Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

Home > Fantasy > Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) > Page 56
Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 56

by Robert J. Crane


  “Just keep in mind, one good poke and he’s ashes,” Hendricks said, wondering about the look in the man’s eyes. “That happens, those kids are gone, okay?”

  “He won’t get the hard end unless he gets difficult,” Tarley said. The vulture swallowed, his thin neck bobbed. Neat reaction, Hendricks thought as he made his way back to the SUV alone, Duncan throwing him a glance as he walked away with Guthrie. It almost made the vulture look human.

  *

  “Let’s move, let’s move!” Tarley urged as he slid into the backseat of the car next to the demon and Arch took the front seat. Barney already had it running, and they were off almost before Arch got a chance to close his door. It clunked shut and held, but he could tell it wasn’t fully latched. He gave it a good pull and it clicked. But a second later he almost hit the windshield as Jones slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a minivan, and Arch regretted not getting his seatbelt fastened first.

  “Come on now, you so-and-so!” Jones shouted, making a motion with his open hand. He accelerated into the temporary gap left by the minivan’s sudden halt just as they started to go, and it clunked his bumper. He didn’t seem to care, whipping the wheel to the right then back to the left, going straight ahead in the direction in which the demon had pointed them, hitting his horn as he passed.

  Arch saw a woman staring open-mouthed at them as Jones sped them past. It was Brigitte Durst, and he expected she was powerfully shocked to see Barney Jones driving like a bat out of Hades. Jones, for his part, didn’t seem fussed.

  “Now,” Braeden said from the back seat, as menacing as he’d ever heard the man, “I expect to hear from you frequently and without any of this ‘last minute turn’ shit. You let him know a ways off, y’hear me?”

  “I hear you,” the demon said in a kind of classical English tone. It sounded like he was ready for a stage performance or something, not a high-speed pursuit of a demon kidnapper. But, Arch reflected as he grabbed hold of the bar to stabilize himself as Jones took another corner at high speed, the old car not really taking to it very well, that just wasn’t the hand they were dealt. Any of them.

  *

  Erin was poring over the map, her decisions nearly made, but a couple of final things to run through. The topographical map spread out over the hood made things easier, giving her a pretty clear idea of the path of these demons. It would have been really useful back when they’d faced them at Mary Wrightson’s, or on the night of the missing persons incident out on Faulkner Road, when these things had streamed out of the woods like water running over the bank of a river.

  But she had them now, and it was telling her exactly where they had to have gone in the last hour or so since the call had come in. “They couldn’t have done anything but skirt the line and head this way, up the side of this hill.” She looked around, pointing in the distance to the top of a rounded hilltop nearby that was covered in high trees. “They go around it the other way, things start to get mighty rough and they’d run into that house—which—you can still see the chimney, so it’s probably standing, you know?”

  “What if just the chimney’s standing?” Father Nguyen asked, leaning over the map with her. Ms. Cherry was next to him, McMinn and Drumlin were just down the line, and Casey Meacham was staring over Father Nguyen, kind of peeking over his shoulder.

  “We’re going to have to take that risk,” Erin said. She’d thought of that herself, but she hadn’t wanted to waste the time bringing it up just to defuse it like she was now. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong—this is a guessing game, and we’re trying to pick the most likely path. And the most likely path—” she traced a finger down the side of that hilltop ahead, and the one next to it “—is that they funneled this way, into Shade’s Hollow.”

  “Man,” McMinn said, “nobody liked to go into Shade’s Hollow before this. With those things running around I’m doubly disinclined to visit.”

  Erin rolled her eyes at that bit of local color. He wasn’t totally wrong; people didn’t like to go into Shade’s Hollow, that much was true, mostly because the Alder family pretty much treated it like their own personal fiefdom of assholes. Erin knew a few of them, and they were all right once you got to know them—she’d gone to school with a couple of the Alder boys—but few bothered, because they were rough, tumble, and backward as hell. She’d heard someone joke that any day now, they were going to get dial-up internet in Shade’s Hollow. She thought that was a pretty dick thing to say, mostly because Bobby Alder had had an iPhone before almost anyone else in town. That he probably stole it and almost certainly used it in the commission of his various crimes was beside the point.

