Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Lucia’s head ached like someone had sledgehammered her just below the jawline. She opened her mouth to speak but blood and drool came dribbling out on the floor next to her and across her hand, which was planted palm down on the white tile. She felt like she’d given a blowjob again: she was dripping and gagging. Dark liquid dripped across the tile and onto the dark grout that crisscrossed it. Agony surged through her jawbone as she moved it and she tensed her neck, which ached all up and down it.

  Dazed, it took her brain a moment to realize what had happened.

  Mike had punched her.

  “Ohhhhhh!” Karen shouted in exultation. “How’d that feel on your whore mouth? Bet you won’t be sucking dick again anytime soon!” Her feet danced into Lucia’s vision for a moment, then a sharp pain screamed in Lucia’s side like she’d been shot in the ribs.

  Karen had kicked her. That was what had happened.

  Lucia tipped over, cradling her side, trying to protect it under her elbow like a bird shielding itself with a wing, and held loosely to her jaw with the other. She thumped a hip to the ground, lying stretched across her side and curling up rapidly, instinctively, against the next attack. A hot rush of emotions ran through her—fear, like a crashing wave of hot water. Shame, that she had brought this on herself. And then that nagging worry that she deserved this, all those little stomach-deep feelings dug in like a trench line around her belly, setting up for the long haul. Like she hadn’t already had enough to think about.

  “I’m so disappointed right now.” Mike’s face appeared above her, fuzzy through her nearly-closed eyelids. “I thought you were better than this.”

  “She was a whore through and through,” Karen said. The cigarette was still dangling from her fingertips, and she flicked the ash down at Lucia, who covered her face as it landed on her hand. It burned, stinging for a few seconds, but nothing like the pain in her jaw. “I told you that.” Karen snorted. “You’re just pissed you weren’t the one who got her virginity.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Karen,” Mike said, “or you’ll be on the floor with her.”

  “Oh, don’t play that game with me, Michael,” Karen said. “You know you’re going to need me to lie about how she got this way.”

  “We found her on the lawn,” Mike said. “That’s the story, got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it. You want to hit her again while she’s down?”

  Mike didn’t answer, but Lucia felt it a moment later, a hard, cratering blow that felt like someone had taken a steam shovel and just ripped a stretch out of her back just above her left buttock. She tried to scream, but it came out a muffled shriek instead, through her shattered jaw. Then she heard a series of soft, urgent cries, and realized they were coming from her own throat.

  “You should hit her in that pretty face,” Karen said. “Take out some of those teeth. That way, she comes back, she won’t be able to bite you when she’s sucking your dick.”

  “I’m starting to think you might be a little jealous of her, Karen.”

  “She’s just a whore cunt,” Karen spat on her, literally. Lucia could feel it on her hip, exposed where her tank top had risen during the assault.

  Lucia curled up in a ball, trying to keep everything tight, keep them from having any other places to hit. She was whimpering, she dimly realized, a low, continuous whine. Karen kicked her in the leg, but lightly compared to what Mike had just done.

  She deserved this, Lucia realized dimly. This was her punishment for everything. For getting her parents killed. For sucking Ray’s dick, for letting him fuck her like that. This was the penance. This was the price.

  She’d earned this.

  “I don’t want to hear a goddamned squeak out of you,” Mike growled somewhere above her; she could hear him even though she’d buried her face in her hands, trying to compact herself as tightly as she could. “Not one.”

  She said nothing. Why would she? This was hers, her pain. Her punishment.

  Mike’s fingers sunk into her hair, and she drew a deep breath as he forced her to her feet, yanking her along, back toward the door. “You’re going to lie outside for a while. I better not hear you. Then we’re going to come find you, and when we do, we’ll call you an ambulance.” He stopped, yanked her around and ripped her hands from her face. “Look at me.” She tried to guard her face again, but a strong grip clamped onto her wrist and pulled her hand away. “Open your eyes. Look at me.”

