The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  Arch steered the Explorer into the drive, up toward the big white house, which was fading only a little less than the fences were. Beyond a little ways was the dairy barn off to his right, and straight ahead was a big metal gate about chest-high that kept the cows from wandering out of the fields and into MacGruder’s driveway. The funny thing was, it was open. Arch frowned at that then shrugged it off, filing it away for later. It wasn’t like there was a herd of cows wandering around out here, so they must be shut away in a field further up the hill. He settled his car into position behind MacGruder’s old truck and got out, taking a long look around through his sunglasses.

  His khakis didn’t do much to defray the midday heat. This wasn’t the hottest part of the day, even with the sun blazing overhead. That would come later, just about sunset, unbelievably. Still, it was hot, and Arch could feel his undershirt begin to stick with the first beads of sweat beneath his khaki uniform top. He was lucky in that at least he had short sleeves, but he would have seriously considered killing someone if it had meant he could wear shorts to work on a day like this. It brought him back to three-a-days, the murderous football practices his coach used to inflict when they were at camp in the summer. And southeastern Tennessee in the summer wasn’t good picnicking weather, no sir.

  Arch took in the MacGruder house with one long look. It was a fairly typical old southern style, with a porch that wrapped all the way around the thing. They had a couple rocking chairs up front, looked new, like maybe they’d been bought at Cracker Barrel in the last couple years. Nice woodwork. He’d thought about getting some, maybe when he had his own house instead of the little apartment.

  He put that thought out of his mind as his shoes clomped up the short stairs to the screen door and he knocked on it good, three times. Old Man MacGruder was probably out in the fields, after all, and his wife was getting up there in the years. Better not chance her not hearing him. He gave the door one more good rap, then heard movement from inside, and saw a face appear from behind the curtain in the middle of the circular window in the door. When he caught sight of it—just a flash—he immediately that it was not a human face, with human eyes.

  Arch took an involuntary step back, toward the edge of the porch, minding his footing, and drew his gun to low rest, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle down, the barrel on a trajectory to kneecap someone. It was a demon, he was damned near sure of it from that flash he’d seen behind the curtain, but when the door opened a moment later, he wasn’t so sure.

  “Krauther?” Arch asked, seeing the guy in the door frame. He hesitated, kept his gun low. He knew the guy, a good-for-nothing who had been that way for a long time. Had a half dozen disturbing-the-peace citations, had spent a few nights in the county jail.

  “Hey, Arch,” Krauther said, looking dark around the eyes. He was wearing a Metallica t-shirt and had a weak mustache across his upper lip, looking like a scrawny caterpillar had nested there after dipping itself in black ink. “What’d I do this time?”

  “What are you doing in MacGruder’s house?” Arch asked, keeping the gun out and low, ready to raise it and fire if necessary. Maybe he’d just seen things; active imagination, little sleep, and that cowboy had put him on edge, after all. Easy explanations were usually the closest to right. He’d known Krauther forever, for years, even before he became a sheriff’s deputy. The guy was many things, criminal included, but a demon? Hard to believe.

  “Oh, uh, yeah,” Krauther said, looking every bit like the lying lowlife Arch knew him to be. He also looked tired, eyes drawn, like he’d been sleeping one off. “Old Man MacGruder hired me to do some work for him, you know, around the house. Me and some of the boys.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Arch scoured his memory for the names of the boys who ran with Krauther. “Who you got in there with you?”

  Krauther tried to look innocent. Tried, but failed. “Just McGuire and Kellen.” Both low-level, petty criminals as well.

  “And Mrs. MacGruder?” Arch didn’t stop staring at Krauther, looking for a sign of what he’d seen before, that flash from when he lifted the curtain and looked out.

  “Oh, yeah, she’s in here too,” Krauther said. Another lie. A demon should be better at lying, shouldn’t they? Not like a two-bit dumbass who’d had more brushes with the law over stupid things than anyone with half a brain ever should have.

