Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  *

  The 911 line rang, loud and jangling, the sound of a different time. Brian scrambled to pick it up as quickly as he could.

  For a while, this had been outsourced to some call center because of how much volume they were getting and how little help they had. No more; now they had people from the watch on call 24 hours a day, and the volume had softened, because a lot of the crazy, worried calls had seemed to evaporate when the knowledge that it was demons doing most of what was happening to Midian had almost seemed to make most people more afraid to call in. Even after Halloween, if they had to call in and admit they were seeing a demon, people would almost internally combust. Fear of ridicule was holding some or a lot of them back, Brian suspected, from seeking the help they needed.

  Which was why, when he said, “911, what’s your emergency?” he was surprised to hear on the other end of the line: “A demon just broken into Millie Falkes’s house. Just walked right up on the porch and slit her throat.”

  “Excuse me?” Brian hesitated, trying to process through what he’d just heard. The voice had a local accent, but he didn’t recognize it.

  “A demon just busted into Millie Falkes’s house,” the lady said. An older lady by the sound of her voice. “He’s in there right now.”

  “Okay,” Brian said, trying to mentally manage his way through this. He didn’t have anyone to dispatch, since everyone was pretty well at Hickory Lane. “Let me take down your information and I’ll send someone over as soon as we can—”

  “You don’t understand,” the voice came back more urgently. “Millie runs a daycare in her house. There are children in there. And there’s a demon—”

  “Oh, uh, well—that’s bad,” Brian said, trying to agree just to get this over with. “What’s your address, and I’ll try and send someone over immediately.”

  “319 Bilius,” the woman said. “That’s Millie’s address.”

  “And whom am I speaking to?” Brian asked.

  “This is Kay Bland.”

  Brian remembered that name from fifth grade. “Ms. Bland, this is Brian Longholt.”

  There was an impatient noise. “You still wasting your potential, Brian?” She said it as only a disappointed teacher could.

  “Uh, well, I ended up going to Brown,” Brian said.

  A pause. “What’d you get your degree in?” Aura of suspicion hung in her voice.

  “Uh … philosophy.”

  She made another disgusted noise. “All that brain power you had and you’re just going to sit around all day and make shit up about the universe,” she said. “I ought to kick you where the good Lord split you. What a waste.”

  “Hey, I’m answering 911 calls now, trying to help out,” he said.

  “You are playing so far below your potential,” she said, and he could almost hear his former teacher shaking her head on the other end of the phone.

  “Wow,” Brian said, “this is new. Getting lectured when someone calls 911 to report a demon incident.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  Brian paused before replying. “I mean, I’ll probably sort of internalize the criticism, stew on it for a while, emotionally—”

  “Not that, you jackass! The demon in Millie’s house!”

  Brian sat up. “Well, uh, we’ve got all units out responding to a report of devastation on Hickory Lane. I don’t have anyone I can send just now—”

  “Dammit,” she said, and there was shuffling in the background. “I told you it’s a daycare and—my God.” Her voice grew hushed.

  “What?” Brian stood, though there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it or anything else, standing in the station house.

  “He’s bringing out the children. My God, Brian, he’s bringing out the children and—they’re roped up.” Her voice was in quiet awe. “He’s got them tied up like animals and he’s—he’s dragging them out.”

  Brian felt a strange, cold tingle. He hadn’t quite believed the demon call, and there wasn’t much he could do about it right now other than take down the address and call in the watch, but if they had their hands full with the maaasive demons …

  Children being led out of a daycare by a man, roped up? What age were the kids who went to daycare, anyway?

  Brian started scrambling, fumbling for the cell phone, and when he found it, he dialed a number in its memory, waiting for it to ring with his breath held, hoping he’d get an answer.