  Lucia strained against eyes that didn’t want to open. She managed to get them thinly slitted, enough to see Mike staring down at her. She could smell his breath, the faint aroma of toothpaste still on it from his pre-bedtime ritual.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Mike said, staring down at her with deep pools of black in his eyes. “Remember that. I’ve got lots of clients that owe me favors. If you tell the police I had anything to do with this, I will have your whore ass shanked in jail. Got it?” He stared down at her out of the shadows that shrouded his face. “Nod your head if you understand.”

  Lucia nodded, once.

  “This girl knows when she’s beat,” Karen cackled. “Not too dumb. You know, for a dumb whore.”

  “You just keep your mouth shut and everything will be fine,” Mike said, his face in the shadows. “We’ll get you taken care of. Just don’t. Cross me.” He shook her once, for emphasis, then grabbed her by the hair again and dragged her out.

  Karen’s feet tiptoed over to the door, and she opened it quietly, as though she were afraid any sound would alert the police. Lucia took that all in as Mike dragged her over the metal threshold and it hit her shoulder, bumping it like a punch someone had aimed to deaden it.

  The pain was spreading from her jaw, all up into her head.

  “Just wait right here a few minutes,” Mike whispered as she felt the cool touch of the stone front step against her cheek and he finally relinquished his death grip on her hair. “I’ll be back for you, and we’ll make it all right.” Now his voice was soft and soothing.

  He shut the door behind her, leaving Lucia alone on the front steps, bleeding quietly onto the concrete. “Clean this shit up,” Mike’s voice echoed through the door, “while I shower off.”

  “Shit,” Karen said, “why would I want to go do that? Get whore blood on me?”

  “Because if you don’t, you’ll be lying out there next to her, Karen, and you fucking know that. Maybe it’s been too long since I reminded you of your place in this house.”

  There was only a faint squeak in the house, a foot scuffing against the tile. “I’ll—I’ll get it cleaned up.” Now she sounded appropriately cowed, Lucia realized dimly.

  She touched her lip and brought her fingers away. Blood drenched her fingertips. She reached out and pressed them against the concrete, not making a sound. It left a dark impression, a black-looking fingerprint on the concrete.

  I deserve this, Lucia thought as she lay there on the concrete porch. There was no light overhead, only the street lamps to give her illumination. Her neck ached. Her jaw throbbed where Mike had hit her. Her vagina no longer screamed, the lost virginity now the least of her pains. Funny how it had felt like it would be the very death of her only half an hour earlier.

  She lay there for an hour, two—she could hardly tell—thinking about everything she’d done in her life to get to this point, to deserve this pain—and it passed like an eternity of torment in the dark.

  Day Two

  “… and it turns out that this Night’s King? Well, he’s been made by …” Nate McMinn’s voice droned in the early morning still.

  The sun rising over Midian cast a flat glare on the wet pavement of the town square, the splash of the hose going, Keith Drumlin doing his level best to wash off the stains. It had been two weeks since Halloween now, two weeks since the damned world had come to an end. A week since he’d seen that crazy shit go down in the woods with those hellcats, seen a goddamned demon rip Sam Allen in half like something out of a fucking horror film.

  The body count kept tickin
g up and up—an attack on a hiker last week that came wandering in off Mount Horeb with his skull open, half his brain eaten out. A body they found in the south end of town with the pieces scattered all over the road like he’d been pulled apart for sport. Shit, Keith had seen crazy crap before he’d joined the watch, but since …

  He’d hit his quotient for fucking lunacy. And that was absent the nightmares, which came with alarming frequency. He found himself thinking about one now, hands shaking on the hose, water squirting everywhere. “Shit,” Keith muttered under his breath, getting it back under control.

  “So, they’re all charging after ’em, and we finally find out where Hodor got his name—” Nate stopped, lifting the flat push broom he had in hand, the end speckled with dried and crusted blood. “Keith? You listening? Did I lose you?”

  “Sorry, Nate,” Keith said, adjusting the hose to close it, only a drizzle making its way out now. “I wasn’t paying attention, no. Got lost in my own thoughts.”

