Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Well, gosh,” Father Nguyen said, “that’s not very reassuring for the safety of the children.”

  “Oh, the irony,” Brian Longholt said.

  “Predictable,” Hendricks snapped at him. “Goddamn, why are you so fucking predictable?”

  Brian stared at the cowboy, his mouth slightly agape. “I—excuse me?”

  “Hold your fire on each other until after we wrap this up, all right?” Reeve said. “Let’s just … keep Halloween in mind, then. Plan to be on the streets in bigger numbers, and uh, keep our ears to the ground, all right?” He looked around, but nobody said much of anything. “Adjourned, then.”

  Arch frowned as Hendricks took off for the door before anyone else had even started to move. He was out of it before Arch could even make the counter.

  *

  Hendricks was halfway across the parking lot when he heard his name called and stopped, mostly out of politeness to the person who’d called it. He turned slowly back to see Arch standing at the station door, all cleaned up in his khakis like when Hendricks had first met him. He even had his holster back on his hip, though now he was wearing his sword on the other side, which was a weird look on a Southern lawman, even to Hendricks.

  Hendricks drew his coat in close around him, listening to the canvas make noise as he did so. The air was chilly as he breathed it in through his nose, the smell of diesel exhaust from the nearby highway wafting over him. “What’s up, Arch?” he called back, thrusting his hands in his pockets.

  “I was wondering the same about you,” Arch said, sauntering his way over to Hendricks in that stiff-ass way he had. Hendricks always did think he moved a little funny, but then Arch wasn’t exactly the type to fit any mold. “How are you doing?” Arch asked, lowering his voice now that they were only a few feet away from each other.

  “Why I’m just fine,” Hendricks said. “Fine as a frog’s hair, in fact.”

  “I believe that’d make you ‘nothing’ rather than ‘fine.’”

  “Well, nothing’s better than something,” Hendricks said before realizing he didn’t have a damned clue what that even meant and shaking his head.

  “You got a burr in your saddle?” Arch asked, easing a little closer.

  “I don’t love meetings,” Hendricks said, letting that explanation do for an answer. It wasn’t untrue; it just wasn’t the answer to the question asked.

  “We need to organize,” Arch said.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m not in charge of that,” Hendricks said, adjusting his hat.

  “You could be a little more helpful, though,” Arch said, clearly trying to be as tactful as he could.

  “Probably,” Hendricks said.

  “You come off ornery, you know.”

  Hendricks paused before answering that one. “When’s it gonna be just you and me again, Arch?”

  Arch raised an eyebrow. “When everyone else is dead, I expect, and since I don’t favor that outcome—”

  “It was easier when it was the two of us,” Hendricks said without enthusiasm. “Or when it was us plus Bill and Alison and Duncan. Now we’ve got all these goddamned people, and half of them I don’t know, and your brother-in-law I can’t fucking stand—” Hendricks made a noise deep in his throat, guttural and angry. “Your old boss, who made our lives miserable and drove us out into the country, is now giving the orders—”

  “He’s the sheriff,” Arch said. “And it’s not his fault I didn’t square with him, or he might have been in all along—”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Hendricks said, frowning. “I lived years of my life taking orders. Forgive me for not jumping up and down with cheerleader-like excitement when they start coming my way again.”

  “What’s wrong with cheerleaders?” Alison said, emerging from the station door with her arms folded in front of her over her flannel shirt. She hadn’t been wearing it a minute ago, so Hendricks concluded it must be some sort of half-ass jacket she put on to block the cold.

  “Nothing,” Hendricks said, shrugging. “They’re perfectly fine, fuckable people in most cases. I just don’t feel like being one.”

  “Because you don’t want to be a fine, fuckable person?” Alison asked, jabbing him as she smiled slyly. Arch just cringed at her use of profanity, which was always hilarious to Hendricks.

  “Darling, we were just having a conversation here,” Arch started.

  “Were you asking Hendricks what got up his ass?” Alison asked.

  “Definitely not a ham-handed proctologist,” Hendricks fired back.

