfastening it with one hand, beer still clutched in the other. He went to the button of his pants next, then the zipper of his jeans made its way down with a staticky noise to reveal his yellow-striped boxer shorts beneath.

  Lucia got this sick sense of dread, like she’d known this was coming but she wasn’t really ready anyway. She put on the brave face, though, because she didn’t want to disappoint him. Ray reached into the slitted gap of his boxers and from it he pulled out his dick.

  Lucia had seen a dick or two on TV. They’d never really elicited any response but, “Oh, gross,” from her before, the thought of that mushroom-headed noodle getting anywhere near her a slightly repellent one.

  But now she kept her face as straight as possible. Ray had his fleshy instrument out, and it didn’t look too big, maybe a little wider than a couple of her fingers put together. He presented it to her, hand wrapped around its base, like it was some kind of gift. He was grinning widely, and wagged it at her. “Come on then,” he said, like she was supposed to know what he meant.

  She did know what he meant though, or at least she thought she did. A blowjob, right? She froze in place for just a second, a little loop going through her head:

  I don’t want to put that thing in my mouth.

  But—

  I want him to like me.

  But—

  I really don’t want to put that thing in my mouth.

  But—

  I really, really want him to like me. Really, really—

  She went for it. It felt halting, awkward, filled with the lingering worry that he was going to know, somehow, how nervous and sick she felt at the sight of his penis. She touched it first, and it felt sticky, sweaty, the hot Tennessee night making Ray sweat even before they’d gotten in the back seat. The Chevelle’s air conditioning didn’t work all that well, after all.

  She paused as she got close, getting a full whiff of the dick now. It smelled funny, like an armpit but a little worse. It wasn’t like she smelled good down there, either, all the time, but this was different, it was—

  Now the regret was settling in, now that she had a hand on his dick and it was poised about two inches from her lips. Did she really have to do this?

  I really, really, really want him to like me.

  She opened up her mouth and shoved it in, trying to remember what she’d heard Virginia Jenkins say to that group of girls in seventh grade about giving head. It was a long time ago, but it was all she had in terms of firsthand experience, and it basically boiled down to—form your lips into an O over the surface of his dick and move your head up and down fast.

  Lucia did just that, trying to ignore the taste, which was sweaty, like an old gym sock right under her nose as she breathed through it, and ran her mouth over his shaft, burying her nose briefly in his slightly damp pubic hair with each lift. It was like sucking on a lollipop that had been dipped in dirty underwear, and then it started to ooze from the tip, this salty, nasty—

  She came up for air and felt like she was going to gag, holding it back with everything she had in her. She hadn’t been able to look up at Ray’s face during, bec
ause he was seated and she’d been thrusting her mouth right into his lap, but she looked up at him now with watery eyes. His dick had tickled the back of her throat, damned near getting the gag reflex.

  He was leaned back, smile wide on his face. “Mmm,” he said, like he was stirring awake, his eyes coming open, “that was a good start.”

  Oh God, she thought, how could she do any more?

  As if he could see her frozen, deer-in-the-cock-headlights look, Ray opened his eyes again and leaned forward, planting his lips on her neck. That actually felt kind of good, tickling a little. He worked up to her ear, put his tongue in it. That didn’t feel so good. He landed a pawing hand on her breast, grabbing at her small tit through the bra.

  “Mmmmhmmm,” Ray said, tugging at the bottom of her tank top. She let him lift it up over her head, moving her arms to allow it. It was better than the thought of going back down on that cock of his.

  Once her shirt was off, he threw it in the front seat and ran his hands up her sides, rough palms and fingers running over her ribs and back to her bra hook. He fumbled for a couple minutes, cursing under his breath in her ear, the smell of Michelob Golden almost enough to start her retching after all.

  Her bra popped loose with a surprising amount of force, especially considering there wasn’t much beneath it. Ray pulled the bra off and Lucia tried to cover herself, blocking one nipple with a hand and the other with an elbow, breathing in sharply as she did so, instinctively.

  She caught herself in the moment, his tongue still working its way through her mouth. She didn’t want him to know she was a virgin. She just needed to be cool, to let him see her tits as they were, no big deal. It wasn’t like she could augment them here and now, anyway.

  Lucia pulled her hands from her chest and opened her eyes; his were still closed, but a second later his roaming hand found her right nipple and pinched it, drawing a sharp prick of pain and discomfort. She stifled the urge to take so much as a sharp breath to indicate the pain, even as he twisted slightly on the nipple.