Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Hendricks looked at Duncan, who nodded at him once. “Can you lead us to them?”

  The vulture almost sneered. “I could, but why would I want t—oh.”

  Duncan had turned his back, rather obviously and theatrically. “I can’t see what’s going on here.”

  “You don’t have eyes in the traditional sense,” the vulture said, voice rising with irritation.

  Hendricks drew his sword and pointed it at the vulture. One good leap and he could nick the sonofabitch, put a nice hole in him. “I’ve got nothing in particular against you, but leeches piss me off. So, freeloader … you want to suck the grief-blood of this town, you’re not doing it for free.”

  The vulture made a noise of disgust, then composed himself. “And once I’ve done this thing for you, you’ll let me go back to my business?”

  “Of sucking the shitty feelings out of funerals?” Hendricks asked, smiling broadly. “Sure. Maybe you’ll even make a dent in some of that ‘Too much spice even for me’ despair you were talking about.” He nodded toward the door, and Duncan opened it for them. “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.” He put the phone back up to his ear. “Arch, we’re on our way. I’ve got a guy who can lead us to the kids.”

  “I’m not a bloody GPS,” the vulture said, lurching toward the door on his long legs. “More like a divining rod.”

  “Well divine me a path to those kids,” Hendricks said, “or you’re going to be facing the not-so-divine hereafter. And I’m told it’s quite unpleasant for you fucks.” He jerked his head toward the door and the vulture sniffed once more, passing through it behind Duncan. Hendricks followed a second later, keeping his hand on the sword the whole way.

  *

  Erin was staring at a topographical map of the area when the phone call came buzzing through, pissing her off at the interruption. Didn’t people know she had shit to do at this point? “Yeah?” she asked when she realized it was HQ.

  “Hey, it’s Brian.” He sounded jumpy.

  “Kinda in the middle of something here,” Erin said, tracing a line on the map laid out on the hood of her car with a finger. “What do you need?” Make it snappy was what she meant.

  “We had a demon hit a daycare in town,” Brian said. “Arch and his crew are on it, but—”

  “What the fuck?” Erin muttered. “A daycare?” She put a hand over her exposed ear and jammed the cell phone closer as Father Nguyen arrived, the sound of his vehicle’s engine like the fucking car-pocalypse all down Hickory Lane.

  “Yeah. Whoever it was, they marched the kids out all roped up,” Brian said. “And like I said, Arch is on it, but it’s—I mean, they got a head start.”

  Erin just listened, mind racing. “Well … we’re setting up here for—”

  “I know.”

  Erin sagged. “What do you want me to do about this?” How the hell was any human being supposed to make these choices?

  She looked over the remains of Hickory Lane. She hadn’t had the heart to join the search; her crew had been digging in the wreckage of the houses, looking for survivors. Unlike Mary Wrightson’s place, it hadn’t been quite so satisfactory in its results. This road, a nice little cul-de-sac, had a dozen houses on it. She knew at least two families on the street, but not whether they’d been home at the time this had gone down, and she was doing her level best not to contemplate it.

  She was doing her level best to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.

  “I’m sending out a text blast to everyone,” Brian said. “I know—I know what you’ve got going on—” there was a little hiccup in his voice “—but … this …”

  “We’re saddling up in like five, okay?” Erin said, running her fingers through her hair now that Nguyen had shut off his damned engine and she didn’t have to cover her ear anymore. “I can’t spare anyone here. I need basically every person I’ve got to do this, and it still might not work. You send out that mass text and it peels off any of the people I really need …” She didn’t finish the thought, but it was laced with menace. “We haven’t had a line on these things in a week, Brian.”

  “These kids, Erin,” Brian said, and he sounded like he was about to cry. “Can you even imagine—”

  “I don’t need to fucking imagine right now, okay?” She closed her eyes and shook her head violently. “I need to kill these hellcats. Let Arch handle that, and he can rope in whoever’s not with me. But I need Casey, I need Nguyen, I need Drumlin and McMinn, Ms. Cherry, and Chauncey Watson and—”

  “I hear you,” Brian said, almost choking it back. “I’ll try and hit some of the people with it that we haven’t seen in a while. I’ll stay away from—whoever you got, okay?”

