by Sam Witt
CHAPTER 18
JOE ROLLED HIS badge from hand to hand. Stared at the front, then the back, rolled it over to the front again. Blood and ichor had settled into the engravings, staining them deep black. The spike was mangled from the abuse it had suffered. Joe had turned it into a tarnished fishhook with a dulled point. His left palm was split by crescents of blood where the badge had chewed into it with every punch. Joe sighed and hunched over, careful not to break open any of his scabbing wounds. The bleeding had stopped for the moment, but experience told Joe he was one hasty move from tearing something open and leaking more of his vital fluids into the dirt. The Night Marshal was gifted with the ability to heal from his injuries much faster than other men, but he knew he was close to his limits.
He was worried too, about the weakness he’d felt since waking in the house. As the Night Marshal, he was gifted with supernatural strength and vitality, the better to stand up to the evils he faced. It rested inside him, a heavy weight of energy that he’d been able to feel since the day he picked up the badge. But, now, that weight felt lighter, less substantial. It was still there, but Joe felt as if there were something in his way when he reached out for it.
He’d gone through the house and found his duster and boots, tossed in the corner of the kitchen with the rest of the trash. His hat hadn’t turned up, and he didn’t have the strength to go looking for it. He already missed it.
One of the Pryor boys had gotten into the wind, fled in the mayhem. With any luck, the stupid fucker would fall into one of the dead mine shafts littering the hills around the farm and kill himself before he could stir up any more trouble. Joe didn’t think he was much of a threat, in any case. The dead one in the coveralls seemed like the limited brains of the operation, and he was a cooling corpse.
Sitting on the porch, Joe wondered how he’d come to this point. He should never have answered his father’s call all those years ago. Should have stayed on the road, far from Pitchfork County, far from Stevie, far from the son he hadn’t known. Maybe then his father would still be alive. Al and Stevie would be able to live as they chose, without worry about what Joe thought or what the Law said. He spat, angry with himself for regretting a decision most of a decade past.
All he’d wanted was to save his county from the darkness, to uphold the Night Law and keep people safe from the strange powers and eldritch monstrosities that called Pitchfork County home. Somewhere along the way, his best intentions had turned to blood and nightmares. People he thought he was protecting were afraid of him. Idiots he should have killed had crawled up out of his nightmares to make him regret his moments of mercy. He didn’t see how any of this would end well, for anyone.
Headlights crawled off the main road and up the long, winding driveway. The yellow glow played over spilled blood and broken bodies: the corpse in coveralls, the two wounded Pryors, the Night Marshal. The old car rattled to a stop, and its lights died. Joe limped off the porch over to the car. He felt old. He needed a drink to calm his twitching nerves. But there was still so much work left to do before he could rest.
The sheriff hauled his belly out of the patrol car. He flicked his flashlight from body to body. The bright light swung up to Joe’s face. The Night Marshal raised his hand to shield his eyes.
“Really, Dan?” The light shifted back to the ground. “Thanks for coming.”
“Can’t be too sure.” Dan stepped up to Joe and looked him over. “You look like roadkill.”
“You bring the stuff?”
“Much as I could get on short notice.”
The two men walked around to the back of the cruiser and the sheriff opened the trunk. There were six blue-and-white cylinders that looked like oversized tubes of cookie dough, a black box with a big red X taped across its top, and sacks of plastic bottles of kerosene in various colors. Joe picked up a cherry-red bottle and held it to the trunk’s weak light.
“Cranberry?”
“Best I could do. Least it’ll smell good while it burns.”
Joe grunted at that and loaded the bottles of kerosene into the ratty Walmart bags in the sheriff’s trunk. “I’ll take the top floor, you do the —“
“No.” The sheriff shook his head. “I’m not burning down a house. That is not my job.”
“Dan, these freaks made that girl down at the church. Burning this place is justice. It is your fucking job.”
“That’s your justice, your law. You got a court order to start a fire here?” Dan spat a grainy glob of tobacco juice onto the gravel. “No? Then burn the place yourself.I can’t be party to that.”
