Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “You didn’t even like the man,” Arch said. “And he sure didn’t much care for you.”

  “In the Corps, you don’t get to pick your squadmates,” Hendricks said. “There were a few guys I really hated. Fucking assholes, the kind who—it doesn’t matter. Way worse than any beef I had with Reeve, let’s put it that way.” He turned to look at Arch. “But when we went into Ramadi, those assholes were my brothers. They had my back, I had theirs. And if some motherfucking insurgent blew their head off, his was following without mercy as soon as I could get my barrel lined up, I don’t care if I’d been arguing with the sonofabitch he killed two seconds earlier.”

  He rounded on Arch. “This shit right here? This is us versus them. If Pike turned on you, was selling you guys out to demons, he deserved what happened to him and worse. I don’t give two shits what excuses he has. He betrays our side, he’s on theirs, and needs to have his guts exposed to the air just like any other asshole demon that crosses the line.”

  “Who decides that?” Arch said, and he was back to being a rock wall that Hendricks’s words would just bounce off. Which was a shame, because Hendricks would have liked him to understand. “You?”

  “Who else was available?” Hendricks asked. “You were saving kids, Erin was saving the town … what do you do when you get the call? Evil’s afoot. Let it live, it spreads. Maybe it summons a demon, uses it to cause more havoc, kill more people, sacrifice more lives.” Hendricks shrugged. “What do you do, Arch? Just shrug your shoulders and let it be? Because he’s skin-covered and not shelled?”

  “I don’t know,” Arch said, “and you shouldn’t know either. It shouldn’t be one man’s decision. This ain’t some lawless town out of the frontier, where you’re the sheriff and the law.”

  “I know I’m not the sheriff,” Hendricks said. “He’s dead.”

  Arch got stonefaced. “There you go again, dodging out of all responsibility. This ain’t going anywhere—”

  “Damned right it isn’t,” Hendricks said.

  Arch held up a finger, pointing it right at Hendricks. “Erin was right. Get your head out of your backside—”

  “You can say ass; I won’t tell anyone.”

  “—or just get the hell out of town,” Arch said, and he finally lost it, voice rising to a yell. “We got no use for you if you can’t put a leash on yourself!” And he stormed out, not nearly so reserved as Erin.

  Hendricks, for his part, stood and stewed for another minute before he decided he’d had enough of standing there. “Fuck this,” he muttered to himself and left as well, figuring he’d rather stare at the walls in his motel room than here.

  *

  “You ready for this?” Lauren asked, Molly at her side.

  The lawn was overgrown, because who was going to bother to mow it? Albert Daniel, their neighbor, had died just over there, Lauren recalled, killed by the demons that had possessed Molly. She could remember his face. She’d lain right there, shuddering in despair, as the blood had spurted out of his head from a gunshot that rang out on the quiet street.

  The chill wind felt like it was cutting through them, opening up her skin to force in a reminder.

  But Lauren remembered.

  So did Molly; she could tell by the way her daughter’s gaze fixed on that spot on the lawn. It was on her mind, clearly, and why wouldn’t it be?

  They’d both been violated here, in different ways—and yet the same. The things that had happened hadn’t just resulted in demons seizing them, each, bodily, but taking away her mother—Molly’s grandmother—and—

  Their home.

  It stood as it ever did, the house Lauren had lived in all her life. It was forbidding from down here, a two-story that wasn’t all that big but wasn’t all that small. She’d had memories here—her own, and then those with Molly. Growing up, getting pregnant, having a baby, going to med school, raising Molly—all those right here in this home.

  And they didn’t change just because some asshole pack of demons decided to come to town for whatever reason and piss all over everything.

  “If we don’t face this,” Molly said, almost as much probably to herself as to her mother, “this place isn’t ours anymore.” Her daughter’s resolve visibly hardened. “It’s theirs.”

  “When did you get all sensible and grown up?” Lauren murmured, putting an arm around Molly’s shoulder. She didn’t shrug it off, which was good. Lauren felt like she was at peak vulnerable right now, and pulling Molly close to her helped as they took the small, manageable infinity of steps up to the front porch.

