Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Brian made a face. “I, uh … haven’t had that problem.”

  “Well, let me tell you something—you get down enough, it could happen.” Casey coughed. “I’ve heard. I wouldn’t know personally, of course. But this is why it’s so important to get your head right. How useful do you think you’re gonna be to the watch if you got your skull up your sphincter? Anal, not oral sphincter, just to be clear. Because those are two different muscles, and they feel totally different, obviously—”

  “Stick to the point, Casey.”

  “Right.” Casey nodded. “People talk about fitness. Gotta keep your body in shape. But you gotta keep your head in shape too. And if you ain’t got no way to blow off steam, to balance your brain chemistry so it ain’t all overworked and whatnot—”

  “You’re a real expert endocrinologist and neurologist here, Casey.”

  “—I know you’re making fun of me, but this is all just common sense stuff, man. Your head ain’t right, you ain’t right. Simple as that. And your body falls with you. Know what I mean?” He picked up the lighter out of the pickup bed next to him and proffered it to Brian. “So toke up. We’re in the fight of our lives here, and you don’t need to be so wound up, man. Get high every once in a while. Get laid—”

  “No.”

  “—by a girl, if that’s what you need,” Casey said, rolling his eyes. “I think you know I am plenty partial to pussy. I get that. Just get right, you know? Even out, man. Because I get the feeling—” and here he leaned in conspiratorially “—this thing? This fight? It ain’t gonna be like Gus Terkel—by which I mean ten seconds and done, if you get me?”

  Brian lit the joint back up and took a long inhale before he answered, letting the smoke blow out slowly. “It’d be pretty tough to miss a point as boldly stated as that one, Casey. Yes, I get you.” He took a breath, letting the feeling of warmth, of lightness creep up into his head. It felt good. “And yeah … I will let loose a little.” He looked at the glowing end of the joint, the ember fading without oxygen to feed the little flame. “Wouldn’t want to burn out, after all. Not now.”

  *

  Pike was sitting back in his chair when Darla came into his office. The kids were out in the receptionist area with Jenny, already busy talking to her, which was something they viewed as a great novelty. Jenny was good with kids. That was definitely one of her pluses, that warm, personable personality.

  Also, she could suck a monkey through thirty feet of garden hose. That was a bigger plus than her way with kids, at least as far as he was concerned.

  “I got a babysitter for this afternoon,” Darla said as she breezed in, closing the door behind her.

  “Is it Jenny?” Pike asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “No,” Darla said, features pinched with amusement. “She’ll be working late with you.”

  “Oh,” Pike said, then the realization of what she meant dawned on him and he said, “Ohh.”

  “How can you get Reeve up here?” Darla asked, sliding onto the surface of the desk in front of him. She was wearing yoga pants, and when she sat down, the desk flattened out her leg in a line where it met. It looked funny under the stretchy material, and he found his eyes strangely drawn to it. Darla’s legs were never one of his favorite features, but they weren’t bad. A little hammier than he might have liked, even before two kids, but she made up for it upstairs, in brains and tits.

  “I don’t know yet,” Pike said, bringing his eyes up. She didn’t get mad when he stared at her body, but she did roll her eyes and make fun of him if she caught him. Underneath it all, he wondered if it was because secretly—in spite of her protestations to the contrary—all her witticisms about how kids had fucked up her body were really just cover for her being pissed about it.

  “Glad you’re finally looking at me,” she said, and leaned over, dropping a hand into his lap. She caught the tip of his cock in a pincer grip with her right hand, and he flinched until she lightened the pressure and gave it a little rub between her fingers. He took a breath and she rubbed it again, thumb and forefinger finding the spot where his tip met the shaft even through his underwear and his Dockers. “You fucked Jenny yet today?”

  “Not yet,” he said. She wasn’t doing a whole lot for him with two layers of clothing between their skin, but it was better than nothing.

  “Okay, you’re going to need to do it later,” Darla said, all instruction. “You’ll need to blow a load in her pussy, okay? You think you got that much in you?”

