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

by Robert J. Crane

  “I don’t know their technical name,” Hendricks said carefully. He was still walking on eggshells with these two, in spite of the sudden shift in their demeanor toward affable. “But I’ve always heard them called ‘Oh shit’ bars.”

  “‘Oh shit bar’?” Lerner frowned and glanced back at him. They were heading back toward town, Hendricks thought, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said, staring back at Lerner. “Cuz when you need them it’s usually at a moment when you’re saying, ‘Oh shit.’”

  “Ha!” Lerner’s laugh was a bark. Hendricks looked at Duncan, but he was silent, staring into the windshield. Hendricks was ready to write him off as fucking weird, but he had said something about Hendricks telling the truth about Starling. That was interesting. If he was a mind reader—

  “Yes,” Duncan said. “Not really mind, though. Essence reading.”

  “Bullshit,” Hendricks blurted. Couldn’t help himself. He had to think back, try and figure out if he’d been talking out loud.

  “No,” Duncan said. “You weren’t speaking aloud. But everything you were thinking was written all over your soul.”

  Hendricks tried not to roll his eyes, but he didn’t try very hard. “Whatever, man. I could accept you could read minds somehow. Souls are kind of a different story.”

  “Oh, now this is an interesting discussion we could have,” Lerner chimed in. “About the immortal soul—”

  “He’s an atheist,” Duncan said nonchalantly, like he’d just mentioned what he was having for dinner.

  “Really?” Lerner said, and his face got flat around the mouth, like he was impressed or something. “Don’t meet a lot of demon hunters that aren’t of the faithful.” He looked over his shoulder into the back seat. “What was it that brought you into the field?”

  Hendricks glanced at Duncan, who looked back at him. The man’s face was blank, but his eyes were peering right into Hendricks. “Personal tragedy,” Hendricks said, knowing he sounded tense. He waited to see if Duncan would elaborate, but the demon said nothing.

  “Met a few people in it for that reason,” Lerner said, but he was back to the wheel now. “But usually they go toe-to-toe with a few demons and get religious real quick.”

  Hendricks shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never believed in anything I can’t see some scientific proof of.”

  Lerner laughed and exchanged a look with Duncan. “That’s kind of funny, champ. How do you explain what you fight every day?”

  Hendricks smiled. “Just another species of animal. Different basis of life, obviously, since carbon-based lifeforms don’t go PFFFFFT when you stab them with a sword, but still a species of some kind. You can feel ’em, see ’em—”

  “Not all,” Duncan said.

  “—smell ’em, hear ’em—” Hendricks went on, wondering a little what Duncan meant by that one.

  “You can taste ’em, too,” Lerner said with a smile and looked back at him again. “Though I don’t imagine you’ve probably done that. A little too up close and personal, especially for a guy who’s made this a vendetta.”

  “So, you’re demons,” Hendricks said. “And you’re here to …?”

  “Keep things quiet,” Lerner said, and now he was looking at the road again. Dark pastures and fences were passing them by outside the window. “Keep a lid on our peoples’ activities. Keep humanity from getting all uppity and rising against us.”

  Hendricks thought about that one for a minute. “You kill demons?”

  “I’ve let the brimstone out of more of ’em than you, sonny,” Lerner said, like he was some kind of snappy used car salesman getting pissy with Hendricks over his territory.

  “Humans?” Hendricks asked.

  “No,” Lerner said with a smile after a pause. “Most demons don’t kill humans, by the way. They keep their heads down, blend with your people, live their lives. Eat food, work jobs, have babies—”

  Hendricks blinked at that one. “Demons have babies?”

  “You’re a cute kid,” Lerner said, laughing. “Yeah, demons have babies. Some of them are cute, too. Some of them …” Lerner paused, “… not so much.”

  “So, what are you doing with me?” Hendricks asked, trying to bring things back around. He wasn’t sure he entirely believed Lerner when the man—demon—had said he didn’t kill humans, but he’d sounded convincing.

