“I hear you,” Pike said, trying to catch his breath. He’d killed before, a time or two. Schemed more than that. But murdering a lover right after coitus?
Nope, that was new.
“God, this is hot,” Darla breathed. “We should have done this years ago to spice things up.”
Pike turned his head to look at her, eyebrows cocked, head and stomach somewhere between revulsion and horror.
The look on Darla’s face was pure, unsubtle amusement. “Trolled ya,” she said, and broke into laughter.
“God, you did,” he said, shaking his head. She slapped him on the ass once more, and his dick did that involuntary spasm. It was shrinking, but still not flaccid enough to fall out on its own, thankfully. “You got me on that one.”
“It’s all for the greater good,” she said, pressing her hand flat against his ass, cupping it as she leaned in and rested her chin gently on his shoulder. “Well, the greater good of us, anyway. Fuck everyone else.”
“Fuck ’em all,” Pike agreed. He could feel the sweat drying, sticky on his skin, and couldn’t wait to pull out. That hadn’t ever been true before, but now—oh, hell, now? This was bordering on necrophilia.
“Just a minute more,” Darla breathed, sticking her tongue in his ear. She didn’t plunge it in like a diver into a pool; she took it in slowly, the way he liked it, then backed it off to bite the lobe. Pike shuddered; it worked. Reversed the blood flow, got it heading back downstairs.
Jenny gave one last good shudder, and then she relaxed totally. “Shit!” Pike said as her bowels released on him. Darla shoved herself against him, hard, and stymied his inadvertent jerk.
“Just take it, fucker,” Darla said, like a brick wall at his back, keeping him on course. “Take it and grin. Learn to love the scat play. You can shower later, but now we make fucking magic. Blood magic.”
It was over a few seconds later. Darla was still against him, but Pike knew—beyond a doubt—Jenny was good and dead. She’d gone limp as a damned rag, no hint of movement anywhere on her body. Once again he was thankful he’d not chosen missionary today, imagining himself with her legs coiled around him on the desk, leaning up over her, plunging in and having to sit there, stare at her eyes, see the betrayal as he slit her throat—
“All right, motherfucker,” Darla said, and the pressure released at his back. She took a few steps back and waited. He turned around, slowly, naked as the day he was born, and about as covered in feces as the day after, he reckoned. Darla stifled a laugh. “Yeah, you got shit on, all right.”
“I feel like a baby who soiled his diaper,” Pike said, looking down at the disgusting mess that covered him, brown stains from the pubic region on down. He would have vomited right there if this had happened about five years earlier, but the fact he’d been changing diapers these last few years had strengthened his stomach.
“You should be thankful Jenny’s a vegetarian,” Darla said with dark amusement. “Probably could have been a lot worse if she’d been on a high-protein diet.” Ever the pragmatist, that woman.
“I don’t think it really matters that much about the consistency of the shit,” Pike said, “at least not when you’ve been shit upon.”
“Oh, it matters,” Darla said with the practiced aura of someone who had been shit upon a time or twelve. “Hit the showers, champ.” She grinned. “This part’s done. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Pike eyed the disastrous mess of his office—blood, piss, and shit everywhere, across his desk and the carpet beneath. Oh, and there was the little matter of the dead girl on his desk. Jenny slid loose and hit the ground as they stood there, dead, glassy eyes staring up at him accusingly.
He stared back, wondering if he’d feel something … but no. Dead doll eyes, that was it.
Pike put his attention back where it belonged. “You’re gonna clean this up?”
“Aren’t I always cleaning up this family’s messes?” Darla asked with a sigh. She didn’t seem amused. “Hurry up and get done, and get back here, will you?” She leaned in and bit at his ear.
“Shouldn’t I help you first?” Pike asked, holding up his bloody hands, and indicating his mess of a—well, the rest of him. “You know, before I get clean?”
Darla just barked a laugh. “We’re not going to clean up,” she said, licking at his ear again. “We’re gonna get down and dirty right on top of her. For the ritual.”