“Fine. At least carry some of this shit.” Joe shoved a pair of bags into Dan’s hands, then loaded up two more for himself. “You owe me at least that much for cleaning up this shithole.”
“I don’t owe you fuck-all,” Dan muttered. But he followed Joe up the rickety front steps and into the house.
Joe wound his way through the house, splashing kerosene around as he went.
Dan followed in Joe’s footsteps. “You slaughter the whole family?”
Joe laughed, a raw bark that rattled through the house like a kicked can. “Should have the first time I came here. Didn’t this time either. Two of the three out front are still alive. Another one of the slippery assholes got away.”
“Too bad. Sounds like paperwork for me.”
“I could drag the two live ones in here and light ‘em up, if that’s what you want.” Joe emptied the last of the bottles and lead Dan into the sitting room.
“A little late now.” Dan spat again. “You can’t just tell me that kind of shit. Have a little consideration for the actual law.”
“What’s gotten into you, Dan?” Joe took a bottle from Dan’s bag. A high keening filled the room, crawling out of the witch light on the table and digging at his eardrums, scratching at his nerves. Joe shoved the shaken sheriff out of the room. “You-know-who isn’t going to be thrilled if you keep bristling up every time I ask for a little help.”
“I’m tired, and I’m the sheriff here, not your errand boy. I won’t stop you, but you can’t ask me to break the law.”
Joe didn’t say a word as he finished soaking the place with kerosene. His head swam from the fumes, and he was too tired to fight. He led the sheriff back out of the house to the trunk. “We’ll talk about this later, after I’ve had a chance to get a drink and sleep for a few weeks.”
Dan shrugged. “Caps in the box with the X. I’ve got the detonator right here.”
Joe stuck his hand out, and the sheriff slapped a little black wand across his fingers. “Just hit the button when you’re ready to blow it up.”
The Night Marshal tucked the detonator into his shirt pocket and picked up the caps and explosives. The tubes felt warm and heavy in his hands, like living things waiting to attack. He carried them into the house, ready for it all to be over.
He found his way to the basement, tried not to look at the rim of the well, splattered with blood, or the chains with moist shreds of Al’s flesh still clinging to them. Joe crouched next to the hole and opened the box of detonators. He stabbed one into each of the tubes, pushing and twisting them in to secure the electrodes in the clay. He threw two of the tubes down next to the old well, then left the basement. He chucked another pair into the sitting room, threw one up the stairs, tossed another into the kitchen.
Back outside, he grabbed the dead man in the coveralls by the ankles and hauled him up onto the porch. He didn’t like the way that one had sounded toward the end. No sense in taking chances.
Joe waggled the wand in the sheriff’s direction. “Mind giving me a ride up the road before I set this off?”
“Sure.”
“Can we load these two up?” He pointed down at the two groaning men. “Put them in a holding cell until I can get down to see them in the morning?”
“Fine.”
When the sheriff didn’t move to help him, Joe sighed and bent his aching back to load the unconscious men into the back of the cruis
er. They were covered with blood and bruises, but Joe didn’t think their injuries were life threatening. Just painful. He felt sick to his stomach, thinking how close he’d come to shooting his own son for a crime he hadn’t committed. Maybe Dan was right; maybe he’d gone too far. But he didn’t have time to think like that. Doubt slowed him down, made him weak and uncertain. When facing the madness that seethed just beneath the surface of Pitchfork, second thoughts were not a luxury Joe could afford.
The Night Marshal slid into the cruiser’s passenger seat and slammed the door. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as they reversed down the driveway toward the road. After a few seconds, he lifted the wand and pointed it at the house, pressed the button. “Ignitium Assholium.”
Dan snorted. “Harry Potter, you are not.”
A pillar of flame lifted the old place off its foundation, tearing the main building loose from the rickety additions. A shockwave roared down the driveway, kicking gravel and dust into the windshield and shoving the car hard to one side, rocking it up onto two wheels. It banged back down, shocks screaming in protest.