  *

  Arch was in the car with Barney Jones and Braeden Tarley, rolling along toward Hickory Lane but still a ways off. They’d gotten the call in the middle of breakfast and had to put it all down, grab whatever they could carry—Arch had scooped some egg and ham onto a biscuit—and let Olivia wrap things up in hopes of finishing them later. Even now Arch could still smell the egg, that slightly sulfuric tinge, lingering in the air. He might not have been able to detect it a few months ago, but with all his exposure to brimstone of late, sulfur seemed to be a smell that tripped his trigger no matter how small the quantity, now.

  “I don’t truck much with the ideas of the Calvinists,” Jones was saying, part of a longer talk he was having with Tarley that Arch had mostly tuned out, “but—”

  Arch’s phone rattled in his pocket, clicking against some change. He pulled it out and answered it, seeing it was the watch cell phone back in the station. “Hello?”

  “Arch,” Brian’s voice came rushed, “we got an incident out on Bilius Street. Millie Falkes’s daycare might have just been hit by a demon.”

  “Whoa,” Arch said and leaned forward, thumping the seat back in front of him. “Head to Bilius Street.”

  “Rerouting,” Jones said, like he was one of those GPS things, not even questioning as he steered the car into a right turn.

  “Any idea what we’re dealing with?” Arch asked, clinging on to the phone tight.

  “No, it’s—hang on,” Brian said, hushing up for a minute before his voice dropped precipitously. “My God.”

  *

  “I’m going out there,” Kay Bland said through the phone, huffing in Brian’s ear. “I got my husband’s old rifle—I ain’t letting this sonofabitch walk off with those kids. He just put them in a van, and—my Jesus.”

  “No no no,” Brian said, a phone in one hand, but speaking into the headset wrapped around his head. “Kay, do not—demons are not affected by bullets—”

  “I don’t give a damn, Brian,” she said, and she was fired up. “He ain’t getting away with these kids. I wouldn’t have let some sonofabitch get to you when you were in my class, and I’ll be damned if I let some scrub so-and-so get these little—” She grunted, opening a door with a loud squeak. “Hey! You! You stop that right there!”

  “No!” Brian shouted. “You might hit the kids!”

  “I know what a backstop is, Brian!” she shouted back at him. The shot rang out with astonishing clarity over the phone line, followed by two more. “You son of a—”

  “What’s going on?” Arch asked in Brian’s other ear, the one not being deafened by gunfire. At least the receiver helped blot out some of the sound made by the shots.

  “She’s giving ’em hell,” Brian said, cringing away from the noise. He was standing in the middle of the bullpen, all alone, and yet more afraid than he’d been in quite some time. “Not sure how it’s go—”

  “He’s driving off,” she said in his ear. “He’s—he’s—” She was gasping for breath. “I got his front windshield, didn’t want to aim toward the passenger compartment of the van, because the kids—he loaded the kids up in the back, Brian. Dammit. I ain’t shot a rifle since 1978. And I missed him, dammit. I missed him. I must have, because he didn’t even budge. Just ran off, but those kids—oh, Brian, those kids—he got the children—”

  “Arch,” Brian said. “Stand by a second. Kay, which way was he headed?”

  “Left on Bilius outside my house,” she said, still gasping.

  “South, north, east, what?” Brian asked
.

  “Um …” She paused, taking stock. “The sun is over there, so—he’s headed north. Took a left at the end of the street, so … yeah, north. On Hager Avenue.”

  “Suspect last sighted going north on Hager Ave,” Brian said numbly. “Arch, you get that?”

  “On it,” Arch said. “Call me if you get anything else.” And he hung up.

  *

  “Our demon took a van full of children,” Arch said as he pulled the phone away from his ear. “Heading north on Hager Avenue.”

  “That’s a short street,” Braeden said, gulping but suddenly alive in a way he hadn’t been since … well, Halloween. “Comes to a T at Burnham. He’ll have to go either east or west.”

  “We’re five minutes away,” Barney said, picking up the pace and throwing them into a hard curve.

  “Where are they going to go from there?” Arch said, trying to map it in his head.