  “Well, that’s where we’re going,” Erin said, and she pointed out a line. “This area’s been logged, so it makes a kind of natural highway into the hollow.” She didn’t pronounce it “holler,” like so many she knew did. “We’ll roll through the woods and see if we can join up with it there.” She pointed on the map. “This is a swimming hole that the Alders used to use. It’s an old quarry.”

  “I been there,” Casey said, nodding. “Not all that big, for a quarry, but … it could work, we run ’em in there.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Ms. Cherry asked. “Won’t we be boxing ourselves in there?”

  “She’s not wrong,” Casey said, running a dirty finger over the squarish mark on the map indicating the quarry. “It’s got one good entry and exit, and the back half is underwater a decent portion of the time.”

  “But we ain’t had a rainfall since the summer,” Keith Drumlin said, blinking his eyes at them. “It’s gotta be dried out by now, ain’t it?”

  “For sure,” Erin said, staring at the quarry mark. “That’s the place.”

  “Do we have a backup plan?” Ms. Cherry asked, a little tentatively. “In case things go awry?”

  Erin didn’t have to think about it very long to answer, because she’d been thinking of this answer for the entire time. “We fight ’em wherever we have to. Do as much damage to them as we can. Make ’em hurt, make ’em pay. Knock off as many as we can before things bust loose. The quarry’d be better, but … we’ll fight them however we need to.” She grabbed the map and started folding it up. “Now let’s get to work.”

  *

  Pike drove into Midian, admiring his handiwork. There was a house boarded up, probably the result of some family deciding either to barricade themselves in, or pull up stakes. Either worked for him—scared and tender prey for the demons, or one less enemy in this fractured watch. Then on the left, here was a car that had gotten shellacked and vandalized sometime in the last couple weeks, a good example of the trickle-down effects of chaos. Maybe demons had done it, or maybe it had just been shithead kids, but either worked for him. It all served the greater societal breakdown, after all.

  He turned the car left on Vickers Avenue. He had a plan to meet a demon for a late lunch, a little sacrifice to discuss some business. He hadn’t told Darla about it because … well, he was getting an inkling based on how much she’d known about the rituals they’d performed with Jenny and Reeve that she’d perhaps dipped more than her toe in these dark waters. He’d read some shit in books that she kept off the shelves, things that had been marked, ones that made him wonder if she hadn’t been doing some things on the side as well. Scratch that; he knew she had, and not said boo about it. The question was which things she’d done …

  He suspected her of partaking of one of the rituals for sure, a demon gangbang kind of thing. She’d had some bruises, been moving a little gingerly the last few days, cringes of pain when she thought he wasn’t looking …

  Pike put that thought out of his mind, because it made him a little sick to his stomach. He wasn’t really the jealous type—well, maybe a little—but the thought of her doing that behind his back skeeved him out. Darla was seeking power, would probably do anything to acquire it, but the fact she’d hoarded that to herself rather than share with him …

  Well, he’d just have to get a little creative an
d go looking for his own alliances as well.

  And to that end, he was steering toward an old abandoned industrial building just off the square. It had been a cola bottling plant back in the sixties, abandoned when operations for the major companies had gone through a round of centralizations. Some retailer or another had picked up the lease every now and again, but the last of those had moved out years ago, so now it sat dormant in a section of town every damned body was avoiding.

  Seemed to Pike like the perfect place to do some business.

  So he took that last turn, all full of self-assurance and a little muted excitement. The last ritual had turned out pretty damned well. He’d gotten away with it, not a single hint of suspicion from those impotent little hick fucks in the sheriff’s watch. This would be a small meeting, but a good one, a down payment on a future sacrifice. It was time for him to start making his own inroads, start greasing the wheels of his new constituency on the corpses of his old, and this was the next step.

