“Just hurry,” Brian said, face pale, clearly spent. “You have to … to save the day …” And he slumped against the back of the wheelchair as Alison headed around the corner toward the elevator, Hendricks and Arch right behind her.
*
Guthrie had almost caught Duncan on the last lap. Walking around the hospital all day was clearly wearing on him. She wanted to feel a little triumph about that, but it had been a long one, and her essence was being squished by the stupid bra that they’d given her when she appeared on earth. These things were fucking torture, and she was not happy about wearing one, at all, especially for long days. Short days, not terrible. Long days, it was like the old days of corsets that they had to use a winch to tighten, and Guthrie hated it.
“These are the times I miss being a guy,” she said under her breath. Well, and when it came time to urinate, which she tried to avoid assiduously now. What a drag.
She came around the corner at the back of the hospital, where the parking lot was, and almost stopped in her tracks. The hospital was laid mostly in a rectangle, with the front and back being the long sides and the entrances being in the middle of them. Whoever had designed the place had embraced the symmetry. The portico out back looked like it had been added sometime after the hospital’s construction, and they’d put a parking garage across the street on one of the sides, with a walkover bridge to keep the street clear of pedestrians. Guthrie had thought about vaulting over it on one of her infinite laps, just to cut the boredom, but decided against it in the name of keeping a low profile.
Now, she was watching a clear confab of Duncan, Arch, Alison and Hendricks having a meeting of some sort under the exit portico, and inconspicuous wasn’t a word in those idiots’ vocabulary. Not with head dunce in that long black coat standing there, in the middle of the damned portico, waving his hands around like—
Aw, shit.
Guthrie kicked it up to a run, human-style. Not fast enough to draw attention because of its blurriness with inhuman speed, but enough of one that she felt it through these heeled shoes after a day of walking in the damned things. Oh, the shit these people put women through …
She could hear them as she drew closer, Duncan locked into place as Hendricks spoke, the words drifting over to Guthrie as she hurried toward them. “… and he thinks this Legion is going to regard the whole town as part of our, uh, community or tribe or whatever and so this Halloween deal is fair game.”
Duncan’s back was to Guthrie, and he didn’t have muscles to tense, but she could tell he was taking it all onboard like a cannonball to the face for a normal person. “That sounds … pretty logical,” Duncan said as lamely as he said almost everything else.
“He seems pretty certain about it,” Alison Stan said, practically quivering in her too-tight jeans. Guthrie didn’t envy her those.
“It’s a convincing argument,” Duncan said, and he looked almost … paralyzed. “Legions think differently than we do. It might just be that they view this as a war between tribes, and collateral damage is … well, it’s just damage.”
“What’s all the fuss about, kids?” Guthrie asked as she slowed to join them. They were all standing there, looking tense and about half-useless, like they were gonna break and run any second. “Something about this All Hallow’s Eve got you riled?”
“They think,” Duncan said, “that this Legion’s gonna attack a town event in the square in Midian. Make a slaughter of it.”
That one raised Guthrie’s eyebrows; it was the sort of thing that even an OOC feared. “This hotspot ain’t hot enough to absorb that one without blinking yet,” Guthrie said, stock still in her version of stunned. They couldn’t be right about this. Home Office had given guidance, but the guidance was to keep things simmering for the time being, not let them get to a boil—and this was beyond boil. This was like nuking all the water.
Duncan shot him a filthy look that was in actuality barely a raise of the eyebrow and a twinge of the lips. “Also, lots of people are going to die.”
“As an Officer of the Pact, that concerns me,” Guthrie said coolly. “So … we just gonna stand here and jaw, or …?” She motioned toward the car.
“Let’s go,” Hendricks said and lurched into motion just behind Alison, who looked about ready to charge into a battle. Her face was all twisted up with emotion, most of it leaning toward hatred. Guthrie fell in with them, hurrying to get to the car first so she could drive.
Only a couple days back on the job and things were already turning to shit. What was it about this place that—
Oh, right. She knew that. She shuddered and quickened her pace as she sped to the car.
*
Reeve was just about to head to the town square on his own when the phone rang. It was actually Erin’s, fortuitously left behind when she fled through the window. He was still standing in the narthex of St. Brigid’s when it went off, a long, trilling ring that was probably disrespectful given the environs he was in, but he was all about extraordinary times requiring extraordinary measures, and he hadn’t wanted to miss an important call, so he’d ditched the vibrate and turned the ringer on full blast.
“Hello?” he asked. He noticed it was Arch’s number but anticipated Hendricks again.
“Reeve!” Hendricks practically shouted in his ear, “Halloween!”
Reeve just blinked for a second, Dr. Darlington furrowing her brow as she looked at him. She could probably hear it without the speakerphone, but he pulled it away from his ear and hit the button anyway, just to be sure. “I know it’s Halloween, dumbass,” he said. “I’m not that out of it—”
“The Legion is going to attack Halloween!” This time, Hendricks bellowed it, and Reeve was glad he didn’t have the phone near his ear.
“I thought Duncan said—” Lauren started.
“Normal demons aren’t going to attack Halloween,” Hendricks said. “The Legion is.”
