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

by Robert J. Crane

  “They do seem awfully interested in Starling,” Hendricks said, and he looked like he was chewing it over. “Maybe a little too interested.”

  “They might be able to give us some insight,” Alison said, still sedate. “They know this world better than we do.”

  “And it might just be that they’ll take whatever we tell them and run somewhere bad with it,” Arch said. He still didn’t trust Lerner and Duncan, not really. They may have been handy up on Tallakeet Dam, but that didn’t mean they were anything other than self-serving. Or demonkind-serving. One of those.

  “Do what?” Hendricks’s face was crumpled in confusion. “You think they’ll take the basics of this—which is, by the way, not much—Lucia turned into Starling when we confronted her—and do what with it? Kill her?”

  “Maybe,” Arch said. “We don’t know what Starling is. Seems to me like she’s on the other side.”

  Hendricks rolled his eyes. “Like an angel or something?”

  Arch had a little trouble digesting that. “Maybe. I don’t know. Hollywood told me they don’t get involved anymore. Not that he was a sterling source of information, but I’m not sure why he would lie.”

  “Because he was a piece of shit?” Hendricks suggested. “I have a hard time buying Starling as an angel.”

  “Do you even believe in angels?” Arch asked, still eyeing him.

  “I believe there could be creatures that call themselves angels,” Hendricks said. “But if they exist, they’re like demons to me—just some other, different form of life. Might as well be aliens for all I care. There’s nothing mystical about them, and the idea they would serve some all-mighty protector and master and creator of human life is such bullshit I can’t even find the words to say—”

  “Got it,” Arch said, more than a little sour. He was used to the cowboy’s sour attitude toward the Almighty, but he still didn’t love to listen to the man sermonize about it. Probably any more than Hendricks would have enjoyed hearing him sermonize about his beliefs.

  Hendricks just rolled his eyes. “So, now you know. Starling and Lucia are one and the same, at least as a matter of physical form. The hooker seems to disappear when Starling is on the premises, though, and acted like she didn’t know what happened when she came back.”

  “That’s just weird,” Erin said.

  “Weirder than demons rampaging through your town?” Hendricks grinned at her as he said it. Arch wondered if she found it charming.

  “No,” Erin said. By the way that she said it, he knew she did not.

  “There was another thing,” Alison said, and for the first time in a while, she looked a little more animated. “Starling gave us a warning …”

  Arch listened. Listened to every word. Even in the early morning summer heat, it gave him a chill.

  ***

  Lerner pulled into the driveway of the farm that the humans used as a meeting place, sighing as he turned in. Duncan hadn’t spoken to him since the fork in the path, and they’d had a long walk back to the car after that, so that had been a lot of silence. He wasn’t mad, Lerner could tell, just had his mind on other things. Normally, that would have been fine, but Lerner was running short on things he was willing to keep to himself. Still, he kept his quiet. Painful as it was.

  The town car bumped in the ruts as he took her down the driveway to the farm. He could see the two cop cars ahead, and another car—probably Deputy Stan’s wife’s car, since he doubted the cowboy had a vehicle to his name—and eased up behind them. It looked like the humans had all fallen silent. Lerner was a little bit of an observer of human nature, and nobody in this group looked remotely happy. At least, that was his professional opinion.

  “Don’t everybody get all excited and greet us at once,” Lerner said as he stepped out of the car. Duncan was as subdued as the rest of this group, which was annoying in its own right.

  “Did you find anything?” Deputy Harris spoke first. She looked the least down of all these people. For fuck’s sake, were they all that depressed about a couple people getting splattered? Humans were weird. He glanced at Duncan and saw a long face there too. Maybe not just humans.

  “Not really,” Duncan answered, breaking his several-hour silence. Lerner just raised an eyebrow at him. “Path came to a split, and all we saw were bicycle tracks.”

  “Which makes sense, since it’s a bicycle path as well as a walking path,” Deputy Stan said. “Hard to believe some demon thing that made as much noise as Erin described didn’t leave a trail.”

