“Stop fucking doing that!” Duncan shouted from beneath the last few demons he was fighting to get out from under. “You’re killing these people!”
“That’s the point,” Amanda said, but she hit the next one coming at her squarely in the nose with a little less force and just shoved her, nose broken and bleeding, blackness vaping out of her eyes, through the hole in the wall like she’d done to the last one. This one would probably get up again, though. Maybe need a little cosmetic surgery, but she’d live. “I’m sick of punching the same faces over and over and getting nowhere.”
“There can’t be that many of them left!” Duncan shouted, way more emotionally exposed than when Amanda had left this planet. That couldn’t be good; Duncan was already soft. Loosening up further was probably a terrible, terrible sign that things were going awry here and that Duncan was opening himself up to the fleshbags.
“There’s enough to kill us,” Amanda said, suddenly missing the Boston accent that she hadn’t even noticed she’d had in the Lerner form. Now she spoke in very highly educated tones, lacking any local inflection. “You should treat this deadly seriously.”
“I’m not sure I do anymore.” Duncan threw a human body across the room, it snapping at him as it arced over the bed. “Not since they’re apparently just letting people out of the pits these days, just turning them loose all willy-nilly—”
“You willing to bet your eternity on that?” Amanda hit him with that one, because she didn’t want to have this discussion yet. Not nearly yet. Maybe never, if she could have swung it, but she knew Duncan too well to think he’d let this go for very long.
“I’m not willing to kill these people for it,” Duncan said, and he drew the damned line. Amanda didn’t like to hear it, but there it was, and it was a bad sign from where she was sitting. They’d seen hundreds and thousands of humans die since they’d partnered up. That was the laws of nature, and it was no use getting too sentimental about it. You didn’t see humans weep giant tears over the passage of flies.
“I am,” Amanda said, and rammed her baton through the ear canal of some poor bastard who looked about twenty. His whole life was probably in front of him, or it had been until Amanda rammed six inches of steel into his brain, then pulled it out, watching the black horror of a demon returning to its origin, and a human’s life fleeing right out of there in tandem.
Duncan hardened up right then, she could feel it. “So that’s how it is, huh?”
“That’s how it is,” Amanda said, drawing a line of her own. “My instructions were clear.” She watched Duncan make a face, a real subtle one. That little thing she’d thrown out was just bait, for later, to try and keep him going in the wrong direction. She’d need him to, at least for a while, because if Duncan got his head out of his ass and started focusing on what was really going on here instead of what the humans were concerned about … well … that was why Amanda was here, after all.
*
Lauren was dragged, naked and screaming, out onto the lawn, and while she wanted to believe she didn’t make it easy on Molly or Yvette, that other lady, she was pretty sure her resistance didn’t make one hell of a lot of difference either way. She ached and burned, cuts on her knees and forearms from trying to fight and claw and scratch and grab onto furniture and doors giving her nothing but a little more blood to show for it. She was sticky with the stuff already, most of it her mother’s, and now she’d just piled on a half-dozen aggravating little wounds, each oozing their own marks of protest at her rough treatment, trailing down her naked flesh and catching there in globs.
Now she was palms down in the dirt, her chest hitting the front lawn and shocks of pain running up through her body like a twin tit punch. Her knees were crying in protest, too, but it was lost in the chorus of a thousand agonies and buried under the trauma of watching her mother get her throat slit right in front of her eyes.
Lauren pushed herself up onto all fours, her hand finding a twig that resisted her, buried in the grass like a dagger. Dirt clung to her body like a thousand tiny pebbles, the grains glued to her skin. She pushed herself up, desperation and fear crackling through her, her wet hair still hanging over her shoulders. Little droplets of water fell past her nose, disappearing into the dirty, thin grass that made up the lawn.
A hard rubber sole kicked her right in the butt cheek with alarming force, driving her forward into the ground again. She jerked her head at the last second but still ended up facedown in the sod, unable to prop herself up with her flagging arms. She hurt, from the kick, from the impact of her landing face-first, the emotional bruise of watching her mother slaughtered like an animal in front of her eyes by her own daughter … it all just hurt.
It made Lauren just want to lie there. What else was she supposed to do? She’d fought as hard as she could against those two demons on her way out of the house and it had done not a damned thing. They hadn’t dragged her anywhere near a weapon she could use to do anything, and now she was naked, in the middle of the front lawn, and if there was anything else she could do to fight them, she was dogged if she could see it.
She thought about playing dead, the dirt and grass against her cheek, just leaving it there. She could lie here for a good long while. She was still in pain, but moving was worse, wasn’t it? When they brought someone into the ER suffering from trauma, it wasn’t like she advised them to get up and run around, after all. Moving was stupid. Fighting back was just going to get her hurt even worse than she already was. She was bleeding from enough places already. There was no hope of actual, effective resistance that would do a damned thing.
It was time to just lie there, she decided. That was the right course.
A little drop of water snaked its way down her temple and stopped when it touched dirt. She could feel it float there as the dry ground started to absorb it, leaving her feeling like there was a crust on her skin, a residual sign that she’d either cried a tear or dripped blood or water. A little mark of what had happened to her just now, a sign of her surrender.
