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

by Robert J. Crane

  “I know we’ve seen some weird shit this last week,” Erin Harris said, standing off the curb, straddling the cracking pavement as the sun beat down on the trio, “but this is monumentally fucked. Not quite the Mount Rushmore of fucked, but maybe like the Lincoln Memorial of it.”

  “Ahuh,” Arch said, more than a little preoccupied, and not just by the grisly mess in the middle of Berg Street. There was blood every-dang-where, splattered all over the pavement like it had been dripped on a canvas by a painter trying to make a statement— the statement being, “Let’s drench this beast!” Though some avant-garde painter who covered an entire canvas in red probably wouldn’t use the word beast.

  Still.

  “I’ve seen a lot of traffic accidents in my day,” Reeve said, shaking his head, “but I ain’t never seen nothing like this shit.” He waved a hand at the remainder of the body. “If he didn’t have his damned wallet on him, you’d never even know that was Tim Connor.”

  Arch nodded and caught Erin doing much the same out of the corner of his eye. Tim Connor had been a pretty active guy, always running. He wasn’t gonna be running no more, that was sure and certain.

  “Whoever fucking did this had to be going a hundred and twenty on a residential street,” Reeve said. “Kids play here, people jog—like Tim.” He indicated the remainder of the corpse. “This is so goddamned reckless I can’t even define it.” Arch could tell Reeve was shaken because he was dropping the Lord’s name in vain at ten times the usual rate. Arch had gotten over flinching every time the sheriff violated the Third Commandment by now; if he hadn’t, dealing with Lafayette Hendricks would have been well-nigh impossible for him.

  Arch shook off the thought of the cowboy-hat-wearing demon hunter and looked back at the sack of butchered meat that had been Tim Connor. He’d been a middle-aged guy, in good shape, always drinking protein shakes whenever Arch ran into him somewhere. He’d seen him at the diner a few days ago, and the guy ordered a bare fish, no fried topping.

  “He was such a healthy motherfucker,” Reeve said. “Always running, eating right, trying to push the damned envelope.” Reeve unconsciously reached for his own belly, which hung over his belt. “Son of a bitch should have outlived me by a long shot, but he didn’t because some cocksucker ran him down going a hundred miles an hour in a thirty. This is whole fucking town is turning into a fucking slaughter fest out of goddamned control—”

  “Sheriff,” Erin said, catching Arch’s eye as she spoke. Probably to avoid looking Reeve in the eye. “It ain’t your fault.”

  “I’m the law in this goddamned town! When County Administrator Pike,” Reeve put a special sauce of sarcasm on that title, “gets wind of this, the blame’s gonna come one way, and it’s mine.”

  Arch drew a breath and felt a certain tightness that had nothing to do with how well his shirt fit. Unlike Reeve, he did tend to do that whole exercising, eating right thing. Or had, until a couple weeks ago when things had got suddenly busy in his life. “Still ain’t your fault,” Arch said.

  “I appreciate your support,” Reeve said without an ounce of sincerity, “but I doubt the voters are going to share your enthusiasm for the results of our law enforcement efforts this last month. Disappearances, kidnappings, entire families getting wiped out, some sort of crazy highway massacre, and a hooker that got burned alive from the inside. Not to mention those security guards up on the Tallakeet Dam.” Reeve pulled his hat off his head and ran his fingers through thinning hair. “Yeah, I can’t see how I could possibly be blamed for anything.”

  “At least the town didn’t flood,” Erin said sympathetically. She shot Arch a sidelong look that was full of meaning—and the meaning was “What do you say at a moment like this?” Arch didn’t say anything because he didn’t know either. It wasn’t Reeve’s fault.

  It wasn’t like he’d set out a sign inviting every demon in North America to Midian, Tennessee. Heck, he probably didn’t even know that was the source of his problems. It wasn’t like mass murders and slaughters and burnings of people alive automatically brought to mind the idea that demons were real and walking among humans like regular people. That was crazy talk.

  But then, these were crazy times.

  Arch glanced at Erin and found her looking at him. Thought maybe she was thinking the same as him—that they were both crazy and bound for the same asylum. “How long ’til the corpse wagon gets here?” Erin asked, drawing her gaze back to Reeve.