  “Asking questions,” Lerner said and then he sent a scalding look back at Hendricks, which was mirrored by Duncan. “And hitting you for probably banishing some of our kind without good cause.”

  Hendricks flinched. “Banishing?”

  “Yeah,” Lerner said. “You don’t think you’re actually killing them with that little pointy thing you swing around, do you?”

  ***

  Erin was driving the patrol car around in circles. She’d been awake for close to twenty-four hours, and her vision was a little blurry at times. She pulled off and got a coffee at the all-night convenience station next to the interstate. Sat there for a while, drinking it in the parking lot with the car idling, watching the Sinbad motel.

  She told herself it was because she needed to drink the coffee before she could safely drive around some more, but even she knew that was a lie.

  ***

  Lerner took a left onto the main road. The cowboy demon hunter was in the back seat, Duncan was silent next to him now, and he was happy as he could be. The cowboy didn’t seem bothered by his desire to talk, which was kind of like heaven—or some form of paradise, at least—after being stuck with Duncan’s annoyingly reticent ass for so long.

  “So if they’re not dead …” the cowboy said from the back seat.

  “Back to the underworld,” Lerner said. He wasn’t a stupid one, fortunately. “Suffering down there together with their own kind. Probably trying to find a way back, which is … problematic.”

  “Why is that?” The cowboy asked.

  “You don’t need to know,” Duncan said, breaking his silence. Lerner looked over at Duncan, who was giving him the side-eye. It was annoyance combined with a dose of shut-the-fuck-up.

  “So what are you doing here?” the cowboy asked after a moment’s silence. Persistent, too.

  “Keeping things on the level,” Lerner said, letting the sedan glide smoothly along the highway. Much better than the bumpy dirt back roads. He cracked a window and listened to the rush, the cool night air catching him in the face. It had that damp, post-rain smell to it. Lovely. “Keeping our kind from crossing too many lines. I don’t know how many hotspots you’ve seen—”

  “I’ve been doing this for a while,” the cowboy said. What was his name again? Hendricks, yeah.

  “About five years,” Duncan added helpfully.

  “So you’ve seen a few,” Lerner said. “But you’ve missed the really bad ones. The ones that vanish off the map. To say nothing of the places that aren’t hotspots that just get hit with a wave of demon activity. Someone hangs out a shingle, says, ‘Hey, we’re open for demon business!’ And it’s a mad rush. Lost a town in Serbia like that last year. Ugly mess. Entrails everywhere.” Lerner shook his head. It had been gruesome; he and Duncan got to bat cleanup on that one. And cleaning up had been all that was left when a family of M’r’kirresh had been done.

  “So, you’re demon hunters, too,” Hendricks said. Lerner felt himself crack a smile. Yeah, talking to this human was all right.

  “We’re lawmen,” Lerner said.

  “Law-demons?” Hendricks asked.

  “Whatever,” Lerner said, shrugging. He didn’t get caught up in semantics like that. He had the male pieces, after all, even if they didn’t really get used. “We enforce the Pact, which set forth Occultic law on earth to govern everything non-human. Keep things from getting too heavy, make sure that when stuff gets out of control and loud somewhere, it gets stopped as quick as we can make it happen.”

  There was a silence in the back seat. “So you’re … I hate to use this term �
�� kind of like … ‘good guys.’”

  Lerner sighed. “I hate that phrase, too. It shows such a lack of subtlety. Of complex thinking. So I’m ‘good’ just because I don’t murder humans?”

  “I don’t …” Hendricks was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t make you bad, I don’t think.”

  Lerner shrugged. “I turn my back on the killings of humans every day, did you know that? If they happen in small batches, I remain unconcerned. My job is to stop the big ones, the ones that get attention.” He grinned and turned back to the cowboy, who wore a little bit of a sick look now. “Am I still a ‘good guy’?”

  “Probably not,” Hendricks said, and Lerner could hear the distaste.