  “Please do,” she said and hung up, staring out at the ruins of houses, pieces of them all sticking up out of the ruin—wood and stone, shingle and nail, a grave for whoever had been home at the time, an almost certain doom.

  Just like she might have sent those kidnapped kids to by what she was doing now.

  “Goddammit,” she said, squeezing the edges of the phone in her hand. It bit into her palm, the smooth edges, and she almost threw it, but couldn’t bring herself to. She needed it, after all, for this job.

  “Erin?” Nate McMinn’s soft voice reached her where she was standing, and she kept her back to him for just another minute while she tried to get her shit together. “We’re about ready here. Just need an idea of where we’re moving.”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding once, and then she turned around, letting her face fall back into steely calm. She had shit to do—and no time to worry about the things she couldn’t do jack about.

  *

  County Administrator Pike was feeling like a bit of a vagrant lately, wandering around the county visiting some of the smaller offices and working out of his home when he had actual stuff to do that didn’t involve meetings. It wasn’t ideal, but on the bright side, he was able to wake up and not dress up a decent portion of the time.

  Not today though. He was suited up today.

  “You going in this morning?” Darla asked from the stove. She was making grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids, by popular request. She wore her apron over her pajamas, her hair up in a bun that had been flattened on one side. The effect was comical, but Pike knew better than to comment on it.

  “Got a meeting in Midian,” he said, adjusting his belt. He’d gained a pound or two since they’d burned down the office, shot Reeve in the head, and killed Jenny while he was fucking her. Of all of those, it’d been Jenny shitting all over him when she died that had caused him the most stress. It’d made it hard to get a boner since then without thinking about it, too. Put a kink in his sex life. Now he was down to basically Darla and his own hand for relief, and her thoughts this last week had been … elsewhere. “Should be back by noon.”

  “Good,” Darla said, flipping a sandwich. She beckoned him forward, and he half-expected a kiss. Instead, she whispered in his ear, “These little shits are driving me nuts.”

  Pike turned his head to look at the kids. They were both parked in front of the TV, not a care in the world for their parents, who were discussing boring adult stuff behind them while Doc McStuffins was doing her thing on the screen. “They seem all right to me,” he said.

  “For now,” she said, “but the minute it goes off—boom. They’re going to be all up in my area.” She let air hiss out between her teeth. “I’d send them to daycare, but …” She rolled her eyes. “On a County Administrator’s salary …”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “when these rituals we’ve been doing start paying dividends, salary’s going to be a little less of a worry.”

  “I know,” she said with a thin smile. “But the waiting sucks sweaty, unwashed cock.” She reached over and slapped him in the ass. “Get out there and accumulate us some more power, okay?”

  “I’m all over that,” he said with a smile of his own as he adjusted his tie. With a peck on the cheek, he was out the door, and about the business of reshaping
this sorry-ass county in the image he had in mind for it. Probably not the one the residents would have preferred, but who gave a shit about these unwashed hillbillies, anyway?

  *

  Drake stopped at the intersection of Burnham Street, peering left and right before pulling out onto the road with a slight squeal of the van’s tires. He was obeying the rules of the road scrupulously, not daring to break the law, even though his windshield was a spiderweb of cracks. That probably wasn’t street legal, but it wasn’t as though Drake had asked someone to shoot at him. It certainly wasn’t his fault.

  Nor did it matter. The van was rented and couldn’t be tied to him, and he had his veal, all loaded up and whimpering in the back. He was quite deaf to the noises they were making. It was all the moans of cattle and goats to him. So on he drove, ignoring all the pitiful sounds from the small creatures behind him, continuing toward his destination—and his culinary destiny.

