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

by Robert J. Crane

“Way to sound like a corporate employee,” Lauren said. “But since you brought it up, call this a management initiative from your mother to try and keep you from having to do your algebra in a rush as you run out the door.”

  “I got it done fine,” Molly said, and her brow had descended, eyes turned dark with fury.

  “I’m sure you did,” Lauren said, trying to figure out how to broach the other gaping subject just sitting there in the middle of the room. “But the real question is why you didn’t get it done before that—”

  “I told you, I fell asleep.” Molly’s voice crackled with teenage anger. Lauren started to wonder if she’d sounded like this at sixteen, but she didn’t have to think it over very hard. She knew she had.

  “I’m not gone so much that I don’t know when you’re lying.” Lauren just laid it out there, quiet, trying to avoid the path that would set her off. Doubtful that this would do it, but it was worth a try.

  “You think I’m—?” Molly’s eyes flickered. They still held that resentment, but there was a flash of uncertainty. “Whatever. I got my homework done, turned in, and my grades are sound. I don’t know why you’re bitching at me.”

  “I’m not ‘bitching’ at you,” Lauren said—but she was, wasn’t she? Same shit her mother would do to her, that passive aggressive thing where she’d latch on to something unrelated to what she really wanted to talk about—which was the reason she was lying about not finishing the homework. Lauren remembered sixteen like it was yesterday—hell, it practically was—and there was always a reason for her to do it, too. “Who’s the boy?”

  Molly just stared at her but didn’t adjust quite quickly enough. “What boy?” she asked, a second too slow.

  Lauren laughed, light, near-toneless. “God, I wonder if it was this obvious to my mom when I was lying?” Of course it was; she’d almost always figured it out.

  Molly made a half-grunt, half-seething sound. “I have to practice. And then I have homework to do.” She made the dagger eyes, the ones that Lauren had made at her mother.

  “I’m going to check your homework later,” Lauren said. “Leave it out for me, okay?”

  The eyeroll was prodigious. “Fine.” It was definitely not fine.

  “Okay, then,” Lauren said, and started to leave her daughter’s room.

  “Close the door behind you!” Molly called, a little more snot in her tone than was really needed. Lauren did and stood out there, just waiting, listening as the tone of the violin picked up.

  It was late afternoon, the sun was still high in the sky, and she could feel the tension wracking her. What to do? Normally she might have tried to squeeze in a run by the Caledonia River, but since she’d seen that body at Rafton Park, she had no desire to go anywhere near there. Or town, for that matter, since Tim Connor had gotten run over on a jog of his own.

  No, she needed air but not danger. Those places were right here in town, along with whoever the hell was being so damned vicious as to run people down. Lauren wanted somewhere a little more isolated, a little more removed from what was going on in Midian. There was the road up on Mount Horeb that she’d run a few times. Maybe she’d try that.

  ***

  Arch could see Erin’s Crown Victoria behind him—the sheriff’s own car, he still thought of it—easing up the curved road leading up Mount Horeb. It wasn’t like they’d planned to travel in a convoy, but once they were out of town she was a little heavy on the pedal and he was light, so it was natural she’d catch up to him eventually, he supposed. Besides, they weren’t going all that much farther.

  “Where do you think this thing is?” Alison asked from next to him. She was pretty quiet, thinking it over on the way up. “Hiding in one of the old mines by day, slouching down to Midian by night?”

  “Could be,” Arch said. “It’d be tough to comb all those old mining tunnels, though. Best we check up and down the main roads first, see if there’s any sign of anything amiss. Maybe look at driveways for a sign of …” He let his voice drift off. “Well, I don’t know what we’d been looking for a sign of.”

  “Mmmm,” Alison said, and he could tell she was lost in thought again. She was pretty smart, his wife, valedictorian of her class and all. Sometimes he forgot how smart she was because she didn’t always come out with the deepest thoughts. She put her mind to something, she could usually do something with it, though he wasn’t sure exactly how far she’d get with demons hiding somewhere on the mountain. “Locals,” she said.

  “What?” Arch asked, holding the wheel tight around a curve, the vinyl steering wheel smooth against his fingers.

  “Erin said this thing made noise. Loud noise. When it came past her.” They passed a mailbox on the right, and Alison flicked her wrist to indicate it as it shot by. “Some of the locals might have heard it, especially if it’s following a path or a road.”