  When they were up there, they paused, by mutual accord, both staring at the door. It was closed, some kind soul who’d brought them their clothing and effects surely having done so. Lauren took a breath, then leaned down, and tugged at the handle.

  It squeaked, that old sound that always greeted her when she came home from a long day at the hospital, and then relinquished its grip on the lock, and started to swing open.

  Darkness waited within as it swung wide, the faint grey of the sky overhead streaming in to light their path.

  Molly was the first to take a step forward, over the threshold, but Lauren matched it, stepping in on the rug behind her.

  They stood in the silence. It wasn’t like she remembered it—full of laughter and joy and happiness and wonder and arguments and TV shows and all else.

  It was different.

  Empty.

  She squeezed Molly tighter, and felt her daughter do the same to her. It wasn’t the same, but … they hadn’t expected it to be. Because things were different now.

  Everything was different now. And it always would be.

  “Well,” Molly said, and her voice came out warbling and uncertain, then strengthened, “we’re home.”

  *

  Arch was still thinking about Hendricks as he gathered up his stuff from the spare room in the Jones house. It was a tough thing to fathom, what Hendricks might have done to Pike. It shook him right to the core of what he thought of the cowboy, what he’d always thought of the man—turned his opinion around in the worst way. He didn’t know what to do with those thoughts, those—feelings, really.

  Especially not giving everything else he’d already worked through.

  He’d felt strangely alive again after bringing those children out of the drains. It was almost like he was crawling his way back to life. He’d prayed in the dark, prayed for the light, and he’d seen it again, somewhere in there as he got shellacked and nearly eaten by a demon.

  Answered prayers were a funny thing, but he wasn’t sure this was something he’d even asked for. At least not in this way.

  “Going somewhere?” Barney Jones’s voice was quiet, almost wry. Arch turned to find him at the door, leaning against the jamb, watching.

  “I think it’s time I moved on out,” Arch said. “Seems to me that there’s work to be done, and a room at the station that’s empty, so … I’m going to head on over there, be a little closer to the center of the action.”

  Jones pursed his lips. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  Arch lowered his voice. He knew the man’s concern, could see it plainly now in a way he hadn’t before. “I know you’re worried about me. And a week ago—heck, a day ago—you were right to be. I ain’t been handling this well. But … I think I got my head on straight.”

  Jones raised an eyebrow, cocked it at him accusingly. “That so?”

  “I think it is,” Arch said, nodding slowly. “Everything I’ve gone through lately—part of me was praying for deliverance from it like it was something directed specifically at me. Alison dying, her not telling me about—well, you know—I took it all personally. But it wasn’t.”

  Jones watched him quietly for a moment, then nodded. “Go on.”

  “The world’s a tough place,” Arch said. “People make choices. Choices have their consequences. Alison chose not to tell me—and I can see why. That demon that … killed her … he … they, whatever … they made ch
oices too. She chose to fight for her town, for … me, I guess. All this while, I wanted to make it about me. I did make it about me—in my prayers, in my mind. But it wasn’t about me.” He nodded. “I see that now.”

  “We all suffer from a little self-centeredness every now and again,” Jones said wryly. “But thinking about yourself at the worst of times—how this thing hits you, when others are suffering—it ain’t good. We think about ourselves, crawl up our own heads, we tend to turn to rage and revenge as a solution—like Braeden.” He lowered his voice and looked over his shoulder. “Now maybe that beating he dealt out will do his heart some good, maybe it won’t. Either way … it ain’t pure as a motive, that’s sure.”

  “No, it’s not,” Arch said. “I don’t believe that just being angry, that striking back … that these are the things that will heal a heart.” He shook his head. “I could march into that jail tomorrow and put a sword right through the heart of that man that carried the demon that killed Alison … but it wouldn’t do a danged bit of good. She gave her life, the last minutes of it, to save us—and save him, really.” He bowed his head. “Now, I want to use my time, however much of it there is … making good her efforts.”