  *

  Hendricks felt a little weird driving on his own in the SUV. Arch and company were ahead of him two up, Guthrie and Duncan emoting like a sullen married couple just ahead, and he was following, watching the drama play out.

  He didn’t really feel like he necessarily had a real interest in the fight, more of a detached interest in not seeing Guthrie go asshole and ruin their mission to recover these kids. Just another magnificent day in Midian. He looked out at the cloud-lined sky overhead and drove on in silence.

  Still, something was nagging at him: this vague sense that everybody was chasing different things for different reasons. He should have been happy about that—it was how he’d operated for years, after all—but it didn’t please him. It didn’t even leave him indifferent.

  It left him … cold.

  But here he was, chasing this trail because … he needed to. Didn’t he? There were kids at risk here, and he should be all over that, right?

  Hendricks squeezed the faux leather wheel. He should have been all over it. He should have been gung-ho. He damned sure stuck his pig-sticking sword in that vulture’s direction quick enough when the chance presented itself. These were little babies, and anyone who went after them was the lowest of the fucking low.

  And he should put a hole in them. End of story.

  But … how many damned demon hunters did it take to track down one stupid demon and poke them with something holy?

  Hendricks sighed, making the pleather wheel squeak as he gave it some pressure. It felt smooth and a little softly pebbled in his grasp. This was the problem with running with a pack—Arch was on his thing, Erin was on hers, but Hendricks … he was a lone wolf. Always had been, up to now. When he’d started in this with Arch, it was a partnership. They were going to fight the tide together, here in Midian.

  But the tide wasn’t exactly going out, was it? And the watch, which had looked like it was going to swell, to go not just big but huge, had decided to mostly go home instead. Sure, they had a core of people, but Dr. Darlington, Sheriff Reeve, Bill Longholt, Alison … shit, they’d taken some fucking losses, the kind that’d make a lesser man—probably some army pussy—weep like a bitch during a sappy movie.

  And here he was, riding in with the cavalry like days of old. Except …

  Hendricks had left the Marine Corps a long-ass time ago. He didn’t ride with a squad anymore.

  “This shit is for the pigeons,” he said, thinking of a flock. They’d go wherever the trouble was now, and then where it was tomorrow, and then the day after … like demon hunters, sort of, but so tied to this place they couldn’t see objectively what was happening …

  They were fucking losing this war. All the way to the streets.

  As if to drive the point home, he passed by a car that had been spray-painted and vandalized, something that never would have happened in this town when he’d first come to it. Kids were being stolen out of daycares, the public got slaughtered out on a square during a festival …

  “You despair,” came a voice from beside him, and it nearly sent him into the fucking ceiling. It took Hendricks a second to unclench; if he’d had a pencil up his ass it would have snapped cleanly in two just now.

  “Things are going straight to shit,” Hendricks said, keeping his hands on the wheel and not bothering to give his red-headed sudden co-pilot a glance. “Doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it, even if we save these kids.”

  “What if there was?” Starling asked, cool, calm, robotic as ever. “Something you could do about it.” This she asked lower, and maybe a trifle less cool.

  That seemed to wake up a little something in Hendricks, made him sit up a little straighter. Keep following this convoy, or do something else, something that actually made a difference in the long run? “Shit, I’m in on that,” he said, giving her a look. She didn’t respond with a smile or anything, because why would she? This was Starling.

  *

  Arch was wishing he was behind the wheel for the first time in a while. Not because he thought he was a better driver than Barney Jones, but because—just maybe—he might have been a safer one, at least at the moment.

  Something about the thought of kids at risk had turned the pastor into a madman, because he was going, going, gone in his crazy. Every direction the demon who acted as their guide pointed, he was heading, and all at top speed.

