Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

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Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 52

by Robert J. Crane


  He’d been just about to cum too, which was a damned shame.

  “Fuck,” he said under his breath, but whether Starling heard him or somehow just knew what he needed, she sped up again. The frenzied tempo of her sweet snatch sliding up and down his glistening, veiny pole increased, and he watched the snake slither in and out a few more times, mentally imagining that peak getting closer … and closer … her ass riding up and down, his cock sliding in and out of her perfectly shaven slit of a pussy …

  He put his hands on her hips and slowed her ride as he came in that last stretch. He moaned, breathing heavy, even though he wasn’t exerting himself at all. It was close … close … he could barely breathe, now … felt like his tip was going to blast off … any second …

  Hendricks flew off the track, blew his wad, and Starling sagged down on it, sliding up and down less heavily, keeping it lower when she’d go up, just massaging him through his climax. And when he was done, he put the pressure on her hips and she slid to rest on him, his dick buried up to the balls in her.

  For his part, Hendricks let her sit there, splaying out his arms to either side and letting his head sag onto the pillow. “That … is the way to start a day,” he said, because damned if it didn’t beat the shit out of coffee or reveille or a ten-mile run or anything else.

  She didn’t say anything, just let him rest his cock in her. He didn’t really want to move her yet, because all was sweet in afterglow, and her weight didn’t bother him much. She tipped forward onto her hands, causing his dick to slide out only a little as she changed angles. He grimaced slightly, that extra sensitivity across the body of the cock dragging a moan out of him. Not a pleasurable one, either. Well, maybe like 10% pleasurable and 90% FUCK FUCK NO AIGHHHH.

  “Are you finished?” she asked after another minute.

  He could feel his hard-on shriveling up like one of those retractile garden hoses that went flaccid when the water was drained out of them. “Yeah,” he managed to grunt out, because he was done, at least for this morning. She’d got him last night going to bed and this morning waking up, and that was pretty close to Hendricks’s limit for now.

  She dismounted and there was that 90/10 feeling again, but it only lasted a second and she was off, standing beside the bed. He wondered if she’d wander to the bathroom. She never really had before—Starling didn’t seem to need to answer the call of nature, unlike other women he’d been with—but there was a first time for everything.

  But she just stood there, back to him, not looking anywhere near him, and finally, she said, “You buried the sheriff.”

  “Not me personally,” he said, eyeing her, kinda torn between getting up, showering, getting dressed, and going into the station—fuck, that sounded like a lot of work—or just riding the post-climax sleepy feeling back to unconsciousness. The path of least resistance had been winning until she’d started talking. “But yeah. We had his funeral already.” Hendricks stared at the bumpy wall, then at Starling’s little ass, tight as a lug nut that had been drilled on. “His kids didn’t show up. I guess nobody told ’em their mom and dad are dead and their childhood home burned to the ground. What a fuck job, huh?”

  She didn’t answer that, of course. “It is a shame,” she said instead.

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said. “A shame.” What was even more of a shame was, “You know they don’t even seem to want to hunt down the thing that did it?” This was still burning his ass like seven straight nights of acidic diarrhea. You just didn’t leave a fallen comrade unavenged. “I wanted to track down that fire sloth motherfucker, but they’re all—’No, we’ll wait until we get a call, we shouldn’t go wandering in the woods with the dangerous demons.’” He snorted. “I get that and all—hell, I championed it when we were going after those hellcats—but … goddamn. This was Reeve, for fuck’s sake. We ought to make this thing that burned him to death pay—”

  “He wasn’t burned to death,” Starling said, standing there naked. “He was dead before the fire.”

  Hendricks had let his eyes drift shut, but they suddenly sprang open. “What did you just s—” He sat up.

  Starling was gone.

  “Of fucking course,” he muttered to the empty room. The darkness was not complete, not nearly, but she was plainly vanished.