  “But you do the same thing every day,” Lerner said, and his grin was just getting bigger. It was a such a joy to hammer home a rhetorical point. “Where was that place a few years ago where they had that ethnic cleansing?” He clicked his tongue. “South Sudan.” He snapped his fingers a couple times, like it could help him remember. “Darfur! Yeah, that was it.” He turned to the back seat. “Did you go to Darfur to help stop the slaughter?”

  The cowboy’s voice got quiet. “… No.”

  “Well, then welcome to the ‘bad guys’ team,” Lerner said with a grin, steering the car along. They were almost there, he knew as they passed a diner on the left.

  “I do what I can,” Hendricks said, and Lerner could hear the fire starting in his voice. “Going in, me—one man—against an army? Suicide. I go to hotspots and try and stop demons there—”

  “And kill some of them who have never hurt a human in their lives,” Lerner said. He was enjoying this. “Yep, you are a hell of a ‘good guy.’”

  There was a sigh from the cowboy. “Where are we going?”

  “Right here,” Duncan said, speaking up, as Lerner turned the car into the Sinbad Motel’s parking lot.

  “You drove me home?” Hendricks asked from the back seat, and Lerner could hear that the boy was more than a little perplexed.

  “As a good date should,” Lerner said with the same grin. “But actually, we’re not here for you. If we’d been heading the opposite direction, I would have left your ass on the side of the road.” He wondered if the cowboy thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

  “Why are you here?” Hendricks asked, remaining still in the back seat even though they were now parked.

  “Now that is an interesting question,” Lerner said as he pulled the keys out of the ignition.

  ***

  Erin had seen Hendricks’s cowboy hat in the back seat in profile as the sedan pulled into the Sinbad’s parking lot. She thought about driving over right then but held back. There were two guys in the car with him. She felt her hand tighten on the hot coffee cup, heard the Styrofoam crack a little before she slackened her grip.

  What the hell was going on now?

  ***

  Gideon stepped into a world upside down. He’d seen farmhouses on TV; they were simple, quaint things, filled with homey samplers on the wall, quilts on the back of overstuffed furniture. For some reason he imagined the smell of gravy cooking, the smell of every greasy spoon restaurants he’d ever been to.

  This was nothing like that.

  Every wall was red. Deep red, not quite blood, but a heavy maroon of the sort you’d see on a weather map. The smell was all herbs and spices, or something of that sort. Maybe incense. Damned sure wasn’t vanilla, though. And the furniture wasn’t homey. At all.

  There were cages to his left, animals within, but not a trace of the smell he might have associated with them. He could hear the rattle and noise of some of the chickens—and there had to be a half dozen of them alone. He could see some dogs below that, in bigger cages, staring out at him with hopeless eyes. Gideon had to concede that if he was a human, it might have moved him. But he wasn’t, so his eyes moved on.

  There were other animals, too, the cages stacked floor to ceiling on three sides of what had once been someone’s sitting room. The last three cages, the ones closest to the open arch leading to the entry hall, had humans. The cages were kind of small for their occupants, heavy metal bars fencing in two men and a woman. They were dirty and naked and didn’t project one third of the sad-eyed pathos that the dogs did.

  “Come in,” came the voice from ahead. Gideon stared forward, looking away from the spectacle of the cage room, and started walking down the hall. Every step in his shoes made a lovely, resonant thump against the hardwood floor that echoed through the quiet house. If the animals were making noise, it was masked by a conjuring of some sort. And that was fine with Gideon. If they were screaming toward death, he’d hear it anyway. If they were just screaming, he didn’t give a fuck.

  He walked down the long, red hall, keeping his eyes on the space ahead. The hall was longer than the house, at least as he remembered it from outside. The occasional shelf and end table that could be found along it was filled with curiosities, orbs, jars with light and darkness enclosed within and shelves laden with arcane, leather-bound books.

  “Come further,” the voice commanded. It was cold and clear, reminding Gideon of a winter wind in Chicago for some reason. It felt like it was blowing down the hall at him. He didn’t shiver, but it was a near thing.

