“Several,” Lauren said. “Or shrugged a few off, at least.” That one got Molly frowning, so she explained. “Demons just sort of … well, bullets don’t hurt them much.”
“Oh.” Molly steadied herself, letting go of Lauren. “So … are you in for the night?”
“I blew off work, if that’s what you mean. Got a meeting later,” Lauren said, heading on through into the kitchen, where her mother was standing before the stove, looking like she was about to get to making some dinner but had paused to listen to Lauren. She was peering at her as she came around the corner, just staring at her all serious, clearly eavesdropping while she was out of sight of the door. “Administrator Pike got a judge to issue an order taking Sheriff Reeve out of his job. We got kicked out of the station.”
Her mother’s reaction was barely insulated horror, wrinkled hands popping up to cover her mouth. “Good Lord!”
Molly’s was a little baser. “Holy shit.” Lauren gave her a look of horror all her own. “Errr … dang?” Molly corrected.
“I know,” Lauren said, not really breaking off the dirty look aimed at her daughter. “It came as a blindside to us, too.”
“I wonder if Pike’s a demon?” Molly asked, like she was starting to warm up. Whenever she got this look on her face, frenzied discussion and a shit-ton of questions followed.
“Nope,” Lauren said, causing her mother’s penciled-in eyebrows to rise, “Alison Stan poked him with a holy blade.”
“Well, that’s rude,” Vera said.
“That’s clever,” Molly said.
“It was a little bit of both,” Lauren said, “but it worked. Now we can be assured that he’s probably just operating from a deep-seated sense of denial.”
Molly frowned. “You don’t think it’s something more sinister?”
Lauren’s lips puckered into a frown of her own. “I guess it could be, but … if he was really trying to be dark and evil or something, I think he’d be doing something a lot worse than trying to remove the sheriff from his job. I mean, a true villain would just kill the shit out of—”
“And you wonder why she talks like that,” Vera muttered.
“—whoever was in the way of their evil, right?” Lauren shrugged. “Yeah. I think he’s in denial, because if he really wanted to tear things up,” she gave her mom a pointed glance, “he could do a lot worse than use the court to order the sheriff out of his job.”
“I guess,” Molly said, but she didn’t sound totally convinced. “I suppose true evil would come off a lot more … uh, evil.”
“Exactly,” Lauren said, starting toward the stairs. “And you would recognize him by his villainous theme song. There’d be deep, foreboding music anytime he entered the room, y’know?” She sniffed the air as she heard her mother start to pre-heat the stove. “How long until dinner?”
“Half an hour,” Vera called back.
“I’m gonna get a shower,” Lauren said, making her way up the stairs.
The doorbell dinged when she was about halfway up, and she heard Molly scamper on the wood floor. “I got it!” Molly shouted, and Lauren just yawned. The call of the warm shower and its pulsating head was a lot more powerful than her sense of curiosity about who was at the door.
*
Reeve came into his house a step behind his wife, entering the dim, wood-paneled dining room and smelling the smell of home, which brought him next to no comfort. He’d been silent on the drive home because he hadn’t had much of anything to say, dammit. Having his job ripped right out from under him by that goddamned Yankee had been bad enough, but turning in the keys to his office, his car, cleaning out his desk—hell, all that had been nut-kick frosting on the castration cake. He’d just considered himself fortunate that prick Pike hadn’t demanded he rip off his khaki uniform as property of the sheriff’s department, because that would have just about exposed his newly impotent penis to the damned cold.
Donna turned to look back at him, the same concern in her eyes that he’d been ignoring whole way home. She couldn’t help but worry, because that was her way, but he didn’t love that part of her. It was a nuisance, because while his temptation would be to take all these shitty feelings that were burning him up inside like a lit cigarette in dry brush, she would damned sure want to talk about them, every one, leaf by crackling leaf, until he’d want to take a blowtorch to the pile himself just to get it over with.