  “I think I can manage that.”

  “Watch some porn on your phone if you have to. Get a little slow burn going, build up some interest—but don’t finish yourself off, okay?” He nodded, and his gaze fell down to those yoga pants again, and where they met the desk. “Jesus, Jason, it isn’t even going to be difficult, is it? You’re hard already.” She twinged him a little between her fingers. “Also, you should look at a lady when she’s talking to you.”

  “I’m looking at your thighs where they meet the desk,” Pike said, looking up with a smirk of his own.

  “I’m not my thighs. Or my ass. Or my tits, because I know that’s where you’ll look next.”

  “I’m still on those yoga pants, really,” Pike said, admiring the curve of the top of her thigh.

  “Still up here, jackass.”

  “If you didn’t want me to look, maybe wear something looser?” He shifted his gaze to her tits, because dammit, she pretty much asked for it, but mostly to get her goat. He smiled as he met her eyes again. “Come on, Darling Darla. You’re sitting here talking to me about getting fucked like I’m a hungry beast. Don’t get mad when I start appetizing on what’s in front of me.”

  She snorted, still rubbing his tip under the cloth of his pants. “I’m just giving you shit. Do whatever you have to do to make this happen. I’ve got everything planned on my end. You have two jobs—get Reeve here, and get ready to nail Jenny’s ass. Just get ’em done.” She stood.

  “I’ll be all over that as soon as you leave,” he promised, and then watched her yoga pants ass retreat toward the door. She shook it a little extra for him, smiling as she did so. He really did love that woman.

  *

  Lauren came into her friend’s house quietly, like the guest she was. Elise was a doctor too, but she’d moved on to private practice and the wealth that came with it. Meanwhile, Lauren was doing her time as an attending at Red Cedar, and not receiving much in the way of wealth. But it was still better than med school, where she’d been actively paying rather than earning.

  The lovely front door had a glass, ovoid window that was partially frosted and distorted in the rings where it wasn’t, making it difficult to see inside. She refrained from calling, “I’m home!” to see if Molly would come running. Spoiler alert: she wouldn’t, because they were still barely speaking.

  She closed the door behind her, taking her time, keeping the noise to an absolute minimum. She slid out of her shoes, parking them on a mat that lay over the beautiful teakwood floor, and padded down the hall. She could hear faint voices ahead, through a push door in the kitchen.

  Lauren paused just outside, listening to the conversation within. She could hear Elise bustling around the kitchen, probably fixing herself an organic kale smoothie or something.

  “You settling in?” Elise asked. She wasn’t working today. She only worked like three, four days a week—and still lived in this renovated beauty near downtown Chattanooga. It would be enough to make Lauren jealous, under normal circumstances.

  “Well,” Molly said dryly, “last week we lived in a whorehouse and this week we’re here. Before that, we lived at my grandmother’s house—you know, until she was murdered.” Lauren could almost feel Elise flinch even though she couldn’t see her. “So I guess you could say … no, I’m not settled, really. I’m unsettled.”

  “What a coincidence. Me too, after that answer,” Elise said. “Here we are. Two unsettled people. In a kitchen. Yay.”

  “Yes, but you’r
e unsettled as in your tummy is a little queasy with pity, because you don’t know what to say to me.” Molly speared Elise with unerring accuracy, and Lauren cringed because … ouch. “I’m unsettled like the state of Oklahoma right up until people didn’t have anywhere else in the US to expand.”

  “I saw that infographic,” Elise said. “Poor Oklahoma.”

  “Ever been there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then you know why it was last.”

  “Well, it was also supposed to be reserved for the Native Americans, but … yep.” Elise’s tone changed. It was still stilted. “Well. Maybe I should leave you to—”

  Lauren brushed into the kitchen, the door squeaking as she pushed through and let it swing back. She stepped clear, taking care that it didn’t come back and whack her heel, which had happened before when she’d stood in its swing radius for dramatic effect. “Molly,” she said warningly. She actually sounded like her own mother, and Lauren wanted to curse herself for it.

