Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (15 page)

“Our society thrives on rules and order,” Lerner said, and even he was subdued on this one.

“A society where you can order human meat in most major cities,” Deputy Stan said.

“That’s a little underground,” Lerner said. “They’re not openly slaughtering humans in the streets. It’s kind of like modern-day America, right? There’s crime—burglaries, armed robberies, murders. There’s organized crime, where they set out to profit from things that are illegal. But none of this is socially acceptable in mainstream society. How many of you regularly hang out with murderers and rapists?” He glanced at the two cops. “When you’re off the job, I mean.”

“We don’t tend to get many of them around here even when we’re on the job,” Arch said.

“Because it’s not socially acceptable,” Lerner said. “You can’t walk out onto the street and murder someone without expecting a societal response—some sort of societal response. It’s the same thing in the demon world.” He paused. “Except in hotspots.”

“So that’s where demons go to blow off some steam?” Deputy Harris asked. “It’s like their version of the bar?”

“I’d say it’s more like their version of a no man’s land,” Lerner said. “OOCs are in charge of enforcing demon law. Of keeping the lid on the things our people would do unfettered, things that would expose us to mainstream human society. But when it comes to a hotspot … it’s like our version of…I dunno, pick a spot on the globe filled with chaos and apathy.”

“Washington, DC?” Alison said.

Lerner felt himself grimace and didn't have to wonder why. “We try, okay? We try and police those spots, but once the shit starts to roll down the hill, if it gains enough mass, there ain’t no stopping it from wiping out everything below.”

“Downward spiral,” Deputy Stan said. “And that’s how entire towns disappear off the map.”

“You got it,” Lerner said. “The problem here isn’t just that things are progressing fast, either.” He looked around the little circle of faces. “That happens sometimes, especially when a town is remote enough that we can’t get to it en masse quickly enough. No … here it’s a worse problem.”

“Yay, a worse problem,” Deputy Harris said. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense. What’s the worse problem? Because we could use not only some bad news right now, but some
worse
news.”

“Let me guess,” Hendricks said. “With eighteen hotspots flaring at the current moment, you can only cover so much ground.”

Lerner tilted his head slightly. “The cowboy gets it in one. The Office of Occultic Concordance … is officially out of manpower.” He paused then sighed. “Well, demon power.”

When the alarm went off at six a.m., Laura wanted to hit it, so she did. When it went off again at six-fifteen, she smacked it hard enough to leave a bruise on her hand.

At six-thirty, even in her fog of sleep, she knew she couldn’t ignore it anymore.

The sharp, delicious smell of coffee greeted her as she opened her bedroom door. It was the same door she’d been opening her entire life, the same bed she’d been sleeping in since she was a kid. As she yawned, she reflected that it felt like she’d been living the same day a lot lately. Work, home, Molly, work, repeat. It wasn’t quite a grind. It was more like a good sanding.

She thumped her palm against the bannister as she descended the stairs. Her mom was already sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread out in front of her. Molly was there, too, her soft brown hair twirled around and a tip of it stuck in her mouth. Lauren hated that habit in principle, but in practice, it’d been cute ever since Molly started doing it at roughly the age of three, when her hair had finally gotten long enough.

“Morning,” Lauren pronounced, and she could hear the drag in her words, the tiredness. She felt every ounce of the middle-of-the-night awakening, and the irritation of running into Archibald Fucking Stan at the crime scene was predictably a sour note as well.

“Did you leave in the middle of the night?” Vera asked. She did not look up from her paper.

“Yeah,” Lauren said, pulling a coffee mug that said “World’s Greatest Mom” from the cupboard. It was her mother’s, not hers. She stuck it under the coffee maker and grabbed one of the single-serve cups. “Sheriff Reeve called again.”

“Oh, no,” her mother said, voice dripping with that small-town sense of worry that was absent in all but the most empathetic people Lauren had met in the thriving metropolis of Chattanooga. It was a lot easier to have a “Shit happens, shrug it off” attitude when you didn’t personally know the people who died tragically. “Who was it?”

“No idea,” Lauren said, taking her first sip of coffee. She swished it around in her mouth, tasting the glorious flavor of the dark beans as it circled down the back of her throat the way she imagined liquid leaving through a drain. She’d need to keep it coming today. “It wasn’t a body that was in great condition for identifying, it was dark, and I was just there to …” She paused. “I don’t have a clue why I was there.”

“Somebody else died?” Molly asked, looking up from her homework. The little knot of chewed hair had saliva dripping from it, which was decidedly un-cute.

“Yeah, Midian is turning into a real Sunnydale, California, lately,” Lauren quipped. She paused. “You should be careful, just in case.”

“This is just awful,” Vera said. “I ain’t never heard of nothing like this in all the born days of my life.”

Lauren rolled her eyes at the “all the born days of my life” bit. She’d traveled a little bit in the last few years, and she hadn’t heard anyone else, anywhere, say anything like that. It was uniquely Tennesseean. Still, her mother had a point. “It has been a little grim here lately.” To say the least.

“You think it’s the same person causing all this mess?” Vera asked. Lauren would have been willing to bet that her mother had had this conversation before, probably every day for the last week, with all her friends. Fortunately, Lauren hadn’t been around to hear it. She viewed her mother through the lens of having known her for all her life, and her motivations were as plain to Lauren as the dime-sized blemish on her mother’s cheek. She had these conversations because she got something out of them, some little delight in the misery being discussed, some small reinforcement and social joy out of having something delightfully negative to talk about. When it wasn’t something as big as this, it was the small things, like how so-and-so’s husband had stepped out on her. It was always “stepped out on” instead of fucked around, which would be how Lauren would have said it. Another generational difference.