“Get up,” the voice came back to her again, and strong arms clawed at her armpits, fingernails digging into the bare skin and hauled her to her knees. Hadn’t they just kicked her into the dirt? She went limp and made them hold her up. Fuck them. If they wanted to drag her around, she was through giving them any help doing it, or fighting them. She’d just lie there like a jellyfish, like she was dead.
Because inside … she felt like she kind of was.
“Up, up,” the harsh voice came again, blaring out of Molly’s mouth like a bad dub of a foreign film. They held her there, and Lauren just let her head loll limply forward, fixing her eyes on the lawn. Why did it even matter if she was up? Who gave a shit whether she was—
“What the hell is going on out here?” Lauren’s eyes snapped up to see Albert Daniel looking in barely contained horror at the spectacle happening on her lawn, reflection of light hitting his glasses. “Molly, Yvette … what are y’all doing to her?”
Lauren looked right at Albert, and she felt no glimmer of hope. He was older, after all, and the likelihood that he had any kind of a holy weapon on him was about as likely as her growing clothes to cover her nakedness. The sheen of dirt clinging to her skin wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t a bad guy, though she’d never liked him. He’d gawked at her once when she went for a run in a sports bra, and that had set tongues to wagging. He was exactly what she hated about Midian, actually, and yet somehow, looking at him now, she couldn’t help but hope he would just shut up and get away and save himself from this horror show that she’d gotten dragged into.
She opened her mouth to say some version of that, but it wasn’t in time. Not nearly.
Yvette reached under her sweater and drew a pistol, taking cool aim faster than Lauren could properly tell what she was doing. She pointed it right at Albert’s head, and BANG, there was another spray of red not unlike what she’d seen when Molly cut her mother’s throat. Albert dropped like she had when she’d gotten kick
ed in the ass, just folded and fell, facedown, planting on the concrete sidewalk so Lauren could see the gaping hole in the back of his head where the bullet had kicked its way out.
Lauren wanted to scream, wanted to cry, wanted to shout for divine intervention, but something in her just clammed up harder. She sagged to her knees as the demons let her go, and she just stared at that gaping hole in Albert’s head, like it was a black hole that would suck her right up into it, away from this fucking hell that was eating Midian alive.
“All right,” Molly said, in that voice again, that voice of horror and awfulness, that voice she’d spoken in before she ran a dagger hard against Vera’s neck. Lauren didn’t dare look up at her, she was concentrating on Molly’s shoes. They were white and spotted with red everywhere, like she’d painted in them, or like they’d come polka dotted. “Eyes up here,” Molly said, and Lauren didn’t look. She didn’t dare.
“I said fucking look at me!” The voice screamed out of Molly’s mouth, and Lauren couldn’t avoid it anymore. Coercion was coming. She’d be compelled to look at some point, through force, just like they’d ripped her out of the shower and out of her house, torn away her last shreds of safety and exposed her to the world. They’d torn everything away from her—well, everything except one, that last thing—
Lauren raised her head, almost certain she knew what she’d see. She was not disappointed, either; Yvette was standing there, knife in hand, and she had it poised over Molly’s heart. And when Lauren looked up, both of the demons grinned down at her with their real faces, because they knew—they had to—that there was nothing she could do to stop them from killing her daughter right in front of her.
*
Reeve didn’t even finish screaming before she stabbed herself. He barely heard it, a kind of high-pitched, girlish “NOOOO!” at the top of his lungs before he saw a spark of blackness through the flames, the sign of a demon being sucked back to hell riding the thunder.
Donna’s hands jerked once, and the impermeable, invincible flesh that had shown strong through the burning fire instantly lost its strange luster. Her skin started to char and blacken immediately; her clothing had long ago burned off to reveal the body he had seen naked in front of him more times than he could count.
There was another sound, too, beyond that of the pop and hiss of flames. It was another scream, deep and powerful, pain and agony that cut off after a long few seconds as Donna jerked spasmodically in front of him, the fire consuming her flesh.
Reeve’s body came back to him, back to his senses, the smell of burning flesh now added to the rest of the fiery stink that was flooding his sinuses and threatening to gag him. He launched forward and tackled her, slamming her to the ground, the words, “Stop, drop and roll,” thundering back to him from more yearly safety visits to the local schools than he could count. He hit the ground and bounced off her, smacking his back into the doorframe as he tried to do the “roll” part of the thing. It didn’t go so well, penned in as they were by the wooden frame, and the heat rose around him as Reeve hit full panic.
He’d been in fights, he’d been in scrapes, he’d taken on a few demons of late, but watching his wife burst into flames and then stab herself in the heart had been something so sick and demented he wondered what sort of torturous bastard had come up with this plan. He knew the answer was a demon, but it was just so far beyond the pale that when he hit the doorframe for the third time trying to roll Donna to snuff the flames, his brain just snapped into default self-preservation and he tried to push her away. She was limp and unresisting, and that meant something he didn’t even want to think about. Not now, not ever.
