Yvette stiffened behind Molly, and her eyes flared black. She opened her mouth to scream and Lauren could see the writhing blackness that told her a demon was being sucked back to hell from within her body. Molly saw it too, and hissed like a snake, recoiling from Yvette.
Yvette toppled over, falling past Molly, something strange sticking out of her back. Lauren blinked at it as Molly stumbled away, still hissing in the dusk air, the sound permeating the quiet neighborhood.
“That’s right!” Casey Meacham shouted, charging up with Father Nguyen a few steps behind. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he stooped a second to tug that something out of Yvette’s back. Lauren blinked at it as he brought it up, and realized it was a tomahawk, probably only as long as her forearm, but with an axe head and a point at the rear of it. He’d apparently thrown it at Yvette from behind and the pointy end had stuck in her back. A small wound showed through her shirt, probably no bigger than a scratch. “Someone call for the cavalry?”
“Casey,” Lauren said, still on her knees, “my daughter, please—”
Casey snapped his head around, looking right at Molly. He reared back his hand with the tomahawk to throw it, but Molly hissed in a demon voice and shouted, “This isn’t over—Mother!” But she said it so furiously that Lauren didn’t recognize it as her voice. It sounded like it was booming down from on high, or on low. Real low.
Molly gave her the devil’s own look again and leapt into the air. She landed on the roof of the house, hissed once, loud enough that the sound filled the whole street, and then leapt off behind the house in a jump big enough to clear the row behind them.
Lauren watched her go and she felt … cold. She shuddered in her nakedness, on her knees, feeling completely broken, hair still dripping cold on her shoulders. The sound of silence followed that last angry hiss, broken only by Yvette’s moans of pain as she came back to herself a few feet away.
“Goddamn, Lauren,” Casey said, meandering up, “you are starkers, girl.” She heard him rustling about, and then felt soft cloth on her shoulders, something that smelled funny, like it had been treated with chemicals. Like a taxidermist would have, maybe. She looked down and saw that he’d put his sleeveless flannel over her shoulders and was trying to thread her limp arms through the sleeve holes. “Maybe we should go inside?” he asked as he started to button it up the front.
Lauren shook her head, unable to make a noise. The front door was open, and once upon a time it might have looked inviting. Not anymore. If she could avoid it, she’d never go inside that house again. She stared up, up to the roof as Casey buttoned her up, and wondered where Molly had gone, and if she’d be back ever.
*
“Sheriff Reeve!” The voice burst across his ears, jarring him out of the little reverie he’d been indulging himself in. Reeve was a man of action most of the time, but he hadn’t taken any action for a spell here, he’d just sat beside his wife’s body and stared off into the purpling sky, not really cognizant of a damned thing except that Donna’s burnt hand was starting to get cold next to him.
He blinked and looked up as Erin’s face darted before him. Her eyes were wide with worry, which felt a little funny to him. Donna was already dead, after all, and he plainly wasn’t, so what the hell was there to be worried about? She shook him by the shoulder and he looked down at her hand in mild surprise. “Erin, I’m right here, you ain’t got to shake me.”
She stared at him in numb disbelief, her mouth slightly open before she spoke. “Reeve … Nick … your house is burning down behind you.” Her voice sounded a little husky. He guessed she was taking it bad, kinda like him.
Reeve blinked and turned his head to look. Sure as shit, it was burning, all right, flames coming out of the windows. It was fully involved, now, the flames reaching out to kiss the heavens from the roof, rolling high into the air above him. He hadn’t even realized he’d dragged Donna a good fifty or so feet away, out into the yard, which had been pointless, since she was dead. “How about that,” was all he said.
“Sir,” Erin said, voice still a little rough, like she was trying to hold back her feelings, “we—we got attacked, sir. Hendricks called to tell me that his door got kicked down. He thinks this possession demon went after the rest of the watch, too.”