  “To be honest, I preferred the whorehouse,” Molly said. She had been sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen’s island, and she got up, heading off to the staircase and up, without even a backward glance at her mother.

  “Good talk,” Elise called after her. “We should do this against tomorrow.” Molly didn’t react. “She’s so much like you it’s creepy,” Elise said once the sound of a door slamming came from upstairs.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Lauren said, taking Molly’s place at the counter.

  “Her freeze-out game is on point. That shit was tense,” Elise said, sliding in front of her and leaning over like a bartender—except with a green, cloudy drink in front of her. It smelled of apples and something bitter. Kale, probably. “Like your shoulders.”

  “That obvious, huh?” Lauren felt for her right shoulder and—yep, sure enough, knots like a ship’s line.

  “Obvious like a meteor striking you in the middle of the street just after you’ve changed your undies,” Elise said, and when Lauren gave her a perplexed look, she said, “because afterward you’re going to need to change your undies again.”

  “Wouldn’t you be dead?”

  “I assumed a small meteor. The better to make you suffer. Maybe a good head wound, concussion, loss of con—”

  “Stop it, Doctor,” Lauren said, cradling her head.

  “How was work? Miserable as ever?”

  “It was pure delight,” Lauren said. “I got sent home early.”

  “What? Did your boss grow a heart? A conscience? A pair?”

  “Some human decency, maybe. He kept mentioning that he lost his mother last year, so who knows?”

  “I’m surprised he had a mother,” Elise said. “I figured he was grown in a lab somewhere from rejected scrotal tissue samples.” She let the last joke hang for a second before moving on. “So … your kid’s pretty pissed.”

  “She’s turning into a really maladjusted child,” Lauren said.

  “Bet you’re wishing you’d gone into psych now, huh?”

  “I don’t know that there’s a category of study for …” Lauren’s voice trailed off. She hadn’t told Elise the raw truth about what was happening in Midian because … well, hell, if Elise had come to her with that kind of story, their roles reversed, Lauren wouldn’t have believed it, either. “For whatever we went through back there.”

  “Your mom dying is tough,” Elise said with that kind of mostly-sympathy that lacked empathy, the cold voice of distance that told Lauren she maybe was trying to understand, but didn’t get it on any level. That was Elise; she was the poster child for ooh!-ing in sympathy whenever someone got hurt, but when it came to feeling the pain of others, she didn’t. She was way too busy feeling her own self-indulgent emotions and planning her social calendar. “Especially since she basically raised your daughter. It’s gotta be weighing on Molls.”

  “I’m sure it is, and don’t ever call her that to her face,” Lauren said as neutrally as possible. How could she explain that what happened would be weighing on Molly more than it would have if, say, her mother had died of old age, or cancer, rather than a knife wielded by Molly’s own hand? That wasn’t the sort of thing she could easily walk Elise through, step by step. Oh, and then the demon took over Molly’s body, and used her to strike back at me for my part in an anti-demon organization trying to save our hometown …

  “Well, I gotta go,” Elise said abruptly, counseling session over. “Got late lunch plans with Cara—you remember her from med school, right? She landed at a radiology practice in North Carolina, can you believe it? But she’s back in town for a few days, so we’re going to go eat at Puckett’s in downtown Chattanooga. I think after that I’m going to indulge in a little retail therapy before my spa appointment this afternoon. I have this wonderful massage therapist named Kelly. You should book with her—but not today, because I need her to work out some knots. And then, later tonight, I’ve got one of those parties where my friend Jana is getting us together to drink wine and sell us stuff. Essential oils, maybe, or dildos? I dunno. Honestly, I hope it’s the dildos, because the last one I went to was essential oils, and I’m kinda over that whole thing.”

  Lauren watched her as she spoke, prattling on about such insignificant shit that it was hard to keep from picking up the garlic press on the counter and throwing it at her just to shut her up. This was what Elise spent her day doing? Lunches with old friends and parties with dildos and wine? Brunches on weekends, long days at the office followed by dinners out and then a return to her immaculate yet empty house?