Pike just swallowed, looking over the corpse, the shit, the piss, the smells—oh, and his dick, hanging limp as a squeezed-out tube of frosting, covered in crap up to the pubis. Hell, he’d be lucky if he ever got a hard-on again, he thought, but that’d be a lie. After all, this was what they’d worked for. Still, now? “Damn, Darling Darla,” he said. “Ain’t you ever heard of a refractory period?”
*
“Sadly, this ain’t even among the worst of the clusterfucks I’ve presided over in the last few weeks,” Reeve admitted, almost as much to himself as Mary Wrightson, as he watched the fire department working to get the blaze under control. They’d been lucky, he figured, the developer of this place having cleared some land near the woods in order to build back a little ways deeper in the trees, and they’d already put hydrants in. The woods had been going up pretty quick thanks to the dry spell they’d been experiencing since the rains quit back in summer, but who had time to worry about a damned drought when you had demons wrecking the town? It was just another worry piled on a ton of them, and not a particularly big one. Droughts came and went, and hopefully someday soon they’d say the same about these goddamned demons.
“You ain’t exactly making me want to vote for you in this election here, Nick,” Mary said. Her lips were thickly pursed like she had a wad of chew in them. Though she probably didn’t. It was hard to say for sure, knowing Mary.
“You already cast your damned ballot, Mary,” Reeve said with only a little irritation. He didn’t have much left to spare for her at this point.
“You’re a shit campaigner, Nick,” she said with folded arms. “If you lose, this is why.”
Reeve laughed mirthlessly. “If I lose, it’s because the town’s going straight to hell in a handcart, and there ain’t much I or anyone else can do to slow the process of entropy.”
“Fancy word,” Mary said. “Most people’d just say it’s all going to shit. Or taking a dive in a septic lagoon.”
Reeve furrowed his brow. “Septic lagoon?”
Mary frowned right back. “You youngins. Don’t know anything.”
“I know a fair amount,” Reeve said. “Don’t recall hearing about a septic lagoon though.”
“It’s a septic tank without a top on it,” Mary said. “Not much to know.”
“That’s pretty damned gross, if you ask me,” Reeve said, taking a look at the billowing black clouds still hanging over the woods. He couldn’t see any fire now, but that didn’t mean anything given how much smoke was hanging in the air. “Why not just cover it up?”
“Well, we all ain’t wealthy enough to afford covers for our septic systems,” Mary said with great sarcasm.
“I gotta be honest, I didn’t think capping a septic was that expensive at this juncture in our civilization,” Reeve said dryly. People were trickling off now, the watch disassembling again. That was how it went, wasn’t it? They’d come together, fight something, then dissolve before the next damned thing happened.
How long would that last? Because Reeve was already feeling the burn of responding to some five-alarm craziness every hour. He rubbed his eyes. The headache wasn’t getting any better either, just staying at a low thrum of pain behind his eyes.
“Well, I guess that makes you somewhat ignorant, doesn’t it?”
“Been called worse,” Reeve said, pulling his hand away from his eyes and letting the cloudy light flood in again. The headache had subsided just a pinch when he’d covered his eyes, like he was suffering from the light sensitivity that followed a hangover. Maybe going in the back room at the station and closing h
is eyes for a spell would cure him. If not, maybe a nap. Or coffee. Or both, if he could squeeze it, though he doubted he could. “Just today, probably.”
“I tell you, I ain’t seen anything quite like it,” Mary said. She spat, and sure enough, a brown tinge to the saliva was evident as it hit the ground. “I mean, you had a flame-breathing thing the size of a shed out here, and a pack of—I don’t even know quite how to describe them—running nightmare lions, I reckon—”
“Colorful.”
“Nah, they were black as a tire,” Mary said, missing the point. “Scary as hell. The noise they made? Worse than a coyote. Creepy things. And when they hit the house? My daddy was in the navy, and his ship sunk during the war.” Reeve did not bother to ask which war, for fear the answer he’d get would be that he served on the CSS Hunley. “That house going down was exactly like what he described. Shuddering, crashing, things falling every which way—it was a hell of a thing, Nick. This is all—it’s a hell of thing.”
