Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

“We got a point of agreement there,” Reeve said.

  “We got a lot more common ground than maybe you’ve given credit for up to this point,” Pike said. “And that’s fine, because I know why you’ve done what you’ve done to protect people, Midian, the county. Just understand—I can’t maybe fight the fight the way you can, marshaling an army. But I’m gonna try.” As lies went, that one was a whopper the size of Russia, but Pike delivered it with a smile and boyish charm. “In every way I can.”

  “Help is surely appreciated,” Reeve said again, grudgingly. “And sorely needed.”

  “I’m going to get you all the help I can,” Pike said. He thrust out a hand. “We’re in this all the way, all the way to the end.”

  Reeve eyed his hand for a second like it was emitting radiation, then took it as he pulled the car to the side of the road, giving Pike a handshake that fortunately stopped short of bone-crushing force. “I’m sorry if I’m come off strong, especially if you mean what you say. But you’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical.”

  “You’re a virtuous man, Sheriff,” Pike said, and caught the upraised eyebrow. “Protecting the people the way you do, plunging through the personal tragedy you’ve endured recently … that’s a virtue of the old kind. The sort of drive to duty they used to sing songs about.”

  “Well, I don’t imagine there’s going to be a whole lot of songs sung about what we’re doing here,” Reeve said dryly. “Unless they’re funeral hymns.”

  “‘Amazing Grace’ always did have a nice ring to it,” Pike said, turning his head to look at the mailbox just outside his window. It read MILNER. “But I don’t think I’m ready for it to play at my funeral just yet.”

  “Good,” Reeve said, “because I’ve been to enough damn funerals this week.” Reeve gave him a dark smile, and Pike matched it with that rueful one of his own. It was working, slowly. Maybe he’d move the man in the direction he needed yet. Maybe.

  *

  Hendricks listened to the buzz of the watch phone again and rolled his eyes. The hearse was still ahead of them, and finally he’d had it, so he looked over at Duncan and said, “What’s the deal?”

  “All call,” Duncan said, looking at his own phone. “Hellcats on the prowl outside of town.”

  “Shit, fuck, damn,” Hendricks said.

  “That sounds like a hell of a Saturday night,” Duncan said. “Maybe fuck before you shit?”

  Hendricks cracked a thin smile. “What about the damn?”

  “Seems we’re heading that way, doesn’t it?” Duncan didn’t smile much, but he had a thin one right now too. “Should we give up following this guy and go render aid?”

  Hendricks thought about it. “You think this hellcat army is massing up for a big assault?”

  “Hard to imagine a coordinated one,” Duncan said. “They’re not a hive mind. They run in small social circles—or at least they did. I guess I’ve seen some new behavior from them since I got here.”

  “Do they have documentaries on these kind of demons somewhere?” Hendricks asked. “Because all I got was a lousy handbook, and if there’s a channel where I can On Demand this shit, I’m telling you, I’m gonna be so pissed at—” He cut himself off.

  “At her?” Duncan was smiling now, for sure.

  “Who?” Hendricks played dumb. “Starling?”

  Duncan rolled his eyes, but he kind of sucked at it, so they went sideways. “You know that’s not who I’m talking about.”

  Hendricks kept his head down, hunched over the wheel a little tighter. “It amazes me how, even with your senses supposedly constipated, you can still have a pretty good read on some of this stuff. How do you know about her?”

  “She’s a player,” Duncan said. “The Office of Occultic Concordance would be pretty shit at our jobs if we didn’t know who’s breathing down the other end of your phone at night, given what she’s got going for her.”

  Hendricks shot him a sideways look. “How much do you know about her?”

  “Everything.” The reply was even, knowing, and more than a little frustrating in its lack of specificity.

  “Forgive me if I don’t leap right into believing that just cuz you say it’s so.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me what you believe about that,” Duncan said. “It’s not even the question at hand anyway.” The phone buzzed again and he held it up. “What do we do about this?”