Reeve tried to fight back to his feet, tried to figure out the next move. The damned house was starting to burn around him, which was a special kind of alarming, and Donna was just out and burning next to him, like she’d just gone to sleep at his side and they’d woken up with everything on fire. He hoped he’d snap out of it, find out this whole thing was just a shitty nightmare, the mack-daddy worst of them all, but when the fire licked at him, burning him, he knew this shit was all too real.
“Dammit,” Reeve whispered. His head locked onto a new plan—get Donna out of here somehow, because he couldn’t put out the fire on her while everything else was burning. He went to her feet and grabbed her ankles; they were so charred, her socks burned crispy so that the cotton flaked off in ashy pieces like it had never been there, revealing scorched skin underneath.
He ignored that and grabbed a solid hold and started pulling, dragging her back into the bathroom, away from the hallway that was fully engulfed. He lifted his head up enough to realize that black smoke was pooling at the ceiling, and that was dangerous. This was fire department shit, not his deal, but he had to get her out of here before it was too late. Something was scraping the floor hard, resisting his attempts to pull her along and he finally realized it was that goddamned sword of his, stuck through the middle of her chest. The blade was ripping up the finish on the wood floor, he realized dimly. He looked up and saw the dresser burning, the lifetime of family pictures being eaten up by ravenous fire and realized that the scratch to the floor was the least of his problems, so he gently tugged the sword out of her chest with one hand and kept dragging her across the bedroom floor with the other, displacing the rug between the bed and the vanity as he did so. It was on fire anyway.
He stopped when he got to the window on the back bedroom wall. He needed to break it, needed to create an exit, and—no, wait. He needed to put her out now that he was clear of most of the fire. He looked down at the rug he’d caught her on and had his answer. He grabbed the edges and beat them against her, trying to snuff the flames that were already dying anyway. They must have been running low on fuel, the gasoline mostly burned off by this point. He had them out in a few seconds, coughing and hacking like his lungs were turning black all the while.
Reeve tried not to look at her, at the blackened skin like a catfish left in the oven for too long, and he focused on his next problem, brain chugging along faithfully, pinging to one thing at a time. Now he needed to get her out the window. Which meant first, he needed to get the window open.
That was simple enough; he hit the latches and ripped it up, the window squealing as he lifted it so hard that glass broke. He ran the sword around the sill, clearing the fragments and shards, then stuck his head out the window and took deep, hungry breaths. He hadn’t even realized how bad his coughing had gotten, with deep, racking spasms as his lungs sought fresh air.
Taking a deep breath, he tossed the sword out the window and ducked back inside. Distantly, he heard the rattle of the blade against the pavers out back and ignored it as he reached down and grabbed Donna under her arms. The smell of meat cooking over an open fire held a strange appeal, reminded him of his camping days, and he felt sick as he realized that was his wife that he smelled. He ignored the feeling of slippery flesh tearing as he lifted her, utterly obsessed with just getting her outside. That was all he could do, get her out and follow after her. Everything else could be worked on from there, one thing at a time until they fixed it all. He’d get her out, then get her to the hospital, then get the doctors working on her, maybe find Dr. Darlington first, come to think of it, get her on the problem …
Donna wasn’t a small woman. He’d carried her over the threshold on their wedding night, but it hadn’t been the easiest thing he’d ever done, and he didn’t remember trying to repeat the feat since that time. He was doing it here, though, lifting and pulling dead weight, trying to lever her up over the window ledge. He was coughing again uncontrollably, and it was affecting his ability to do anything, to exert himself. He shoved his head out the window for a second and took deep, cleansing breaths again. He lifted, trying to pull her up and out, and he got her up a couple feet with some serious effort. He felt like he was lifting a car or a boulder, and she wasn’t helping, goddammit, she needed to help …
He got her up over the frame and she tumbled out, hitting the groun
d with a thump he barely heard. She was there and then suddenly she was gone, dropping out of sight over the sill and leaving him stunned for a beat, almost clueless what to do. Then Reeve threw himself up over as well, rolling over the sill and coming down harder than he expected.
He landed on the ground and rolled down the short slope to where Donna lay, a few shards of broken glass falling down behind him. He coughed hard, trying to expel the smoke from his lungs, hacking loudly for what felt like long minutes of agonized spasms throughout his entire upper body. He forced his eyes open, got up on an elbow and started to think about the next problem, which was—
“Jesus,” Reeve said. “Oh, Jesus, no.”
In the burning room, Reeve hadn’t seen Donna, not really. He’d looked around her but not at her with anything more than a glance that slid off, that gave him enough information to do what he needed to do but nothing else, like his vision was zoomed in on one thing and one thing only, like staring through a telescope.
Now that his lungs were full of clean air again, the smell of burnt meat still hung in his nose, the faint light of fading day still closing out above him, he got a real good look at her under the flickering of the lights behind the house, still burning bright in the waning day.
Donna was burned from top to bottom. Her steel hair was blackened and even entirely gone in some places, and her skin looked like it was wet, puckered like a running sore. Her clothing was scorched and burnt into the skin in some places, and when he looked at her chest …
“Holy fucking shit.”
Her chest didn’t move up and down; she took no breath as he sat there, watching, waiting, hoping, the panic doing nothing but rising with every moment she lay there—still as death.
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 30