  “Unless it was flying off the ground,” Hendricks said. Lerner thought the cowboy looked like he was thinking deeply.

  “You run into a lot of flying demons, cowboy?” Lerner asked with a grin. He was just messing with the cowboy; of course there were demons that could fly. But that close to the ground? That would just be a weird choice. Especially given the noise the thing had made.

  “A couple, yeah,” Hendricks said, staring him down. The cowboy had found his spine. Lerner liked that, too. When they’d first met, he’d just sort of folded on a few things Lerner had tweaked him about, and that kind of shit got old fast. A mark who doesn’t know he’s a mark was not as much fun as pulling something over on someone who was aware it was coming. That was a challenge.

  “This feels pointless,” Mrs. Stan said, stopping Lerner before he could try to twist the cowboy around again. “No one really knows what this thing is, what’s causing it.” Lerner watched her. She had a deeply serious look about her. From what he’d seen so far, when she spoke, she tended to be either wise or frivolous. Not a lot of in between. “We’re just sitting here jabbering about it and guessing.”

  “It only comes at night,” Hendricks said. “That’s when the two incidents have happened.”

  “The two splatterings, I think you mean,” Deputy Harris mumbled under her breath.

  “That makes it sound like diarrhea,” Mrs. Stan opined. Frivolous again.

  “That’s not exactly a huge reveal, kid,” Lerner said. “Most of our kind prefers to operate in the dark, especially if they’re doing the kind of things that kill humans. They’re like you people in that regard.”

  They lapsed into silence. Lerner could sense the frustration brewing under the surface. He couldn’t say he didn’t feel it like the rest of them, though it wasn’t exactly the same. His frustration wasn’t because he couldn’t catch some creepo demon that had only killed a couple people so far; his was more rooted in the general progression of the town’s degeneration. “Downward spiral,” Lerner said, drawing every eye to him.

  “What?” Deputy Stan asked.

  “He’s talking about the slow fall of the town,” Duncan said before Lerner could compose an answer. He was only so slow in responding because he was trying to find a tactful way to broach the subject. “The more demonic incidents that openly occur, the more socially acceptable it becomes to our kind to do these things—and worse.”

  There was a pause. “You’re saying that as more bad shit happens,” this from Deputy Harris—she seemed like a smart cookie to Lerner—“the more demons think it’s okay to openly massacre humans?”

  “Our society thrives on rules and order,” Lerner said, and even he was subdued on this one.

  “A society where you can order human meat in most major cities,” Deputy Stan said.

  “That’s a little underground,” Lerner said. “They’re not openly slaughtering humans in the streets. It’s kind of like modern-day America, right? There’s crime—burglaries, armed robberies, murders. There’s organized crime, where they set out to profit from things that are illegal. But none of this is socially acceptable in mainstream society. How many of you regularly hang out with murderers and rapists?” He glanced at the two cops. “When you’re off the job, I mean.”

  “We don’t tend to get many of them around here even when we’re on the job,” Arch said.

  “Because it’s not socially acceptable,” Lerner said. “You can’t walk out onto the street and murd
er someone without expecting a societal response—some sort of societal response. It’s the same thing in the demon world.” He paused. “Except in hotspots.”

  “So that’s where demons go to blow off some steam?” Deputy Harris asked. “It’s like their version of the bar?”

  “I’d say it’s more like their version of a no man’s land,” Lerner said. “OOCs are in charge of enforcing demon law. Of keeping the lid on the things our people would do unfettered, things that would expose us to mainstream human society. But when it comes to a hotspot … it’s like our version of…I dunno, pick a spot on the globe filled with chaos and apathy.”

  “Washington, DC?” Alison said.

  Lerner felt himself grimace and didn't have to wonder why. “We try, okay? We try and police those spots, but once the shit starts to roll down the hill, if it gains enough mass, there ain’t no stopping it from wiping out everything below.”

  “Downward spiral,” Deputy Stan said. “And that’s how entire towns disappear off the map.”