  “Well, what can we do?” Hendricks asked. He nodded at the hearse in front of them. “We have a definite lead in the hellcats, and then we’ve got a … I don’t even know. A feeling, I guess?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What’s one more car in that clump out there?” Hendricks asked. “I mean, we could go slay some hellcats, but …” He shook his head. “We’re starting to get into the realm of the stupid for the fights we’re undertaking, with that kind of shit. Those things …” He shook his head. “They’re not a game-changer, they’re a fucking game-breaker. They find their balls and go tearing through Midian all at once, this is fucking over, man. There won’t even be anyone left to cry.”

  “Agreed,” Duncan said.

  Hendricks gave him a double-take look sideways. “‘Agreed’? Isn’t it your job to keep these things under control?”

  This time Duncan shrugged. “Sure. Lots of things fit in that purview, though. Busting the shells of a thousand or so hellcats is a little outside my abilities, though.”

  “So much for demonic pest control,” Hendricks said. “What the fuck good are you OOCs against that, then?”

  “Not much, I guess,” Duncan said. “Not in our current numbers.”

  “So, stupid question then,” Hendricks said. “Why don’t you have more numbers here?”

  Duncan stayed silent. Scarily silent, Hendricks judged. “Good question,” Duncan said.

  Hendricks felt like a grenade had gone off in front of his fucking face. “One that you don’t have an answer to? Or one you’ve got a shitty answer to?”

  The OOC just sat there like a stone, or a corpse, and when he finally stirred, it was a simple hand motion, putting a palm up. “A little of column A …”

  “And a little of B?” Hendricks slammed a palm against the steering wheel. “I’m used to my hotspots sucking, but shit, man. We pulled back the tide on this place how many times now?”

  “Lots.”

  “And it’s creeping in hard,” Hendricks said. “I get that your office doesn’t give a fuck about every flyspeck that has a hotspot flare, but JFC, man. When you see the train coming toward the wreck in slow motion, you’d think they’d want to do something about it.”

  “I don’t know that they’re not doing something about it,” Duncan said. “I just have no idea if the thing they’re maybe doing is even something we’d want them to do. If that makes any kind of sense.”

  Hendricks felt like he’d need a few hours to untangle that fucking knot. “How on the outs with the office are you?”

  “Pretty out.”

  “And is Guthrie … ‘in’?” Hendricks asked delicately. Well, for him.

  “Hard to say.” Duncan looked over at him. “You were hoping to hear the beating of the cavalry’s hooves?”

  “Maybe literally in the case of your peeps,” Hendricks said, white-knuckling the wheel. “I ain’t never counted on a demon to solve my problems before, so no—I wasn’t expecting your … folks … to do anything for me. To me, maybe, but not a goddamned thing for me. Just seems weird, every time I try and wrap my head around your mission. Keep the order, but you know, don’t actually worry about the order—”

  “I think you’re laboring under a false assumption that my people care about your so-called order,” Duncan said. “They don’t. They want to maintain the status quo, keep things hush hush. That doesn’t mean no fatalities, no towns going to hell and disappearing off the map—it just means few enough that people don’t start noticing and making a fuss. Acceptable losses. They could give a fallookandresh’s turd if you and everyone in this
burg goes down the craw of the nearest helghar’lac, so long as it doesn’t reach a tipping point.”

  Hendricks held tight to the wheel, then spun the SUV about hard, flipping a bitch and taking the vehicle around into the opposite lane. He brought her about and hit the accelerator, squealing the tires and heading back in the opposite direction.

  Duncan was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “So … solidarity, then?”

  “Seems like I’m the only long-term demon hunter in these parts,” Hendricks said, nudging the MPH needle up toward 100. “And that means the only professional doing something about this, so … yeah, I guess I should be there for whatever they got going.”

  “Good,” Duncan said with something faint approval.

  “Why?” Hendricks asked. “Don’t you care about catching the Thin Man back there?”

  “The undertaker can wait,” Duncan said. “There are bigger priorities.”

  “Like hanging together?” Hendricks asked.

  “Better than hanging separately,” Duncan said. “Because honestly … you got no chance of getting out of those nooses on your own.”

