Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Cuz I just fucking do,” Hendricks said, feeling the exasperation before the realization cracked down on him. He really hadn’t given much thought to how particles or whatever of smell made their way into his brain. Because who thinks about that shit when there was so much else to do?

  “Exactly.” Duncan didn’t wear smug very often, but when he did wear it, he wore it well.

  “Interesting,” Arch said, but he said it so neutrally Hendricks couldn’t tell if he actually thought it was interesting, or if he was just saying it to make a comment and close the conversation.

  Either way, it shut everybody up until Duncan said, “Turn here,” at a sign for a new subdivision that looked like it was still under construction. There wasn’t even one house standing in the place yet, just a few wooden skeletons of partially framed buildings, no sign of workers on the site and the machinery parked and silent.

  Well, that was understandable. Who the hell would want to build in Midian right now?

  “Looks like the local construction companies are experiencing slumping demand,” Hendricks said, steering the car down the road, which was littered with some old wooden pallets and probably five times as dusty as a normal street thanks to all the ground being torn up to make the vacant lots ready for building.

  “Guess they’ll have a rough quarter,” Duncan deadpanned, then nodded. “Somebody’s still here.”

  Hendricks followed the OOC’s gaze and saw that, yeah, there was one work truck still here. It was fairly easy to tell a construction work truck; they were always wider-bodied, the big Fords and Chevys, the occasional Dodge or Nissan or even Toyota, though those seemed to be rarer. Toolbox in the back, sometimes a King cab if it was someone having to a haul a crew, or maybe kiddos on weekends. Scaffolding type shit hanging out of the bed seemed to be a dead giveaway, a few torn cloths and an old plastic shopping bag dangling in the breeze.

  “Ghost town,” Arch muttered under his breath, and Hendricks wondered if he’d even meant to say it aloud.

  Hendricks brought the SUV to the curb, which was a good inch above the first layer of asphalt, the one the construction company had laid down in order to get trucks and concrete mixers and all that shit rolling out here. They definitely hadn’t put a final layer on yet, though, because the nearby manhole cover jutted out of the street a good inch or two above normal, a nice little navigational hazard that he’d had to roll over.

  They got out, Hendricks being real gentle when he shut the door. “Think there might be some hellcats lurking around?” he asked. This was a little ways out of town. Nice spot for those fuckers to tear into shit without getting too public. Not that the hellcats worried about that sort of thing, but they had seemed to avoid humanity en masse so far, keeping their activities out of the town proper.

  “Could be something else,” Duncan said. “Remember, I didn’t bring us here because I was sensing those things. I’m having trouble getting a bead on them, which is weird for a low-thought demon like that—”

  “Someone actively interfering with your abilities?” Arch asked. He already had his sword out, the deputy standing there like an old knight about to go to battle.

  “There are rituals that can interfere with my sense, yeah,” Duncan said. “Sort of a broad-based version of those talismans, the equivalent of throwing up a cloud of hot pepper to mess with my smell.”

  Hendricks was staring at the partially constructed house that the truck was abandoned in front of. He reached down and gently brushed the tailpipe. It was plenty cold.

  “What’s that for?” Duncan asked.

  Hendricks smiled. “For exhaust.”

  Duncan didn’t sigh, but Hendricks could sense his displeasure nonetheless. “Why are you feeling it up? Is there something missing in your sex life that compels you to stroke it like that?”

  “It’s got a nice-looking hole right there,” Hendricks said, “just about the right size for—”

  “That’s enough.” Arch’s disgust bled out. “Construction guys would start early. That thing would be long cold even if they had just come to work here today.”

  “Yeah, but construction guys ain’t quiet,” Hendricks said. “Especially ones that are carrying scaffolding and lumber in the bed of their truck. You oughta hear hammering and shit. Electric drills. Something.”

  “They could be masons,” Arch said. “The slap of a trowel doesn’t make much noise.”

  Hendricks scanned the aborning subdivision. “I don’t see any houses ready for brick, Arch. This stuff is all in the framing stages. That means heavy machinery and guys bolting shit together. Noise. Lots of noise.”