  The knock at the door nearly scared the shit out of him, and Hendricks just about leapt out of bed at the sound. All thought of pleasant, basking afterglow was gone, and he was on Red Alert right away. “Who is it?”

  “Knock knock, motherfucker,” came the voice of Duncan from beyond the door. Hendricks shuffled over and unlocked it, throwing it open without bothering to put his pants on. The OOC just stared at him. “You’re going like that?”

  Hendricks blinked at him, the morning sun streaming in and nearly blinding his ass. “Going? Where?”

  “I got that old familiar feeling again,” Duncan said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder. “Something’s up.” He glanced down at Hendricks’s groin. “And it ain’t you, plainly.”

  “You missed it by five minutes,” Hendricks said.

  “Lucky me. You gonna cover up? Because I’m guessing you’d have a hard time keeping your belt from sliding off relying on that alone, especially right now.”

  Hendricks responded with a rough laugh. “Gimme five and we’ll ride.” And he shut the door.

  *

  Arch awoke to the sounds of the house, the quiet hum of electricity and conversations in the distance. A clatter of pans shocked him out of unconsciousness, but it took him a few more seconds to process what he’d heard.

  Olivia was making breakfast, he realized as he turned over and buried his face in the sheet. The smell of fresh detergent was powerful, and he rolled away again. It wasn’t whatever brand Alison had used to wash their clothes.

  Alison …

  He put his head back down in the sheet again and inhaled the detergent Olivia Jones used. He had heard things got easier, but no, they did not. Or they hadn’t for him. It was getting toward the end of November now—the calendar for the month would be turning over in another week or so—and he was still living in the last of October. Hendricks, that son of a gun, throwing that little detail Arch had missed right in his face. Not that it had been easy before that either …

  How could he have been so stupid? As soon as the cowboy had said it, he’d known the truth of things. Alison, pregnant. Well, why not? They hadn’t exactly been careful these last few months, so far as he knew. He’d sort of forgotten about them trying to have a baby in all the rush of the demons coming into town, and she hadn’t gone out of her way to remind him.

  Something about that information was a kick right in the pants. It was a wake-up when he wanted to sleep more, a piece of grit in his eye he couldn’t ignore, like a drill that was eating its way right down to his heart. Didn’t feel like it would ever stop, either. He wanted it to, but grief was like an endless well, never going to run dry …

  “Oh, Lord,” Arch said, closing his eyes, hoping he could complete a prayer and maybe drift back to sleep for a while, “I do not know the mysteries that you know …”

  He let the words drift off, sinking into his own head as he prayed. … I don’t know why you chose to take my wife from me, but I trust in your plan. That was a little bit of a lie. He wanted to trust in the plan, but it was something he was struggling with. He wanted to believe it was for a good cause, but he was having one devil of a time seeing any cause at all. It looked more like a cause and effect to his eyes—demons came to town, he and Alison tried to fight them off and help people, Alison died. And that was … somewhat more understandable. Because to him it being chalked it up to collisions of free will rather than plan of the divine; capriciousness on the part of that demon mingled with Alison’s desire to do the right thing … there was something brave and noble about that, something that put the actions squarely in their court rather than assigning this terrible deed to the Almighty.

  The idea that there was a plan, som
e greater good to be served, some higher ideal they were pursuing? Well … Arch wanted to believe in that too. But he was struggling with believing these days, and it started with the smaller ideas and stopped there—for now. He worried about that though. After all, when the foundation crumbled, the roof wouldn’t long survive it.

  “Oh, Lord,” Arch said, talking out loud again. “I worry. I worry, and I fret. I obsess about that which is already over. I add no hours to my life by doing so, but I worry nonetheless.” When you had such a solid, tangible grip on the way things were, and loved the way things were, how could you not latch on in your mind to how things had played out? How could you not wish for a referee—the referee of the universe, perhaps—to call foul on the play, cost the other team some yardage, and reset the downs so you got another chance?