  “Fucking reassuring,” Hendricks said, then added grudgingly, “but … thanks for at least being honest about it.”

  “That may be all I have left to give you,” Duncan said. “That and a baton for a few demons.” He didn’t smile, didn’t look at Hendricks, just stared straight ahead through the window.

  “Well, that’s fucking unnerving,” Hendricks decided after a moment’s thought.

  “I agree,” Duncan said, “and I don’t even have nerves.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way, that thought causing Hendricks’s guts to churn as they raced to meet up with the watch.

  *

  “He’s stable; let’s move him upstairs to the OR,” Lauren said, pulling her stethoscope off the patient’s chest. If he’d been conscious, he might have been whining about how cold it was as she pushed it against his sternum, but he was dead out, and a few inches from actually dead, so he didn’t say a goddamned thing, which was good. Because she’d just saved his life temporarily, and bitching about it might have compelled her to slap the shit out of him.

  “Moving.” One of the nurses rolled the gurney, and another doc went with, heading for the elevator upstairs. Lauren snapped off a glove, pretty confident she was done for now, and if not—well, Dr. Stevens had this one until they got to the OR.

  “Nice work,” Alanna Castle said. She was a career nurse, and one of those mother-bear types who bridged the gap between docs and nurses when it came to the back and forth. She treated the ER like it was one big, happy family, which it often wasn’t, especially around contract negotiation time. “Welcome back.”

  “I’d say it’s good to be here, but you know bullshit when you hear it, Alanna,” Lauren said.

  Alanna’s smile was as snide as Lauren’s comment, and just as knowing. “I got three teenagers; I don’t just know it when I hear it, I can smell from a mile off. Still, welcome back.” She stripped off her plastic gown and trashed it, tossing the gloves in the bin with it, and went off to her next patient.

  Lauren took a breath. She was probably due to check in with another patient soon too. The ER’s tempo was manageable, but damned sure not quiet. Every time it got quiet, staffing cuts tended to follow, because why pay for doctors and nurses you didn’t need? Management didn’t tend to think about things like long-term demand, not when it hit the bottom line.

  She took a few steps out into the hall, looking down at the worn white tile. She hadn’t spoken with Molly after the unpleasant wake-up, and that was potentially a problem given that her daughter was going to be sitting around Elise’s house all day without anything to do but think about how much she disliked the current situation. And maybe read a book or something. But probably mostly stew.

  Lauren could understand that. She wasn’t happy about the way things were right now either.

  But what the hell else was there to do? Head back to Midian, with its fucking endless streams of demons, toss her daughter into a human-sacrifice situation in the name of—what? Home? Was that the primitive god she would be willing to give her daughter’s life for? It was like some fucking caveman territorial instinct, the desire to protect the ground they considered theirs at the risk of Molly’s life and her own, and that just didn’t sit right with her higher brain functions.

  Her gut told her a different story, but her brain? It was all in for staying the fuck away from Midian.

  Lauren looked up when she heard her name called. It was a calm, male voice, and for a moment she thought maybe it was her boss about to give her grief for wandering aimlessly. Well, shit, her mother had just died and been buried; she was entitled to a little aimlessness, wasn’t she? She turned, about to snap at him—

  And shut the fuck up right then. It wasn’t her boss at all.

  “Hey,” Brian Longholt said, hand up in a little wave. He looked like shit rubbed in dirt, a few days of pathetically thin beard stubble on his cheeks and upper lip, his clothes looking like they’d been slept in for weeks, and his hair—well, it had never been that impressive, but it was especially bad now, like a faux hawk gone terribly wrong, the point apparently having been directed sideways in his sleep.

  “Jesus,” Lauren breathed. He was only ten feet away.

  Brian looked skyward for a second, like he was thinking about his reply more carefully than normal. “No, it’s Brian, but that’s a common mistake—oh, who am I fucking kidding? No one makes that mistake but me.”