Through the dust, Joe could see the ruins of the house, jagged splinters thrust up from the earth, shattered stones in pools of fire. Ragged fissures in the earth radiated out from the blast site, spewing flames into the night sky. Black shadows flitted through the rising smoke, deeper pockets of darkness swarming toward the stars. The shadows caught fire and fell back, their power burnt away, their connection to this world lost as whatever dark arts had bound them to the house were destroyed.
“They were monsters, Dan.” Joe pointed at the burning shadows. “You know I’m right.”
“You have your law,” the sheriff said and spun the car away from the carnage, “and I have mine. Where’s your truck?”
Joe gave directions and eyeballed the sheriff on the ride back to where he’d left his old truck. There was something different about the man, more than this new streak of rebellion up his spine. A change. Joe worried at it like an old hound with a bone, but he couldn’t put his finger on what had changed in the man next to him.
“I’ll hold them for twenty-four hours, Joe. After that, I have to cut ‘em loose.” Dan stopped the car next to Joe’s beat-up old truck.
“You’ll hold them until hell freezes over if that’s what I want.” Joe threw the door of the cruiser open and unfolded through it like a praying mantis out for a stretch. “You need to remember who pulls the strings around here. You keep this shit up, I’m going to make a phone call, and the three of us can have an old-fashioned palaver.”
“One day,” Dan snarled and threw the cruiser into reverse. Joe just managed to jump away from the still-open door as the sheriff swung the car in a tight half circle. The cruiser’s engine revved, and the door slammed shut. Joe watched the patrol car blast off down the winding road, and its lights were out of sight long before the whine of its engine had died away. He didn’t know what had gotten into Dan, but he’d beat it out of him if need be.
He drove the truck home, grumbling right along with the ancient engine. He was dead tired and felt like he’d been run over and dragged down a gravel road for a couple of miles. All he wanted was a bottle of Jack and his bed. He eased the truck up the driveway, mouth dry with anticipation of the smooth amber liquor waiting for him.
Joe’s house was a big place, imposing. Natural stone walls rose to a steep roof clad in layers of overlapping clay tiles. The windows were all dark, but the porch light was on, and a golden-haired angel sat in its pale glow, rocking in the old chair Joe’s father had made for his dead mother.
The Night Marshal climbed the steps to his porch, slow and with great care, trying to keep from running, from charging, at Stevie where she sat. His vision blurred, and he wanted to snatch his wife into his arms, crush her against his chest, and kiss her until her heart beat its last and her lungs emptied into his mouth. He loved her, he hated her, and he was in no mood to deal with her after the day he’d had.
“Go on back down to your place, Stevie. Been a bad day.”
She didn’t move. Just watched him climb the steps, her green eyes fierce, her mouth a straight slash between flushed cheeks. “No.”
“Stevie,” Joe’s left fist clenched, and his right fingers twitched. “Not tonight.”
“What have you done, Joe?” Stevie stood up from the chair and her long black dress flowed out around her feet like spilled ink. “What followed you home this time?”
“Stevie, I —“
The slap rocked Joe’s head hard to the left. He caught himself against the porch railing with his good hand.
He turned back to Stevie, squared his shoulders and licked the blood from his split lip.
Her hand came back the other way and split Joe’s lip wide open on that side, too. “What have you done to my babies?”
CHAPTER 19
JOE SNARED STEVIE’S swinging hand out of the air and spun his wife toward the house.
Her feet tangled, and she stumbled into the screen door, face pressed tight against the wire mesh. She shook her hand loose and whipped around to face Joe, fingers hooked into talons at her sides. Stevie glared at Joe, cheeks flushed red, eyes burning bright with rage.
Joe’s face stung where she’d laid hands on him, an infuriating pain that dredged old hurts up out of the darkness of his heart. He breathed deep, forcing air past his bruised ribs, willing his thundering heart to slow.