  “You got it,” Lerner said. “The problem here isn’t just that things are progressing fast, either.” He looked around the little circle of faces. “That happens sometimes, especially when a town is remote enough that we can’t get to it en masse quickly enough. No … here it’s a worse problem.”

  “Yay, a worse problem,” Deputy Harris said. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense. What’s the worse problem? Because we could use not only some bad news right now, but some worse news.”

  “Let me guess,” Hendricks said. “With eighteen hotspots flaring at the current moment, you can only cover so much ground.”

  Lerner tilted his head slightly. “The cowboy gets it in one. The Office of Occultic Concordance … is officially out of manpower.” He paused then sighed. “Well, demon power.”

  ***

  When the alarm went off at six a.m., Laura wanted to hit it, so she did. When it went off again at six-fifteen, she smacked it hard enough to leave a bruise on her hand.

  At six-thirty, even in her fog of sleep, she knew she couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  The sharp, delicious smell of coffee greeted her as she opened her bedroom door. It was the same door she’d been opening her entire life, the same bed she’d been sleeping in since she was a kid. As she yawned, she reflected that it felt like she’d been living the same day a lot lately. Work, home, Molly, work, repeat. It wasn’t quite a grind. It was more like a good sanding.

  She thumped her palm against the bannister as she descended the stairs. Her mom was already sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread out in front of her. Molly was there, too, her soft brown hair twirled around and a tip of it stuck in her mouth. Lauren hated that habit in principle, but in practice, it’d been cute ever since Molly started doing it at roughly the age of three, when her hair had finally gotten long enough.

  “Morning,” Lauren pronounced, and she could hear the drag in her words, the tiredness. She felt every ounce of the middle-of-the-night awakening, and the irritation of running into Archibald Fucking Stan at the crime scene was predictably a sour note as well.

  “Did you leave in the middle of the night?” Vera asked. She did not look up from her paper.

  “Yeah,” Lauren said, pulling a coffee mug that said “World’s Greatest Mom” from the cupboard. It was her mother’s, not hers. She stuck it under the coffee maker and grabbed one of the single-serve cups. “Sheriff Reeve called again.”

  “Oh, no,” her mother said, voice dripping with that small-town sense of worry that was absent in all but the most empathetic people Lauren had met in the thriving metropolis of Chattanooga. It was a lot easier to have a “Shit happens, shrug it off” attitude when you didn’t personally know the people who died tragically. “Who was it?”

  “No idea,” Lauren said, taking her first sip of coffee. She swished it around in her mouth, tasting the glorious flavor of the dark beans as it circled down the back of her throat the way she imagined liquid leaving through a drain. She’d need to keep it coming today. “It wasn’t a body that was in great condition for identifying, it was dark, and I was just there to …” She paused. “I don’t have a clue why I was there.”

  “Somebody else died?” Molly asked, looking up from her homework. The little knot of chewed hair had saliva dripping from it, which was decidedly un-cute.

  “Yeah, Midian is turning into a real Sunnydale, California, lately,” Lauren quipped. She paused. “You should be careful, just in case.”

  “This is just awful,” Vera said. “I ain’t never heard of nothing like this in all the born days of my life.”

  Lauren rolled her eyes at the “all the born days of my life” bit. She’d traveled a little bit in the last few years, and she hadn’t heard anyone else, anywhere, say anything like that. It was uniquely Tennesseean. Still, her mother had a point. “It has been a little grim here lately.” To say the least.

  “You think it’s the same person causing all this mess?” Vera asked. Lauren would have been willing to bet that her mother had had this conversation before, probably every day for the last week, with all her friends. Fortunately, Lauren hadn’t been around to hear it. She viewed her mother through the lens of having known her for all her life, and her motivations were as plain to Lauren as the dime-sized blemish on her mother’s cheek. She had these conversations because she got something out of them, some little delight in the misery being discussed, some small reinforcement and social joy out of having something delightfully negative to talk about. When it wasn’t something as big as this, it was the small things, like how so-and-so’s husband had stepped out on her. It was always “stepped out on” instead of fucked around, which would be how Lauren would have said it. Another generational difference.