  “Should we keep jawing or go take a look?” Duncan asked, stepping up on the curb. The lawn was a patchwork of weed and blown seed grass, the sort of stuff that wouldn’t look good no matter how often it was watered. It wouldn’t ever grow into a proper lawn either, because it looked like some grass fairy had spread a patch here and there and then a weed demon had come along behind her and shit copiously before wiping his ass all over the ground. What didn’t have green or weeds was dry damned dust, ground that looked like it hadn’t been rained on since the Big Bang.

  “Of course we’re going to take a look inside the partially framed house,” Hendricks said, starting across the “lawn.” “Because we’re stupid like that. Or heroes, maybe. Can’t decide.”

  The house looked like it was built on a hill, a basement maybe sticking out the back following down the hill’s grade. They might have dug in, tried to give it a little extra square footage by following the curve of the earth here. Hendricks had seen plenty of that; it was a pretty common thing in the Midwest. He hadn’t given much thought to what kind of basements they might have here, if any at all. Hell, why would he? Housebuilding was for people not engaged in a war with demonkind. He didn’t know many demon hunters who had wives or families or houses. It was pretty much an all-consuming occupation, and not a lucrative one that allowed for peaceful private villas elsewhere in the world.

  As he approached the house, Hendricks tried to tune out Arch’s soft footsteps next to him. The big man had automatically gone into quiet mode too, figuring it was better to scare the hell out of a construction worker or two than have the hell beaten out of you by some demon or twelve who heard you coming.

  The floor was in, but just barely, dried cement showing in a few places where they’d poured subfloor. In others it was straight wood, but kinda patchy, because he could see some nice drops right into the dark of the basement below. It was hard to tell how much of a basement there was; he suspected by the slope of the land it was partially buried, maybe a few egress windows or something at the back of the house, but it was tough to tell from the front, especially with most of the floor installed and occluding his view.

  “Hm,” Duncan said from a step back. “You see that back corner over there?” He pointed at the rear left of the house.

  Hendricks hadn’t noticed it until now, but it did look a little funny, like someone had stacked a few beams off to one side, and that maybe one of the floor joists had fallen in. “Either something big brushed aside some of those supports, or else … this is the shittiest construction job you’ll find this side of Sochi.”

  “I’m inclined toward the former,” Duncan said, “because I’m sensing something … right down below us.” He kept a steely calm, but it was still enough to stop both Hendricks and Arch in their tracks.

  “Sensing … what?” Hendricks asked. “Tell me it’s a couple teenagers with a blanket playing hide the salami in the back of the basement.”

  “Why, you want to watch a really, really amateur porn?” Duncan asked. “It’s not teenagers. Or human at all.”

  “Shit,” Hendricks muttered. “This our boy in the suit? The funeral crasher?”

  “What’s Will Ferrell got to do with this?” Arch asked, and when he caught looks from both of them, he said, “Y’all aren’t the only ones who can make stupid jokes.”

  “That movie was about two guys
who tried to sneak into weddings to screw vulnerable chicks,” Hendricks said. “Feels like that’d be a little too sinful for you.”

  “I didn’t rent it.” Arch was stiff as a board, shoulders looking like they had enough tension built up that he might not be able to swing the sword, and it only took a second for Hendricks to get the message: Alison rented it.

  “I don’t think this is our funeral crasher,” Duncan said. “Feels rougher. Bigger.”

  Hendricks froze. “How much bigger?”

  Something scraped against the floor below, and the entire wooden framework of the house rippled. The fierce smell of sulfur came wafting up between the boards, and a piece of concrete subfloor broke loose and fell into the basement below, shattering on impact, reverberating through the confined space like a thundercrack.

  “However much space is below there,” Duncan said as the basement started to collapse in, “that’s the size of the thing.”

  “Helpful,” Hendricks said, taking a step back as the meager framework of the house began to fall in on itself. “Really fucking helpful.” He had his sword out, trying to get himself ready for whatever was coming.