  *

  Lauren had just finished up the intubation of a heroin OD and had received a pat on her back and an attagirl when she decided to stop by her locker on her break. Her mind was still on the twenty-something—just a kid, really—that she’d spared from death with a generous dose of Narcan, when she checked her phone. She liked to do that about twenty times a shift, just to make sure that she hadn’t missed any important messages from Molly. Something like, “I accidentally burned Elise’s house down, please stop by the police station with bail money,” or, “I had sex with a well-sculpted set of Bohemian triplets and now I’m pregnant with their Eastern European children.” The essentials, only.

  So when she snapped off her gloves and reached into her scrubs for her phone, she expected maybe something from Molly. She should have some of those myriad messages from the watch, but for some reason she didn’t.

  There one was though.

  KIDS TAKEN FROM MILLIE FALKES’S DAYCARE. ALL HANDS NOT DEALING WITH HICKORY LANE INCIDENT PLEASE REPORT TO BURNHAM STREET FOR SEARCH IMMEDIATELY!!!

  “Oh,” she said, a sick feeling in her stomach welling up as she processed the message before her eyes, like it was written in blood—Molly’s, she thought for some reason. “Well. At least it’s all spelled right.” It was a sick thing to say, to think … but it was all she could come up with.

  *

  Brian sent the message and then slumped back in his seat. He was loose against the back of the chair, feeling like spilling those words out through the keys of the phone had drained him of life.

  It wasn’t the texting though, was it? No. He’d sent a billion texts in his life. It was the content of the fucking thing.

  Child trafficking? He knew, dimly, that it happened, on a small scale, even here in the US. Maybe even on a bigger scale than he’d ever want to admit. But it happened out of sight, easier to ignore.

  Shit, lots of things happened that way. He slid his hand along the sharp edge of the desk, and it felt like a dull sword blade against his palm, a distant threat of a cut.

  This happening here though, now … a demon kidnapping children, maybe killing a daycare provider … hell, they couldn’t even spare anyone to go check on Millie, because they were all too busy chasing after the kids right now.

  How fucked up were things in Midian right now? This incident was about as emblematic as Brian could imagine.

  He stared down at the phone in front of him, wondering if maybe somehow he could go out to—but no. He didn’t know how to transfer the incoming 911 calls, which had to be answered … because they didn’t have anyone else to do it …

  And, he reflected ruefully, it’d be a real shame if they missed an important one right now, even though there’d be not a damned thing he could do if one came in except sit there and sympathize with them over the phone, hoping things would work out all right.

  *

  Hendricks was in the back of the SUV, the vulture riding shotgun, Duncan in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t his preferred method of travel, but he’d deal, sword in his hand and threateningly close to the vulture’s side, the demon looking distastefully back at him. He imagined that was how an English lord would look down upon his subjects in times of old.

  The vulture sniffed, and Hendricks grinned at him. “What’s the matter?” Hendricks asked. The SUV hit a bump; Duncan had it cranked up around fifty and was tearing through town trying to get to the damned rendezvous with Arch.

  “I appear to have been drafted into the service of humanity,” the vulture said, looking straight ahead once more. Duncan took a corner hard, tires squealing, the car feeling like it might just tip. At the last second it hugged the ground, though, so it all worked out.

  “You too good to serve?” Hendricks asked. He’d heard that shit before, usually preceded by, I would have joined the military, but blah, blah, blah. “Blah, blah, blah” always translated to, “Because I was a pussy,” at least in his head.

  The vulture wisely did not answer his loaded inquiry. Hendricks shrugged it off; having a demon provide excuses as to why he didn’t want to help humans wasn’t exactly something he needed in his life anyway. “How far out are we?” he asked Duncan instead.

  “We’re not,” Duncan said, and brought the car to a screeching stop. Hendricks had braced his knee against the back of the driver’s seat, but still he almost went flying. He managed to plant his left hand at the last second, which was the only thing that kept his sword from coming forward and turning the vulture into a cloud of free-floating stink.

  “Nice fucking driving,” Hendricks said, throwing open the rear passenger door and stepping out. Duncan was doing the same.

