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

by Robert J. Crane

  “Unlikely,” Duncan said in that quiet way he had.

  “We think he’s planning something big,” Lerner said. “He’s probably laying low until then.”

  “Something big?” Arch asked. “Bigger than the mass murder yesterday morning? Or the traffic pile-up yesterday afternoon?”

  “He didn’t do the mass murder,” Lerner said with a shake of the head. “That was a group of Tul’rore. We sent those back the night before last.”

  Arch frowned. “You did?”

  “Yeah,” Lerner said, like it was no big deal. “We got that taken care of for you.” He smiled. “See? We’re not all bad.”

  Arch wasn’t quite ready to concede that just yet. “I gotta go drop some parole violator off at the station.”

  “Watch out for the lawyer,” Duncan offered helpfully as Arch stood up, his back cracking as he removed himself from where he’d been leaning down to talk to them.

  “Why?” Arch asked. “Is she a demon?”

  “Possibly,” Duncan said evenly. “Though not as many attorneys are demons as you might think. I just meant be careful because she’s a lawyer.”

  “Not every evil thing on earth is done by demons,” Lerner said, and he was lecturing Arch now, which Arch found plenty annoying. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of morally vacuous humans on this planet.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Arch said and started back toward his car. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  ***

  Gideon sat at the table, thinking. It was what he spent most of his time doing when he wasn’t enjoying a death. There was nothing on the horizon, sadly, but that was all right. It was understood. He’d accepted that death just didn’t happen here with the frequency it did in cities. So instead of dwelling on that, he was trying to—gently—relive some of his greatest hits.

  Surprisingly, they were all from the last few days.

  It came as a shock when he realized it. He’d hated this town, after all, and how frustrating it had been for him. It was stifling, the lack of death for him to enjoy. Like starving.

  Like starving in the middle of a buffet, though. That’s what he’d figured out here.

  All he had to do was take matters into his own hands. And not masturbationally speaking, either, because he’d been doing that for years, obviously. No, he had take his destiny in his own hands, go after what he wanted. It was an important lesson.

  Now he was a hunter. Now he didn’t have to wait for the satisfaction to come to him, he could seek it. And it was more thrilling than any of the other deaths he’d felt.

  Spellman’s empty vessel was still across from him, staring blankly into space. He’d been like that for a couple hours now. It didn’t bother Gideon; it was like being in a room with a doll. Which Gideon hadn’t ever done, that he could recall, but it didn’t bother him.

  There was a stirring, and Spellman’s hand moved. Something was in it, something he could see. It was a red silk bag, tied at the top, and big as his head. Gideon knew it hadn’t been there before, and it was embroidered with gold stitching on the sides. He wondered if he was paying extra for that fanciness, then realized he didn’t care.

  “It is done,” came Spellman’s quiet voice, pushing the bag across the table toward him. Gideon grasped it like it was water and he was in the middle of a desert. “It still requires a few trifling components in order to activate, but it should be no challenge for one such as yourself.”

  “Additional components?” Gideon felt the urgency rising within. He needed to get off. Soon. “What components?”

  “The heart of human,” Spellman said, ticking it off on his fingers, “some blood, a scream. You should be able to get it all from one person, actually.”

  “Where am I supposed to …?” Gideon looked at the bag. He hadn’t killed anyone before, not in the way that would pull screams and a heart from them. Not blood, either, really. “I’ll have to get my hands pretty dirty for this.”

  “As though they were clean before?” Spellman asked, with a twinkle in his eye. Gideon got the feeling there was a double entendre thrown in there somewhere. “There will be security guards where you’re going, and they’ll be human, of course. Naturally, they will be no match for a greater such as yourself.”

  “I have to kill them myself?” Gideon took a breath and felt a tightness, as if his essence was heating his breath to expand within him.

  “Now, now,” Spellman said with that same glimmer in his eyes, “think of how much of a growth experience this could be for you. Especially after all the self-discovery you’ve had in the last few days.”