  “That’s good to know,” she said coolly. “What are you up to for the rest of the day?”

  “I got my exercises to do,” Hendricks said. “Gotta keep in shape, you know.”

  The door to the station opened again, and out stepped Erin Harris. She locked eyes with Hendricks on her way out the door and froze just a second. He didn’t want to look away first, but he did, turning to get back to his car.

  “See you later,” Alison said, overly loud.

  “I’m sure,” Hendricks spun to deliver his reply, walking backward all the while so he could get away as soon as possible.

  *

  No sooner was Hendricks in his car than he fired it up, the rental SUV he’d taken from Kitty Elizabeth belching a cloud of mist as it started. Alison was watching. He jacked the damned thing in gear like a second later and she heard the transmission do a power drop, not quite fully in gear before he hit the accelerator. It made a little noise, and he gunned it backwards, then floored it out of the parking lot in a squeal of tires that left the scent of burning rubber in a cloud that almost made Alison sicker than she was already feeling.

  She coughed weakly and slapped Arch on the shoulder. “Dammit, what were you thinking?”

  Arch let a little cough of his own, his expression sour, and not just from the smell of rubber. “I was thinking I’d ask him what was wrong.”

  “You know damned well what’s wrong with him,” Alison said, shaking her head at her husband’s unbelievable denseness.

  “Really?” Erin interjected, stepping into the conversation. “Because I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but I’m wondering if it might be something a speeding ticket could fix, since he looked like he was heading for one.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Alison said.

  “If you were me as a sheriff’s deputy?” Erin asked, cocking a faded blond eyebrow at her. “Or me as—”

  “You as the person he was screwing most recently,” Alison said, just giving it to her straight. “Hendricks is damaged right now.”

  “He’s been damaged since I’ve met him,” Erin scoffed. There was plainly some real bad blood there, Alison saw.

  “Well, he’s a lot more damaged since Kitty Elizabeth got her immaculately-done nails sunk into his ass,” Alison said, watching Arch’s near-inscrutable expression all the while. “He’s fucked up in ways that he wasn’t before, which probably took some doing.”

  “I like how every time you say ‘fuck,’ Arch acts like you’ve just said ‘Voldemort’ in the wizarding world,” Erin said, a dry sort of nastiness to her tone that Alison couldn’t remember hearing from her before the accident.

  “Yeah, it’s really funny how I don’t like the sound of my wife swearing,” Arch said under his breath.

  “It is funny,” Erin said.

  “What do you think, Erin?” Alison asked, more to see if she guessed right on the deputy’s read of Hendricks than because she really cared what the girl thought.

  “Hendricks is just a boy,” Erin said, shrugging it off like it meant nothing. Alison caught a glimpse of the pain behind the eyes, though, and if she’d been feeling a little less sickly and a bit more ornery, she might have told her so. That wasn’t likely to do much good, though, so she just let it pass. “Boys do what boys do, and then they go off and fuss and moan about it all afterward.”

  “You don’t think he took some damage from Kitty Elizabeth?” Arch asked.

&
nbsp; “What’d she do, cut his balls off?” Erin scoffed.

  “Tortured him for sure. And likely raped him,” Alison answered for Arch, who’d gotten his stony face.

  “Gross,” Erin said, making a face like she’d just had shit rammed right up to her lips. She paused for a second. “Like, made him—”

  “Does it matter?” Alison asked.

  Erin’s gears spun around a couple more times, but she didn’t speak until they stopped. “So you think he’s chugging along, even more angsty and damaged than before?”

  “Yeah,” Alison said. “I think it’s—I think she’s—in his head. All the time, maybe. Not sure if he knows it or if she’s just lurking in the shadows, but she’s there. He’s not saying anything, so it’d be tough to tell.”

  “Feels like that’d be the sort of thing to stick with a man for a while,” Arch said in solemn agreement.

  “Like he wasn’t fucked up enough already,” Erin said, kind of regretfully as she stared after the SUV that was now long, long gone.