  Duncan started to say something, but he didn’t get to finish. Something ripped through the back corner of the basement nearest them, climbing up the foundation to their right. Hendricks backed off, Arch a couple steps behind him and Duncan leading the field in getting the fuck back. The first thing to emerge was a paw—there was just no other way to describe it—and it had three big claws, each probably the size of Hendricks’s shin, emerging from the broken boards. There was fur too, dark and straight, like porcupine quills but with the unmistakable aura of something unnatural.

  It showed its face a moment later, pushing up through the wooden supports and breaking some of them in half easily. Hendricks realized that this was where it had made its den, and it was using that rear corner to enter and exit the structure. Now it had foregone the simple entry because there was prey nearby, and this thing was a hunter.

  It had glowing orange eyes that burned like someone had lit a campfire in each of them. That worried Hendricks when he saw them sticking out of the domed head, but it probably would have been positively fucking pants-shitting scary if he’d seen them glowing in the dark from inside the basement. “Kudos for Duncan’s danger sense,” Hendricks muttered, taking another few steps back. He was not alone in this at all; neither Arch nor the OOC were being stingy about getting the fuck back.

  “I wish it had been a little more clear,” Duncan said, almost plaintive. He was fussing with something, baton in one hand and—a cell phone, Hendricks realized after a second look—in the other. He was dialing, and then sticking it up to his face. Hendricks didn’t hear an answer, but Duncan said, “GPS my coordinates and get the watch out here now. I’ve got a stray—” He said something else here, something in demonic gibberish, something Hendricks couldn’t have repeated back unless maybe he cut out his own tongue. Probably not even then.

  The beast was still clawing its way out of the basement, but making a pretty good job of it. Now it seemed to have emerged up to the belly, stepping out. It was at least as big as that construction work truck, and Hendricks no longer wondered what had become of its occupants. He had a suspicion they were on the big monster meal plan, and it had probably come as a bigass surprise to those poor bastards to show up for work one morning and find that fucking thing already on the job site.

  It had a funny shape, he realized as it cleared the house, pulling itself out like a snake from its den. Its head was a dome, and its body below the arms or forelegs or whatever was almost chubby, like a raccoon or a possum, that slick fur running the length of the body and something like scales or really dry skin covering the belly. It popped its backside out, and of course it had a tail behind shorter back legs that lifted the body out. The claws were covered in concrete dust from where it had scaled its way through the block wall.

  “I’m not even gonna bother to ask what you called that thing,” Hendricks said to Duncan. “But I would like to know what it can do.”

  “You don’t recognize it?” Duncan said, a little more tautly than the OOC usually spoke. “It’s in that book of yours. Funny name, but the tribes of—” Here he said something else, something Hendricks maybe could have said with ten years to practice “—call it something else. Loosely translated, it’s a fire sloth.”

  Hendricks snapped his finger. “That’s what it looks like. I was trying to figure it out. A fucking sloth. Those claws! The face! It’s a giant demon sloth.”

  Arch raised an eyebrow at him. “You may be fixated on the sloth part … but I’m a little worried about the demon part. Does that mean it can—”

  The fire sloth opened its mouth, bellowing toward the heavens in a show of pure, territorial animal bravado that Hendricks recognized from countless documentaries he’d seen. Following that horrible howling noise came a wash of fire so hot that he felt it even fifty feet away.

  “Yep,” Duncan said, and took a step forward. “Hellfire, in fact, straight from the depths. Just like your pal Gideon, actually.” He held out the baton. “I wouldn’t expect it to back off; it won’t give up, and it’s not going to present much of a target to us—at all—if it can avoid it. These things are smart and dangerous, and if it can cook us from a distance and then eat us all crispy, it will do so.”

  “So it’s like Erin then?” Hendricks quipped. And the fire sloth, either hearing this and becoming offended or else simply running out of patience, bellowed again and charged, shaking the earth as it came after them.