  “Who fucking knows?” Reeve said, and for a moment, it looked like he was gonna spike his hat.

  “We should probably get back out on patrol,” Arch said, shrugging his shoulders. “Unless you want us to stick around to help you guard the scene?”

  “Get the hell outta here,” Reeve waved his hat at them. “Maybe you can do some good elsewhere, because there ain’t nothing going on here other than me trying to keep the lookiloos from peeking at the hamburger someone made of Tim.”

  Arch’s gaze danced over to Connor’s body again. Hamburger wasn’t far off. Limbs were missing, knocked clean from the body. There was a straight line of blood from the site of the impact some fifty feet or more from where the body rested now to where it had started, and the terminus of that line near the corpse was filled with the evidence of a long, skidding roll that it had undertaken before it came to rest in its current position. An arm was missing at the elbow, and one of the legs was hanging by a string of flesh so narrow it looked like an onion straw. But drenched in blood.

  Nope, that wasn’t a good way to go.

  “Get on out of here,” Reeve said again, waving his hat at them. “Go patrol, just … get the fuck outta here.”

  Arch didn’t need to be told again. He’d never really seen Reeve in one of these moods before.

  He thought about trying to say something else reassuring, but he still couldn’t think of anything. So instead he just fell into line with Erin as they headed toward the barricades set up just past the site of Tim Connor’s launch. They stayed quiet all the way ’til they were on the other side of the first blood splatter, and Arch knew that was as far as he was gonna get before Erin said something.

  ***

  “What the fuck do you think did this?” Erin asked. She had the sick feeling in her stomach that came from knowing something the sheriff most assuredly did not but being totally unable to voice it to him. It made her feel bad, made her feel—if she admitted it to herself—a little bit excited, too, like she was on the inside for a secret that no one else knew.

  “No idea,” Arch said, the big, stoic man that he was. He was stalking away from the scene in a hell of a hurry, his eyes hidden darkly under the brim of his hat. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to be shadowy and shit or if he was annoyed with her.

  “But it was a demon, right?” Erin asked a little louder than she intended and realized a moment later there were people out on their porches all down the sides of the street.

  Arch played it cool and didn’t even bother to turn his head to look, like she hadn’t just said anything. He was a cool customer, Arch. “Probably,” he said in a low voice that was probably more appropriate to the situation than hers had been. Erin kicked herself mentally. She should have been a little more circumspect, she knew. “But it’s not like I know enough about them to tell what kind.”

  Erin thought back to that book of Hendricks’s that she’d pilfered a couple days ago, before the dam. It had all types of demons in it. Crazy shit. She was sure it meant he was crazy, too, but then she’d seen a guy breathe fire out of his mouth like some kind of dragon, and suddenly the ex-Marine didn’t seem quite so insane. “You think Hendricks would know?”

  Arch just looked tense now. “Maybe. If not him, maybe his new buddies.”

  “You mean Lerner and Duncan?” Erin shot him a coy smile. Lerner and Duncan seemed all right, even though they were demons. Or Officers of Occultic Concordance, as they’d pronounced themselves when she’d gotten the full intro. Lerner had said it with a swagger. Duncan h
adn’t said anything at all.

  “Yeah,” Arch said tightly as they crossed through a gap in the barricades to where their patrol cars were parked on the other side. “Them.” Arch’s Explorer’s lights were flashing, and so were the dashboard lights in Erin’s car—which had until really recently been the sheriff’s own. She didn’t exactly consider this a moment appropriate to smile, considering how straight-to-shit things had gotten in Midian lately, but the thought of having her own car was almost worthy of one, even under the circumstances. Even if it was still missing the driver’s side mirror.

  “How did you explain that mirror to the sheriff?” Arch asked, like he could read her fucking mind or something.

  “I haven’t,” she said. “Figured if he had time to notice it, it’d be the least of his problems. He hasn’t said shit about it yet.”

  Arch paused next to his car, lowered his voice. “What about those spent shells from the rifle in the back?” He kept his cool gaze on her. “He find out about those yet?”