  Gideon looked down at his pudgy hands. The incense smell in the air grew stronger around him. It could be fun, couldn’t it? It wasn’t like killing that girl last night hadn’t been a joy. This could be better, even, because he could make it last longer, make it more painful. It’d be like foreplay. With tremendous ejaculation involved. “All right,” he said and pulled the silk bag up as he stood. “All right. I can do this.”

  “Of course,” Spellman said with a smile. “Now … I’ll need to do another bank transfer to cover the cost of this …”

  “Do I have to wait for you to do that?” Gideon stared at the bag in his hands, and he found himself wanting to do nothing more than add the last components and place it where he wanted it to go. He wanted to get the party started. Now.

  “I can handle it,” Spellman said with a vague gesture of his hand, “if you’re in a hurry.”

  “Please,” Gideon said, turning to walk out “I’ve got business to attend to up in the hills.” He carried the silk bag at his side, and it bobbed with his motion. It felt kind of heavy to him, like he was carrying something of great importance. Which he was, he supposed. The next stage in his growth, in his awakening. Soon he could take the next step, and move on.

  All he needed now was a blood sacrifice.

  ***

  Hendricks was floating peacefully in the water when heard the knocking at his door. It was a recurring dream for him and it usually turned into a nightmare. This time it was different. It hadn’t yet turned into a horror story when the thumping jarred him out of it.

  He came to with the comforter mashed against his face. It kind of smelled, like feet or body odor or both. He realized as he woke that his legs were hanging off the edge of the bed, that he had not in fact been in the water, nor anywhere near it.

  There was another thumping at the door and he realized it was closed. Lerner and Duncan weren’t anywhere around, and he wondered for a moment if he’d hallucinated the pair of them. Demons that were out to help people? Bullshit, his common sense told him as he rose, wiping the drool off his chin.

  He still felt the fog as he staggered to the door. He flipped the lock and opened it without even thinking about who might be behind it. It was only as it was swinging open that he considered it. Too late by then.

  An unfamiliar man waited just outside, dark clouds behind him covering the sky. Hendricks wondered if he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and was trying to think of a polite way to say FUCK OFF when the man spoke.

  “Good day to you, Mr. Hendricks,” the man said with a bow. He looked to be in his fifties, grey hair. He looked awfully alert, though Hendricks thought he might have been drawing an unfair comparison since he was still swimming in the wash of his own head. “Are your friends Lerner and Duncan still here?”

  “What?” Hendricks asked. He really did feel like he’d just gotten pulled out of the wash. Since that had actually happened to him at one point in time, he knew it was a valid comparison.

  “Lerner and Duncan?” the man asked again. “They’re not here right now, are they?”

  “No,” Hendricks said, and he felt the weight of the sword in his coat. His gun was on his hip. “Who are you?”

  “Ah, forgive me my lapse in manners,” the man said with an abbreviated bow. “My name is Wren Spellman.” His eyes glimmered, as though he had a secret. He put a finger into the air, and red sparks shot from
it as though it were a firecracker. “I’ve come to talk.”

  16.

  Erin’s frustration tolerance was being tested to the point of ridiculousness. She was convinced that Lex Deivrel was, in fact, a demon, if such a thing existed. The blond lawyer had a perpetually smug smile, and it was driving Erin to the point where she wanted to just slap it off the woman’s face. She’d grown up with three older brothers and had no compunction about doing such things. Outside of the lawful consequences, of course.

  Reeve, fortunately, was taking a more patient approach. They stood under dark skies, and it looked like the rain might cut loose at any moment. The road shimmered from the humidity, and it was getting past midday now. The crime scene unit from Chattanooga filled the street, and they still hadn’t managed to get Cherry or Lucia’s statements.

  Erin reconsidered that helpful bit of face punching but doubted it’d do much other than land her in jail. And civil court, probably.