  “Well, shoot,” Arch said, blinking in surprise. He hadn’t come near to thinking of that.

  ***

  Erin eased off the gas and pulled into the overlook as Arch guided the Explorer off the road in front of her. She had been expecting him to drive slow, but he was past slow and into granny territory. She bit off another complaint, let it die on her lips, and just took the Crown Vic in to park behind him and the town car already waiting for them. The overlook was on a curve, and down below the whole Caledonia River Valley was laid out, with other smaller mountains and foothills providing the rise that fenced it all in.

  “Here we are,” she said, stating the obvious to Hendricks, who was already reaching for the door. They hadn’t talked much on the way up the mountain, because there wasn’t much to say. Plus, she could feel her own fatigue setting in, and she knew he was dealing with more than a little of his own. She’d already picked up on the fact that when Hendricks got tired, he got cranky and sullen. It wasn’t subtle, either, though he seemed pretty pleasant overall right now. She attributed that to the idea that they were maybe close to something on getting this demon.

  “Evening,” Arch said as Erin got out of the Crown Vic. The overlook was a nice view, all green valleys and a nice picturesque scene of Midian lining the valley floor. It was a fun drive, usually, a real scenic thing to do on a Sunday morning, maybe meander on up to the Mulberry Lodge near the peak of the mountain, such as it was. Nice restaurant, nice place for prime rib. It had the added bonus of a hell of a view, so it tended to cater to a little higher-end crowd. She’d been there a couple times with her folks back in the olden days, celebrating special events, before her brothers had left town.

  “So what now?” Hendricks asked, and Erin could hear the cranky and sullen starting to come out.

  “Alison had an idea,” Arch said as Lerner and Duncan came shuffling over. “Erin said this thing was loud; maybe someone who lives up here might have heard it.”

  “Good point,” Lerner said in that Boston accent. He wasn’t acting like a dick at the moment for some reason, and Erin wondered what it was. “We could split up, canvas the area a little.”

  “Closer to the bottom of the hill, the better,” Erin said. “We know this thing probably came toward the mountain, but it may not be up the mountain. It could have veered off before it got here.”

  “It could have,” Arch agreed. “Could have gone to the far side over the pass to the north. Probably didn’t go easterly, because there are other roads that would have made more sense to take out of town if it meant to go that direction—”

  “Maybe this thing doesn’t know your town that well,” Hendricks said.

  “Maybe,” Arch conceded. “But this assumption we got is all we’ve got to go on, so we might as well—”

  “Work it, yeah,” Hendricks said, sounding a little resigned to her ears. “Probably best if the cops knock on the doors, right?”

  “It’d make more sense than having Lerner and Duncan flashing their badges,” Erin said with a half-smile. She gave them a frown. “Do you even have badges?”

  Lerner pulled something out of his jacket and
flipped it down; it wasn’t something she could easily read, but she got the sense it was important and that he was very official, whatever it said. “We have something close,” he said with a grin. “It’ll work well enough to get us answers if we knock on a door.”

  “Maybe we should split up,” Hendricks said then paused. “Wait …” He almost sounded like he was slurring his words. “Never mind, that’s a plot from a horror movie.”

  “It’s still daylight,” Erin said. “That means we’re fine, right?”

  “No telling,” Lerner said. “Teams of two would be my recommendation. At least one of us law enforcement types to balance out you two civilians.” He gestured vaguely to Hendricks and Alison. “I’d also really recommend that you don’t put me, Duncan or cowboy together.”

  Erin felt an insufferable smile coming on. “What’s the matter? You two having marital tension?”

  Lerner grinned. “Well, we’ve been not sleeping together for about a hundred years, sweetheart, so there is that. But I was suggesting you split us up just so because the three of us are the only ones carrying something full length that can handle killing a demon.” He waved a hand faintly at Arch. “No offense to your safety knife, but that thing is gonna be about as effective as a toothpick for poking at something that moves as fast as this thing supposedly does.”

  “None taken,” Arch said. “All right, how about—”

  “How about I go with Duncan?” Alison said. Erin felt a little surge of surprise at that one.

  “I’ll ride with the blond deputy,” Lerner said, and Erin’s surprise increased, mingling with irritation. Her annoyance increased as well as he headed toward her patrol car without even waiting for her to say yea or nay. “I guess that leaves you boys as the dynamic duo.” His eyes flicked from Arch to Hendricks.