  “I thought so,” Duncan said, then looked over at the vulture’s side of the car. The door opened and stayed that way, the lanky creature springing out and breaking into a run. “Seems we’ve got a prison break.”

  “Bullshit,” Hendricks said, and jerked his .45. He put two right in the vulture’s back and the demon wobbled a little, a little squeal escaping him as Hendricks circled around the car and caught him, laying the sword tip right on his buttock.

  “This is a custom Brooks Brothers suit,” the vulture said, both pained and clearly upset at the same time.

  “And it’d still be fully intact if you hadn’t decided to be a jagoff and run,” Hendricks said. “Life’s about choices, bitchnuts. Don’t make the wrong ones unless you want to eat a shit sandwich of consequences, the least of which being your fancy suit springing a couple of holes.”

  “What in the fires of Hades is going on over here?” Arch called, popping out of where he’d been sitting in Barney Jones’s car.

  “First-world demon problems,” Hendricks called back, careful to keep the point of the sword good and resting on the vulture’s back.

  “What the hell are you doing?” another voice called, harsher and higher, and Hendricks turned to see that Guthrie was sauntering toward him. She didn’t look pissed—yet—but that’d probably change if she sussed out what the vulture was and what Hendricks was doing.

  “Coercing, probably,” Hendricks said as Duncan fell into line next to Guthrie. The OOCs looked like an unusual pair, Duncan cool as a cucumber and Guthrie scowling. “Trying to get a little help from our local citizenry in apprehending this dangerous kidnapper,” Hendricks said, keeping his voice level as he tried to decide how best to jump this particular hurdle. Guthrie wouldn’t play as fast and loose with the rules as Duncan, no fucking way. She’d come down on the side of this vulture, for sure, and that’d mean their one good lead for tracking down the kidnapper would either get away clean or else have another chance to escape while he and the others fought Guthrie to the death over this fucker. In that situation, Hendricks wasn’t sure whether Duncan would end up on their side or that of his putative partner, and that was cause for worry because these OOCs could fight.

  Arch came on over too, along with Braeden Tarley, the mechanic looking like someone had finally lit the pilot light under his ass. Hendricks gave him a once-over and that was all, preferring to keep his attention on th
e vulture and where his sword was pointed. Safer that way. Still, he couldn’t fail to miss the flush to the cheeks this particular threat had seemed to awaken in Tarley. About damned time, in his opinion. Hendricks had lost before, but never a child; still, it seemed to him, the mechanic was going to gutter out if he didn’t get to burning soon.

  “This guy,” Hendricks said, gesturing with the sword at the vulture, “can sniff out our missing kids. But he requires a little … persuasion.”

  Tarley came at the vulture just then, raising high his wrench. Hendricks thought maybe by now it had been consecrated, but who knew? Nguyen was busy as a horny priest in a room full of altar boys. “I’ll persuade him,” he said, and the vulture flinched back without Tarley making it within five feet of him.

  “What kind of demon is this?” Guthrie asked, face all clouded with suspicion. She was looking over the vulture with a wandering eye, and not the good kind.

  “Saskavon,” Hendricks lied so Duncan wouldn’t have to; the chubbier OOC gave him a grateful look behind Duncan’s back. Saskavons could read proximity to prey, including the size of said prey.

  Guthrie shrugged, though the vulture favored Hendricks with an offended look that he gave very little in the way of shits about.

  “Let’s get this party started,” Tarley said. “Time’s wasting and the trail’s getting colder by the moment.”

  “All right then,” Hendricks said, nodding to the vulture. “Let’s saddle up, and you start telling us which way to go.”

  The vulture blinked at him for a moment, apparently gauging his chances of dodging out of this. He must have given up, because he picked a direction and pointed. It was left. “That way.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Hendricks said, and jerked his head toward Tarley. “You want this fuck to ride with you?”

  Tarley smiled, and it was a malicious damned look. “Damned right. I’ll make him talk.”