“On this we can agree,” Reeve said, and felt the buzz on his belt as his phone rang. “Just a minute, will ya?” He picked up the phone, glanced at it, and sighed. “What can I do for you, Mr. Pike?”
“Oh, I’m calling about what I can do for you,” Pike said, and he sounded like he might just be on speakerphone. “You mind stopping out by my office when you get a chance?”
“Sure,” Reeve said, committing to it but planning to punt it way out—say, eight football fields away. “How about tomorrow—”
“No, no,” Pike said, “you’re going to want to get on this right away. Tonight. Hell, this afternoon, if possible.”
Reeve felt that weary sense of resignation tugging at him. What were the odds Pike had something useful for him? Actually useful? Only one way to find out. “I got a lot on my plate right now—” he said, figuring he’d fish for more info before going for a meeting this eve.
“I got that money loosened up for you,” Pike said, “and that ain’t all. Come by tonight. Please?”
Well, that was something, at least. Paying the watch might make all the sacrifice and endless calls they were getting at the moment a little easier, maybe even motivate a few of them that were hanging pretty loose at the moment, struggling with the hours they were putting in and the whole lot of nothing they were getting from it.
And if Pike had something else … well, the money would cushion the blow if whatever the other thing that had Pike all excited turned out to be a dud, since he wasn’t saying what it was. A tick on his balls, for all Reeve knew. That goddamned Yankee would probably enjoy having a bloodsucker working his little cock.
“You want to say what this other business is about?” Reeve said warily. He still didn’t have an overabundance of trust in the man or his judgment.
“Not over the phone,” Pike said. “Come see me.”
Reeve looked at his watch, looked around. They almost had things wrapped up here, and the County Administrator’s office was in Culver, only about twenty minutes from here. It was likely this was the closest he’d get in the next few days, barring some other wildass call in this direction. “I’ll be by in a bit,” Reeve said with a sigh, and hung up without bothering with pleasantries.
“You sound so overjoyed,” Mary said as he slid the phone back into its cover.
“Well, you see how it is,” Reeve said, feeling a little spike of pain at his temple. Was it too soon to take down some more Tylenol? “Just one goddamned thing after another.”
*
Pike hung up the phone and put it down on his desk, taking care to avoid the spots recently soiled by blood. He turned to look at Darla, and a grin broke across his face. Jenny’s corpse was now in the closet, and the desk was more or less clean, but the stink of shit and piss hung in the air. “He’s coming,” he said, feeling the grin tug at the corners of his mouth. “Didn’t say when he’ll be here, but … he bit the bait. He’ll be along.”
“And we’ll be waiting,” Darla said, with a smile of her own. He could see it in her eyes, could feel it in a quiver down his leg.
It was all coming together now.
*
Hendricks opened the door to the hotel room expecting to find her there, and he wasn’t disappointed. She was lingering just inside, hair backlit by the glow of the bathroom light. It gave her tresses a fiery look, like the flames that had shot out of that fire sloth’s mouth, and it was a good look on her. Her curves showed up in the silhouette too. She was stripped down to a seafoam green bra and panties.
“You almost died,” she said, keeping her distance.
Hendricks put his back against the door and just admired the look of her for a minute. Goddamn, she was hot, even in shadow. She had just a little meat to that ass, and he liked it. Her belly had just a little extra layer to it too, a little more than when he’d first met her, like she was getting healthier over time, and he liked that. It gave him half a chub just to study her nearly-glowing pale stomach in the dimness. It was smooth and flawless, and he had a sudden desire to blow a load of white cum on that pristine belly, though he knew he’d change his mind in the heat of the moment, stay to the pleasure and keep it in her until he finished. “You weren’t there,” he said, trying not to sound too worried over it, “so I guess I wasn’t in that much danger.”
“I was otherwise occupied,” she said softly.