  “We’re going to need to talk to your clients sooner or later,” Reeve said to Deivrel, “and we’re gonna do it at the station.” He’d been on and off the phone with the TVA all morning, trying to manage their flood response. In addition he’d fielded calls from the Highway Patrol regarding the mess on the freeway and also the crime lab’s initial report. Reeve was a busy man. Erin felt a little sorry for him.

  The smell of the body in the house was wafting out now, the heat of midday causing it to ripen. It just smelled burnt to her, an appalling odor. She would have covered her nose, but for the fact it would have made her look ridiculous.

  Instead, she sat there and listened to Reeve dicker with Lex Deivrel as she looked down the street. Just past the crime lab van she saw a familiar sight. It was the sedan that was parked outside Hendricks’s motel room, and the two guys that were with him were sitting in it.

  ***

  Lerner and Duncan were still sitting outside the whorehouse, staring at the goings-on and had been for hours. What else were they going to do? “Laywer looks like she’s cockblocking everything,” Lerner pronounced with a note of sympathy. They had lawyers to deal with in their own work, though fortunately not as frequently as human law enforcement had to. The Pact from whence their authority was derived had a variety of interpretations, and lawyers tended to find lots of devils in the details of it.

  “Deputy Harris has seen us,” Duncan said, calm on the outside, but Lerner could hear the alarm in his voice.

  “That’s the little blond, right?” Lerner asked. “This could be good or bad, I suppose. For Hendricks, I mean; not likely it’ll have much effect on us.”

  “She could make herself a pain in the ass,” Duncan said, about as succinctly as Lerner himself could have put it.

  Lerner sighed. “Let’s hope she doesn’t, then. I’d hate to have to—” He stopped as Duncan’s head snapped up, eyes wide open. “What?”

  “Someone just threw up a conjuring,” Duncan said, mouth hanging open when he finished talking. “A big one—loud, showy but without any substance, at Hendricks’s motel room. Someone’s with him there, now, and they want to get our attention.”

  Lerner sighed again. This was not going to look good to Deputy Harris, taking off after she just noticed them. Probably seemed suspicious. He started the car anyway, put it into gear, and executed a three-point turn on the street to take them back where they came from.

  ***

  Arch unlocked the door to his apartment and set his keys on the table just inside. He paused as the cool air hit him, and listened for a sign that anything was moving in his home. Not a sound. This was getting to be usual.

  Alison sat there, on the couch, swallowed up by the boxes rimming the white walls. She was dressed in one of her halter tops with a pair of jean shorts that had been cut ragged. Her hair was all done up, he noticed.

  When she turned to look at him, she wore that same aura of indifference, that cool, unemotional look that had become so common on her lately. He wondered if she was suffering from PTSD. They’d been through something traumatic, after all. “Hey,” he said, casually as he could.

  “Hey,” she returned, without much in the way of enthusiasm. She was seated without anything in her lap. The TV remote was on top of the entertainment center, and he hadn’t even hooked up the cable yet. What had she been doing? Just sitting there? “I thought you were working again.”

  “I was,” he said with a nod, taking a few tentative steps toward her. “Reeve sent me home. Figured I’d, uh … seen enough, I guess.”

  “Oh?” She asked it with no more seeming interest than she’d devote to a coupon circular. “Nothing new going on, then.”

  “Actually,” he said, almost regretful to spoil her image of the town back at peace, “there was another murder this morning.” He figured it’d get some reaction out of her, but she didn’t even blink.

  ***

  Erin watched the sedan do its turn in the middle of Water Street and drive off. She wondered if it was because she’d seen them that they were taking off? She thought about going after them, but a peal of thunder overhead caused everyone to look up, and the first droplet of water hit her on the cheek.

  “Goddammit,” Reeve said. “Can we please take this show on back to the station?”

  “Aiming for a change of venue?” Deivrel asked, the same insufferable smile on her face. Erin still wanted to punch her.

  “Aiming to not get soaking wet,” Reeve replied, hitching his thumbs in his belt. Erin couldn’t tell if he was doing it for some kind of effect or if he was holding up his pants under his gut.