“This isn’t us, Stevie.” Joe forced his hand to relax, his fist to open. “This is what your mama did. Let’s not get tangled.”
His words splashed over Stevie like a bucket of ice water. She blinked hard and shook herself, as if she could shrug off the dark mojo her mother had wrapped around them both all those years ago.
“Something’s wrong, Joe. Bad wrong.” She opened the door and held it for him. “We need to talk.”
Joe took the door from Stevie, careful to hold it high above her hand, let her get ahead of him before he went inside. No point in risking another touch and stirring up the bad blood between them. After all these years, they still couldn’t harness their passion and keep it from turning dark and hateful.
Al was waiting in the family room, naked except for a pair of jeans he’d hacked off at the knees. His chest and shoulders were scored with deep scratches and angry bruises from his ordeal at the Pryor house. He crouched on the back of the sofa, hunched over his little sister where she lay quiet on the cushions. Al glared at his father. “Happy now?”
“What happened?” Joe stepped past Stevie and knelt before his daughter. He took her cold hand between his palms, rubbing them together to try and warm her freezing fingers. Elsa stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide and clear and blind as if they’d been plucked from her skull. “Who did this?”
Stevie walked around the back of the couch and put her hand on Al’s shoulder. He winced, and she moved her hand, only to land on yet another scabbing slash. Al reached up to hold her hand.
“Why don’t you tell us, Joe?” Stevie asked.
“It isn’t me,” Joe said. “Al and I finished that mess tonight. When did this happen?”
“Hours ago. Near sundown.”
“Before or after?”
Joe’s thoughts were back under the bats, the swarm falling around him, their wings whispering, the eye boring into his skull. He remembered the thing tasting him, drinking his blood through the mutant bats it controlled. It had seen him, but more than that, it knew him.
“After what?” Stevie gnawed her lower lip and watched Joe study their daughter.
“Sundown.”
“Sure. I guess.”
Joe tried not to think of the change in the man he’d killed, the strange presence he’d sensed in the house. Had it come for Elsa? Her gifts made her strong, but vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. It all made a terrible, sickening sense.
He held tight to his daughter, hoping he could hide his trembling fingers by hanging on to her. He drew another deep breath, aware of the
weight of his family on his shoulders, of Al’s rage and disappointment, of the storm of emotions brewing in Stevie’s heart. He had to be strong. He had to look.
Joe leaned forward and looked at Elsa’s right eye. One pupil, wide and black and empty as a moonless autumn night. So far, so good.
“Come on, baby.” The Night Marshal rubbed his little girl’s hands. “Please come back to me.”
He stared at Elsa’s left eye. His breath gushed out of him, relief sucking the air from his lungs and leaving him weak and ragged.
“She’ll be all right,” he said, though he wasn’t sure that was true. Something had happened here, even if it wasn’t related to what he’d been involved in for the last few days. But there was just one pupil in her little eye, which meant that thing hadn’t come beaten him home, hadn’t burrowed into his daughter’s special head and taken root. “She’s going to be fine.”
“You believe that?” Stevie’s voice cracked like a whip, cutting through Joe’s relief and slashing open his doubts. “Do you really believe that?”
Al leaned over and scooped Elsa off the couch, pulling her hand from Joe’s grip with deft, strong hands. Joe watched his children vanish from the room, heading into the shadows of the kitchen, to their rooms on the other side of the house. The rooms they’d never slept in, because Joe didn’t trust himself to be so close to their caged darkness.
“I do,” Joe stood and turned from the couch. He walked over to the liquor cabinet next to the small television and took his time pouring a tumbler of whiskey. He took one slow drink to steel his nerves, then turned back to his wife. “Everyone is going to be fine, Stevie. We put an end to whatever it is they were doing out there. Ask Al if you don’t believe me.”
“Al won’t talk about what happened. He turned up at the little house naked and bloody, wouldn’t say a word to me.” Stevie blew her hair out of her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “He could have been killed, Joe. It looks like he almost was.”
