Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Hendricks thought he smelled sulfur, nearly threw up in his mouth at the memory, and shivered in the cool motel air. His dick was limp now, and it would have been just as limp if he’d remembered Kitty Elizabeth in the middle of fucking Starling. It had happened before, and when it did, he’d fake getting there before he lost it completely, thrusting a few more times as he mimed the noises he made when climaxing just so he could get out of her, get away, get into the shower and wash himself clean as he could get, down to the red and rubbed-raw skin.

  Starling didn’t smell like a normal woman, but at least she didn’t smell like that.

  “You remember her,” Starling said.

  Hendricks froze for a second. “Which her? Erin?” He doubted she meant Erin. Doubted she meant Renee either, but … why the fuck would he talk about this with Starling, of all people?

  “The Duchess.” Starling stood there like a black hole in the middle of the room. “She hurt you.”

  Fucking understatement, Hendricks thought. “She carved out a little damage, yeah.” He shrugged. “I’ve been through worse.” But that was probably a lie, because he wasn’t sure he had. He damned sure couldn’t remember having nightmares like this, even after Renee, even after his tour in Ramadi.

  Hell, even dying hadn’t done a number on him like this.

  “Have you?”

  Another shrug. “I’ve been through a lot,” Hendricks said.

  Starling kept her silence for a few minutes. Hendricks tried to close his eyes, tried to get to sleep, but it felt futile. “Christ,” he muttered. It was the middle of the day, after all, and the tranquilizing effect of the orgasm had apparently already evaporated. Shit.

  “Would you like me to open the curtains?” Starling asked. Her eyes glimmered in the dark.

  Hendricks stared at the ceiling, at the line of light that made its way in a long diagonal across the white popcorn coating. “Why? Are you leaving?”

  “Soon.”

  This didn’t bother him too terribly much. He wasn’t going to be able to find his way back to hard, not this afternoon. Maybe this evening, but not now, not after goddamned Kitty Elizabeth had just invaded his mind again. He nearly retched once more at the memory of her, of what she’d done to him. It was fading; that was the only good news. A week earlier and he would have found himself on all fours over the toilet, heaving up his fucking guts at the thought of her, of her touch, her knife, her … her fucking cockroach of a clitoris rammed into his mouth, writhing against his tongue as she ground her pelvis into his face.

  He kept his eyes open, trying not to picture those eyes, the purple veins sticking out of her legs and face as she’d crushed him into the ground in that fucking pull shed of hell. He felt a phantom ache in his toes where they’d regrown after she’d done what she’d done. “Yeah,” Hendricks said, remembering that Starling had asked him a question. “Open the curtains.” Don’t leave me in the dark, he didn’t say, as she shuffled over and they screeched open, Starling hiding her naked body in the shadows still cast by them, her pale skin and tight body suddenly visible for an instant, her red hair hanging over her shoulders. He could see the little dab of cum he’d left on her ass, just to the right of the crack, glinting slightly as she turned.

  She stood there for a moment, naked, breasts visible and on display, her legs slightly spread so that he could see the perfect slit that worked its way from her pubic mound down. He focused on it, staring. He seldom examined her in the light, but he did now, staring at her crotch, bare and hairless, staring at it until—

  She was gone a second later, the curtains just there where she’d been standing a moment earlier, bare, swinging slightly from where she’d moved them at his request. Hendricks lay naked on the bed, alone, looking out at the grey day, on the empty parking lot of the Sinbad motel, feeling small, miniature, now that his silent sentinel was gone.

  “Don’t leave me in the dark,” he murmured, almost like a prayer. Don’t leave me in the dark, he said once more, this time in his mind.

  Don’t leave me in the dark … with her.

  *

  Reeve didn’t really want to go to the funeral, didn’t want to acknowledge what it meant any more than he wanted to have another damned conversation with Pike. But he was bound to both, it seemed, bound to a duty he didn’t particularly care for. Sometimes a job was like that; sometimes life was like that, he reflected.