“Nick …” she said gently, and he could feel where this was going before it even made the turn.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, and it came out a fair sight less kindly than he’d intended. He just about bit her head off over it, really, and he knew that, and while on a normal day it would have made him feel shitty, this damned sure wasn’t a normal day. He looked down at the khaki uniform and it lit the blaze even harder in him.
He’d spent his whole adult life serving this department, this town, this county, and now they thought he was a liar and a fool. Of all the kicks to the nuts, that might have been the fucking absolute worst. He stared down and felt a wave of revulsion pass over him, a sick to his stomach feeling that was entirely directed outward and not inward. He’d been attacked, insulted, derided, mocked and now his reputation among the people he’d spent his life protecting was in tatters.
“I need to go change,” Reeve said, just about spitting it out, disgusted at himself, at the people of Calhoun County, and mostly at the damned uniform at the moment. If he could have, he would have burned the thing right now and been done with it. Hell, maybe he would, as a giant fuck you to County Administrator Pike and that goddamned traitor Ed Fries. Not like Fries’s fat ass would fit into it anyway.
Fuck it all, that was how he felt, and he stalked off toward the bedroom to change. The sound of a doorbell dinging in the distance only penetrated his consciousness enough to nettle. “Whoever it is, tell them to go fuck themselves,” he shot over his shoulder at Donna. As mad as he was, that was as civil as he could manage to be. He’d apologize later, after he’d gotten off these goddamned khakis.
*
The awkwardness had stayed with them on the entire car trip, but Alison didn’t care. She felt sick to her stomach, and it didn’t have a damned thing to do with her brother and what she’d said. She wasn’t sorry for tipping over his little emotional applecart, because he deserved it and worse, as far as she was concerned. She might normally have been a little more merciful, but Alison was not feeling anything other than irritation at present. Irritation and nausea, and riding in the back seat, stuck between her brother and her husband on the windy roads toward home, hadn’t helped.
When she came in the door, held open for her by Arch, bless his heart, quiet as a mouse, it smelled like nobody had been cooking for a day, and she was still hungry as hell. Ravenous didn’t even describe it, like carrying around kids had burned all the calories she had and more, and she just needed to rummage the pantry and start opening cans to dump them down her throat. She had the weirdest craving, too, like mixing canned ravioli with pickles was a great culinary decision that everyone had been overlooking all these years—
“Oh, shit.” She stopped dead in her tracks, and Arch just about tripped over her as he shut the door and came in. Her mom and dad and Brian were all ahead of her, wandering quietly off to do whatever they were aiming to do, plainly wanting to get clear of her in case she was about to go off again, ticking time bomb that she was.
“What?” Arch mumbled quietly as he came up beside her in the mud room. He was talking low enough that no one else could hear him, even if they hadn’t been working hard to get the fuck away from her at present.
“Let’s … go to our room,” Alison said numbly, suddenly aware in a way she hadn’t been before, and worried and sick all at once. It was the nausea and the crankiness and the sudden delirious hunger mingled with weird cravings that had finally tripped the trigger for her … but … she couldn’t be, could she?
Arch frowned at her. “Uhm … right now?” He
had that clumsy suggestiveness to his tone, like he thought she wanted … but she didn’t, not now. He never was that good at reading her.
“We need to talk,” she said, clarifying, as her head ran through it, jumping like an Olympic gymnast along through a routine, through questions. She hadn’t been on birth control since … well, over two months now. She just hadn’t thought of it because she’d intentionally gotten off it, and when everything had happened with the demons and their sudden exodus out of town, she just hadn’t considered …
Well, shit. She was pregnant. Probably. Almost certainly. She knew her body well enough to know that something was amiss, and she was way, way too young for menopause.
“What about?” Arch asked, loosening a little and sounded disappointed all at once. “The meeting later? Because—”
“No, not about the watch,” she said, brushing him off with a frown that probably came off a lot more irritable than she meant it to. “It’s about …” she looked into his eyes. They were dark brown and lovely, the eyes of the man she’d fallen in love with.
Maybe the same eyes their baby would have.