  *

  “So, what are we doing out here?” Brian asked Casey as they jolted down a country road. The ride wasn’t just bumpy, it was like his seat was spring-loaded, firing him at the ceiling of the truck every few seconds, the old seatbelt not exactly doing a great job of holding him down.

  “You’ll see,” Casey promised with a gleam in his eye. He hadn’t made a peep about where they were going during the whole car ride, ever since Brian had rejoined him at the station house. Instead, he’d launched into a graded assessment of the asses of the women of Midian, and even thrown in a couple of guys for good measure. That was wearing pretty thin for Brian, but he’d yet to say so, instead looking intently at the road ahead, trying not to get carsick.

  The inside of Casey’s car smelled like the man enjoyed a cigarette every now and again, faint traces of smoke seeped into the upholstery and even the faux-leather dashboard and linings of the doors. It was slightly sweet, like maybe pipe smoke would be. Not weed, Brian reflected with a careful sniff. He didn’t want to get caught smelling the seats for fear that Casey might think it weird. Or worse, that he wouldn’t think it weird at all, but rather take it as an invitation to something stranger.

  “Great,” Brian said under his breath. He’d committed to go on a dude date with the weirdest man in the watch. At least Casey had seemed like he wanted to cheer Brian up, had engaged with him as a fellow human being. Everyone else seemed too mired in their own misery to do anything other than offer him a brief comment, a nice little pat on the head for his grief: “Such a shame, they were such good people, you must be suffering, you poor thing.” And then they were back to caring about their own business, their own grief, their own worries.

  Brian got that. There was no shortage of misery or worry floating around Midian these days.

  But it sure did conspire to make him feel more lonely and cut off than ever. At least when he’d been hanging in the basement and getting high, he was actively choosing to cut himself off from humanity. His daily discussions with his father—lectures, really—so hated at the time, had been an unintended source of warm-ish human contact.

  Now … he only wished he could be on the receiving end of one of them again.

  Instead, his dad was languishing in a persistent state of near vegetativeness.

  “Hell of a way to spend the rest of your life,” Brian muttered.

  “In Becky Stordal’s ass? I
reckon that would be a little like heaven,” Casey said, nodding along.

  Brian blinked. He’d unwittingly interrupted Casey Assman’s Top Forty. “No, not Becky Stordal’s ass. I was talking about my dad being permanently—well, you know.”

  “Brain damaged? That’s a motherfucker, all right.” Casey scrunched up his face, and hesitated for a moment. “Say … never mind.”

  Brian leaned his head back against the seat, breathing in that long-buried aroma of cigarette. “What?”

  “I just thought of something, but it ain’t important right now.” Casey had a gleam in his eyes, fixed straight ahead.

  “What?” Brian pushed a little harder. He hated when people did this shit: brought something up, acted like it might be good or interesting, and then withdrew it like they were pulling the bait back. “What is it?”

  “I was just thinking when I said ‘motherfucker’ … hey, your mom’s a stately lady … and now that your dad’s down, she might get lonely …”

  “Fucking shit,” Brian said, rolling his head to look out the window. “Jesus Christ, Casey.”

  “Look, I know she’s got a period of mourning to go through. I was just thinking, you know … she might need some comfort at some point, and I have a wonderful shoulder to cry on. And then, after—”

  “Jesus! Don’t say it!”

  “I have an excellent penis to bounce up and down on—”

  “Fucking—fuckety—that’s my mom, asshole!”

  Casey stared at Brian, seemingly infinitely perplexed. “Well, then don’t you want her to be happy?”

  A little bit of gruesome sick feeling washed over Brian, and it wasn’t from the winding of the roads bouncing his inner ear. “Of course I want her to be happy. Which is why I don’t want her having to deal with you or your bizarre, sick fuck, horny old dog turned up to eleven ass, while she’s mourning her daughter and caring for her husband.” He put a hand over his eyes, enjoying the faint darkness. It was hardly complete, but when combined with thick boughs of the trees overhead gave him a break from the sunlight flooding him.