That was a hard pinch to Reeve’s nipples. “Damn,” he whispered, feeling a little stir of something. He’d been in a real fine mire of apathy for the last little bit here, but the thought of Arch having shit like this done to him was a quick slap to the face, a goosing with a cold hand on a warm night. He started to get to his feet, bones cracking and popping as he did so. He hadn’t been seated in the most comfortable of positions, after all, and he’d been sitting there for quite a spell, it seemed. “We got any word from any of them yet?”
“I don’t—” Erin froze, and her phone was buzzing. She swiped it up and held it to her ear. “Hello?” She was listening intently, the shade of a nearby willow tree catching her with shadowed impressions of its branches to darken her face. “Jesus. Is he—? Fuck. And everybody else? Good God. Okay. Watch your back.” She hung up, the hand with the phone in it going limp as she let it drop to her side, swallowing hard before she spoke to him. “Bill Longholt caught a bullet to the head. Demons possessed Brian and made him do it. Arch stabbed it out of him, but he’s hurt.”
Reeve felt strangely tense, leaning in to listen to this bit of news. “Is Bill dead?”
“They’re working on him, I guess an ambulance is on the way, maybe, but it don’t sound good,” Erin said. “Hendricks said a demon possessed Brian and shot at the house some when Arch went out after them. Also got that jackass Lonsdale and tried to make him bust down Hendricks’s door, but Starling stopped that from happening.”
Reeve didn’t know too much about this Starling character, but she seemed awfully convenient a lot of the time. “We should …” He was still having trouble getting thoughts together. “We should check on Dr. Darlington and Duncan—”
“I sent Casey and Father Nguyen over to Lauren’s,” Erin said. When Reeve frowned at her, she elaborated. “I guess they were together at the time, doing something.”
“That’s a strange pair,” Reeve mused, “like peanut butter and guitar strings.” He felt a cold chill creeping up his back as he remembered what was waiting just behind him. “Did …” He tried to compose himself. “We haven’t heard anything from those two yet, I take it?”
Erin’s phone buzzed a second later, before she could answer him, and she picked it up. “It’s Casey.” She pressed the accept button. “Hello? Yeah—Jesus!” She cringed. “I mean—sorry, Father. Yes. Okay. Well … we need to find a place to meet, because—yeah, uhm, the sheriff’s house is …” She looked over Reeve’s shoulder and he glanced behind him by force of habit.
The roof beams had fallen in and he hadn’t even noticed it. The roar of the blaze was loud as hell. The house was coming down, no doubt about it. He’d lived here his whole adult life. He and Donna had bought it right when they started out, and they’d been here their entire marriage. They’d raised their kids here, had all their—
“Jesus,” Reeve whispered, and looked down at the body behind him. It really was just a body at this point, because there was nothing left of Donna in there. “Jesus … they took … they took everything …”
“Yeah, we need to find another place,” Erin said. “Hm? St. Brigid’s? If that’s all right with you, Father. Yeah. Okay, I’ll get him—get him moving here.”
Reeve looked across the ruin of his house, his life. It was so goddamned unfair. He’d known about demons for all of a week now, and they’d just—the wind had whipped the fire across his yard, and it was singeing the picket fence behind the house—they’d taken everything. Donna’s car was under the carport and it was burning, the roof collapsed over it, the grill blazing flames.
All their memories.
All their treasures.
His whole life.
He look
ed down at Donna, and he didn’t recognize her anymore. He’d known her since they were practically kids, had seen her when she was young and her body was all curves and pale, smooth skin, and he knew her now, with a few extra pounds and more wrinkles than he could count, and they’d changed together. He still thought she was beautiful, and he would have recognized her thirty years from now, if things had stayed on the course they were on.
But they hadn’t. And now she lay a few feet away from him, scorched and burned, and if he hadn’t been there to see it happen, he wouldn’t have had the first clue it was her.
These demons … they’d taken everything from him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Donna, even though she wasn’t here anymore, not really. It was so damned unfair that this had happened to them, to their house, to their town. What the hell had they ever done to deserve this, aside from try to do their best to live good lives? To be good friends and neighbors?