  “The gun’s clean,” Erin said. To this she smiled, though politely and coolly rather than with any kind of satisfaction. “Cleaned it myself after I took it to the range. Bought some replacement ammo while I was there, so no need for anyone to be the wiser about that little ordeal.” Because losing a mirror was one thing but discharging an AR-15 in a gun battle with a demon on top of Tallakeet Dam was the sort of thing Reeve might pay attention to, even in his current state. “What about those big .50 cal rounds hiding up in the tree line near the dam?”

  Arch didn’t even flinch. “Picked ’em up myself the day after.” He opened his driver’s side door and got in. He shot her a little half-assed look of pure chagrin. “No need to leave that thread hanging out for anybody to yank on.”

  ***

  Hendricks was running down the goddamned hill at a high enough speed that it ought to have scared the shit out of him. Maybe it did a little, but after clearing doors in Ramadi a few times, the fear factor for running down a steep hill turned down a few notches. It was like being afraid of getting in a bicycle accident after learning to drive a car at a hundred and ninety miles an hour; it could still happen, but it wasn’t something you gave a lot of thought to.

  Tree branches whipped at him as he descended the slope, hauling ass and all else while whipping around tree trunks and shit. He wasn’t winded, not yet, but he wasn’t in near as good a shape as he’d been in the Marines, either, so it was bound to catch up with him soon. He thought that, anyway, as he ducked his head slightly to avoid a low-hanging branch and nearly fucking toppled. That would be an embarrassing thing to have to cop to—yeah, I rolled down a fucking hill while chasing after a demon. I’m a serious demon hunter, all right.

  He’d busted down the front door of the demon’s home as impolitely as he could. About like he imagined Arch would do, crashing in some meth dealer’s house if he had to. Knocked it off its hinges before his companions could volunteer to do it for him; he was always more of a DIY guy, hating to delegate shit. Do it yourself it gets it done right. He wasn’t an officer, after all.

  Now he was damned near pinwheeling his arms to keep from getting that weightless sensation as each foot left the ground. It was a steep fucking hill—foothill, he guessed—somewhere near the bottom of the King Daddy mountain in these parts, Mount Horeb or something stupid. His mind defaulted to calling it Mouth Whore-ebb, though that wasn’t exactly how the locals said it.

  All this kept flashing through his mind as he ran. Busting down that door, sword in hand, ready to deal damage to a demon only to have the scrawny bastard flash those eyes at him and cannonball out the nearby picture window into the gulch below the house—all of it played along with a commentary in his head that said, Holy shit, what the fuck am I doing?

  And the answer was: Trying to make this town a safer place, one demon sonofabitch at a time.

  The wind kicked up a little as he came over a slope. He grunted and adjusted his feet to compensate. He still felt like he was out of control, but his legs were keeping up so far. It was a crazy fucking feeling, not quite as bad as tear-assing down a steep road on a bike but close, and his quarry was at least a hundred feet ahead of him, busting branches of the trees with his arms as he ran. Hey, it cleared a path for Hendricks, and he wasn’t choosy about the kind of help he was getting, especially lately.

  Especially lately.

  He didn’t have enough breath to shout insults at the thing or he would have. All he had was the focus to keep his eye on the damned ball, on the damned demon, and his mind out of the possibilities for all the shit that could befall him should he fall. He wasn’t sure if there was a tonic that could undo all the fucked-up damage his body would take if that would happen, and he didn’t want to find out.

  The wind kept a coming, blowing in his eyes and making him squint. It was a hot damned day, and he was sweating like he was on Parris Island again, just wishing it was some morning PT. It wasn’t quite as bad as Iraq, though, that was certain. The ground was all dried up, too, which was weird as hell, he thought idly as he went, because only a couple days ago it had rained hard enough to flood the fuck outta the whole county.

  “On your left!” came a voice from—big surprise—his left. Hendricks would have tossed a look of disdain but instead he tucked his left elbow again, even as he kept dodging down the slope, his big black drover coat billowing behind him and his cowboy hat still clinging to his head.