Reeve didn’t think he quite heard that, either time. “Excuse me?”
“They’re giving no damns about collateral damage,” Hendricks said, “so they’re gonna hit Halloween and we have to stop them. We’re like …” He stopped, and there was a muttering in the background, “… forty or fifty minutes away, but who knows when this thing is gonna start?”
“Halloween?” Ms. Cherry piped up. “It’s starting right now.” She held up a lovely platinum wristwatch with diamond accents.
“Holy shit,” Reeve said, and he almost dropped the phone. “We gotta go. Now.”
*
The town square wasn’t the busiest Braeden had ever seen it, but it wasn’t bad, either, especially considering what Midian had been through lately. The sun was dipping closer to the horizon, and the streets leading up to the square were alive with laughter and kids, moving around in groups with adults close at hand. Even teenagers were prowling the streets in groups, apparently a little afraid of what was going on, in spite of the fact most of them thought they were invincible. At least, that’s what Braeden had thought when he was their age.
“Ooh,” Abi said from the back, peering out the window from her car seat. She was in a forward facing now, and turning that sucker around so she could see while he was driving had been the happiest day of his parenting life. She’d gone from hating car rides to loving them in a minute, and now he could take her just about anywhere, and if she was tired enough, she’d just conk right out in the car.
Braeden pulled up and parallel parked, thumping the curb as he pulled in. He hated parallel parking, which was the second reason he seldom came to the square, the first being the almost total lack of anything to do here. He managed to find his spot on a side road about a block away, and he’d mostly gotten her between the lines, the nose of his truck sticking out just slightly beyond the perimeters—but good enough. He killed the ignition and got out. Three more cars passed him looking for spots as he made his way around to get Abi out on the curb side, and the more people he saw, the better he started to feel about this little excursio
n. If there was strength in numbers, Midian was putting on a grand ol’ show of strength.
He saw a careful knot of parents go by with six kids between four adults, their worried eyes not dissimilar from his own. One of the mothers looked like a nervous wreck, but one of the dads was smiling wide, and the kids were all on his side of thinking. One of them was dancing about, turning around and walking backward to yell something to one of her little friends, all excited to be out and dressed in a faerie costume complete with aluminum foil-wrapped wings. Braeden saw cheeks red from the chill wind, and smiles all around.
He couldn’t help but put one of his own on as he opened the back door and clicked the red button on Abi’s five-point harness. The weight of his revolver pulling on his belt was reassuring, telling him that even if, for some reason, things got bad, he’d have things under control. “Come on, baby doll,” Braeden said, unclicking the chest straps as Abi wormed her way out and ignored his hand, his little princess stepping down from her carriage all on her own.
*
Arch was beyond tense in the back seat of the car, Alison squeezed between him and Hendricks, Duncan in front of him in the passenger seat and Guthrie at the wheel. Even she seemed worried about what was going on, and Arch didn’t think that came too naturally given the personality change she’d acquired with her new body. He had his hand firmly planted on the Plastileather door, wanting to be somewhere that he could open the darned thing and get out, start planting his sword in demons, doing some good.
But they were still burning up Interstate 75 toward Midian, and Arch felt like he was late for the world’s most important party.
“How bad could this get?” Hendricks seemed to echo Arch’s nervousness without a channel for action, and he looked across his wife to see the cowboy chewing a fingernail idly.
“A host of angry demons cutting loose in a square filled with people?” Guthrie said, answering before anyone else—like Duncan—could. “Gee, I dunno. How much do you like blood and carnage? Because if you’re an aficionado, it could be a grand ol’ time.”
“Did you come back with a menstrual cycle?” Alison sniped. “Because it seems like you might be experiencing a little PMS.”
Hendricks chortled, but Arch held in his feelings, which bordered on mild dismay. At least she kept it clean.
“I came back to a town that’s going straight into the shitter,” Guthrie said, steering the town car around a truck at about 85. She didn’t bother to signal, Arch noticed, and it caused him to quiver a little, thinking about the ticket he’d have written if he’d been in a position to. “No bleeding or cramping necessary to make me testy. It’s days like this that make me long for sweet, eternal torment.”
That was a sobering thought, at least for Arch. It didn’t seem to do much for Hendricks, though. “What did they have you doing?” the cowboy asked with a twinkle in his eye. “Cleaning out Rosie O’Donnell’s toilet?”
Guthrie didn’t miss a beat. “More like being sodomized by a cleg’ham’rrvar every hour of the day for six weeks.” She looked back, and nothing about her expression suggested that she was joking. “They’re worse than they sound, by the way. And what they shoot out makes our old pal Gideon look like he’s been drinking pineapple juice all the live-long day.”
Hendricks’s eyebrows were up, his cowboy hat seemingly like it was angled to slide off the back of his head. He didn’t gulp, but Arch expected it was only because he was holding it in. “Oh,” was all he said, and that was enough to throw them all back into a tense silence as they sped along toward home, hoping like heck it wasn’t too late.
