All told, it was juicy, lip-smacking meat, and he practically sucked it off the bone, it was so tender. This arm had belonged to a young fellow named Morgan Davis. Drake had quietly broken into Davis’s home and discovered him and his girlfriend sleeping quietly in bed only last night. He’d quickly taken them, breaking Morgan’s neck almost before he could open his eyes, and then smothering his girlfriend with a pillow as she struggled and screamed into the feathered down. He was still running A/B experiments with meat and the flavors caused by dying in a panic, but it was sooooo difficult to decide. One time he’d be certain that yes, adding in the fear definitely gave the meat additional flavor. The next he was certain that, no, the adrenaline gave it no seasoning at all. He’d done some reading online in some of his fellow demons’ culinary sites, and they seemed to be rather torn about the whole thing.
Drake discarded Morgan Davis’s radius and ulna, and they clattered to the plate with a rattle, still joined by a piece of cartilage at what had been the elbow. He’d hungrily slurped the meat from between the bones, his tongue flicking out and stroking it clean in an act of almost sexual pleasure. For Drake, it nearly was; flavor profiles excited him much more than the silly lusts exhibited by these humans or his fellow demons who were capable of such appetites.
No, his was a more sensible appetite. The closest to nirvana a demon like him was capable of experiencing was a satiation—a full belly, ideally, one that had been filled while sampling delectable flavors. Drake sighed. His latest excursion—a home invasion—had produced good results and little resistance. He was quiet on his feet, and had chosen a house without an alarm sign, killing the dog first and silently—it had all gone to plan. He wasn’t sure it always would, but this time it seemed his calculated risk had paid off. Paid off handsomely enough that he’d follow through again tonight, after he’d had a chance to cook up the girlfriend and eat her this afternoon. He was all about the farm-to-table concept, and the idea of the meat lingering more than a day after slaughter was simply unacceptable to him and his culinary ethos. He shuddered at the mere thought.
No, he’d need more meat—and soon. In fact, in keeping with that ethos of freshness, he had already started contemplations about how best to … stockpile living humans, to keep them before the slaughter for maximum freshness. Humans could be caged, after all, it didn’t affect their flavor as near as he could tell, other than perhaps an increase in that adrenaline he’d been experimenting with.
The thick sauce of regret was still hanging over him, though, regarding the boy who had gotten away after his first kill on that back road. Sure, it had been delicious in the moment he had acceded, letting the child run off without having to give further chase, but the flavor became too rich by half afterward. He had thought of the boy over and over since, wondering if he had simply poured on the speed, gone after him a little harder, maybe now, almost a week later, the question would be settled in his mind: what does fresh veal taste like? He’d never had it before, because it tended to be highly frowned upon in most of the demon channels. If OOCs took it personally when you sold adult human meat, they were merciless at the attention drawn by the slaughter of children.
But now Aaron was in a place where the rules no longer seemed to apply. A better place, really, but one that required a bit more effort on his part than if he’d had pieces delivered to him in New York or LA or DC. He’d found he’d enjoyed the kill, the sensation of ‘farming’ his own dinners, making it an organic part of the whole culinary process. It was nature, it was beautiful, and so richly rewarding.
“I need more,” he muttered, sticking a fingernail in his teeth to dislodge a piece of Morgan Davis. Drake knew he’d go out again tonight. His appetite required feeding, even though, strictly speaking, his stomach didn’t. That lingering regret, too, was eating at him the way he’d gnawed at Morgan Davis’s bones just now. He needed to try one of the little ones, to sample that flavor profile for himself, really taste it. After all, it might just be the taste he was looking for.
*
Arch didn’t like donuts. They tasted fine, sure—good, even. But all he could think about when pushing one of those, sweet, doughy confections in his mouth was how long it’d take him to burn it off. So he tended to avoid them, leaving any that came in the front door to Reeve or Ed Fries, at least back in the days when they operated like normal cops rather than the demon-hunting force they’d become.