  *

  It was more than a little bit of a relief to Reeve when he called the meeting to a close. While this one hadn’t gone as bad as the one last night, he couldn’t exactly chalk it up in the success column, either. Between the cowboy on PMS, the stoner who couldn’t even do his one job, and the discord about what exactly defined a town in chaos … On second thought, Reeve wasn’t sure if this meeting actually had been any better than the one last night.

  “You did fine, Nick,” Donna said, sliding up to him as soon as the meeting was done. She always did know what to say, and she said it with a little smile on her face.

  “Hey, Duncan,” Reeve said, trying to get the attention of the demon. He said the name awkwardly, like he didn’t even really know how to pronounce it. It wasn’t his fault; Nicholas Reeve couldn’t recall a time he’d ever really talked with an actual demon before, unless he counted Lex Deivrel, the lawyer. Which he mostly guessed he did.

  “Sheriff,” Duncan said, coming up to him with his black ‘Naked Prozac’ t-shirt bunched up around his slightly protruding belly. Reeve wouldn’t have known what the hell ‘Naked Prozac’ even was, but thanks to Alison Stan and a similar shirt, he knew it was a band that played music that even Warren Buffett couldn’t have paid him enough money to listen to.

  “I appreciate your help during all this,” Reeve said, “assisting us unskilled rubes in how to, uh, kill your people and all.”

  Duncan didn’t react to that. “Demons as a whole aren’t really a thing. There’s hundreds of species, and while we’re all theoretically bound by the laws of the Pact and subject to the Office of Occultic Concordance, thinking of us as the same people would be just as erroneous as assuming you and Martians were the same.”

  Jesus, there are Martians? Reeve didn’t say, but only because he caught himself at the last second. “Still, as a fellow lawman, your help is appreciated,” he said instead.

  “There are no Martians that I know of,” Duncan offered helpfully. “It was obvious as the nose on your face,” the demon answered after giving Reeve a second to experience the cold, clutching fear of wondering if his mind had just been read.

  “So we don’t have to worry about Halloween?” Reeve asked again. That was a nagging thought for him, the idea that all hell would break loose in the streets of Midian while there were kids out there. It was bad enough losing the few kids to this shit that they already had.

  “I don’t think so,” Duncan said. “Things could change between now and then, but for now, just so long as there are plenty of adults and we’re watching, I think we’ll be okay. Any demon who wanted to start shit in the middle of all that would have to have a death wish, and whatever else you might think of us—and I’m actually speaking of pretty much every species here—we’re not really that into glorious, pointless, self-destruction.”

  “Best news I’ve heard all day,” Reeve said, and suddenly he realized that Casey Meacham had cornered Father Nguyen. The priest had his eyes open wide, and his lips were a thin line. Reed just stared over Duncan’s shoulder at them, wondering what was being said. “Shit. That can’t be good.”

  *

  “And this other time, there were these three hookers, one male and two female—” Casey Meacham said as Father Nguyen just stood there, listening as the horror rose within him.

  “Wait, wait,” Nguyen managed to get out, cutting him off. “Why are you telling me these things? There’s no confessional here.” He paused. “Wait. Are you even Catholic?”

  “What? No,” Casey said. “I just figured you might like a good story.” The taxidermist broke into a grin. “Thought this might be the sort of thing you wouldn’t have heard before.”

  *

  “Thanks for the assist back there,” Brian said, wandering over to Dr. Darlington, who was standing back, watching Casey Meacham appall the hell out of Father Nguyen with something approaching amusement. When she looked up at him quizzically, he elaborated. “On the dumping the remains thing. I was worried about how that was going to go over.”

  “Yeah, well,” Lauren said, shrugging, bringing the coffee cup up to her lips. “Just speak your piece next time.”

  Brian felt the hot flush run across his cheeks. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, leaning in a little closer as Casey Meacham burst into a cackling laugh behind him, “but that’s not the sort of argument that goes over real well around here.”