  “That’s a reasonable cause,” Jones said, “expressed in reasonable words. But …” He tilted his head, looked expectantly at Arch.

  “I’m not doing it just so I can go meet the Lord and see Alison again,” Arch said. “I’m not aiming for that to happen anytime soon, is what I’m saying. I expect if we get through this … I might end up living a whole life after Midian.” He paused. “Though that’s feeling like a mighty big ‘if’ these days.”

  Jones nodded. “I could see it in your eyes, you know, that loss of hope. You weren’t looking for a reason to live, Arch.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You were looking for a reason to die.”

  Arch felt the burn of shame on that one. “I know … and I’m … I’m not proud of it.”

  “Good; you shouldn’t be,” Jones said, coming off the jamb and on into the room, putting a hand on his shoulder. “But you got a lot of good you could still do. Here, and elsewhere after this is over, if … like you said, we make it out.”

  Arch thought about that a second. “Do you think we will? Make it through, I mean?”

  Jones just smiled—wry, again, but with a gleam in his eyes—and said, “I know who’s on our side, and I’ve seen who’s on theirs. And you won’t see me switching, even if it’s just us against them all.”

  Arch nodded slowly. “It ain’t just us, I don’t think. You going to the meeting?”

  “I’ll be there,” Jones said, “but Olivia’s fixing dinner first. You want a meal before you go?”

  “Wouldn’t mind still being able to stop by for one every now and again even after I go,” Arch said, throwing in a little wryness of his own.

  Jones burst into a big grin. “You’re welcome anytime. You know what she says …” And he put his arm around Arch’s shoulder as Arch picked up his bag and started toward the door. “‘I only fixed what I thought y’all’d eat’! And you know what I add to that?” The preacher guffawed. “‘Yeah—what you thought we’d eat in fifty years of digging in!’” He laughed at his own joke. “Anytime you want to stop, Arch, we’ll always have plenty. You just drop on by.”

  Arch felt a warmth over his shoulder where Jones’s arm rested, and lower, a little catch in his throat. It was good to have people you could count on. “I might just do that. I might just.”

  *

  Erin called things to order just past six. She didn’t have a gavel or any such thing, just thumped her palm against the podium in the meeting room in the municipal building, which was filled to the brimming with people who’d professed their loyalty to the watch only a few weeks earlier, after Halloween. She’d stood in this room while Reeve had done the same thing—called them to order, tried to organize them, to draw the strings of a system in place to protect Midian—

  And failed. Three weeks of floundering had proven that much.

  They’d seen untold chaos in these weeks. The hellcats, the demon kidnapper—they’d found his hideout, and it ended up being a truly grotesque set of discoveries that Erin wished she could unsee—and other shit, of course. Never-ending rivers of shit, lately.

  And Reeve. Of course, Reeve.

  Well … she’d seen about enough of it. That was why she was standing here, in front of this group of people who’d said they wanted to save Midian. They’d said it, some of them had dipped their toe in it, some had gone all in, whole hog, and others …

  She hadn’t seen some of their asses since.

  But here they were now, most of them. There were a few notable absences, but she couldn’t trouble herself for those. She was dealing with people, after all, and people were flawed. They fucked up. They lied, sometimes even to themselves.

  She looked over the crowd as she waited for the last of them to settle. No sign of Hendricks.

  She tried to figure out how she felt about that, but ultimately … there was a bare prickle of relief. She didn’t know how to handle the cowboy at this point. She’d been so sure of how she felt about him during the summer, sure enough to go off a cliff for him …

  But now? Maybe it would be better if he really didn’t show up to this. Or anything else either, if he couldn’t stop being the world’s biggest asshole.

  “I call y’all to order,” Erin said, almost jokingly, and it got a couple chuckles. “Seriously, though … thank you for coming. I don’t want to take up your whole evening, but …” Here she got serious. “But I will. If I can.”