  And sometimes … well, for fuck’s sake, you just had to eat your way through a shit sandwich when you were in the middle of it because there was just no other way out.

  This felt like one of those times, he thought, sitting in the front pew of Barney Jones’s church. He could have picked any church in town to go to, because really, he and Donna hadn’t had close ties to a church in years. They’d gone to the Methodist church across town, one that was predominantly white, when the kids were young, but that was probably five or six pastors ago. They’d gone weekly back then, but somehow the fire had gone out of Reeve’s spiritual life when the kids were teenagers. Once they were out of the house and a new, less motivating pastor came, a lot of his motivation to drag himself out of the house on the Sunday mornings when he wasn’t working vanished.

  So here he was, having the funeral for his dearly departed wife in Barney Jones’s church because … well, why not?

  “Are your children coming, Nick?” Barney asked him. The man’s eyes were compassionate, and he had a hand on Reeve’s shoulder as he looked him in the eyes. They were in the small office off the main sanctuary, a dark room with a few sets of the pastor’s robes hung on the wall next to a speaker that emitted a slow, dirge-like song. Reeve suspected that was the church sound system, playing whatever was going on out there, giving the preacher a cue for when he was expected to take the stage, as it were.

  “Hell, no,” Reeve said, then remembered who he was speaking to. “I mean … no. I haven’t told ’em yet.”

  Jones’s eyes went wide, then he nodded, once, as he got it. “You don’t want them to come back to Midian.”

  “Not now,” Reeve said, shaking his head. “They got out, you know?” They’d gone on to build lives elsewhere, away from here. This wasn’t their hometown anymore, by choice and for good reason. “No reason to drag them back now.”

  “When are you going to tell them?” Barney asked. Probably a reasonable request.

  Reeve rubbed a hand over his bald head, feeling the slick, oily skin. He hadn’t showered in a couple days. He was living in the sheriff’s station, after all. “When we’ve driven the damned demons out of town. When they call and ask. I don’t know.”

  Jones nodded. “I got to warn you … funerals right now … they’re not as well attended as ones you might have gone to in the past.”

  Reeve stared past Barney’s shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s liable not going to be a whole lot of people here.”

  Reeve frowned, then got it. “Too many funerals lately.”

  “We have suffered a fair few,” Jones said. He was parceling out his thoughts carefully, feeding out his warning to Reeve. “I think folks are a little worn down, like a boxer going into the late rounds.”

  Reeve raised an eyebrow at that. “Can’t blame ’em. We are staggering, after all.” He drew a breath. The little waiting room they were in was dark. On a table nearby lay a metal tray for carrying communion grape juice in the tiny shot glasses, as Reeve thought of them, and a covered dish for the pieces of bread. Reeve stared at it. Midian had sacrificed enough flesh and blood to fill a thousand of the damned things. We’ve been having a communion of fucking crows, he thought dimly, pecking at what’s left of us.

  “You should go on out,” Barney said, ushering him toward the door behind him. Reeve didn’t argue, just walked out the door, which shut behind him automatically, and paused for a second as he looked out over the near-empty church. Jones had been right; there was only a scattering of people.

  Well, that was all right, wasn’t it?
He’d gotten the town to agree to fight together against the demons, after all, but outside of a fight, the idea of sitting through who knew how many funerals? Shit, that was a special sort of torture, wasn’t it?

  At least it wasn’t a funeral mass, Reeve reflected as he took his seat. Arch was sitting there in the second row, and so was Braeden Tarley. Reeve wasn’t entirely sure why Tarley was there, especially since they’d had words when they’d spoken last. Erin Harris was there too, a few rows back, in her deputy’s uniform, looking somber. She had a baseball bat with nails driven through it leaned against the pew next to her. He might have commented on it, but hell, he knew why it was there, so he just let it pass. He had his holy dagger on his belt too, and suspected Arch had a sword on his, though he couldn’t see it.

  The world sure had changed.