  “I wonder how you could have given me so sweet a gift … only for life to take it from me.” He knew life was transitory, that he was obsessing about something temporary instead of the eternal, but …

  He’d played this game of mortal existence, and he’d been invested in the play. That this one had gone hard against him … well, that didn’t make it any easier to let go of than it had when he actually had played football. That he’d poured more emotion into his life with Alison than any game, any obsession, anything else in his life … it had been his marriage that had weathered it all.

  And curse Hendricks for opening his eyes to a new pain that he hadn’t even realized was there, like figuring out after the adrenaline faded that you didn’t just have a bruised foot, you’d broken the danged thing.

  Soft footsteps scuffed just outside the door and a knock thumped, jarring him. “Arch,” Olivia’s voice came through, “breakfast is going to be ready in about five minutes.”

  “Be right there,” Arch said, and his prayer just sort of ended. He hadn’t been sure what he was going to say anyway.

  *

  Brian awoke to the beeping of the breathing machine. His neck had a fierce crick in it. He hadn’t meant to sleep here, but he’d gotten too tired to drive home, and the hospital had a reclining chair with some sort of plasti-leather cover that didn’t breathe too well. Which wouldn’t have mattered in normal conditions, but he’d gotten hot and sticky during the night, and moved his head to the side, lolling off in search of a way to keep the back of his head from sweating balls. Who would have thought someone would turn the damned heat up so high in a hospital in November that it’d feel like fucking summertime?

  Brian massaged his neck. Hopefully this would dissipate shortly, because otherwise … ouch. He doubted it though. It wasn’t like he was a two-year-old anymore. At the last family reunion he’d seen a distant cousin of that age go to sleep sitting up, tilted forward against a pole. It looked like the most uncomfortable damned position he’d ever seen, and yet the kid awoke later without a whine, like it was nothing.

  “Oh, to be young again,” Brian muttered, letting loose a fierce yawn. Not that he was old, but that neck …

  He sat upright, sliding the reclining seat down so that his legs came back to the floor. Other than the sweat-inducing material, this chair wasn’t bad for sleeping. He would have preferred to be back in his own bed back in Midian, but …

  Well, maybe he wouldn’t prefer that at this point. Not that there was much good here, but it was better than the sounds of an empty house. He’d spent a night or two there while his mother was at the hospital, and the noises—the empty house noises—worked at him, waking him in the night. It was a restless, fitful sleep, and he’d run out of patience with it.

  His mother stirred in her sleep across the way, another one of these rolling recliners in her corner. It looked like a normal enough chair when you sat in it. You had to do a little jockeying to unlock it and get it to lean back, but when you did … whew. Comfort.

  His father was making a Mmmm, mmmmmm grunting noise in his sleep and twitching, head jerking to one side.

  Brian lifted his head up and set about converting the recliner back into a chair. It was habit by now, the nights of sleeping in this thing and the mornings of waking up having turned him into an automaton, setting things up for visitors in case anyone showed up while he was gone. Because he had to get gone; he had his shift at the station to get to.

  Because … well, because he had to. Just another area where he was going through the motions, following the now-familiar routine.

  Stiffening, Brian looked over at his father. His face was lined, way more lined than it had been before all this shit came down. Brian had taken Casey’s advice lately, trying to unwind a little more, trying to find that centering point in himself. It wasn’t easy, but the weed did seem to help … well, some. It at least gave him a reason to go on, those brief moments when everything felt different and better. The rest of the time was sitting around a hospital bed or a desk, waiting for emergency calls to come in.

  “This is my life?” Brian asked himself, standing at the foot of his father’s bed. He didn’t even really feel like he was making a difference at this point. Trying to fight demons had been a thing he’d taken on wholeheartedly back when he’d first stumbled into this mess. He’d seen the value after the Rog’tausch had gone tearing through Midian—and thank God he’d finally figured out how to dispose of that damned thing in a manner that wouldn’t cause it to be an EPA hazard. Or, hopefully, ever be found again.