  Lauren found her hands on her hips, and she was surveying him like a serious fixer-upper she’d been charged with rehabbing. “What the hell happened to you?” The words slipped out before she could rein them in, regret following hard on their heels.

  “So, I guess I must look like the post-crucifixion Jesus then,” Brian said, the ghost of a smile hiding beneath that stubbly lip. He’d never been the most put-together guy, but for fuck’s sake, he’d gone downhill in a hurry.

  “Just about,” Lauren said, tugging at the scrubs that rested uncomfortably on her hips. “I mean … how long has it been since you’ve had a full night of sleep?” The dark circles under his eyes looked like they’d been rubbed on by a football coach … which was an impossibility, because if Brian had ever played football, Lauren would eat the entire biohazard bin in the ER.

  Brian thought about that, too. A bad sign, because the Ivy League grad didn’t usually have to think too long before snapping out an answer. “A while,” he finally decided on. “Better question—how are you doing?”

  “Not as badly as you,” she said, edging in a little closer, hovering out of pity. Part of her wanted to wipe at the smudges on his face, to mom him, though she suspected his mother would probably do that if she got close enough and was … well, still functional after all the shit their family had gone through.

  “Well, you certainly look better,” Brian said with a wan smile.

  Lauren put a hand on the back of her neck and played with her ponytail self-consciously. “I’d ask you what you’re doing here, but …”

  “Yeah, you already know,” Brian said, looking down. He’d lost a lot of the smartassery that had defined him. He’d been such an irreverent, all-knowing kind of dick. Seeing him like this … shit, if pride went before the fall, then the fall Brian Longholt had taken had probably jarred loose a few other vitals as well upon the landing. “Dad’s … the same, basically.”

  “I don’t know if I said it yet—” Lauren started, rushing to her default.

  “Yeah, we exchanged condolences, all that,” Brian said, looking sideways. “I think. I mean, it’s hard to keep track; there’s been so much of it flying around, you know.”

  “Yeah, well … I’m still sorry,” Lauren said. “You got a double whammy.”

  “Triple, if we’re counting,” Brian said, and when she looked at him questioningly, he said, “I pulled the trigger, remember? So we had Alison, Dad, and … the gui
lt.”

  “I think Molly’s going through a little of that last one,” Lauren said. “You know, losing the grandmother who raised her plus … doing it herself at the behest of—of those—”

  “Those things, yeah,” Brian said with a nod. “Lots of that going around too, thick as the funeral invites and obits in Midian. I can’t decide whether the people who didn’t see this coming, who didn’t know about demons before … whether they have it worse or better than those of us who were in the know.”

  “I don’t think it’s a competition,” Lauren said. “Or if it is, it’s the kind everyone loses.”

  “No shit,” Brian said and lapsed into silence. She was just trying to figure out a way to tell him goodbye without sounding like a bitch when he said, “So, I’m guessing by the million ignored messages you just don’t want to talk about it.”

  She almost said, “Talk about what?” but held it back. She stared at him in silence for a few seconds that felt like a year. “Not particularly,” she finally replied.

  “I get that,” Brian said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “No, really,” Brian said. “You’re out; you probably feel like I’d try and drag you back in.”

  She gave him a wary eye. “Because you would. Drowning people tend to drown other people. Not because they want to, but because they try to cling to you for dear life and you can’t really fight the tide plus another person unless you really, really know what you’re doing. And the people who know what they’re doing in this demon invasion are limited to—well, to the cowboy. And even that’s questionable.”

  “I’m not drowning,” Brian said, brow puckered in a frown. “Okay, wait … I’m sort of drowning, but maybe not the way you think—shit, I’m … this metaphor is like—”

  “Been a while since undergrad, but I’m pretty sure ‘like’ is a simile, not metaphor.”

  Brian stopped, smiling. “This is a, uh … complex situation. Comparisons are difficult.”

  “I think I nailed it with the drowning thing.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Brian said, letting out a soft sigh and running his hand through his tragic mess of hair. He paused, frowning again as he ran his fingers through it, apparently discovering the state of it. “Look … can we talk?”