“We should go,” Erin said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Nick … I don’t know if Fries is going to come round here for this, but … the fire department has got to be on their way by now.” That was probably true, Reeve realized dimly. The Midian fire department was all volunteer, and it took them a while to get to the station and get the trucks moving when there was a fire. “If Ed comes a calling … I don’t know what he’s gonna do when he finds your house burning down and Donna like … like this.”
Reeve blinked at her. “Are you saying …?”
Erin swallowed heavily. “I’m saying he might come after you for murder, because I’m guessing you and Donna were the only ones in the house when this happened, and whatever the truth is, it probably sounds about twelve kinds of nuts.”
Reeve stared past her shoulder, off into space behind her. Donna had drenched herself in gas, lit herself on fire and then stabbed herself in the heart with his holy blade. A holy blade which he could not afford to have taken away right now, since they were in the middle of a flood of shit and it was one of a very, very few paddles available to them. “There’s no easy explanation for what happened here, no.” He rubbed a hand over his bald head and it came back blackened with soot. He wondered if that came from being in the house during the fire or from handling Donna.
“We should go,” Erin said gently. “We should get out of here. Father Nguyen offered us his church as a meeting place. I need to tell the others, but … we should go.”
Reeve listened intently, trying to hear anything over the crackling flames of his life burning down behind them. He heard nothing. No sirens that said help was coming. No shouts and cries of neighbors filling buckets and coming to his aid with their garden hoses. “We should go,” he agreed, and he followed Erin out to the street. He looked back a few times, to say his goodbye to what remained of Donna, but when he looked back to the street again, he saw only a few people even out of their houses watching. Most were still hiding their faces behind panes of glass, watching the chaos that was consuming Midian from behind their thin veil of safety. He wanted to tell them that it was all an illusion, that this would be happening to them all too soon, these people who’d been his friends and neighbors, and who had abandoned him at the first sign of trouble.
He wanted to say all of this, but no one came up to him as he walked to the car. They all watched from their yards or from behind their windows, safe in their own minds, and so he kept these thoughts to himself as Erin started the car and drove him away from his life, his home, his friends and his neighbors, pretty sure that all he had left now was a real keen desire to beat the living shit out of a demon or fifty.
*
“This is fucked up,” Hendricks said as the paramedics loaded Bill Longholt up onto a stretcher. Their careful movements were underpinned with a damned frantic energy, that edge of panic undergirding their desire to not do harm as they were transporting him. The fact that he was still alive was kind of a miracle, not that Hendricks believed in those things. He’d seen the hole in the man’s head and it was just gaping, a neat swath of brain blown clear out by his own son, of all people. That was like the jizz icing on the fucked cake, and Hendricks felt a little sick even thinking about it.
“At least you haven’t had fucking demons in your brain twice today,” Lonsdale said, still lurking next to him. Wherever he went, Lonsdale stayed within about two feet of him. Hendricks had a suspicion the dumb bastard was still leery after getting possessed this most recent time. That was probably a smart move, at least for Lonsdale, but if it kept up he was going to have to ask Lonsdale to shake his dick for him when next he pissed, because the bastard would be better positioned to do it than he would.
Hendricks was standing with his arms folded at the accident site. He’d trashed Kitty Elizabeth’s rental SUV when he’d crashed it into the car that held the demon shooting at Arch and now he was pretending he’d never seen the thing before in his life. He suspected there wasn’t going to be a hell of a lot to come out of that, because the sole remaining Calhoun County Sheriff’s Deputy/Acting Sheriff was bound to be worrying about things other than a rental car smashed on the street outside a shooting. Hell, the fat bastard hadn’t even shown up to this one yet. Law and order in Midian was pretty close to the breakdown point, Hendricks figured, which might have been good in this case, because Brian was bound to get his ass thrown in jail otherwise.