  How to play it, then? Arch only knew one way to handle things, and that was as close to the book as he could get while allowing for the possibility of demons, which weren’t in the book. The rule book, at least. They were pretty clearly enumerated in the other book he read regularly, though. “I’m going to ask you to keep your hands visible and come out here and lay down on the driveway, Krauther. Your friends, too.”

  Krauther squinted at Arch, but in an unsurprised way. This wasn’t his first arrest; he knew the score. “What for, Arch?”

  “It’s Deputy Stan to you, Krauther.” He gestured once with his pistol, keeping it ready to be lifted and fire at Krauther if he got uppity. Unfortunately, Arch had seen what bullets did to the demon last night, which was to say nearly nothing. He was already frantically formulating a backup plan in case Krauther decided to try something. It mostly involved running.

  “Deputy Stan is here to cuff us while he comes in and searches the house, boys,” Krauther said, his hands still lazily resting on the frame and the door, spread between the two in an irritatingly casual show of unconcern. “What do we think of that?”

  “I don’t like it,” Kellen said, appearing just off the porch to Arch’s left. He was wearing shorts and a stained wife-beater shirt that might have been white once, many moons ago. Which was probably about the last time it’d been laundered. He had hair coming off his arms, his chest, sticking out from under the shirt in tufts.

  “I don’t think I wanna do that,” McGuire said, appearing on the other side, up on the porch. “I don’t like the feel of metal handcuffs against my skin. Not very sensuous.”

  “Yeah,” Krauther said, pursing his lips and twisting the mustache with them. “I don’t think we’re coming with you today, lawman. The rules are fixing to change around here.”

  If Arch had been a swearing man, being at the center of a triangle of these three would have surely brought it out of him. As it was, he kept his cool, almost as much for lack of anything to say as any other reason. He knew they were demons, was sure of it now, and knew just as surely that shooting them in the face was unlikely to do much other than slow them down. In the absence of a neatly formed plan involving a sword that he could jab in their faces to cause them to be sucked back into whatever hell they came from, slowing them down was just about all he had. Even if these boys were human, they clearly meant him malice. They looked different, predatory, not like the small time losers they’d been before. He looked from Krauther to Kellen and wondered what had emboldened them.

  Arch was normally restricted in the amount of violence he could use in a situation like this, but he was only a couple of percentage points away from one hundred percent certainty that these things were demons, so he gambled. He shot Krauther in the face three times.

  Krauther staggered back, clearly not dead or missing his jaw. In fact, it made the demon face bleed through again, with a horrible scree’ing noise that chilled Arch’s blood even in the hot summer sun. He snapped left and dealt with the next threat, shooting McGuire thrice in the chest for more than luck, and as the thing staggered from the shots, he turned and fired on Kellen, who was already coming up the porch steps. He actually knocked this one off his feet with the gunfire, dropping him onto the back of his neck on the ground. It didn’t kill him, but it made him squirm and caused him to writhe, which was enough for Arch’s plan to take effect.

  He fired blind once more back at Krauther, who was starting to recover and come back at him, then Arch high-tailed it over Kellen’s fallen form with an athletic leap and tore off for the Explorer. All three of them were back on their feet and running at him by the time he got the c
ar started and into gear, and they’d just about caught him by the time he’d executed a roundabout in the drive. He floored it and doused the three of them with gravel as he shot out onto Kilner Road and left them in the dust as he cranked the speed up into the triple digits, trying to figure out what he could tell Sheriff Reeve about this whole mess.

  ***

  Creampuff watched the whole thing go down, Ygrusibas whispering to her the whole time. It was nothing more than a curiosity to old Creampuff, chewing grass as she watched the tall, dark-skinned man in the dirt-colored uniform talking to three of the beasts that had eaten her farmer. Demons, Ygrusibas said as the thing in the doorway had yelled for his fellows and she’d seen them come out on either side of the uniformed man. She kept chewing, though, no reason to be that concerned.