  He could see the hall widen ahead, another room to his left, a stairway leading up to his right. It had an old wood banister with a thousand nicks in it that he could see even at this distance. The smell of incense was stronger here. It reminded him a little of an Indian restaurant in the neighborhood he’d lived in in Detroit.

  “Ah, I see you now,” came a voice from just around the corner.

  Gideon entered a large dining room complete with an oval wood table and six place settings. A man sat opposite him, with a small smile, one that barely wrinkled the corners of his eyes. He looked small somehow, with greying hair at the temples, and solid, thick hair. There were no teeth in the man’s smile, and he wore a Nehru jacket, which seemed totally at odds with his utterly Caucasian look. It reminded Gideon of the movie villain in Austin Powers.

  Gideon halted in front of the table, staring at the man opposite him. “You could see me, huh? Like through a conjuring?”

  “No,” the man said, his smile widening. He put out a hand, open palm gesturing to the staircase behind him. “I have a mirror over there.” Gideon looked and saw it, mounted just above the staircase—one of those distorted ones that stores put high up in their corners to keep watch for shoplifting. “No, you’re not really the type that’s within my power to keep an eye on easily, are you?”

  “I guess not,” Gideon said. He shifted on his feet, side to side. There wasn’t much decor in the dining room; a couple paintings on the wall, a six-foot grandfather clock with gold pendulum halted in the middle of its chest in the corner. There were a couple incense burners, and the light was dim. “So.”

  “So,” the man said and stood, pointing to the chair opposite him. “Have a seat?” He extended his hand as Gideon took a step forward. Gideon took his hand and found it cold, desperately cold. When Gideon looked up at the man, his smile was back to practiced and small, any hint of his teeth gone. “My name is Wren Spellman. And you are?”

  “Gideon,” he replied. It was an assumed name anyway. “Wren Spellman?”

  “An appellation some locals gave me in Kansas once,” Spellman said, taking a seat. That same, unmoving smile remained maddeningly perched on his lips. “I liked it so much, I kept it.”

  “Uh huh,” Gideon said. He was itching to know Spellman’s real name, but that was an itch one simply didn’t scratch in their world. “I’m looking for some things.”

  “I see,” Spellman said, and the smile was gone, replaced with all seriousness. “May I ask how you came to find us? Was it by word of mouth, an ad, our website—”

  “Website,” Gideon said, frowning.

  “Ah, good,” Spellman said, and Gideon realized he had a pad of yellow paper in front of him and was writing on it. When Spellman looked up and ca
ught Gideon looking at him, he smiled again. “Just making a note; we like to make sure our marketing dollars are being spent well, you know. I had a man from Russia design the site and give it some SEO.” Spellman laughed. “Oh, how things have changed since the days when you just hung entrails outside a tent. But in this modern world you have to adapt to maximize profitability, you know?”

  “I guess,” Gideon said, a trace uneasy. “Listen, I’m looking for …”

  “A conjuring? Some sorcery, perhaps?” Spellman said with that same false smile.

  “Yeah,” Gideon said and ran a hand through his thinning hair.

  “I have many of those that might interest a man such as yourself,” Spellman said and started ticking off his fingers one by one as he listed. “Glamours, potions, runes. Something to increase your potency, perhaps?” There was a twinkle in Spellman’s eye at that one.

  “My potency is doing just fine, thanks,” Gideon said matter-of-factly. It was, after all.

  “Sorry, that’s the most popular request,” Spellman said with a shrug of the shoulders. His Nehru suit was green now, though Gideon could have sworn it was grey only minutes ago. “And sometimes it takes people a while to admit it, so I like to just get that out there in the open at the outset.” He steepled his fingers and leaned back in his chair. “So, what’s it to be, Mr. Gideon …?”

  “Just Gideon.”

  “What’s it to be, ‘Just Gideon’?” Spellman wore a pensive look, like he was trying to stare down Gideon’s eyes and look behind them.

  “I need something … really particular,” Gideon said, and Spellman leaned forward. Gideon had a feeling the reaction would be good.

  ***

  “We need to hold up here a minute,” Duncan said as they got out of the car.