  ***

  Lerner surged past the cowboy without much effort. Hendricks had a good lead time because the dumbass had jumped out the window behind the fleeing demon—a quantel’a, as near as Lerner could see—and Lerner wasn’t willing to do something that stupid. It wasn’t exactly a point of pride, like he was too good to go leaping out a window. It was more like he just shook his head at the two of them for being fucking morons and made his way down with his partner, Duncan, in tow. Like civilized people and not fucking animals.

  They were running like animals now, though, he and Duncan. And cursing like men. Well, he was, anyway. Duncan was still stoic and approaching on Hendricks’s right, though he hadn’t bothered to announce himself. He’d often pondered why Duncan was such a mild-mannered sort of fellow when he really could have cut loose—like Lerner did every now and again. He hadn’t come up with any answers on that front, not even after a hundred-plus years. That was probably some sort of answer in and of itself, but as long as Lerner had pondered it he hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it in any way that satisfied.

  Now Lerner was watching the world whip past him as he ran down what felt to him like a mountain, hoping he didn’t take a misstep. Smashing into a tree at this speed could be potentially career ending for him. And by career ending, he meant breaking open the shell that held his happy demon essence in that rough covering he called a body. It would not make for a joyful day, not for him. He could kind of imagine showing back up in the underworld, earthly form busted and burned up, and imagined the reception he’d get. It made him watch his steps just a touch more carefully.

  The fucking quantel’a that had started the whole foot chase wasn’t getting away, but the strung-out dipshit was damned sure making a good show of it. Whatever he was on was letting him run a lot farther and faster than he should have been able to. Fear would probably do that to a quantel’a. Fear and meth.

  “You getting a reading?” Lerner called out to Duncan and saw a shake of the head in return as Duncan passed Hendricks. The cowboy started to do a double take and halted as he cut left around a tree, its big-ass, low-hanging branches causing him to swing wide just behind Duncan. “Sons of bitches. I catch that fucking screen Spellman selling those fucking clouding runes to anyone, I’m gonna expose his empty-ass innards to the light of day.”

  “Would it do any good?” Hendricks had started to gasp now. Lerner wondered how much longer the cowboy could run.

  “It’d do my heart some good,” Lerner said blackly. That screen—just an empty vessel that could talk like a man, used
as a veil by someone from the other side to transact business with earthly creatures—that sonofabitch was the cause of all his problems for the last few days. All of them. And they couldn’t even find his ass now, nor the asses of most of the other troublemaking demons in town, because the fucking screen had been selling runes that hid them from Duncan and his sensing powers. “Yours too, based on how much huffing you’re doing, meatbag.”

  “I’m not used to running mountains every day,” Hendricks answered, and Lerner could hear him trying to rein in his heavy breathing. He hadn’t known the cowboy for more than a few days, and already he could see the pride just oozing off the bastard.

  “Wouldn’t matter if you did,” Duncan answered matter-of-factly, missing Hendricks’s look of ire, “he’s faster than you.” Duncan turned on the jets and blew down the slope.

  Lerner wanted to laugh at Duncan’s sudden burst of speed, but he had enough charity in him that he decided not to rub it into the cowboy. Poor bastard. Instead, he just sped up himself.

  ***

  They were outpacing him like mad now, Lerner and Duncan, and Hendricks could feel his face burning not just from the heat of the run but from shame. Sure, they were demons, and they damned well ought to be stronger and faster than him.

  That didn’t make it burn any less, though.

  Duncan broke loose a tree limb ahead of him, sending it spiraling down the slope with a hard hit of the wrist. The crack echoed down the mountain. Hendricks could see a field somewhere through the trees up ahead.

  He knew they had to catch this bastard soon. Duncan was closest, was closest and almost there—

  The demon juked right as Duncan was almost close enough to lay a hand on him. Hendricks would have held his breath if he hadn’t needed every one of them at the moment. Duncan missed a step and tumbled, his shoulder hitting the ground hard enough to break bones.

  If he’d had bones.

  The demon burned hard right like a receiver in a football game. He snaked out of view for a second behind a low fir tree. Hendricks picked up on him again as he turned back down the slope.