“I think I’m …” She actually felt a little bubble of excitement make its way over the nervousness. Was this really happening? After all their efforts had failed, had they just sort of stumbled into … well, not stumbled, because they’d been screwing like rabbits since this war had started, but … had they really just wandered into it naturally after all that hard work at the beginning had failed?
Arch looked at her with a steadily deepening frown. “You’re … what?”
“I’m—” The doorbell sounded, and Alison nearly swore out loud. What the hell did it take to get a moment of peace around here?
*
Hendricks was drying off and he heard something thump outside his door, like a faint knocking in the distance. He was all resolved to ignore it, but it came again, persistent and annoying, like Starling had taken it upon herself to thump his headboard while he was showering, knocking her hooker head against it with a client between her legs. That was a strange visual for him, but it was the one that came to mind, and he found it distasteful. It didn’t come with just the image, either, he got a strange whiff of sex when it came, but wrong somehow, different; it wasn’t just sweat and pussy, it was more sulfuric, nauseating, like it was forcing itself up his nose unasked. He almost dropped the towel and shoved his wrist up to his nose in order to make it stop.
He paused, took a breath through his mouth, and it was gone, fresh steam and soap smell returned, though he still felt like he could visualize that scene happening just outside. It triggered a weird feeling in him, the thought of the red-headed hooker who could change into a fiery angel in a heartbeat taking some dude in his bed. He knew that wasn’t happening—or was pretty sure it wasn’t happening, anyway—out in his room, but the image persisted like a vision that wouldn’t leave him alone. He could practically see her sweating, freckled shoulders in front of him, some dude just giving it to her. Now she was face down, burying her moans in the pillow, and Hendricks felt sick. He was sweating again, and not from the heat of the shower.
He also had a precipitous rise in the front of his towel, and that somehow made his stomach churn even harder, revulsion running through him hard, like that time he’d kicked down a door in Ramadi and found an old lady three days dead. The flies had been everywhere, the stink had been rancid, and he’d just about dropped the barrel of his M-16 and chucked on the dusty floor.
He put a hand on the edge of the toilet to steady himself, and that thumping noise came again. He pictured Starling’s red head bumping against the headboard as some unknown John put it to her from behind, her moans reminding him of—
—of—
He dropped to his knees and vomited, barely getting the toilet lid up before his stomach emptied itself. He retched, then retched again, but got control of himself before he spewed. It was all about control, wasn’t it, and he’d never felt this out of control in his life; not when he’d washed up dead, not when Renee was taken from him, not ever. He’d had the benefit of being unconscious while that happened, at least, after the ass-kicking, he hadn’t been awake and alert and forced to—
Now he couldn’t hold it in anymore; he vomited hard. It was like someone took his stomach and turned it inside out with violent force, and yellow bile sprayed out and splattered the porcelain. It came in three successive waves, his choking, acid-tinged upchuck, and by the time he was done it was dripping out of his nose. He stared at it, tears rolling down his face from the violence of the experience or maybe something else, heart beating in his ears, and then he heard—
The door burst open and she was there, staring down at him, his towel discarded in the middle of his sickness. He felt heat rush to his cheeks at the violation, unexpected and unwelcome, Starling standing there fully clothed and looking down on him in some kind of judgment. He opened his mouth to speak, bile-filled drool still dripping off his chin, but she beat him to it.
“They are coming,” she said. A hand hammered on the door to his hotel room, and Hendricks stiffened, still leaned over the toilet, naked as the day he was born, a cold chill running over him that had nothing to do with his nudity or the sickness he’d just felt.
*
“So you’re back,” Duncan said, staring at “Amanda Guthrie” like she’d evaporate without so much as a holy implement to touch her skin. It wasn’t a reasonable fear, but then, nothing that was happening in Midian, Tennessee, was exactly reasonable, was it? She knew Duncan well enough to know the questions that were surely rolling around in his essence at the moment, and they were some juicy ones.
“I’m back,” Amanda announced. “Minus the name, of course.”
