Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “You still ain’t seen a demon yet,” Reeve said, opening up his door once he’d killed the ignition. Reeve had figured Pike would talk his ear off, maybe make mention of the fact he’d still not actually seen a demon, at least not in the shell, but Pike had said nothing and they’d driven back in silence.

  “I’ve heard enough stories from the survivors,” Pike said with a shake of the head. “And I did see that house bulldozed to the ground. Well, ‘bulldozed’ isn’t the right word. A bulldozed house would have been a lot cleaner than whatever happened out there.”

  Reeve cocked an eyebrow at him. “You ready to believe me now?”

  “Been ready for a while now,” Pike said with an easy grin, coming around the car. He extended a hand. “I’ve been trying to help you, remember?”

  “Well, maybe it was tough to see that helping hand while I was busy trying to fight off demons and keep myself from getting dragged out of office,” Reeve said, eyeing Pike’s hand. He was about ready to take the man’s hand, but he couldn’t resist getting one more good lick in. Pike had certainly put him through enough to warrant it. Hell, he wasn’t technically even done, at least not until Reeve won his recall—if he did win.

  “I don’t know how many times I can apologize for that,” Pike said, hand still hanging out there.

  “Well, let’s hope it ends up being no big deal,” Reeve said and shook his hand. He felt slightly dirty doing it, but he couldn’t be real choosy about where he got his help right now, could he?

  “It’s my most sincere hope that a year from now, we’re sitting on a front porch around sundown, sipping a couple sweet teas, talking about how glad we are this bullshit is behind us,” Pike said. He seemed to mean it, but who could tell with a politician? He sure pumped Reeve’s hand like he was serious.

  “Let’s hope so,” Reeve said, breaking off. “What are you up to now?”

  “Back to the office,” Pike said, nodding as he stood right where he was. “Gonna see what else I can shake loose for you from the county budget. Don’t reckon the parks department is going to need the allotment for that playground we had planned in Culver—you know, if the county goes sliding into hell or whatever.”

  “I’m hoping that don’t become a reality,” Reeve said, catching sight of the others filing into the sheriff’s station, Mary Wrightson giving him a real sour look as she passed through the doors. He figured he was going to get an earful from her. Another delightful perk of being a public servant.

  “I’ll let you get back to it then,” Pike said, waving. “Keep me in the loop, Sheriff. Let’s knock these bastards back, all right?”

  “We’ll do everything we can,” Reeve said, waiting until he’d turned to roll his eyes. Did the fucker think they weren’t already trying to? Well, at least he was showing up and seeing for himself now, and not just pissing on them without even bothering to lie and tell them it was raining—which was what he’d been doing before that.

  *

  “We seem to have lost the thread we started on this morning,” Duncan said as Hendricks walked in the door, the OOC a few steps behind him.

  “No shit,” Hendricks said, a nice little blast of warm air catching him as he passed through the inner door to the sheriff’s station. He’d just followed the convoy, more out of habit than anything, and Duncan hadn’t said much on the drive, like anything to remind him they had been up to something when this particular shitshow had started. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “I’ve got a vague idea about where to sniff,” Duncan said.

  Hendricks frowned, stopping just short of the counter. Erin was already stomping around back behind it, looking pretty fucking surly, Guthrie grinning to high heaven at Casey Meacham, which gave Hendricks a little chill. “Why didn’t you say that before we got here?”

  “Reasons,” Duncan said.

  “What fucking reasons?” Hendricks asked.

  “What are you two going on about?” Arch asked, a somewhat menacing look on his face as he loomed into their conversation, lunging in awkwardly as that cranky lady they’d dug out of the house appeared behind him. She looked like a real bitter pill to Hendricks’s eyes, a battleaxe that was looking for somewhere to swing herself. Or maybe a ballbuster looking for some testicles to turn into jelly.