That stuck in his craw, but not too much. “Well, I guess I better hope you’re not meeting a client next time my ass is headed for the chipper-shredder. Or into the furnace, I guess, like this time.” He hadn’t thought he was that close, but then again, if Arch hadn’t jumped out in front of him, he’d have gotten the full blast of hellfire. That would have kicked his day in the ass. Hell, it would have made it his last, and that would have been an unsatisfying end, to say the least.
“You should not joke about such dangers,” Starling said, still quiet, but she took soft steps across the motel carpet toward him. He watched her small feet move, just as pale as the rest of her, just as bereft of flaws and marks. She was young, a little younger than him, but the girl had some miles on her. Whatever was in her head had lived, man; shit, had it lived. He’d seen the face beneath this one, the hooker named Lucia, and she wasn’t appealing, really. Sure, she had the same body, the same curves, but she was a fucking shell compared to Starling, this face, those eyes he couldn’t get a bearing on save to see that they were darker than the room around him.
Hendricks brought his eyes up slowly, taking in those perfect calves, those widening thighs that tapered to that perfect ass, hidden beneath the seafoam green bikini underwear. She was close now, close enough to reach his hands out and put them on her hips, to hold her there for a second while he stared, drinking her in. She smelled good, a little sweaty, like Starling had caught Lucia just after a job, but he didn’t give a fuck about that. Something in it spurred him on, like he had to have her, had to claim her for his own—reclaim her, maybe—after catching the scent of a lesser stag. He was all fucking man, after all, and she saw that, he knew, as he pulled her close and pressed his lips to her.
She pressed back, fiery and full of life, a passionate gasp escaping her when they broke. She dove for his neck and buried her face in it, nibbling along the skin, working from his earlobe down. Hendricks tingled and shucked off his coat. Once his hands were free, he wrapped them around her and found her bra clasp. He fumbled with it, but got it undone, and her tits burst free of the bra, poured out like a sweet Leinenkugel’s on a hot day by the lakeshore.
Starling pressed her chest against his smoky t-shirt, and he caught that smell of her again as she worked against the side of his neck. He was full-hard now, poking into her belly, thinking again of just cumming right there, making her flesh even paler; give her a little ivory spot next to the belly button, a pool of slow-sliding white that would stream down her skin like honey down a wall.
She kissed him again, and again, her lips hungry against his. Her hands fumbled with his belt and undid it, found his button a
nd zipper and practically ripped them down. His pants sagged under the weight of his gun and sword, dragging them down as Starling’s hands tugged at his boxers, sliding them over his hips and letting them drop, too, as she grabbed his cock in hand and pulled back her face so he could see the freckles on her cheeks for just a second before she dove down—
Her lips found his cock and gave it a sweet tickle. She didn’t just dive right into the deep throat, or even put it in her mouth at all. She just slipped her lips around the head and left it there, moving subtly for a couple seconds as Hendricks shuddered with pleasure. Then her tongue moved across his tip, and he shivered again. It felt like she was tonguing the hole in his urethra, and it felt surprisingly good. She worked it a couple times, moving under the tip, running it smoothly along the underside, across the scarred skin where the evidence of his circumcision remained. He’d heard someone talking in the corps about how, really, circumcisions were cruel because they took off the most sensitive part of the penis.
But they made you last longer in the sack, according to that know-it-all jackass, so that was something.
Starling slid her lips down his mast and Hendricks let out a low moan, throwing his head back against the motel room door. It made a satisfying thud, and he felt like the blood was leaving his brain. Sucked out, almost, and little lights flashed in front of his eyes. Didn’t hurt enough for him to stop focusing on that sensation rolling up and down his dick, centering on the band of skin that lay right under the head of his cock.
She worked it slow and steady, nothing flashy, nothing too fast. She took her time, red hair highlighted in the light of the bathroom flooding out across the motel floor. Hendricks’s bare ass rested against the smooth wood door, and her lips ran up and down his woody. He arched his back as it continued to rise in him like a tide, subsiding slightly every now and again like he’d hit a peak and then went down into a valley before it started to rise again. He could feel the Mount Everest of his orgasm in the distance, getting closer all the time.
Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 41