  Reeve cast one last look behind him and saw a familiar face in the fourth row. He stared a second too long, and the subject of his attention caught his gaze and blushed, looking away.

  She was as smartly dressed as ever, her suit darker than usual. He eyed Lex Deivrel and wondered what she was doing here. She’d been of some help recently, which was an unusual turn in an antagonistic relationship that stretched back years. He caught her eye again, and this time she looked back evenly at him.

  Reeve turned back to the front just as Barney Jones came out. He walked quietly in front of the pulpit, and Reeve caught motion out of the corner of his eye. He glanced over and saw a guy sitting there in the front row, all the way down at the end. Tall, lanky, raven-haired, dressed in a black suit and tie, with a white shirt and a long face, he met Reeve’s eye for a moment without guilt or guile, and then nodded once, expressing his condolences with a look.

  Who the hell was that? Reeve barely had time to wonder before Barney Jones started up, and he listened to the man extol his wife’s virtues with one ear while his cop’s brain tried to work out who the unknown man in the front row was. It didn’t take long before emotion forced him to put the thought on the back burner and devote himself, entirely, to keeping himself from breaking down in public.

  *

  Erin Harris didn’t know quite how to take the fucking disgraceful showing at Donna Reeve’s funeral. She’d known the woman forever, as had a great many people in town, and the fact that there were maybe fifteen people in attendance was like a personal insult. She’d talked to Arch and Braeden Tarley beforehand—Arch looked pretty okay, surprisingly, but Tarley was a fucking disaster, barely able to string a sentence together without lapsing into a blank look followed by a deep swallow and haunted shaking—and had heard what Barney Jones had been telling people, about how Midian was trauma’d out or whatever.

  Yeah, that was bullshit.

  Sure, she hadn’t gone to many funerals herself, but dammit, didn’t people see? Reeve had hosted that meeting to pull the town together after the Halloween slaughter to try and—well, to unite the fucking town. The fact that they weren’t here for this funeral, that they weren’t showing up like they usually did, weren’t filling peoples’ houses with fried chicken and sandwich platters and potato salad—dammit, it was a shitty omen for a town that needed to pull together. Yeah, maybe they were mounting some effective patrols and shit now, sending people out to fight, but the fact that they weren’t backing each other up in the moments like these …

  Well, hell. It was a bad day for Southern hospitality, that’s what it was. If her mom hadn’t left town a couple years earlier, she would have been ashamed to see it come to this.

  “We all knew Donna,” Pastor Jones said, his powerful voice not needing a microphone to resonate to the highest corners of the wood beams in the ceiling. “We knew she was a good woman, a good servant of the Lord.”

  Erin might have found herself cynically raising an eyebrow at that if Donna had still been alive and someone said that about her. Not that Donna Reeve was a bad woman. Hell, she wasn’t; she was a damned good one, one of the best. But had she and the sheriff even gone to church these last few years? Erin had never heard them say a peep about it.

  That was the problem with someone dying. They always had to paper over the bad spots in someone’s past in order to make them sound good. Erin had understood that once, but that had been before a flock of demons had come to roost in her head and made her kill her fellow fucking townsfolk in the process. She remembered how long she’d had to work to scrub the blood off her hands after Halloween.

  She’d imagined her own funeral a few times since Halloween, had pictured herself eating her Glock. The only reason she hadn’t was because she couldn’t seem to muster up enough care one way or the other to pull the trigger. So she’d sat there one night, teeth clenched just behind the metal sight, taste of grimy, dirty gun oil permeating into the back of her throat, urging herself in a calm and reasoned voice to just do it, put a bullet out the back of her skull, make sure and hit the base of the spine so it would well and truly be over and the blood she squirted out the back of her head would be the last she’d shed.

  God—if that bastard existed—knew she’d certainly spilled enough of other people’s.