  “We were following a lead earlier,” Duncan said, “and were about to head out again just now.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Arch said, pushing himself into the conversation between them and making it a little triangle of people. Well, people-shaped entities anyway, what with Duncan not really being a person. Arch hadn’t even made it sound like a suggestion. He was just coming.

  Hendricks tried not to grin at that. He’d been wanting to catch Arch by himself for a while. It wasn’t funny, really, not at all. He figured the two of them had things to talk about, and had been surprised—but not that much—when the big deputy hadn’t sought him out after the square. Well, he’d had other things on his mind, Hendricks reckoned.

  “Yeah, let’s head out,” Hendricks said, waving Arch and Duncan toward the door.

  They passed Reeve, who looked wary, like he knew he was about to skydive onto a bed of nails without a parachute. “Where are you fellas headed?”

  “Getting some lunch,” Hendricks said. He glanced back at Arch, who didn’t even roll his eyes at the lie as he normally might have. “You want something from that diner on the square?”

  “It’s called Surrey’s,” Reeve said. “And in case you ain’t found this one out for yourself yet, don’t get the burritos.”

  “I have heard tell of the epic diarrhea those tend to prompt,” Hendricks said, nodding sagely. “I definitely don’t need any of that interfering in my evening activities.” He grinned, and the sheriff just nodded, still wary as fuck, probably knowing he was strolling into an ass chewing of epic proportions from that angry old biddy they’d pulled out of that house wreck. Hendricks tossed another look over his shoulder; she’d gone and picked up the phone and was using it without so much as a by your leave. Shit. “Let’s roll, bitches,” Hendricks said, and sprang for the door.

  “What are y’all after?” Arch asked as they hit fresh air again.

  Hendricks cast a look over the unmowed, vacant lot next to the sheriff’s station. Grass was getting long there, and starting to brown for the coming winter. “Not sure,” Hendricks said. “Duncan?”

  “Also not sure,” Duncan said. “Got a little hint of something through my demon senses. We were following a guy.”

  “What’d he look like?” Arch asked, fingering the hilt of his sword as they walked across the parking lot.

  “Thin,” Hendricks said. “Drove a hearse. Wore a black suit.” He hesitated, then, “I think he was at Alison’s funeral.”

  Arch froze in his tracks. “Tall fella. When he smiles, you get the feeling he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what else to do.”

  Hendricks shook his head. “I dunno. I didn’t get him to smile at me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t think you were pretty,” Duncan said.

  “Motherfucker, everyone thinks I’m pretty,” Hendricks said. “Look at this chiseled jawline.”

  “It is the like of which they used to carve into marble,” Duncan conceded.

  “You would know,” Hendricks said, then to Arch, “You remember this guy?”

  Arch was looking pretty pissed now too, like it was a communicable disease he’d picked up riding with the old lady, though Hendricks guessed it went back farther and deeper than that. He was considering how he felt about an uninvited demon crashing his wife’s funeral. “I remember him.” He shot a forceful look at Duncan. “You sure he’s one of your people?”

  “You mean an Enshelled-American?” Duncan cracked. “Because ‘you people’ is offensive for many reasons, the least of which being that we’re not really people.” Hendricks nodded along in amusement.

  “Answer the danged question.”

  “Hard to imagine he’s not,” Dunca
n said. “Don’t get me wrong, my senses pick up some human activity at times, but what I got from him definitely felt like a demon vibe rather than the low-level lust of, say, Hendricks about to get his pickle tickled.”

  Hendricks blinked. “You can feel that?”

  “Smell it, more like,” Duncan said.

  Hendricks waited a second to take that in. “What … does it smell like?”

  Duncan kept a straight face. “Bacon.”

  Hendricks had a feeling his leg was being pulled, but hell, who wanted to argue with an answer like that? “Goddamned right. Let’s go.”

  *

  Pike was already dialing his phone before he was out of the sheriff’s station parking lot. It rang as he headed down Old Jackson Highway, that familiar dinging echoing through the cabin of his vehicle, the hands-free projecting the sound of the call out of the car’s speakers so he could hear it and talk without having to hold a damned phone up to the side of his head. That shit was dangerous, after all.