  “That’s a shame, man. I was just bringing you up to speed so you can pick up the next season.”

  “I don’t care about that right now,” Keith said with a shake of the head.

  Nate stared at him dumbly. “Well, you should. The sixth season of Game of Thrones was the best damned season of scripted television I’ve seen in a long fucking time. That sumbitch moved in a way the last five seasons just didn’t—”

  “That’s because they took it out of the books and started making shit up as they went,” Keith said, waving him off. “Without some author slowing you down, your television writers can write fast and make a lot of crazy shit happen.” He shook his head again. “I don’t care about that though.”

  “But you watched it religiously up until this last year! We used to talk about it all the time!”

  “Yeah, but we got other shit going on now,” Keith said, mouth feeling dry as a West Texas gulch in August. “And I used to catch up on it once summer was over.” He waved a hand around to indicate the square. The blood was long dried, the remaining pieces of corpses putrefied. They both had a special solution rubbed on their upper lips to defray some of the stink as they cleaned. “Summer’s over, and now this is the shit that we get, right? Can’t even enjoy deer hunting season for fear I’ll get ripped into pieces like that dad last week.” He frowned. “They ever find that kid?”

  “No,” Nate said. “Don’t reckon they ever will, either. Those damned critters were fucking vicious. You see what they did to Sam?”

  “I ain’t seen anything but that when I close my eyes this last week.” Keith shuddered in the morning chill. “Sam didn’t deserve to go that way.”

  “Hell, that kid didn’t deserve to go that way! He was just hunting with his daddy, and boom! Then he got hunted, with his daddy. Then attacked with his momma, and soon enough …” Nate shivered. “Shit, Keith. Is this what it’s going to be like from now on?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Keith said. “Maybe. Hard to say. I ain’t never been part of an anti-demon militia before. Guess I don’t know what to expect other than what I’ve seen so far.”

  “I reckon that is what we are,” Nate said, straightening his posture, like he’d just woken up to the fact that he was part of something cool. “An anti-demon militia. That’s badass.”

  Keith gave him a jaded look. “Until you get cut in half like Sam, sure.”

  “You got a real good point there,” Nate said, and put the broom back down, scrubbing at the concrete. The problem was that everything had dried and crusted, and it didn’t want to come off so easily. And there was a lot to be scrubbed—piss and shit, blood by the gallons.

  “This is depressing as fuck,” Keith said, and this time, Nate took notice of his murmurings.

  “I been saying that a lot lately,” Nate said knowingly, getting back to sweeping. “That, and ‘I just don’t know.’”

  Keith tried it out—”‘I just don’t know,’”—experimentally, like. “Yep, it fits,” he decided. “For pretty much everything.”

  Nate paused, looking up at the sun layering streaks across the horizon. “Yep. That’s why I just keep saying it.” He surveyed the mess around them uneasily. “Reckon we oughta get back to work.”

  Keith stared at the detritus around the square. Two weeks, and it was still in a fearful state. “You know, Nate … I’m starting to believe this might be a lost cause.”

  Nate didn’t stop scrubbing. “You talking about this little project of ours? Or the whole town?”

  The sun was coming up, bright orange. Keith swallowed heavily. He would have spent his nights here too, if he could, just to get away from the quiet, empty house. But then he’d be out on the quiet, empty square, so he bore the nights in anticipation of getting out in the mornings, of doing this. Feeling the whisper of fall air on his skin as he sprayed the rivulets of gore off the town square, once the proud centerpiece of Midian, Tennessee, and now …

  Well, now it was the site of their saddest hour.

  “I might just mean both,” Keith said, his mouth a little dry, hands feeling a little weak. But he went back to work anyway, alongside Nate, opening up the hose valve and trying his best to clean up the mess around them.

  *

  Reeve woke to the radio playing the Dean Martin standard, “Ain’t Love a Kick in the Head,” and he had to agree with at least part of that sentiment. He definitely felt like he’d been kicked in the head, and as slow recall came rolling over him with the return of consciousness, he started to wonder if he’d be feeling kicked in other places, too, as the day went on.