  “I guess it does,” Hendricks said, shrugging as he headed for Arch’s Explorer. Erin started to say something to him, but Lerner stepped up to the door Hendricks had left open before she had time to come up with something that expressed what she was feeling. She just watched the cowboy go, the black outline of his drover coat nearly touching the gravel and dirt of the overlook as he disappeared around the back of the Explorer.

  “I have a feeling you and I are going to get along just great,” Lerner said with that toothy, dickish smile. Did he know how fucking annoying she found him?

  “Yeah, we go together like Rikki Tikki Tavi and Nagaina,” she said.

  “I like you already,” Lerner said as she got into the car. “That’s such a great film. A classic.”

  Erin slammed the door harder than she ever had before. They might even have heard it down in Midian.

  ***

  “This is called canvassing,” Arch said as Hendricks considered tuning the man out. He was already bleary-eyed, and the intro to basics of police work was about as boring as any of the ten thousand procedural shows he saw on the rare occasions he’d turn on the TV in his hotel rooms.

  “Yeah, thanks for that basic instruction,” Hendricks said, noting the quick flash of annoyance on Arch’s face. “Think I’ve heard that somewhere before. Seems like the thing to do is for you to knock and me to sit in the car with the window open, since—hopefully—we’re not going to accidentally stumble onto the actual demon we’re looking for in the course of this canvassing thing.”

  “You never know what you’re gonna find when you knock on doors,” Arch said, and Hendricks could see the tension in the man. “Could be anything.”

  Hendricks could feel the annoyance building. “Tell me about it.”

  “Mountain folk get a bit peculiar at times,” Arch said. Hendricks was already bored of the lecture. “Most of them are normal enough, but every once and a while you get a real weird one. Anti-social types. Maybe even a little angry at the authorities, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Yeah, sure, hostile,” Hendricks said with a yawn.“I realize that’s probably a foreign concept to you,” Arch said, giving Hendricks a little angry side-eye.

  “You ever hear of Ramadi?” Hendricks waited, but there wasn’t even a hint of recognition in Arch’s face when he looked over. “It was a town in Iraq where there were insurgents hiding. We—the Marines—had to go busting down the doors to houses. It was fucking shitstorm, too, a real Charlie Foxtrot.” Hendricks looked out the window.

  He could hear the gears grinding for Arch, and when the policeman spoke, it was a lot quieter, a lot less irritable and with a mountain of humility. “What happened?”

  Hendricks shrugged. He was too drained to put much into it; not that he had much to put into it anyway. “I was nineteen. We go busting down doors, sometimes I’m on point. Thing is, the guy who’s on point? Something like two out of three of them go home in a coffin, family gets the American flag to display on their mantle. We didn’t even get to use our fancy scopes and shit. We just short-stocked the rifle, lined our pointer fingers up with the barrel and BANG. Point and shoot. Pink mist splashing the walls. It was a goddamned clusterfuck. So, yeah, I’ve knocked on a few hostile doors in my time, even before I started finding demons on the other side.” He sniffed, irritation causing his face to twitch. “Hell, I prefer the demons to some fifteen-year-old fuckstick with an AK-47 that thinks he’s doing God’s own work. At least I don’t have to feel guilty about what I do to the demons.”

  Arch was hesitating, and Hendricks could hear it. “You feel guilty about what you did over there?”

  “Hell, no,” Hendricks said, staring at the greenery passing by out his window as they wended their way down the mountain road. “It was us versus them. I don’t care what you’ve heard, we didn’t fight over there because of orders or CO’s or for some fucking butterbars—that’s a junior lieutenant that doesn’t know his ass from an M203—trying to get a goddamned medal.” He turned to look at Arch. “We fought for the guys in our squad. If I’m blowing through the fatal front—that’s the three feet around a door, which you gotta clear in a goddamned big hurry—I’m doing it because of the guys with me. My buddies. It’s us versus them, and anyone who ain’t with us gets a bullet in them if they raise so much as a finger that looks like a pistol barrel.” He turned back toward the window. “That’s why it doesn’t bother me, having Lerner and Duncan with us. Because they’re with us, not them.”

  “For now,” Arch said.

  “For now,” Hendricks agreed. “But be honest. Those guys are working on the side of order against chaos. You think they’re gonna go switching sides when all we’re getting promised is chaos in the forecast?”

