And something about the name … told her that was where she was supposed to be.
Go.
So she went.
Who are you? she asked, the quiet question coming in her own mind.
Starling, the voice said.
It wasn’t the name that she’d called in that room, with everything falling apart around her, but for some reason …
It was enough.
Day Four
“Starling!” Hendricks called into the empty motel room. It was six o’clock in the morning.
No answer.
His bag was packed, and he was dressed. He was calling out as one last attempt. Figured he owed her that much for giving him all those orgasms. Like an obligation—try to talk to her one last time, murder an evil guy when she tells you to. It was payment for saving his life a few times too.
The orgasms probably weighed more in his calculus, though, if he was being honest.
“Fuck it,” he said, and meant it, slinging the bag over his shoulder and heading for the door.
He didn’t bother with a last look. The Sinbad motel was a shithole, and one he’d grown pretty damned tired of, cumshots to Starling’s vagina notwithstanding. He’d seen enough of Midian, Tennessee to last a lifetime, and when he tossed his bag in the SUV, he didn’t feel a need to do anything dramatic, like look around or cut a figure or pose or some shit.
No, he just got in the car and started the engine.
He pulled up the GPS for his new phone and entered an address. He looked at the different options, the different ways he could skin the cat of this journey, and decided to go for the scenic route, the one that bypassed the freeways.
That in mind, he pulled onto Old Jackson Highway and headed into Midian, because that was the direction it told him to go.
“Fuck it,” he said again, and couldn’t tell whether he was talking about this town, or the people in it, or maybe—dimly—even himself. But he definitely meant it, whoever it was aimed at. Fuck them.
He pointed the car toward Midian, and realized it was like a metaphor for all this too. He’d have to go right through the heart of it in order to get the hell out of it to his scenic route. Neat little symmetry there, he thought.
Hendricks opened a window and let the wind in. He’d ride it out of town, to where he was going, lie low there for a while, and then maybe—just maybe—figure out his next move. “Fuck it,” he said again, passing the sheriff’s station.
He still didn’t know who he was talking to.
But it still felt right.
*
“Okay, go,” Keith Drumlin said, and he and Nate moved the barricade out of the way, opening up the last road into the square. It was heavy, and they took faltering steps. Mostly it was him moving and Nate just keeping the other end up while he did it, but soon enough he’d gotten it the hell out of the way, and now …
Now, the Midian town square was open again.
“That was a hell of a thing,” Nate said as they set the barrier down again. Keith knew what he was talking about. The barrier wasn’t light, but neither had been the restoration of the square.
And it still wasn’t exactly pristine. There were stains everywhere on the concrete. Blood didn’t wash off so easy, after all. But at least it wasn’t a total fucking wreck anymore.
“That was a hell of a thing,” Keith agreed.
Nate looked at him funny. “We talking about the same thing?”
Keith brushed his sleeve against his forehead. Even in the cool, morning air, it was damp from their labors. “The cleanup?”
“I was talking about Erin’s meeting last night,” Nate said. “She got me all gung-ho to kick some demon ass, man. That’s why I was here half an hour early. I couldn’t sleep last night, I was so fired up.”
“You were here a half-hour early?” Keith asked, eyebrows up. “I didn’t know. I would have shown up early too.”
“Yeah, man,” Nate said. “I scrubbed the last of that shit off the walls over by the diner too. Used that Works stuff from Walmart. The wife uses it for cleaning toilets, but it’s cheap as shit and takes just about anything off of anything. For example.” He nodded in the direction of the wall.
“Well, how about that,” Keith said, staring at that wall in the distance. It did look cleaner. “So … what’s left now?”
“Kicking demon ass, I reckon,” Nate said.
“On the square, shit for brains,” Keith said.
“Well, there’s that area over there,” Nate said, pointing at the sidewalk around the monument. “Seemed like we kinda skipped over it, but it’s just stain work, mostly.”
Keith just nodded, feeling the chill rustle through him. He didn’t look too hard at the place Nate was pointing; he knew it pretty well.
He’d been avoiding it for the last three weeks. “Stain work it is,” he said with a hard swallow.
They were both at it a few minutes later, working on the sidewalk that circled the monument. They worked in a companionable silence, as they inevitably did, until one of them broke it. This time, it was Nate. Keith couldn’t have gotten himself to say anything right now without pouring his guts out on this bloody sidewalk, so he hadn’t.
“Soo …” Nate said, brush running up and down a particularly brown stain. Shit? Blood? Who knew at this point? “Seems the going rate for grabbing Taylor Swift’s ass is $1.” That got Keith to chuckle, the joke a nice substitution for thinking about … well, what had happened on this particular piece of real estate. “Seem like a bargain to you?”
“I think it cost that dumbass a lot more than a dollar to give her a grope,” Keith said, the levity fleeing quickly. He stared at the water, running out the tip of his hose onto the red ground. This was where it happened, wasn’t it? “Who even does that shit, anyway?” he asked, trying to keep his mind on the conversation and off … other things. “Grabs some random woman’s ass unasked? Who thinks that’s even okay?”