  Lauren just stared at him blankly. “You don’t think anyone would give a shit if you dumped a radioactive corpse near the reservoir and killed the whole town?” Her meaning was plain: Are you out of your goddamned mind?

  “I think they’d care if I killed all the fish in the Caledonia River,” Brian said with a smirk.

  She rolled her eyes. “Listen … Brian …” It was amazing how much patronization she could cram into his name and one other word.

  “What?” He leaned in closer, trying to look as concerned as he could.

  Her eye roll came down to meet his. “I know you’re probably used to being a really smart person in an environment of really smart people at Princeton or Columbia or wherever you were—”

  “Brown,” he said, a little self-consciously.

  “—but there’s a difference between not being in the Ivy League anymore,” she went on, “and assuming everyone around you is a fucking idiot.”

  “I …” He stuttered, fishing for a response. “I—I don’t assume everyone is an idiot, I just, y’know, try to approach my audience—”

  “Like they’re idiots,” Lauren finished for him. She showed not one trace of humor, and it definitely put him off his game. “I get it, I do. You’ve spent years at loggerheads with the people in this town over God knows how many things. You go off out into the world, you connect with people who totally get you, who believe the same things you do, and it’s like you were born into the wrong family and now you’ve found the right one, and all is good. Then you leave that and have to come back.” She shrugged. “I understand that, probably better than you know—”

  “I’m sure you—”

  “Still talking here,” Lauren interrupted him. “But just because you’ve disagreed with these people or some of them have done you wrong or most of them didn’t understand your gentle, brilliant philosopher’s soul—” that one stung, he had to admit, “—you’re carrying all that baggage into these meetings, and everywhere else in your life. It’s gotta be exhausting.” She took a sip of coffee. “I mean, it’s exhausting for me to watch you try and interact with people while doing it, so I would guess it’s worse for you.”

  “That’s … there’s a difference between baggage and experience,” Brian said, trying to shape his umbrage into an argument rather than sputtering in pure outrage. “I mean, you can’t deny that this town—”

  “Is being attacked by demons,” she said, pulling the coffee cup away from her lips. “I had all the same problems you did. With my mom. With the town. I have a list of people who
were shitty to me when I was a pregnant, unwed teenage mother. It’s long. But the day my daughter almost got raped by a demon and I found out people were being murdered by these things, my list, my issues with people around here started to look a lot pettier than usual. It’s like the difference between seeing someone’s face at an inch and at half a mile—”

  “You’re just airbrushing away your problems, then.”

  “I’m overlooking them for now and focusing on bigger ones,” Lauren said. “This isn’t a Cosmo cover shoot, all right? If the problems I have are still there once the demons have been driven out of Midian, cool, I’ll pick my baggage up just like you and go back to whapping people upside the head for this shit. I’ve got grievances aplenty.” She shrugged, keeping careful command of her coffee. “But they’re not gonna mean anything if all the people that I have them with are dead, because the likelihood is the people I don’t have them with are going to be lined up right beside them. Demons don’t care who they kill or hurt. I care, though. Even about the people who pissed me off back in the day.”

  “Well …” Brian paused, trying to figure out how to respond to that. “How do you do that?”

  “Look past the flaws of the people in this room,” Lauren said, pushing off the counter where she was leaning. “Maybe focus on your own for a while. Or just stop being a smug dick when you can’t swing a sword for shit.” She pointed at the gladius on his belt.

  He stood there, open-jawed. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She edged a little closer. “There’s no shame in admitting that being out in the fight isn’t for you.”

  “So I’m supposed to just join Felicity Smoak as Overwatch?” Brian asked. “Because I think you’ll find very few cameras or doors to hack around Midian, and I suck at computer science-y stuff anyway.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know who that is.”

  Brian settled back, his anger having piped out a little. “I just … don’t know how I can stand back and be of any damned use at all in this fight.”

  “Better trying to be of use from the outside than being out there in the thick of things and accidentally getting someone killed while they’re trying to cover your ass. You know?” She brushed his shoulder lightly with a hand as she went past, and any other arguments he might have made were deader than a demon with a holy sword through it.