Hendricks cast a look over at Arch, who was holding Alison in his arms as they watched her dad getting loaded into the back of the ambulance. She’d asked to go with them, but the paramedics had warned her off. Probably with pretty good reason; Hendricks had a suspicion Bill wasn’t going to survive the ride to Chattanooga or wherever they were taking him. Arch had called for Dr. Darlington a few times but she hadn’t answered her phone. Hendricks had a bad feeling about that, but when he’d talked to Erin she’d said she was sending someone else to look into it. He didn’t want to call back and check in, not yet, because … well … it was Erin. She’d call if she needed him.
Alison had a sick look on her face, standing perched between her momma and Arch. The paramedics slammed the ambulance doors and the driver ran around the side and got in. The siren sounded and the ambulance did a quick U-turn to get the hell out of there, and it almost sideswiped a town car on the way up the street as it burned out toward the hospital.
“I need to go after them,” Alison said as Arch patted her on the shoulder.
“I’ll go with—” Arch started.
“No,” Alison said, and put her arm around her mother, guiding her smoothly away. “Arch …” She had a hard look on her face as she glanced back at him. “You got work to do.”
The meaning of that was unmistakable, and Arch took it. “Yes’m,” he said, nodding once at his wife as she and her mother headed up the driveway. “You need help getting Brian in the car?” When she looked blankly back at him, he said, “Because of his knee? Get him some help for it, maybe, while you’re there?”
Alison stopped, frowning, her bare feet making a scuffing noise on the driveway. “I hadn’t even thought about it.”
Arch had a pained look on his face. Hendricks knew Arch had done the damage to Brian himself, and suspected he felt a little guilty. A lot more guilty than Alison would have felt at the moment if she’d done it, Hendricks was sure. That woman was closed down like a liquor store on Sunday, and seemed to be carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of Ayres Rock.
“Yeah, we should …” Alison started, but then shrugged and drifted off, heading toward the car. Hendricks was tempted to tell her to get some shoes while she was at it, wandering around with jeans and a shirt and no shoes might be cause for the emergency room to deny her service, but it was an emergency room, not a grocery store, right? They wouldn’t turn away the shoeless, especially given what she’d gone through today with her daddy being shot, would they?
That town car that almost hit the ambulance came screeching to a stop a few feet away and Lonsdale nearly jumped out of his fucking skin. Hendricks gave him a wary ey
e, half expecting the Brit to grab hold of him for dear life, and then glanced over at Duncan’s car to see that Duncan, in fact, was not driving. There was a black lady at the helm instead, someone he’d never seen before.
Duncan got out of the passenger side and Hendricks gave him a look. The OOC didn’t look too pleased, and that took some doing since Duncan was a fucking stoic son of a bitch if ever there was one. “You all right?” Hendricks asked.
“Peachy and keen, in equal measure,” Duncan said, but he sounded super pissed. Hendricks looked at the black lady as she got out of the car. She was tall and pretty, her skin tone fairly dark, with some really sculpted cheekbones. She was wearing yoga pants and a tank top and looked athletic. Her hair was straight and came to about halfway down her neck. It was kind of a bob look, carefully styled. He had a hard time pegging her age, but figured she was at least older than him. He couldn’t help checking her out, either, as she came around the hood, because she looked pretty damned in shape and hell, it had been a while since he’d gotten off. It was like a rising toxicity in his blood, even at this moment, and he felt stupid for staring but did it anyway.
“Who’s your friend?” Hendricks asked, looking right at the lady. She looked right back at him and then smiled. It wasn’t a great look for her, it felt all wrong somehow.
“I’m so disappointed that you don’t remember me,” the lady said as Duncan rolled his eyes hard, his lip twitching slightly. “How could you ever forget me, Lafayette Hendricks? I may just cry.” The way she said it all, he was left with zero doubt she was totally fucking with him, but he was no closer to knowing who she was.
Arch was standing there staring as Alison pulled out of the driveway, her mother and brother in the car. She peeled out, not even a backward glance at the little confab on the lawn, and that distracted them all for a second or two. Arch seemed to come out of it first. “So who are you?” he asked the woman.
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 32