“A real douchebag, I reckon,” Nate said, brush still running up and down. “I mean, I could see it if you were on a dance floor with a girl, dancing real close, and your hand kind of wandered down, giving her enough time to shift away—”
“Right, right.”
“But a grope during a photo op?” Nate made a pffffft-ing noise. “That’s some animal shit right there. Savage as fuck, and not in a good way.”
“I reckon he’s going to be on the outs of polite society for a good long while,” Keith said. He was dousing a stain pretty hard, drowning it, but the red … it wasn’t coming up. “Who’s going to hire you when a Google search turns up the fact that you grabbed Taylor Swift’s ass?”
“Hmm,” Nate said, nodding as he scrubbed. “I guess it probably did cost him a lot more than a dollar.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Hey, Keith?” Nate asked after a few more minutes of quiet.
“Yeah?”
“D’ye reckon Erin Harris knows what she’s doing?” Nate threw that out there, sounding the least bit unsure. Maybe more than the least bit.
Keith gave it a thought or two, looking up in the sky, away from that stain—that fucking stain, the one that wouldn’t go away. It was like a personal nemesis. He’d certainly been avoiding it long enough, dreading it long enough. “Does anybody know what they’re doing, really?”
That shut him up for a minute. Not that Keith was aiming for it, but he wasn’t complaining that it happened. “Some people sure do act like they do,” Nate said at last.
“Well,” Keith said, “she did manage to lead us through that demon pack of hellcats. That’s gotta be worth something.” That had felt good. Real good, in fact. Best Keith had felt since …
“That’s a good point,” Nate said. “Not many people would take an idea Casey Meacham came up with and turn it into victory. But she sure did.”
“She did,” Keith said. “Yeah, I think Erin’s about as good as we could ask for at this point. She’s young, but you can tell she’s really into killing these fucks. She’
s lived here her whole life. Probably believes in this place like nobody’s business.” He nodded again. He understood that motive. Understood it real well. He looked away from the stain, but it didn’t help.
He could still remember standing over it on Halloween …
Watching his family die right here.
Keith just swallowed, trying to bite back hard on that emotion.
Nate went on, oblivious. “Yeah, I think we might have an actual chance with her in charge, and getting real serious about getting people in or out.”
The low hum of a car motor caused Keith to look up. A sweet distraction at last. He listened; something was definitely coming.
An SUV cruised into the square a few moments later, window down, and he could see the cowboy, hat on, staring straight ahead as he followed the road up past Surrey’s Diner and onward, not even giving them a sideward look.
“Where do you suppose he’s going?” Nate asked, nodding at the SUV, now fading in the distance.
“Who knows?” Keith said, shaking it all off. His voice sounded low and gruff. He didn’t mean it to.
He was just trying to hold it all in. Just like he had the last three weeks.
“Hey, it’s that cowboy,” Nate said.
Keith could see him now too, in the window of the car as he steered through the square. He never had got a real good read on the cowboy. “Maybe he’s off to fuck that Starling chick somewhere.” It was the first thing that came to mind.
Nate paused. “You think?” He sounded like he might be interested in hearing more.
“Who cares?”
Nate shrugged it off, then started scrubbing again. “You know what a starling is?”
Keith just stared, dazed. “A redhead, about yea high—” He started to hold up a hand.
“Not that like, cheesedick! The bird, I mean.”
Keith didn’t. His head felt like it was floating. “Nope.”
“Well, it’s a bird. A real nasty bird, too.”
Keith made a face at him. “Nasty?”
“Yeah. My uncle told me about it,” Nate said, head bobbing with the scrub brush. “See, a starling ain’t like other birds where they lay their eggs in a nest and sit on them, nossir. You see, a starling will come in to the nest of other birds and kick their eggs out and replace them with their own. Then the other bird ends up raising the starlings as their own.” He made a disgusted face. “Nasty. Just nasty.”
“Mmmhmm,” Keith said, scrubbing along. His mind was elsewhere. Three weeks … it had felt like eternity, and now here he was, standing over the same spot where … “Yeah, that’s something, all right,” he said, and tried to put it all out of his mind. The stain wasn’t washing off; none of it would. The problems of this town didn’t go away that easily; why would he think a stain would? Keith just turned his attention to the next one though, opening up the spray and washing it hard, trying to ignore everything else that threatened to overtake him like a boat on big wave—and just make his town the best he could.
Coda
Two Weeks Earlier
Mack Wellstone was running madly, trying to get away from the things that he’d heard, from the man who’d attacked his mom, from … well, everybody at this point. His breath was coming out in gasps, steaming in the cold air, and his cheeks were so frozen and raw they felt like they’d been sandpapered down. Mack’s fingers were numb, he’d been out so long, and the sky was dark, night fallen over this country road.