  Lauren felt the urge to swallow a lump in the back of her throat before she fully registered that it was there. She’d always complained about the ER, and then about the shit she had to do with the watch, but … damn. At least what she was doing meant something. When she was raising Molly, it was putting her time and effort toward something beyond just herself and what she wanted to do. And once she joined the watch, well …

  Sitting at her mother’s kitchen table, smelling the biscuits baking, gravy bubbling on the stove … she missed that, the simple, homey feeling on the days when she wasn’t rushing around trying to keep a kid from dying after an ATV accident that split his head open and crushed his chest.

  That … had meaning. Those stolen moments after a fight with demons, or after a long day at the hospital … they had meaning because they existed in the time between when she was fighting against some invisible onslaught, either of disease and injury or the very literal demons that had invaded Midian.

  They had meaning because what she was doing mattered.

  And as she listened to Elise prattle on about her day, every single action she was taking oriented entirely toward making sure Elise enjoyed herself … it made Lauren a little sick for ever envying her—whether for her wealth, her freedom or even her cushy job.

  “Well, I’ll see you later, okay?” Elise waved on her way out the door, already back to thinking about what was next in her day. “I’ll bring you some leftovers from Puckett’s, maybe, depending on what I get.”

  The door slammed and Lauren was left sitting in the kitchen, pondering her life and trying to figure out which mattered more—meaning? Or saving her and her daughter’s lives?

  *

  “Well, this fucking sucks,” Hendricks opined from beneath the weight of Duncan, who was pressing into his back and felt, well, weighty.

  The fire sloth, visible through the thin layer of vegetation that guarded them from his sight, was still bellowing flames into the air. The bushes weren’t that thick here, but holding still had kept them safe so far, while the giant demon thing just burned shit in a rage. Three of the houses under construction were lit up now, the damned thing destroying its own den and a few potential others in a mad rush of what looked like pure anger.

  “Shhhhh,” Duncan whispered and gave Hendricks a little poke to the back of his neck. Hendricks shut his mouth, but if the goddamned fire sloth could hear him over its own bellowing and the crackling of the f
lames now racing through the wooden framing of those three houses, hell if he didn’t deserve to catch them like a goddamned king-shit apex predator.

  “I’m about to have a claustrophobic reaction to you smothering me,” Arch said, causing Hendricks a dash of relief. At least he wasn’t the only one feeling squished by the OOC.

  They all three froze as the fire sloth swung around, screaming and bellowing, loosing another blast of flame straight up. It glowed against the black smoke that was already rising into the sky, and Hendricks stared. He could feel the heat coming off it even at this distance, like he’d taken a peek inside the oven while something was cooking. It damned sure wasn’t warm cookies or his mother’s meatloaf either.

  The fire sloth’s black eyes floated over the woods, like it was dimly considering that there might be prey hiding in the trees. Hendricks held his breath as he watched that fucking obvious expression cross the thing’s face, and so it didn’t exactly surprise him when about two seconds later it sprayed a nice, long, hot tongue of fire into the woods ten feet to their right.

  Hendricks held his goddamned tongue, even as the underbrush ignited, going up in a big fucking WHOOSH! of heat and flame. Out of the corner of his eye, he kept his gaze on the growing conflagration, trying not to move his head.

  “We should probably move,” Duncan said under his breath. He spoke in a muffled way that suggested he wasn’t moving his lips. “So you two don’t cook to death.”

  “Mmhmm,” Arch said, clearly trying to keep quiet too. “Where do we go?”

  “All it takes is one fucking stab into this thing’s paw and he’s toast,” Hendricks said, violating his oath of silence. He was overheating, and not just because the fire to his right was rising up the trunks of the trees and spreading into the dry branches and whatever leaves were left alive.

  “All it takes is one good breath of that hellfire and you’re toast too,” Duncan said. “Just keep that in mind.” He paused. “Unless—”