  “Hey, baby,” Darla said when she answered.

  “Darling Darla,” he tossed back, out of habit and to get the pleasantries out of the way so he could get out what he needed to say. “I just spent a little time with Reeve’s crusaders.”

  “Is that so?” She paused on the other side of the call. “Mera, don’t smear food on the table, sweetie, put it in your mouth. You were saying?”

  “He’s forged himself an effective little demon fighting force,” Pike said. “I saw them do a quick rescue after some cats or something ripped down a house out in the boonies. They were ready, steady, all that.”

  “Cats …?”

  “Never mind,” Pike said. “It was some low-level vermin type shit, except lots of them. The point is—”

  “Reeve’s got his shit together,” Darla said. “Jay, sweetheart, we don’t throw spoons or knives or forks at our sister. Put it down. Put. It. Down. Thank you.” Then, without the sweetness, “So, what do we do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Pike said. “No clue where we’re going to end up on this recall—”

  “You voted against him, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you told him—”

  “Lied and brought him donuts, just like you suggested,” Pike said with a grin.

  “Attaboy. I voted against him too. With these little shits scrabbling around my ankles the entire fucking time.” Her voice got tight, then loosened up. “Maybe he’ll lose.”

  “That ain’t gonna solve our problems,” Pike said. “Throw a little monkey wrench into things, maybe—though who’d notice in this town? But it ain’t gonna solve anything.”

  “Mmmhmm.” She was thinking. Or maybe wiping up spittle from one of the babies. “You campaigning against him behind his back?”

  “Hell no. Town this small, word would get back to him in a second. I’m just keeping my mouth shut; figure influencing the vote one way or another doesn’t matter enough to risk pissing him off while I’m trying to get this bucking bronco back under control.”

  “You’re going to find that an impossible task,” Darla said. “Tell me about him and this army. How’d it go with them?”

  “Reeve whistled them up and out they came, neat as you please. They circled the wagons, had a perimeter—”

  “They took orders from him? Did what he told them to do?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hmmm,” Darla said, and the clanging of something in the background of the call drew a hiss from her. “Jay, I told you not to throw your silverware!” A slap of flesh against flesh was followed by a startled cry, then an extended whine that built as the realization swept through the child that his mother had struck him. Pike had seen it enough times to know when Darla got pissed it was best to stay out of arm’s reach. “That’ll learn you, as they say around here.”

  “I get the feeling Reeve is going to be a thorn for us for a while,” Pike said. “He’s dug in now, like a tick. And we’re not getting the top predators around here, not yet. Lots of this little vermin bullshit, enough to bust up a house or two but not bring any real power to this burg—”

  “Don’t let’s worry about Reeve right now,” Darla said. “We’re behind schedule, and things aren’t going that swell, it’s true, but we can always turn it around. If we’re not getting the high-wattage demon stars we’re looking for at this hotspot, then maybe it’s time to re-ring the dinner bell you planned on at Halloween.”

  “You imagine a scenario where Reeve’s little crew ain’t going to roll in and fuck that up for us?” Pike asked.

  “I imagine Reeve’s little circle jerk is going to get tired sooner or later,” Darla said, and he could imagine the smile on her face. “They don’t have the stamina for a long war. They won’t know what it’s going to take when things really amp up around here. They’ll start peeling off in ones and twos, deciding discretion is the better part of valor. They’ll pull up stakes and leave. Some of them will get tired and sloppy, and a demon will take them down, especially if we can get some real power summoned around here. Jason … we need a ritual. Maybe more than one. We can keep it quiet, but … it’ll start drawing the power to us we need, and move the gears on this machine.”

  Pike didn’t quite blanch, but he did frown and evince his disgust to the empty car the way he might have when thinking about praying the Rosary as a kid. “If you say so,” he said, but his heart wasn’t near in it.