The sounds of the fight had long since faded behind him. Mack didn’t care. He’d run for miles, for what felt like hours … and he’d keep going until he couldn’t go any more.
There was nowhere among those people that was safe, nowhere in this town that was safe. His dad had died in front of him this morning, and that man had taken his mom. He knew she was as good as dead, there was no doubt in his mind. He could smell it on that guy, knew he was up to no good.
Mack didn’t have any desire to end up grabbed, to be dragged off by demon cats, to die like that. That was stuff out of horror movies, and he didn’t even watch those, really. Maybe once or twice on a sleepover at his friend Finn’s house, but that was it.
But this was how horror movies went, wasn’t it? Always chasing a kid through the woods. No, not kid … teenagers? Mack wasn’t that old yet …
“I’m … getting out … of this …” Mack huffed, trees blazing past him like spooky fingers reaching out of the dark.
He looked back, just for a second, and started to slow. There was no one behind him.
Nothing behind him.
Mack stopped, putting his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. But then, it felt like he’d been trying to catch his breath all day, even when he’d just been sitting in the police station waiting for his mom to show up.
“What the hell is happening in this town?” Mack asked, steaming breath fogging the night air. The moon slipped out from behind the clouds, and something moved in front of him—
A sharp pain worked its way into Mack’s belly, and he almost screamed, but something hit him in the chest, twice, once on each side, just beneath the nipple. He wanted to shout but he gasped instead, and his chest swelled with pain in the lungs.
He stared, down, vision blurry. Were those … feet? They cleared, and he saw brown shoes, small feet—a woman’s feet, he realized, tapering to thin legs hidden by tight-cuffed blue jeans. He raised his head slowly, up the legs—kinda shapely; he would have stared under different circumstances—and up to tight hips and then a tank top under a white blouse, and finally dusky eyes and a sweeping amount of red hair.
She stared at him curiously, and he realized … she had him impaled on her fingers. They were just sticking into his chest, holding him up from falling, lifting him a few inches off the ground. His legs just hung there, unmoving.
Mack looked down. His belly was wet, slick with blood. Her first hit had …
The pain in his stomach ran through every nerve in his body a second later, and he tried to scream. It didn’t work.
“I’m almost sorry,” the woman said, her red hair aglow, eyes so dark he couldn’t see the color of them.
Mack gasped, feeling something warm slide out of him. The world was getting darker; her eyes—they were—
“But I need your blood,” she said as he slumped, hit his knees. She had it too, hands drenched in red. She lifted her shirt with one hand, a clean one, and smeared blood—his blood—all over her belly with the other. “I need it,” she said again, as Mack started to slump. “Because you’re innocent.”
Mack hit the ground at her feet, staring dully at her shoe, parked right in front of his face. It had started out to be such a good day too, with him finally getting to do the thing he’d most wanted to—to go to the woods with his dad.
He never would have predicted that it’d end up like this, he thought, as the night grew even darker. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d waited for years for this. This was supposed to be—
“Best day … of my … life,” Mack mumbled through the pain, not sure it even made any sense.
No one answered him. The cold was seeping in; the red-haired woman was gone, had just up and vanished into the night after smearing herself with his blood.
Mack’s brain fired its last few thoughts. It hadn’t turned out to be the best day.
It had turned out to be the worst day of Mack Wellstone’s life.
And, he realized as the light faded from his eyes, the night fading into black, the last.
The Watch Will Return In
Forsaken
Southern Watch, Book 7
Coming 2018!
Author’s Note
Thanks for reading! If you want to know immediately when future books become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by CLICKING HERE. I don’t sell your information and I only send out emails when I have a new book out. The reason you should sign up for this is because I don’t always set release dates, and even i
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Come join the discussion on my website: http://www.robertjcrane.com!
Cheers,
Robert J. Crane
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Editorial/Literary Janitorial duties performed by Sarah Barbour, Nick Bowman and Jeffrey Bryan. Any errors you see in the text, however, are the result of me rejecting changes.
The cover was once more designed with exceeding skill by Karri Klawiter of Artbykarri.com.
The formatting was provided by nickbowmanediting.com.
Also, a huge thanks to Megg Jensen, who taught me how a hooker really feels (this is how she suggested I phrase my thanks to her).
Once more, thanks to my parents, my in-laws, my kids and my wife, for helping me keep things together.
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
World of Sanctuary
Epic Fantasy
Defender: The Sanctuary Series, Volume One
Avenger: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Two
Champion: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Three
Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four
Sanctuary Tales, Volume One - A Short Story Collection
Thy Father’s Shadow: The Sanctuary Series, Volume 4.5
Master: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Five
Fated in Darkness: The Sanctuary Series, Volume 5.5
Warlord: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Six
Heretic: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Seven
Legend: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Eight
Ghosts of Sanctuary: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Nine * (Coming 2018, at earliest.)
A Haven in Ash: Ashes of Luukessia, Volume One* (with Michael Winstone—Coming Late 2017!)
Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 64