  “Left ahead again,” the demon said in that stuffy accent, reminding Arch of when Alison used to make him watch Downton Abbey.

  Jones took the corner at sixty, and again Arch was left wondering if they’d get there in one piece or in pieces. Tarley swore in the back seat. This was going to get worse before it got better.

  *

  As immune as Drake was to the squalls and the pleas, they did get annoying after a while. These little creatures couldn’t really even talk—couldn’t construct a sentence, which made them not dissimilar from their parents, Drake thought with a sneer.

  He wheeled the van carefully around a corner. They were in a neighborhood now, not terribly far from his rental home. Already he could imagine the grill, lighting the coals, smelling the white smoke that would come first before it worked its way to clear blue. He had a little paddock set up, a containment pen for these specimens, to keep them fresh. They’d go swiftly, of course, being so small, but he had four or five recipes in mind for them, experiments he wanted to try involving their meat. He was practically salivating already at the thought.

  Tires squealed behind him, and Drake looked in his rearview. The autumn clouds were heavy and grey in the sky, and a long Buick had just turned the corner beside him. Drake frowned. He was going the speed limit, but this madman was driving like a bat out of—well, Drake knew where. The best course was to simply slow, maybe even give this lunatic clearance to pass. There were no telltale signs of police lights to indicate that he was in any sort of trouble, which, to him, suggested he was home free. He hadn’t seen any sign of pursuit thus far, and this wasn’t a police car, so …

  Drake looked ahead. He was approaching a bridge abutment, and an embankment lay to his right, sloping down a hill into a backyard. It passed, and suddenly he was confronted with a cemetery just out his window. He sighed. Such a shame that all that delicious meat went to waste, buried under the ground.

  *

  Jones was pulling the car closer to the van, in sight now just up the road. “We got a problem,” he said, and Arch’s ears perked up.

  “What?” Tarley asked from the back seat, gruff and hard, hand reaching up to grasp the soft leather seat between them.

  “There are babies in the back of this van,” Jones said, lifting a hand off the wheel to point ahead. “How am I supposed to get this demon to pull over without hurting them?”

  That produced a moment of silence in the Buick. “You can’t ram them,” Arch said, thinking of the things he’d learned in the police academy. There weren’t any gentle ways he could think of that would allow for a stop, especially given this was a demon. It was u
nlikely he’d respond to shouts of “Pull over!” or even a police car running up behind him with lights flashing.

  “I got an idea,” Tarley said, leaning forward toward them in the front seat, his wrench still pointed at that demon in the back with him. “You come up alongside to pass, and I’ll open the door and lean out, give his tires a quick poke with a sword.” He nodded to Arch. Arch just stared at him; the idea carried a whiff of insanity. “We pop one of them, he’ll have to stop pretty quick.”

  “He’s going to see us do that,” Arch said.

  “I don’t think he’s going to miss almost any approach we take,” Jones said. “For example—if you were to shoot out his tires—”

  “I can’t do that with kids in the car,” Arch said.

  “—he’d hear that as well,” Jones said. “Anything we do, it’s going to be obvious.”

  “He could swerve the car right into you,” Arch said, looking back at Tarley.

  Tarley’s eyes were alive with fire and fury. “Yeah, I know.”

  Arch didn’t want to argue with those eyes. “All right then.” And he carefully lifted his sword up over the seat and handed it to Tarley. He didn’t see a better way.

  “I’ll come alongside,” Jones said, still gripping the wheel, “you open up and … we’ll just do this thing.” He nodded ahead. “We’ve got a couple blocks to the next stop sign, and he’s not going more than about thirty. This is probably the safest it’s going to get.”

  “When it pops, he might swerve toward you,” Tarley said, “unintentionally or not. I’m aiming for the left rear, which will make him fishtail if he’s not careful. If somehow I get smashed in the door by him hitting us, you keep on his ass.” Tarley’s voice was aflame. “Don’t worry about me. You get those kids back, y’hear?”

 

‹ Prev