  He knows, Ygrusibas said to her as the dark-skinned man started making loud noises with the wand in his hand, and the demons started falling, falling and hurting, she knew, like that time she’d brushed up against the metal fence in the far pasture. The uniformed man made a hurried run and went back to his moving building, and it thundered off with the three demons in pursuit.

  He’s dangerous, Ygrusibas told her, and Creampuff nodded, though it was in time with her jaw moving to chew the grass. Food was a higher priority to her than the uniformed man, after all. Food was more important than anything.

  NO, the voice told her, this thing that was so loud, so commanding, this thing that swore it could make her hurt worse than the fence in the far pasture. She doubted that as the fence was very painful. Nothing is more important than Ygrusibas.

  Creampuff didn’t want to argue with that, so she didn’t. She just kept chewing and watched the moving building with the uniformed man in it speed off down the road behind the fence. She nodded along with Ygrusibas, though, just in case. What else was she supposed to do about it?

  4.

  Hendricks awoke to a pounding on the door that was almost perfectly matched to the pounding in his head. He was disoriented, and for a moment he thought he was back in New Orleans, on a dock, waking up for what seemed like the first time, bright sunlight streaming into his eyes.

  It turned out that the sunlight was coming from behind the curtains, which were drawn but had an imperfect seam where the two met and were letting in outside illumination. Which would have been fine, if not for the pounding in Hendricks’s head. “Just a minute,” he said, realizing it was someone at the door. The stale air of the motel was heavy in the room, and it was already hot, the air conditioning fighting a losing battle against the Tennessee summer. He struggled into his boxers, the sweat on his body and the throbbing ache in his skull and somewhere much lower making the fit more difficult than it needed to be. The hammering sound at the door came again, relentless this time, and he shouted, “Hold your goddamn horses, I’m coming,” as he pulled on his jeans.

  When he pulled open the door a minute later, after closing his eyes from the blinding burst of light, he managed to wrench them open to find Deputy Arch staring at him, looking a little nonplussed to his admittedly hungover eyes. “What the fuck is it?” he asked, more than a little nonplussed himself.

  The deputy’s level of tension was clearly higher than his because the man just barged in, bumped past him and into the room, ignoring the fact that Hendricks didn’t even have a shirt on yet. He caught a whiff of himself as he started to close the door and realized that showering hadn’t been on the list of things to do before he’d passed out last night, apparently. And it probably wouldn’t have made a difference because the air conditioner wasn’t doing shit to alleviate the heat in the room, and he was already covered with a thin sheen of perspiration. He closed the door and stared at Arch’s uniformed back as he stood in the middle of his room. “Well, what? It’s a little too early in the morning to be paying a courtesy call, but you ain’t slapped cuffs on me yet—”

  “It’s afternoon,” Arch said, turning to face him. The man looked beleaguered, to say the least. Spooked would be another way to say it. He was sweating, and Hendricks got the feeling it wasn’t just from the heat.

  “Sorry,” Hendricks said, not really apologizing so much as being polite. “It was a late night and I had way more to drink than you.” He brushed past Arch and found his soiled t-shirt on the counter next to the sink and put it on. “What brings you to my door at this hour?” He flinched a little. “Which admittedly is more unholy to me than to you, I suppose.”

  “Demons,” Arch said.

  Hendricks just let that lie there for a minute, waiting to see if he’d elaborate. “What about ’em?”

  “They’re here,” Arch said, like that explained everything.

  “Yes, I know that,” Hendricks said mildly. If this was what he’d been awakened for, the lawman was lucky he had a badge. If he’d just been some schmoe, like an IT help desk worker, Hendricks would have flattened him with a punch to the jaw for this shit. Especially if he’d been an IT help desk worker. Smug, unhelpful fucks. “It’s why I’m here.”