  Lex Deivrel seemed to ponder this. She’d been stonewalling them all morning, had come up with fifty different excuses thus far. “All right,” she said finally. “Back to your station. But my clients come in my car.” Her smile broadened. “Which seems to be blocked in by a crime scene van.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Reeve said. “I’ll take you in one of my squad cars—all of you. And you can watch to make sure I don’t say anything out of line.”

  “I’m afraid my clients would be insulted by a ride in the back of a police car,” Deivrel said with a smile. “They’re not criminals, after all.”

  “Sure,” Reeve said, deadpan, “there but for the grace of a prostitution charge or twelve, go I. Or you. Probably more likely you.”

  Deivrel’s smile grew colder. “We can wait.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Reeve said. “Two of you with me—in the front seat, if need be, and one of you can ride with Deputy Harris.” He chucked a thumb at her. “You pick the arrangements, but I’ve had enough of this stonewalling shit, Lex. You got no ground to stand on here because I haven’t charged your clients with anything, they’re probably not guilty of anything I’d charge them for, but that is gonna change rapidly if you don’t stop fucking with me and help me get their goddamned statement on paper!”

  Deivrel didn’t flinch, didn’t change expression one whit, just froze. “Fine. I’ll ride with you and Ms. Cherry. Lucia can ride with Deputy Harris.” She shot a look at Erin that was malice wrapped in razor blades. “Talk to my client about anything other than the weather and I’ll make sure it ends your career.”

  Erin started to say something but Reeve held up a hand to shut her up. “I think we can live with that.” He looked back at her. “Right?”

  “The weather,” Erin said, looking up in time to get hit in the face with another drop of rain. “Got it.”

  ***

  Hendricks wasn’t sure how to feel about Wren Spellman, at least not until he frowned at Hendricks, waved a hand at him and produced something that looked like a cured cow’s bladder he’d once seen when he was younger. “Drink this.”

  “Are you fucking kidding?” Hendricks retorted. Stranger shows up to your hotel room, tells you to drink something. Sounded like the perfect setup for him to be roofie’d. “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” Spellman said with a shrug. “But it’d cure what ails you. I just feel bad for you, sitting there, looking like hel
l. I can tell some people have been less than gentle with you of late, and coupled with what I’m reading of your past,” his eyes flashed blank—like, white—for a minute, “I’m just feeling a spot of pity. Like I should help you.” Spellman pushed the bladder thing toward him, held out in a lightly spotted and wrinkled hand. “Drink this. You’ll feel better. Promise.”

  Hendricks took the thing, not really sure why. It was kidney shaped, seemed kind of like leather, like something you’d see in a fantasy movie when the characters would drink on a long journey. “What is this?”

  “The container is a cured cow’s bladder, as you might suspect,” Spellman said, talking with his hands. They came up in a looping gesture that turned into a palms-up shrug. “What’s inside is a tonic tinged with certain ingredients that are … otherworldly, let’s say.” Spellman grinned. “It’ll heal your injuries in the course of about thirty seconds. Call it a sample.”

  “Uh huh,” Hendricks said, and stared at the bladder. “Why?”

  “I told you, pity,” Spellman said. “Also, marketing. I have a store out in the country. You should come see me sometime if this works for you.” He held up a hand to his lips. “But don’t tell your friends,” he said in a whisper that felt … shrouded, somehow, like it had been breathed right into his mind.

  Hendricks stared at the bladder, pondering if the Percocets he’d taken were still fucking with him, and how hard.

  “Ah, here we go,” Spellman said mildly. “About time.”

  “About time for what?” Hendricks asked, looking from the bladder to the unassuming man in the Nehru suit. Vaguely, he heard something outside, like tires squealing. He listened closer and heard car doors slamming then watched as Spellman gently opened his door for him.

  “Let’s keep them from knocking down another door, shall we?” Spellman said. “I hate to cause any more expense for the owner of this motel. Concern, you know, from one business owner to another. It's tough enough out there without someone cutting into our margins.”