So when County Administrator Pike thrust the box of donuts at him, Arch took them out of politeness only, and transferred them and their sweet-smelling selves to the counter, opening the carton so that the air could get at them, make them even less appealing to him over time and, hopefully, spare him the temptation.
Because that glazed one there in the front row, all glistening … it looked mighty fine.
“I know, I know,” Pike said with a saccharine grin that made Arch want to take a step back, “donuts and cops. What a stereotype, right? But still, I figured maybe it had some little grain of truth in there, somewhere.”
“Ed Fries was a big fan,” Reeve said, arms stiff at his sides. Arch figured the sheriff was working to keep from crossing them in front of Pike, give the wrong—or right—impression.
“You’re telling me you don’t pick up a donut from time to time, Sheriff?” Pike still grinned, like he was trying to be in on the joke.
“Maybe later,” Reeve said. “I just ate.” That was a flat-out lie, unless he had a box of Twinkies secreted away in the back storage room. “What can we do for you, County Administrator?”
“Well, I came to get out the vote,” Pike said, his grin fading a little. “I’ve just cast mine in favor of you, Sheriff. Been campaigning for you as much as I can in these parts—not sure how much good it’ll do since people are a mite suspicious of everything at this point … but I’ve done what I could.”
“And I do appreciate it,” Reeve said dryly. Arch had known the man long enough to hear the unsaid words: But I would have appreciated it more if you hadn’t tried to drag me out of office to begin with.
“Well, I just hope we can move past this and focus on the crisis at hand,” Pike said.
“You mean the demons?” Brian tossed in helpfully. He was still sitting at the dispatcher’s desk, and had a grin to match Pike’s, but for entirely different reasons, Arch was sure.
“Absolutely,” Pike said with a nod. “That’s exactly what I meant. Demons. It sounds funny, and it’s tough for people—voters—to wrap their brains around, because I know it was for me, but … demons. Yeah. We gotta focus on what it’s going to take to bring this county through this crisis, this demon crisis—together. And I’m just glad this election is going to be over after today, with the result—I hope—being you still sitting in that chair, Sheriff.” He nodded at Reeve. “But I know even if things go awry, you’re still going to be front and center helping us on this, because I truly believe that you’re the only man that can.”
Arch felt like he needed hip waders, it was getting so deep in here. He didn’t say anything though, waiting for Reeve to respond, because it was his malarkey to respond to, not Arch’s.
“Well, that’s mighty kind of you,” Reeve said, showing some hint of loosening up. Arch wondered if it was because of the pretty words or because he was fighting against his nature and trying not to show himself as an enemy to Pike right now. “I—”
“Here we go,” Brian said as the dispatch phone in front of him rang. He clicked a button and said, “911, what’s your emergency?” He stared off into space, concentrating intently. “Whoa, whoa—slow down. I can’t—ohhh, oh shit.” He covered the microphone boom that stretched over his mouth, apparently missing the mute button hanging from the cord that dangled in front of his chest. “We got a pack of hellcats terrorizing Mary Wrightson.”
“Got it,” Reeve said, springing into motion so fast his coffee slopped over the edge of the mug. The sheriff ignored it and headed for the door, sweeping up his sword in the process. “We’re en route.
” He shot a look at Arch. “You coming?”
“On your six,” Arch said, then wondered why he’d said it that way. Hanging out with Hendricks too much, probably. Then again, the way the cowboy swore, hanging out with him for any amount of time was too much.
“Let’s go,” Pike said, scrambling and opening the front door for Reeve.
Reeve missed a step, almost coming to a stop. “You can’t be serious.”
“Hey, we’re all in this together,” Pike said, smarmy smile gone in the urgency of the moment. “I want to see what we’re up against. I owe to it the voters. Maybe I can even help.”
“With what?” Reeve asked.
“Come on, Sheriff, it’s Tennessee.” Pike raised his suit jacket and half-turned. Visible inside the waistband of his pants was a holster and a pistol. “Anyone who ain’t packing around here right now is a damned fool, and I only consider myself a mediocre fool, at worst.”