  “No, I mean,” Arch said, shaking his head like he could shake it into making sense, “I went out on a call from my boss, a— not a missing person, exactly, but like a friend who they couldn’t reach—anyway, I go up to the door and there are these good ol’ boys I know from way back. Stupid guys, real idiots, three or four misdemeanors each, maybe a petty felony or so apiece, and they’re hanging out in these people’s house.” His hands were moving when he talked, like an Italian. Hendricks tried to hide his amusement because clearly the big man had been rattled by what he’d seen. “I swear, when one of them peered out of the curtain at me, I—I saw him.”

  Hendricks waited to see if it was a pause in the conversation that Arch was using to take a breath. After another moment it was pretty clear he was waiting for a response, so Hendricks spoke. “Yes, that’s generally what would happen when someone stares out at you through a window, you would see them.”

  “No,” Arch said, head shaking again, “I mean I saw him. Saw him saw him. Like his demon face.”

  Hendricks felt an ashy sensation, like he’d swallowed something he shouldn’t have. Which he had, but he didn’t think it was the beer doing this to him. “Look,” he said, trying to be sympathetic, “what I told you last night, maybe it’s got you kind of rattled. It’s not like everybody’s a demon, okay? Even in a hotspot, they’re pretty few and far between. Most people are just honest citizens—or citizens, at least—and if you saw these guys getting into trouble, the odds are good that they’re probably just the petty criminals you were describing, no demonic influence necessary—”

  “So then they tried to surround me and I shot each of them in the face and ran.”

  “Oh, fuck!” Hendricks was already cursing himself for his stupidity. Explain the demon world to someone for the first time in five years, and the next day they go and commit multiple homicides … “Look, those guys … they probably weren’t demons …“He felt like shit and not just because of the hangover. Were these his fault? It felt a little like they were.

  “Well, they chased me down the driveway after three head shots each,” Arch said, his eyes were burning. The man was pissed, deeply so. “I would say that unless you know a lot of petty criminals that can take a few .40 rounds between the eyes and then catch up to a car doing thirty—”

  “Oh, shit, you ran into demons!” Hendricks said.

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Arch said, well, archly. Hendricks couldn’t blame him.

  “Sorry, I thought maybe you were just a little overzealous,” Hendricks said. “You know, first day after I turned your world upside down, thought maybe you were still acclimating. I know my first day after learning about demons, I was seeing them everywhere, looking in everybody’s eyes trying to figure out if they were one. I’m told it’s a natural response, especially when you’ve witnessed something traumatic involving—” He shut his mouth and bore the scrutiny of Arch’s curious and furious stare while he pondered how b
est to change the track of the conversation. “Where were they?” That was easy.

  “Old Man MacGruder’s dairy farm,” Arch said. He seriously was pissed, like these demons had called his mother a whore or something. “Three of them that I saw.”

  “This MacGruder a friend of yours?” Hendricks asked with more than a little curiosity of his own.

  “What?” Arch said, like it was a question out of the blue. “No, I barely knew the man. What do we do now?”

  “We?” Hendricks asked, a little dumbfounded. “I don’t know what we do, but I’m gonna try and go out there and kill them in a bit. Might have to get a little breakfast first, though.” He patted his stomach, felt the rumble of displeasure. “Or maybe not.” He tapped on his forehead then stopped when it hurt. “How many of them did you say there were?”

  “Three.”

  Hendricks got a pained look that wasn’t just from how he was feeling. “Shit.” He waited for a beat, thinking it over. “Okay, maybe this is a ‘we’ thing instead of a ‘me’ thing.”

  ***

  Arch didn’t love the thought of involving Hendricks, a near-stranger, in what was really department business. But when a demon hunter wanders into town the day before you nearly get overrun with demons, it narrows your options right down: either tell the people around you that you think there are unearthly creatures involved in unpleasant dealings in your town or go to the supposed professional about them. Part of Arch was wondering if Hendricks was jerking him around, but it seemed mighty unlikely. The cowboy was leaned against the door of Arch’s patrol car, looking like he was suffering just from being up and moving, and mighty displeased to be awake even now. “You gonna be all right?” Arch asked him.