“They renamed you.” Duncan nodded idly. It wasn’t a big deal; Lerner hadn’t been his name before, just as Duncan’s name wasn’t actually Duncan.
“You gotta admit,” she said, indicating her new female form, “the old one didn’t quite fit anymore.”
“I heard they were going a little more diverse with the new shells.” Duncan eyed her. “Still, it’s a little weird to see it done this way.”
She looked down at her hand; it was true, seeing the dark tone there where before her shell had been white as a cloud was requiring some adjustment. “I don’t think it’s the skin color that’s tripping you up.”
“It’s not,” Duncan agreed.
“It’s the fact you can’t read me,” Amanda said with a dickish smile. She could still pull that off, though she’d looked in the mirror while she’d done it, and it definitely was not the same as the Lerner shell.
“That’s disconcerting, yes,” Duncan said, “but not that unusual in this town. Not lately, anyway—”
“Fucking Spellman,” Amanda said, feeling that old anger come right back. “You still haven’t ripped that screen to fucking pieces?”
“It’s not an easy thing to pull off,” Duncan said.
“Yeah, well,” Amanda said, getting up off the bed, “that’s practically my mission in life at this point, ripping that bastard to tiny pieces of shell and sulfur.”
Duncan stared at him. “Is it? Is that why they sent you back?” There was a deeper question there, and Amanda had been wondering how long it would take him to bring it up.
Amanda gave him the sly smile, slightly less dickish. “Maybe.”
Duncan didn’t like that, plainly. “You got sent back from the pits. That doesn’t happen, remember?”
“I remember,” she said.
“But you got sent back.”
“Obviously.”
The suspicion just dripped off Duncan. “I haven’t heard from Home Office in months.”
“So you said.” Amanda just stared back at him. “And?”
Duncan opened his mouth to reply, but the hotel door exploded off its hinges at that very moment, and it spared Amanda the trouble of trotting out a very well-practiced lie. She forgot all about it for a little while after that, too, because th
e two of them were fighting for their damned lives about five seconds later.
*
Hendricks barely had time to haul himself off the cheap linoleum before Starling darted out the bathroom door, vanishing around the corner. He listened, strangely frozen in his naked state, wondering exactly who “they” were and how bad this was going to be. He fumbled for the sword he’d left between the shower and the toilet, neatly slicing his finger as he strayed a little too close to the blade below the guard. He cursed and grabbed the hilt, bringing it up, too worried about what was about to go down to try and squeeze his junk into his jeans instead of leaving it flapping in the damned breeze. He didn’t even bother to wipe the vomit off his mouth, he just came around the corner with his sword up, just in time to see Starling jab someone with a finger hard, in the shoulder, sending them rolling back out the door.
He heard them hit the ground with an “Oof!” as the air rushed out of their lungs. They just sat there for a second, on their back, then a head came up and he recognized Lonsdale, blinking and looking stupid, some lady lying next to him that Hendricks had never seen. Lonsdale stared in through the door at Hendricks, utter puzzlement on his face. “Fucking ’ell, Lafayette. What am I doing outside your room? And where are your bloody pants, Brov’ner?”
Hendricks sagged against the doorframe, looking to Starling, who stood between him and the Brit. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked, and then it clicked. “Legion.” And the panic he felt on his knees by the toilet a few minutes earlier suddenly seemed like a long-ago worry, like being scared of a little yippy dog until the angry, bloodthirsty wolf showed up.
*
Lauren was undressed and showering, and it was fucking heaven. She hadn’t checked her voicemail from her boss yet, because she was presently in the real-life version of LA LA LA-ing at the top of her lungs against reality’s attempts to intrude in on her, but she was sure it was going to be a doozy. The hot water helped keep her mind off it, though, making her quite glad that she’d been able to find this short little span of time for herself. Showers were her nirvana, her place where she could just relax and be herself, without any demands on her as a mother or doctor or daughter or demon fighter. She’d left her cell phone in her room and was quite content to leave the world outside the bathroom door.
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 27