  “‘They’?” Tarley almost snarled—but not at Arch. “That’s a load of kids? ‘They’ ain’t going anywhere they want to go, I promise you that.” He thumped his hand against the car door, and it was impossible not to read that for what it was. Fire was burning in Tarley’s eyes, focused, angry and looking straight ahead for the first time in weeks.

  Jones saw it too, Arch knew. “Simmer down, Braeden. We’re going to get them back.”

  “Damned right we are,” Tarley said, voice cracking. Even a blind man couldn’t have missed the transformation in Braeden Tarley, and Arch knew exactly where it was coming from. You couldn’t lose a child like Tarley had lost his Abi and not come off the bench swinging in a situation like this. Not unless you were a completely broken man.

  “Where are they going to go?” Arch asked again. “They turn on Burnham—left or right?”

  “I don’t know,” Tarley said, head down, eyes shifting left and right like he was reading an invisible map on his lap. “Left takes you out of town toward Mt. Horeb, eventually … but there are so many turnoffs. Right goes straight through the middle of town, through some neighborhoods.” He shrugged hard. “Who is this demon? Where’s he going? If we knew—”

  “He’s taking kids,” Arch said, his own mind racing. “Might be related to all these disappearances.”

  “Might be the cause of these disappearances,” Jones offered. The speedometer was pushing 60 in a residential area and Arch knew they were seconds from another turn.

  “We can’t do this alone,” Arch said, coming to his own conclusion. He picked up his phone and started to dial.

  *

  Hendricks thumbed the ignore button on Arch’s call as he stepped into the funeral home, Duncan a step behind him. It didn’t feel smart having the OOC walk in front of him, not if he needed to draw a sword. It’d be a real shame if Duncan caught the tip instead of the thing he wanted to catch it, after all. He might even mourn for like five seconds for Duncan.

  The interior of the funeral home was all warm wood paneling, aged but classic. Flowers everywhere, of course. It was also pretty empty, save for a couple padded benches along the left wall, and upon one of these benches sat the fucking thin man of legend that they’d been chasing.

  “Well, well, well,” said Hendricks, eyeing the lanky fuck and sauntering in, letting Duncan step up on his left side, out of the way of his draw. “Here you are.”

  The thin man frowned, his long face lined in concentration. “I’m sorry,” he said with a trace of a British accent. “Do I know you gentlemen?”

  “You’re about to,” Hendricks said, stepping forward, putting a hand on the hilt of his sword, “but don’t worry; our acquaintance will be brief.” He started to draw—

  Duncan grabbed him by the upper arm and jerked him back a step. It was like a wall had been built around his arm and secured it in place, and Hendricks almost dislocated a joint trying to move while the OOC had a grip on it. “Stop,” Duncan said, flat and forceful.

  “Can’t I stop after he’s got a hole in him?” Hendricks asked, not daring to look back at Duncan, no matter how much the OOC had pissed him off with this bullshit. Here was a demon, Hendricks had a sword; put the two together and they’d be done with this shit. Why couldn’t anything be easy anymore?

  “Show me your ID,” Duncan said, not letting Hendricks go. Hendricks didn’t bother to struggle. He assumed there was a point—a fucking irritating point that was keeping him from showing this tall demon his own point, right to the fucking shell—and decided to be a good grunt and hold fire for a second.

  The thin man stood, reaching delicately into his black suit and producing a wallet from which he extracted a card and showed it to Duncan and Hendricks in turn. “I don’t fucking care that you’re from Vermont,” Hendricks said, not daring to look away from him.

  “Your other ID,” Duncan said, and the thin man produced another card, this one … different.

  Hendricks stared at it, and for a second he felt woozy, like he’d looked at Duncan’s badge or something. “The fuck?” he muttered.

  “Okay,” Duncan said, and jerked Hendricks back another step. “We can’t kill him.”

  “What the actual f—” Hendricks started to say. “Demon royalty again?”

  “No,” Duncan said, keeping that grip on Hendricks. Hendricks just stared at the thin man, who showed no emotion at the discussion about his very life taking place in front of him. “He’s a law-abiding demon. And probably not a killer, either.”