  “I say so,” Darla said. “If we’re not getting the fish we’re here for, let’s switch bait. Or hell, chum the waters and get some damned sharks coming this way. Put some good blood in the water and they’ll show up.”

  “What ritual were you thinking?” Jason asked. He knew of a couple she’d been keeping under her hat, but … damn. They weren’t just not for the faint-hearted; they weren’t for anybody who didn’t have an iron-clad stomach and ice water in their veins. One of them even made him sweat with discomfort at the mere thought of performing it.

  “Blood and sex,” Darla said.

  Pike let out a little, “Whew.”

  “That doesn’t mean we won’t, later—”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, brushing his hand against his forehead. “I’m just not savoring the thought of—”

  “Jason,” she said softly, “this is about power. Real power. Eternal power, not the silly shit you’re doing as a County Administrator. This is real influence we’re talking about, not stupid backwoods Tennessee podunk horse-trading bullshit. We’re steps away from the big game. Don’t let them see you sweat now, and don’t fold like a little bitch because you see a table full of fat chips, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Pike said.

  “Gotta go,” Darla said. “Somebody needs a nap.” She hung up unceremoniously.

  Pike just sat there, blinking. “Hell, I could use a nap.” That didn’t seem likely to be on the agenda for today though.

  *

  “Mary,” Reeve said, trying to dodge her and get over to Casey, who was sitting at the dispatcher’s desk, wearing an expression that said he might, just maybe, have something interesting to say. It was a thin thread on which to hang his hopes, but Reeve was quite willing to discuss something unsavory with Casey—hooker sodomy, maybe—in order to get the hell away from Mary Wrightson, whose expression was not nearly so benign as the taxidermist’s.

  “Nick,” Mary said, stopping him in his tracks because her voice had an I got a bone to pick with you quality to it. “What’s all this I’m hearing about demons?”

  “Oh, you’re just now hearing about demons?” Reeve said with great sarcasm. “I would have thought the shit-ton of them plowing into the front of your house might have clued you in that they’re real and they’re here.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” Mary said. “I didn’t know what I was seeing. I thought maybe it was a herd of buffalo.”

  “A herd of buffalo?” Reeve let his jaw go slightly slack. “In East Tennessee?”

  “I hear they’re farming
’em now,” she said. “I went out to Knoxville last year to visit my boy Larry, and he took me to this burger place where they had buffalo burgers. It ain’t out the realm of possibility that they’d be farming some around here, and that they might slip loose.”

  “Well, now that’s something,” Reeve said. “But yeah, it was demons, not buffalo.”

  “They seemed a little small for what I imagined a buffalo to look like,” Mary conceded. “And they had long tails too.”

  “We call ’em hellcats,” Reeve said, trying to get past her. Casey was just sitting over there, feet away, like a human lifeline he couldn’t quite reach.

  “Why ain’t I heard about this until now, Nick?” Mary asked as he attempted to squeeze by again.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Reeve said. “I’d always figured you hear everything, Mary. Not sure how something like demons invading the town could slip your attention, especially since we’ve had meetings about ’em—”

  “You know I don’t truck with that meeting bullshit.”

  “—we had that whole Halloween massacre; posted some flyers afterward at Rogerson’s—”

  “Like I’m gonna stop and read a flyer on that bulletin board, Nick. Honestly, now. Half that shit is people from those companies selling soap and shit—”

  “—we put it in the newspaper, tried to let people know that way—”

  “I don’t read that crap. Half of it’s lies and the other half is bull-larkey I don’t care about.”

  “—figure maybe somebody would tell you, failing all that. I mean, your boy Gary is still here in town, I know.”

  “Please. That little shitbird barely calls.”

  “Well, I don’t know then, Mary,” Reeve said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Sounds like you’re about cut off from all human contact. I have no idea how you might get the word about demons short of us coming up to your house and door-knocking like one of them Jehovah’s Witnesses from the temple over on Bilmore—”