  “I don’t know,” Arch said, guiding the Explorer into a slow turn. “I don’t have any idea what they’re about—really—and we ain’t got a lot of time to dig into it right now.” He made a face. “Help is help in this situation. I guess we need all of that we can get.”

  “We do indeed,” Hendricks said and came within about a millimeter of asking Arch if he thought his wife was going to be a help or not. He didn’t, though, because he could’ve felt the tension between the two of them even if he hadn’t known Arch for a little while now.

  ***

  “So what do you think this is?” Erin asked, waiting to see what Lerner said. She figured now that she had him alone, maybe she’d get the straight dope, the rumors and shit he didn’t feel compelled to share with a larger group.

  “Fuck if I know,” Lerner said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen a few bodies get the shit beaten out of them, flung for a distance like these two have been, but it never quite looked like this. I mean, this shit isn’t like a beating. This is the sort of thing you’d swear was vehicular homicide if you didn’t already smell demons slinking about in the streets.”

  “You said ‘slinking,’” Erin said, glancing over at him. He was cool as a cucumber, just sitting back like he didn’t care. “You don’t like your own kind?”

  “I don’t like trouble,” Lerner said, not looking at her. She didn’t mind; she didn’t like his grin anyway. “Every one of the ones that’s draw
n to a hotspot is trouble, lots of them with a capital T. It’s the nature of my job to deal with trouble, but much like a prison guard, I don’t have a lot of love for the inmates.”

  “You run across a lot of the same shit?”

  “There’s a lot of variety in the demon world,” Lerner said, still pretty close to neutral—and not like a douche. “Hell, you should remember, you grabbed your boyfriend’s demon guide. Thick book, right?”

  “Like a Bible or an encyclopedia,” she said.

  “It probably doesn’t even cover close to everything,” Lerner said, putting his hands up behind his head and leaning back into the seat rest. She worried his slick hair would get grease on the upholstery, but she didn’t say anything, just ticked another box against him. “There’s a lot of different kinds of demons out there. We number as many as the stars in the skies.”

  She thought that sounded vaguely familiar but didn’t know from where exactly. “So how do you tell what you’re dealing with?”

  “The thing you gotta understand,” Lerner said, and he finally turned his head to face her, lecturing like he was some professor and she was some fresh-faced student just out of high school, who didn’t know the world was going to fuck her for all it was worth, “is that most of the kinds in that book your boyfriend has are extinct or nearly extinct. They may have been prolific back in the day, but there was a war between man and demon, and demonkind got its collective ass kicked real hearty. Lots of species died off or came near enough to it as not to matter. The ones that survived learned to adapt and go underground. Stay out of human sight, keep things quiet, let them forget about our kind. Those are the ones that are still walking, still feeding and living their lives. Maybe they were fruitful and multiplied, who knows—”

  “Don’t you know?” she asked. “Weren’t you there?”

  “Hah!” He barked a laugh. “Good one, kid, but I’ve only been on earth for about a century. This was thousands of years ago. Point is, the demons you see today are mostly integrated into human society. The troublemakers are the ones that travel around, look for the places of upheaval—hotspots—and thrive on the chaos there. They come to a town like this, where you probably had more than a few demons living already, all peaceful and normal, and they stir the pot. They come and whatever they touch gets tainted. Corrupted, I guess you could say.” Lerner’s expression turned dark. “Just like a good man might live his whole life decent and gentle in a place where he’s safe and secure. But you put that same man in a lawless waste where he’s gotta steal and kill to survive, and you get a whole different animal. See, these wanderers, these agents of chaos—they come to a hotspot when it flares, and they start breaking down society. Dead bodies in the streets. Some family gets turned into dinner. Worse things happen. Point is—that lawful demon who’s just been living his life, suddenly he’s wondering why he’s bothering. He’s strong—stronger than a human. Maybe he’s got a taste for flesh, wants something his neighbor has—so he takes it. Because he saw someone else do it. Because he can. Because all the things that told him how normal it was to just be one of the people, they start to evaporate.” Lerner tapped the window with his fingertips, and Erin saw him leave oily residue on them. “See, the process of corruption leaves marks behind. Leaves spots. Dirt. The things that were once clean and pretty get ugly fast.” He held up his hand, then used his sleeve to wipe the fingerprints, leaving a smudge behind. “But just like this, it doesn’t come off so easily.” His smile was gone. “Sometimes it never goes away.”