*
Lauren watched the fading day with a nervousness bordering on nausea. Her stomach was doing its own version of calisthenics, jumping around like some sort of crazy, possessed bean. It wasn’t just the town being at stake, after all, that had her nerves on full alert. It was that maybe, just maybe, somewhere in this crazy plot by the Legion crew to make a disaster happen at the Halloween event, Molly would be there, and involved.
They were rolling down side streets, Melina Cherry at the wheel of a beautiful white Land Rover. If she hadn’t been about to shit bricks, Lauren might have admired the vehicle, because it was totally pimped out, which she considered appropriate given who its owner was. The madam wasn’t sparing the horses, either, but Lauren had other things to worry about besides traffic laws; most of the people of Midian did, too, though she doubted they knew it yet.
“This is going to be a clusterfuck if it starts before we get there,” Reeve said, in the passenger seat. Casey Meacham and Father Nguyen were in the back with Lauren, and Lonsdale was sitting in the hatchback area. Lauren had seen him clutching at his sword, the demon hunter plainly anxious for some action. Meacham had his tomahawk in his non-bandaged hand, but at least he was keeping it still. Father Nguyen had loaded up a couple pistol squirt guns with holy water and had put one of the brass crosses that stood on a wooden stave in the back of the Rover. What he was planning to do with that, Lauren had no idea, but he also had a Bible laid across his lap, and he looked nervous.
“Depending on how many of your people they’ve possessed, us being there might not have much of an effect on the outcome of said clusterfuck,” Lonsdale offered from the back.
They were about six blocks from the square and Lauren could see the traffic increasing a little. There was a reasonable amount of street parking around here, but it was starting to fill up. There were also people walking down the sidewalks, something she couldn’t recall seeing towards sundown, at least not lately.
“You think your boy Fries is going to be there?” Casey asked, leaning forward with his bloody, bandaged hand to ask Reeve the question. Lauren adjusted herself as she stared at it; she really should have changed it before they came, but there wasn’t time.
“I don’t give a damn,” Reeve said. “But if he comes after me, you all know what to do. I’ll see if I can distract him by running.”
“You think you can outrun him?” Casey looked at him questioningly.
Reeve looked back at him, clearly annoyed at the question. “Ed weighs about three bills, maybe even three-fifty. Yeah, I reckon I can outrun him, even on my old knees.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Ms. Cherry said nervously, plunging them forward into the heart of town, “because if these ‘legions’ are as bad as you say, we’re likely to need your help to stop them.”
*
Abi was in seventh heaven, holding Braeden’s hand with one of hers and carrying her lime green plastic trick-or-treating pumpkin with the other. She had a big ol’ grin on and had yielded to putting on her jacket as soon as she got out of the truck, which Braeden considered real lucky, because he didn’t want to carry it. It wasn’t a purse, but holding onto a hot pink puffy coat wasn’t really his jam.
They were walking toward the square, and the air was alive. None of the fear that had settled on Midian was present here except in the lowered voices of some of the parents. The kids could feel the energy, and it was electric. There were Queen Elsas everywhere, skull masks, every stripe of Avenger that Braeden could imagine, even some blocky head that looked like someone had just taken a perfect cube, colored in a funny digital pattern and stuck it on a five-year-old’s gourd. He almost laughed at that, getting caught up in the moment. Abi sure did.
A gust of cold wind tore down the street and caused the growing crowd to actually “Ooh!” as it came through. It was a brisk breath of fall, like an ice gust out of the north, and Braeden had a daydream about heating up some hot chocolate or maybe some apple cider later tonight, sitting with Abi on the couch after this was over and talking about how exciting it all was. Those were the fun parts of parenting. Not the occasional screaming matches, not the constant battle of wills, but the quiet moments, the ones where—every so often—she still fell asleep on his shoulder while they were watching Doc McStuffins.
He squeezed her hand tight as they passed Surrey’s Diner. Yep, this was the place to be
, a crowd on the square, the chitter chatter of Halloween and the excitement of people finally standing up, being unafraid to stick their heads out. It wasn’t Groundhog Day, but damned if it didn’t have the feeling of something a hell of a lot worse than winter being put in their rearview mirror.
*
Chester could feel the excitement of the crowd, even standing on the periphery as he was, backed up against a boarded-up shop front, looking out at the center of the square and the obelisk monument in the middle of it all. He was watching the back and forth as he stood there, no coat as a bulwark against the cool, rising night. The sky was a deep purple all the way to the western horizon, where the glow of orange behind the edge of the square heralded the end of day.
And for these people, the end of all their days.
Chester heard the laughter of children, the excitement. He watched a little boy tell another about his costume, about his Minecraft head, whatever that was. There was a time when he might have cared, when he would have taken the side of this child and his hopes and dreams and enthusiasms over William’s quiet despair for the inevitable death of all these people.
But now William was not here to argue against them, and Chester could not find it in himself to argue for them, and so that was that.
All that remained was the cold knowledge that all of these people would die eventually, and that all he was doing was speeding it up, pushing the minecart down the tracks faster than it would otherwise advance toward its natural end. These people had hurt him, and they were mortal. William had not been mortal, but they had brought his end, his and his fellows, even so. It was a crime what they did, a crime for all of them, these horribly detached people, blind and stumbling and stupid to the last of them.
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 42