  “I have no idea,” Lauren said, not wanting to get drawn into her mother’s dramatic mess. It was a conversation that could last decades when it was a matter of insignificance like a cheating husband; she didn’t even want to think about how long a conversation could go on with the grist for it being the shit that had been going down in Midian lately. She had to get to work, anyway.

  Lauren blinked some of the sleep out of her eyes and looked over at Molly, whose head was back down. “Is that your math homework?”

  Molly did not look up, which was telling. “I’m almost done.”

  “Why didn’t you finish it last night?” Lauren asked. It was a valid question, but the minute it came out, she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be taken well by her daughter.

  Molly’s eyes came up flaring, widened as her lips became a thin, hard line. “I fell asleep, okay? I fell asleep early, that’s all.” Super defensive.

  Lauren just stood there, coffee cup in hand, the steam swirling off the liquid. She had a pretty good bullshit detector, and it was squealing at her just now. “Did you?”

  Molly did that teenage thing where she grunted, sighed like she was being put upon, and nudged the cover of her math book closed. “I don’t have time for this, Mom.” She slid her chair out and scooped up her books and paper, carefully settling her homework into the page she’d been working on. Lauren could see the algebra from where she was standing; it was only half done by her reckoning. “I’ve gotta go.” Molly shrugged into her backpack and motored out the door with her math book in hand before Lauren could come up with a reply.

  “She was lying, you know,” Vera said, not looking up from where she was flipping the page of her paper.

  “I caught that, yeah,” Lauren said, staring down the hall to the front door that had just been slammed shut. Now just what the hell was she supposed to do about this?

  ***

  Hendricks was in the passenger seat, rolling along with Erin at the wheel. They’d split shortly after Lerner’s grim-ass pronouncement. It was on his mind more than a little because it dovetailed with his own experience. Plus, it went right along with Starling’s scary-ass prophecy. He glanced over at Erin. She hadn’t said a word to him, which was—well, it wasn’
t fine, that was for damned sure. He was tired enough to not want to delve into it, though, having only gotten a few hours of sleep on Arch and Alison’s couch before Mrs. Stan had shaken him awake to meet with Arch and Erin as they came off their emergency shift.

  All in all, it had not been a good night. He thought about voicing these thoughts to Erin, but she was clammed up, jaw tight. He figured she was still pissed about the whole Starling visit, but didn’t know quite how to approach that particular minefield. He decided on the direct approach, limbs be damned. “You still mad because I went to a whorehouse?”

  She turned to look at him sidelong with eyes that would have burned the skin off of Superman. “No, I’m totally fine with you visiting a whorehouse. Hell, do it every night. Send me postcards, or better yet, take some video footage of yourself in the act so we can watch it and get all sexed up together.”

  “‘Sexed up together’?” He let out a low guffaw that probably didn’t help his standing any. “You know damned well I didn’t do anything untoward in that place.”

  There was only a grudging hint that he might have been right in her reply. “I don’t know that you didn’t.” She wavered just a little.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Alison suggested I should,” Hendricks said, letting himself crack a grin, “but somehow I resisted the lure of a possible STD and the cold embrace of a woman with multiple personalities. Can’t imagine why. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she can turn her entire disposition on a dime.” He glanced at Erin, who was now looking a little less hostile. “Kinda like that, yeah.”

  “You’re not helping your case any here, Marine.”

  “Sorry,” Hendricks said, genuinely contrite. “Look, we needed answers. Shit is weird around this place, way weirder and more hostile than any hotspot I’ve been to before. We’re stumbling blind in the dark here. Someone has the potential to shine a light for us, I’m inclined to go a little out of the way for the illumination. Even if it means I gotta go somewhere I don’t really care to go.” He meant every word of it, and hoped like hell she could hear it from him. “And I hope you believe me when I tell you that it wasn’t a place I truly cared to go.”