  She took a breath and could almost smell that gun oil still, almost taste it on her tongue, bitter and greasy. It was like a mark on her, like the bloodstains she couldn’t see anymore, branding her. She wondered dimly if it would follow her all her days, and how long those days might last. She’d once imagined guilt to be a crushing weight, but it wasn’t really like that. It was more like one of those damned little dogs, constantly biting at her ankles while she tried to walk.

  It just kept taking little bites out of her flesh, a little bite here at the ankle, the next at the toe. She was bleeding as she walked, trailing it behind her, draining slowly, leaving a clear path of red for someone to follow her.

  No one was going to follow her though. They were all too busy fighting demons and trying to keep themselves together. That was why they weren’t here, weren’t supporting each other by going to the funerals. Everyone had reached their limit, everyone had given what they could give. They were all taxed out. Shut down.

  That, Erin understood. It came over her slowly, and she looked away, down the row toward the stranger in the black suit and tie, very plainly dressed, tall with a long face. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t care to know him either. He wasn’t particularly handsome, nor was he very young, and while she certainly wouldn’t have said no to some comfort right now—and had some ideas already churning in her head about where she might find some after this goddamned funeral was over—he wasn’t her type at all. Not that that always mattered, but she wasn’t drunk enough to make an exception in his case. Not at her boss’s wife’s funeral. Not today. Not even if he had the biggest cock in the room, a tongue that could reach his eyebrows and a willingness to use both without regard for any orgasmic interest of his own for the next six hours.

  *

  Nora Wellstone was probably in shock, she thought, hands clutching tightly to the wheel of her car. She hadn’t started the day expecting anything big—her son, Mack, and husband, John, were down in Calhoun County, Tennessee, going hunting together for the first time. It was a rite of passage in her husband’s family, one that Nora found as mysterious as the fetishistic girlie magazines that John kept in the bottom of his underwear drawer. But Nora didn’t try to understand hunting any more than she tried to understand her husband’s fantasies about Asian women. She just left them all alone and went about her business.

  Up until this year, Mack—the light of her life and the main reason she and John were still married—had stayed home with her when her husband went to the woods in the first weekend in November. She’d enjoyed her time with Mack. He’d grown up so fast, and those weekends were a nice way to reconnect, to eat TV dinners and forgo cooking and cleaning and all the other crap she hated but did for the good of the family. It was her weekend to relax, to enjoy Mack, and let him break from routine.

  She hadn’t been happy when John had pronounced this as the weekend M
ack would make his entry into manhood. There was a small trace of regret that her baby boy was going to be going with his father rather than staying with her for the weekend to keep her company, but that was balanced out by the fact that she could go see the new Sandra Bullock romcom and meet her friends for drinks at Cheddar’s without worrying about what Mack might get up to without her for the evening. She could get tanked on margaritas, reconnect with her girlfriends about everything from jobs and work to men and sex (she was barely having any, like most of them), Uber home, and sleep in the next morning.

  She’d been out for a nice lunch at Chipotle when she’d gotten the call from the unknown number. She’d taken it because that small mother’s instinct had cried out at her that it might, just might, be an emergency involving John and Mack, though she didn’t really believe it—

  Until she’d heard the cool words of the man on the other end of the line, telling her that John was dead and Mack was sitting in the Calhoun County Sheriff’s office, waiting for her to come pick him up.

  She hadn’t cried, surprisingly. Maybe it was because she and John had been mostly staying together for Mack. Maybe it was because they hadn’t had sex in almost a year, and when they had, it had been mechanical, over quickly, and left her wondering afterward if he’d been picturing an Asian woman when he closed his eyes for most of it.

  Maybe the tears would come later. After all, they’d been married for almost twenty years. That didn’t just pass without some emotion, did it?

  Nora clutched the wheel tightly as she drove down the interstate, the grey sky hanging over them like a ceiling on the world and Mack sitting next to her like a black hole of silence, sucking in every word she said without radiating any out in return.

  “Mack?” she offered again, trying to get something, anything out of him. He glanced at her, attentive enough to watch her, waiting for her to say something more than his name. “Are you …?” She didn’t bother to finish.