  Because it was election day. Time to see whether or not County Administrator Pike’s little effort at ripping him out by the roots was going to bear any fruit. Wouldn’t that just be a bitch, trying to fight this war without the office, without the cars, without the funding that Pike had just pushed through for him to put some of the members of the watch on staff.

  At least Pike had come through like he’d promised during their conversation last week. He might have kept those purse strings tighter than a nervous virgin’s thighs up until recently, but he’d loosened them up a little in the last few days. Not enough to get at the honey pot, but then Pike wasn’t totally in charge of that.

  Reeve rubbed his bald head and turned over on the cot where he was sleeping in the back of the station house. A dim light seeped in under the door and informed him that it was well past daybreak.

  He swept his legs over the side of the cot, ignored the cracking of his back and knees as he realigned things, adjusted himself so as to stand. He was still in his clothes, because he’d be damned if he’d be awakened in the middle of the night to deal with a crisis in bunny slippers.

  Soft voices made their way through the thick door of the supply closet. He concentrated, trying to hear what they were saying. He could hear Arch out there, and maybe Brian Longholt too, though it was tough to tell from here. Reeve stood, caught his balance by shoving off from the cinder block wall, and toddled his ass on over to the door to open it up.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind seeing you,” Brian said as Reeve opened the door and damned near fell over from the brightness shining in through the windows. Shit, they were blasting him like someone had set up klieg lights outside. It was just the sun though, nature’s version of the same.

  “I don’t reckon I’d want to see me if I were him,” Arch said, arms crossed over his chest. The big man was wearing his uniform, standing like a pillar in the middle of the bullpen area. “I don’t expect I’d aid his recovery. More like remind him of his daughter being gone.” His tone suggested that there was no emotion below the surface, none at all, which was a feat even for the stoic Arch Stan.

  “I doubt he’s operating on a high enough level to work through all that,” Brian said, turning back to the dispatch radio. “You’d have to see him to understand. It’s … not pretty.” Brian glanced up at Reeve. “Morning, Sheriff,” he said, all business again.

  “Any calls in the night?” Reeve a
sked, trying to compose himself as he shut the door to his bedroom/supply closet behind him.

  “Minor stuff,” Arch said, a statue barely coming to life to answer. “More sightings of those shadowcats—”

  “Hellcats,” Brian said with a wide grin. “Hell. Say it, Arch.”

  Arch just gave his brother-in-law—former brother-in-law, now?—an icy gaze. “More of ’em,” he said. “Out near Rucker’s place. Probably a couple packs. Gone by the time we got out there.”

  Reeve grunted. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “Figured you needed your rest for today,” Arch said. “And besides, we ain’t had a clash with them since last week out on Faulkner Road.”

  “Could come at any time,” Reeve said, working his way over to the coffee pot. He could smell the brew. Smelled old and stale, and he gave no fucks as he poured a big old cup and watched it sit there, not a hint of steam.

  “Sorry I missed that little throwdown,” Brian said. “All I’ve heard the last few days is you guys talking about it. Sounds like an epic showdown between good and evil.”

  “Really?” Reeve did the slow turnaround. “Because to me it seemed a lot like us almost getting wiped the fuck out and then having to basically surrender our decency in order to leave a twelve-year-old to die in the woods alone.” That still stuck in his fucking craw, that they’d left Mack Wellstone out there to get ripped apart by those goddamned hellbeasts. And he must have gotten ripped up good, too, because no one had seen hide nor hair of the boy since that night. Over a week in the woods with those things prowling around and not a sign?

  Shit, Mack Wellstone was deader than the U.S.S. Maine.

  “Better than taking an entire crew into infested woods and pitting them against those hellcats on their own territory,” Brian said. The fact that the lily-livered Ivy League pussy was on his side wasn’t much of a balm to Reeve’s butthurt over his own choices. Logic didn’t sell half as hard to him when it carried a whiff of cowardice, and this thing stunk of chickenshittery. “Unless your goal was to get our town’s only line of defense good and dead.”