  “Good grief.” The thin man looked affronted. “I’ve never killed a human in my life. That’s not my area of interest at all.”

  “Area of—the fuck?” Hendricks tore his gaze off the thin man and put it squarely on Duncan, who was looking at him. “What the shit is this?”

  “This is a vulture,” Duncan said. “They won’t kill you; they’ll just pick at the bones.”

  “Carrion eater?” Hendricks rounded on the thin bastard. “I don’t see why we spare an eater of the dead.”

  “I don’t eat the dead,” the thin man said with clear revulsion, upper lip twisted in disgust. “I feed on the sorrows of humanity, not any sort of literal destruction. I crave the wreckage of the soul.”

  “Like Gideon,” Hendricks said, itching to pull the sword.

  “Gideon got a rush out of death,” Duncan said. “This guy lurks at funerals and feeds on the negative emotions of the mourners. The sorrow, the sadness, all that. He’s harmless. Actually helps a little, leeching the despair away.”

  “Despair is a rich sauce in this town,” the vulture said, his long nose looking a little like a beak to Hendricks.

  “I thought you demons were coming to town to destroy it,” Hendricks said, no longer tugging on Duncan’s grip. What was the point? He liked to slaughter demons every chance he got, but as much as he enjoyed that, he didn’t go out of his way to wipe out the ones that weren’t doing shit to people.

  “I wouldn’t care to destroy your town,” the vulture said, no trace of amusement. “I’d much rather keep things on their current clip or even move it back a pace or two. Too much death and the despair gets … impossible, really. Too much for even me to bear. Rather like overseasoning a meal. You can only eat so much cake, you see …”

  “Our grief is your cake?” Hendricks wanted to pull the sword again. He threw Duncan a look. “Seriously, you don’t want me to kill this guy?” Duncan shook his head. “Because he obeys your laws?”

  “And yours,” the vulture said archly. Resignation came over him. “Still … things are reaching a state in this town where it won’t be safe for even me much longer, as your mere presence here suggests.”

  “Where will you go next?” Duncan asked.

  The vulture sniffed. “Another large city, of course. There are so comparatively few that aren’t taken up by my people these days, though.”

  “Too many ticks, not enough veins,” Hendricks said. “One sympathizes.”

  “It’s not quite like that,” the vulture said. “We help. If I had a few more of my brethren here, even you�
�watchers or whatever you call yourselves—might have an easier time of things.” He was looking down his nose at Hendricks. “Do you know how desperate people are getting here? How little hope remains?”

  “I have some inkling, yes,” Hendricks said, looking at the vulture with narrowed eyes. His phone buzzed again, and he reached for it, shaking off Duncan’s grip. Now that he had found this to be a dry hole, there was no point in not seeing if something interesting was happening elsewhere. “Are we on speaking terms again?” he asked when he answered.

  “We got a problem,” Arch said, ignoring his remark. “Demon hit a daycare, made off with some kids, killed the proprietor. We’re trying to chase ’em down.”

  That one hit Hendricks like a brick in the face. “Jesus. Where?”

  “In town. Heading toward Burnham Street. We’re trying to figure out which way they went.”

  “Good heavens,” the vulture sniffed. “That’s appalling.”

  Hendricks spun around on him. “You talking about this or the floral arrangements here?”

  “Stealing children is a loathsome practice,” the vulture said, looking very put out by the whole affair. “They don’t even have fully developed emotions yet.” He sniffed, which was apparently his preferred expression of distaste. “A terrible waste.”

  “Your objection to them being kidnapped is that they can’t feel grown-up feelings yet?” Hendricks stared at him coolly.

  “Who are you talking to?” Arch asked, sounding like he was edging closer to panic.

  “Just a sec,” Hendricks said, getting an idea. “Can you feel these kids’ feelings? Their pitiful little sad, non-adult, not-of-interest to you feelings?”

  The vulture blinked at him a few times, then closed his eyes. He opened them again. “Yes. They are … quite afraid, at least in their … limited … terms.”