  That sent a little rumble through the crowd. They’d been invited to a meeting, no doubt assuming it would be a standard progress report. They hadn’t had one of those since Reeve had died. Some probably were coming just to hear whatever sort of spin would get thrown out about the sheriff’s death.

  Well, Erin didn’t have time for that shit.

  “We stood here a few weeks ago,” Erin said, looking through the faces in the crowd, gripping the sides of the podium for support, “and Sheriff Reeve—God rest his soul—asked y’all to make a commitment to help with the shit going on in this town. It was a small commitment, in most cases; a show of hands kind of thing. He wanted to see who would fight for Midian, and some of y’all really came through.

  “And some of y’all,” she said, trying to keep the next part low-key to avoid being a Hendricks-level ass, “ain’t done a blessed thing since then.”

  That caused a little hum, and she held up a hand to stay it off. “I don’t blame you. Y’all are busy. Got lives to lead. Maybe you ain’t been hit by this personally; maybe you’re ignoring it all, hoping it’ll go away. But I’m gonna say it now, and we’ll have it out, and if you want to tell me to take a flying leap of fuck off after this, then you won’t hear from me again. But … y’all have got to see that shit is spiraling down around here.” She put her heart into her voice, tried to put the plea into her eyes. “People have been dying left and right. In the woods, in the neighborhoods, in the streets. We got a demon problem, and it ain’t going away.

  “Those of us that can fight—well, we’ve been trying. Trying real hard.” She looked around and saw Chauncey Watson nodding his head behind those big glasses, and Ms. Cherry, nodding a little more subtly in the second row, looking her right in the eye, practically telling her, You go, girl, with that look. “But we can’t do it alone, those of us in this fight.

  “It’s come time for some of y’all to shit or get off the pot,” she said, and that caused another uncomfortable murmur. “We are failing this thing, failing this town, because we just don’t have the people. So I’m asking you for a big-ass commitment. I’m asking you to come in on this with us, and treat it like a damned job—to be like volunteer firemen, only a volunteer army.”

  “The demon fighting minutemen,” Mike McInness said, and a low hum of agreement met that statement. “And women.”

  “Exactly,” Erin said. “We
tried this with a few, but we need to get in the fight with many. They stir shit, we show up with forty, fifty, a hundred people, and lay their demon asses out.” She thumped a closed fist down on the podium, rattling the wood. “We can’t keep having this half-hearted army try and save things. You either need to get in on this, with us, trying to save this town—

  “Or you need to get the fuck out of Midian before your ass gets killed by demons,” she said, and that shut up any buzz and sucked all the air out of the room.

  “We’re failing because we don’t have an army, and they’re picking us apart a little at a time,” Erin said, looking over the quiet room. Some faces were nodding. Some were looking real hard at their laps. She couldn’t tell what anyone was thinking. “I know this shit is scary and unprecedented and—and I know we all wish that Reeve was here to lead us through it.”

  She got a little something caught in her throat just then. “But he’s not. And we need 100% from all of you who are willing to give it right now. Nothing less is going to save this town. It’s them versus us, and it will only work if us works together as a team.” She paused, and choked up, just for a second again. “Like Reeve would have wanted it.”

  Erin took a couple breaths. They were all listening. Hard to tell what they were thinking, but they were sure as shit hanging on her every word, even the shamefaced ones looking at their damned shoelaces.

  “Maybe some of you think this is just going to taper off, that things will get back to normal.” She shook her head. “That we’ll win the battle and win the day. Well, I’ll tell you—we’ve won days—but the damned war grinds on, and it’s going to keep going until we kick every last demon sonofabitch out of this town.” Nodding heads greeted her. “Now that’s not going to happen today, that’s not going to happen tomorrow. Best settle in for a long war. But with your help—we can actually fight it. Get together, build ourselves into an army, and cram holy steel up every demon ass in this town until there is not a goddamned one of them left.” She stared out over the quiet crowd, wondering if she’d just killed them all with that one. “Now …” Her mouth went dry. “Who’s with me?”