  But now … the price for this demon business was getting too high. He turned for the door, the antiseptic smell of the hospital particularly strong today. He needed to get out for a while, go to the office, answer some calls, maybe head home and smoke a J, then shower and take a night off from visiting the hospital. Maybe spend a night in his own bed, restless sleep be damned. He’d earned it, hadn’t he?

  As he came out of the stairwell on the ground floor he looked to his left and saw a flash of dark hair turning the corner. He got a glimpse of the profile of Dr. Lauren Darlington, but she hadn’t seen him, which was just as well. He thought about chasing after her, but what was the point, really? Let the woman have her life, he thought, turning to head toward the exit and his car. She didn’t need to get sucked back into this Midian bullshit.

  Hell, really, no one did.

  *

  Lauren was behind in her rounds, but that was okay, because her boss was still treating her with kid gloves. She probably didn’t need that treatment, but by God she’d take it, especially since she kept getting the mass texts from the watch. So her phone blew up every once in a while. Or every day. Several times a day. Like now.

  She glanced down at the text: MAAASIVE DEMONS SITED AT HICKORY LN.

  How in the hell did you even mess up the word ‘massive’ that badly? Autocorrect had gone badly astray.

  Lauren put her phone on nighttime mode, knowing that the pager she wore on her belt would guide her just fine. She’d just disregard, maybe ask Molly to help her block the watch number later tonight. Because Molly was speaking to her again, in small doses.

  Or maybe she’d just Google how to block them. It didn’t seem like a wise idea to provoke her daughter by bringing up the watch, not when things were finally starting to defrost between them.

  *

  Erin felt the buzz and was instantly on high alert; if her cell phone was going off, odds were good it was something important. She fiddled to grab it, slipping as she took the car into a turn to enter Jackson Highway, and managed to check it without fucking up too badly—like, say, ramming the car into a semi as it went by. Near thing, though.

  She got the phone up to the steering wheel and it lit, automatically. MAAASIVE DEMONS SITED AT HICKORY LN.

  Erin wasn’t much of a pedant, but she spied a few things wrong with that sentence. Instead of texting back a thoughtful reply about spelling, though, she flipped the switch that activated the lights and sirens and whipped the car around, cutting off Mort Grammer in his pickup. With an apologetic wave in his direction, she hauled ass toward Hickory Lane.

  *

  Drake h
ad planned this for a week. He had the recipes, he had the ideas, and he had it in mind to do great things. All he lacked …

  Was the meat.

  The veal.

  Human veal.

  Drake’s hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his eyes focused on the little house across the road from where he’d parked. It was an in-home daycare, according to the ad in the yellow pages. He didn’t even know there still were phone books, but he found one in the drawer of his rental house, thin, almost the length of a reasonable novel. Such an anachronism in this modern age. Not that he was complaining.

  The ad boasted that the daycare had been open for thirty years. Well, that was good. Experience. Also, a person in charge who probably hadn’t seen his like before. He eyed the white house with the colonial-style porch and sniffed. It wasn’t to his liking at all. Too old, too provincial. He liked the sleeker style of modernity, not this old … stuff.

  But he wasn’t here to live in the place, he was just here to pick up the ingredients for his next culinary masterwork. All that mattered was securing them.

  With that in mind, he picked up the knife from the seat next to him and took a short breath. He didn’t care if anyone got hurt, really, so long as he got what he wanted.

  It was time to take the next step.

  *

  Brian walked in the front door of the sheriff’s station and found Benny Binion at the desk. He’d gotten the text; he should have known. For all his myriad faults, Casey knew how to spell and construct a sentence reasonably well. Also, autocorrect wasn’t his mortal enemy.

  “Hey, Benny,” Brian said without enthusiasm. “Any idea what’s going on out on Hickory?”

  “Something big,” Benny said. “You shoulda heard the call. Penny Frye sounded like she was about to shit a brick. Said it was big and black—”

 

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