Reeve looked ready to argue, but Brian said, “How many?” And they all turned to look at him. He covered the mic again and said, “Fifty or more. You might want to hurry. They’re massing out there, running through the fields.”
“Shit,” Reeve said, and motioned for Pike to come along. “Whistle up some help, will you?” he said to Brian. “We’re going to need it. Nobody goes in until ordered. I want this done tight, you know? If they’re coming en masse, we need to also.”
“Got it,” Brian said. “I’ll set the rendezvous point for just up the road from her—say Orville and Edith Milner’s place, end of the driveway?”
“That works!” Reeve shouted behind him as he headed out the door, Pike in tow. Arch was a step behind them, the sound of Brian reassuring Mary Wrightson that everything was going to be all right fading behind him, and he wondered, given how many of those hellcats were out there, just how right his brother-in-law would turn out to be.
He slid into his car as Pike was saying to Reeve, “I’ll ride with you,” not even asking.
Reeve’s jaw tightened, but the sheriff kept his composure. “I don’t know when I’ll be getting back here. You may want to drive yourself.”
“Hell, no,” Pike said. “I’m not sure I’d feel safe without someone who knows what they’re doing in this situation.”
“You got a gun,” Reeve said.
“As I understand it from what you’ve told me, those only delay this enemy,” Pike said. Well, shucks. Turns out the County Administrator wasn’t a total buffoon, not that Arch had ever taken him for one.
“Get in,” Reeve said, and they both disappeared into Reeve’s car, Pike flashing a last look of triumph as he did so.
Arch just shook his head and shut his door, starting up the big Explorer, which he had today. He didn’t want to be part of the conversation that was about to be held in the sheriff’s borrowed car. Funny how they fell into patterns; Reeve hadn’t even asked Arch for the Explorer back after his cruiser had been shredded by one of those hellcats. He’d just gone to the square and taken a dead man’s car for his own use, a big Toyota 4-Runner that sat a ways off the ground. The sheriff started her up and Arch let him lead. He didn’t need to hear any complaints about how he drove like a grandma, not today.
He pulled onto Old Jackson Highway just behind the sheriff’s 4-Runner, turning on the sirens and lights to clear a path. He’d stick relatively close to the sheriff’s bumper, and he could already see through the moisture-covered rearview window that Pike was turned and talking to the sheriff. No, he didn’t want to be part of that conversation at all, but then, there were quite a few of those conversations he’d been avoiding of late. Braeden Tarley had wanted to talk—to do all the talking, actually, after the encounter with the shadowcats in the woods. He’d jabbered for hours; Arch had heard him through the walls of Barney Jones’s house long after he’d gone to bed, barely shutting up for two seconds to allow Jones to say anything.
Then there was Jones himself. He’d been trying to catch Arch for days, but Arch had dodged thus far. He had a feeling he knew what the pastor was going to say, so he’d been carefully structuring his time to avoid the man. He felt some residual guilt at avoiding an envoy of the Lord, but he had a purpose he was called to, and it was crossed with what Barney had in mind, he suspected. No right or wrong there, just a lack of clarity on the pastor’s part. He was called to save; Arch felt called to destroy in the name of God. Hard to reconcile those two points of view, Arch supposed, but hadn’t people been telling him for years that real life was muddier, less clear than he’d always thought? It wasn’t black and white, no—but in this case, it sort of was.
Arch glanced at the file sitting on the seat next to him. It was a thick manila folder, filled with witness statements he’d been taking these last few days. Three calls over four days, all the same thing—missing persons. What had started with Nora Wellstone was becoming a pattern. A lady assaulted and kidnapped from her car. A man missing from a local park when he went to walk his dog near sundown. The dog came back dragging his leash; no sign of the man. And then there the lady who went out for groceries at Rogerson’s and apparently disappeared from the parking lot. They found her car, loaded with groceries, but she was gone, her purse lying underneath the vehicle.
He’d seen the work of demons these last few months. Up close. Too close. They were messy creatures, vile, disgusting beasts that worked in the name of evil. He’d seen one that burned people up from the inside, seen ones that ripped people apart and tore them to bits after coming into their houses. He’d even seen ones that ran people down on their bicycles.
But in all that time, in all these cases, he hadn’t had a lot of missing persons reports. Demons tended to kill people right where they found them, not a lot of runaround, no playing hide-the-corpse.
They’d found nothing of these missing folks. Not a fingernail, not a sign, nothing but the blood smeared on Nora Wellstone’s steering wheel. It was a bone Arch felt he had to pick, trying to find the meat. Because these folks could still be alive for all he knew, and it didn’t sit right with him that he not try to find them.
He looked ahead into the sheriff’s car. Pike was nodding animatedly to whatever Reeve was saying. No, Arch didn’t need those complications, that conversation, or any of the other ones people were lining up to have with him. “I got this,” he said, and he was sure of it. He knew what he had to do.
He’d keep fighting, doing what he needed to in order to kick back these demons. He’d find this kidnapper, whoever he was, making people just disappear out of the lives of their loved ones without a word, without a trace. Arch swallowed hard; that thought got to him, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. “I can handle it,” he said, and he meant it. Because he was sure he could.
*
Erin got the mass text and saddled up immediately. It didn’t take long for her to get dressed and sweep her hair back in a ponytail, grab her gun belt and bat and hurry to the car. It was a misty cool morning in Midian, the kind that prickled the skin even if you were wearing a jacket. Her cruiser’s windshield was covered over with condensation, a thick layer that turned the world into a massive distortion as she slid into the seat and started her up.
With luck, this wouldn’t turn into a bad day, but that was all pretty fucking subjective these days.
Her cruiser’s engine roared as she took her out onto the road, bumping as it crossed over the storm gutter. She turned the wheel hard to the left, heading for the sticks—again, subjectively. Mary Wrightson’s place was outside the city proper, though well inside the town’s boundaries. This was how these things were going lately, caterwauling their way through the countryside but not approaching the neatly laid street grid of Midian itself. They’d gotten a few calls and picked off a few stragglers, but killing a half-dozen hellcats wasn’t exactly making a difference in the world, or the county, or whatever.
She’d seen that swarm of fuckers with her own eyes. She could aerate a hundred of them and not make a dent.
Erin was still working the problem. Ev
eryone was, but it wasn’t a problem with the kind of solution that just jumped out at you. Thousands of demons that moved like a pack of … well, demon wolves or something, and they weren’t small. Even with the army that the watch was assembling, they weren’t going to be easy to put down in combat. She had a vague vision of massing a bunch of people on a hilltop with spears and lances and battle standards, like something out of a movie. It always ended in an abject clusterfuck, because those goddamned hellcats would come charging in and keep coming, and because she doubted they could muster a thousand people to fight that kind of battle. Maybe a hundred or two if really pressed. That made the numbers very uneven. Worse, there weren’t exactly an abundance of holy weapons yet, which made things even more lopsided in her epic battle vision.
Every way she sliced it, it always seemed to end in a slaughter for her side. Even if they were really, really fortunate, Sam Allen-type casualties would turn the fucking ground red wherever they decided to fight. And the mobility of these damned things … it practically guaranteed that if for some reason they were able to turn the tables, the hellcats would just run away, like they seemed to every time the watch showed up.
That stunk like a trap to her, if these things could think and assess risk at all. She deemed the threat of the watch to be pretty fucking low to this pack as a whole, but maybe they didn’t see it that way. It was better for her if they didn’t, because a skittish enemy beat the shit out of one that knew it was too badass for you to handle. Nothing would embolden the hell out of these things better than the feeling that they were unstoppable.
And it was all the worse because, as near as she could tell … they kind of were, at least in these numbers.
Erin went rattling over the interstate bridge with her sirens blaring and lights flashing, undeterred. Hell, just because there didn’t seem to be a hope in hell of beating the things didn’t mean they should just surrender. She’d go out there, put a hole in the fuckers as best she could, hopefully wear them down eventually. Because what was the alternative? Bug out like the doc? Hell no. That wasn’t her way. That wasn’t her way at all.
Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 26