“I have no idea,” Lauren said, not wanting to get drawn into her mother’s dramatic mess. It was a conversation that could last decades when it was a matter of insignificance like a cheating husband; she didn’t even want to think about how long a conversation could go on with the grist for it being the shit that had been going down in Midian lately. She had to get to work, anyway.

Lauren blinked some of the sleep out of her eyes and looked over at Molly, whose head was back down. “Is that your math homework?”

Molly did not look up, which was telling. “I’m almost done.”

“Why didn’t you finish it last night?” Lauren asked. It was a valid question, but the minute it came out, she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be taken well by her daughter.

Molly’s eyes came up flaring, widened as her lips became a thin, hard line. “I fell asleep, okay? I fell asleep early, that’s all.” Super defensive.

Lauren just stood there, coffee cup in hand, the steam swirling off the liquid. She had a pretty good bullshit detector, and it was squealing at her just now. “Did you?”

Molly did that teenage thing where she grunted, sighed like she was being put upon, and nudged the cover of her math book closed. “I don’t have time for this, Mom.” She slid her chair out and scooped up her books and paper, carefully settling her homework into the page she’d been working on. Lauren could see the algebra from where she was standing; it was only half done by her reckoning. “I’ve gotta go.” Molly shrugged into her backpack and motored out the door with her math book in hand before Lauren could come up with a reply.

“She was lying, you know,” Vera said, not looking up from where she was flipping the page of her paper.

“I caught that, yeah,” Lauren said, staring down the hall to the front door that had just been slammed shut. Now just what the hell was she supposed to do about this?

Hendricks was in the passenger seat, rolling along with Erin at the wheel. They’d split shortly after Lerner’s grim-ass pronouncement. It was on his mind more than a little because it dovetailed with his own experience. Plus, it went right along with Starling’s scary-ass prophecy. He glanced over at Erin. She hadn’t said a word to him, which was—well, it wasn’t fine, that was for damned sure. He was tired enough to not want to delve into it, though, having only gotten a few hours of sleep on Arch and Alison’s couch before Mrs. Stan had shaken him awake to meet with Arch and Erin as they came off their emergency shift.

All in all, it had not been a good night. He thought about voicing these thoughts to Erin, but she was clammed up, jaw tight. He figured she was still pissed about the whole Starling visit, but didn’t know quite how to approach that particular minefield. He decided on the direct approach, limbs be damned. “You still mad because I went to a whorehouse?”

She turned to look at him sidelong with eyes that would have burned the skin off of Superman. “No, I’m totally fine with you visiting a whorehouse. Hell, do it every night. Send me postcards, or better yet, take some video footage of yourself in the act so we can watch it and get all sexed up together.”

“‘Sexed up together’?” He let out a low guffaw that probably didn’t help his standing any. “You know damned well I didn’t do anything untoward in that place.”

There was only a grudging hint that he might have been right in her reply. “I don’t know that you didn’t.” She wavered just a little.

“Don’t get me wrong, Alison suggested I should,” Hendricks said, letting himself crack a grin, “but somehow I resisted the lure of a possible STD and the cold embrace of a woman with multiple personalities. Can’t imagine why. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she can turn her entire disposition on a dime.” He glanced at Erin, who was now looking a little less hostile. “Kinda like that, yeah.”

“You’re not helping your case any here, Marine.”

“Sorry,” Hendricks said, genuinely contrite. “Look, we needed answers. Shit is weird around this place, way weirder and more hostile than any hotspot I’ve been to before. We’re stumbling blind in the dark here. Someone has the potential to shine a light for us, I’m inclined to go a little out of the way for the illumination. Even if it means I gotta go somewhere I don’t really care to go.” He meant every word of it, and hoped like hell she could hear it from him. “And I hope you believe me when I tell you that it wasn’t a place I truly cared to go.”

“I believe you,” Erin said after a long pause, “but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

“Well, there’s a long list of things I’m not happy about,” Hendricks said. “Starting with demons being a real thing and ending with several people making some pretty shit predictions about your hometown’s chances of survival.” He shook his head. “Starling said that whatever was coming was so bad it’d be likely to make me give up. Me! I’ve been fighting this war for five years, and she thinks I’d just throw in the towel and bail town, I guess. Maybe she doesn’t know so much as she thinks she does—”

“Can we not talk about her for a while?” Erin’s voice was quiet, but it cut across him nonetheless.

“Yeah, sure,” Hendricks said and waited a minute or two. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing, right now,” Erin said, and she shot him a slow, only halfhearted smile. “I don’t think I want to talk at all at the moment.” Hendricks just nodded, ready to fall back into silence. “But,” she said, “I can think of something we can do when we get back to my place that doesn’t require a word to be said.”

Hendricks felt the slow creep of the smile across his face. He’d forgotten what it felt like when things were new, were exciting, still intoxicating and fresh. He thought about responding with a “Yes” or a “Yes, ma’am!” but realized that silence just said it best.

Mick was out on the square, just waiting. The sun was already creeping up, like it did in summer. Not as bad as it got up north, where it could be out at five in the morning, but it was up now and getting hot already. The businesses were alive all around him, some diner with a sign that said “Surrey’s” was a buzz of activity, little bees coming in and out with coffee cups and such on their way to face the day.

Mick liked the small towns. They weren’t as crazy as a big city got, weren’t as much of a hive. Here there was some room to breathe. Some room to think.

And you didn’t have to work too hard to stalk someone in a small town because there weren’t too many places they could go.

The girl named Molly passed into the square about a half hour after Mick sat down on the bench to wait for her. He didn’t know for a fact she’d come through, but he suspected she would. He knew the school was a couple blocks away, and if she’d come through last night, odds were she would pass through again. She took no notice of him—not of anything, really, because her head was down and she was hurrying along in her own little world.

Mick took off after her at a trot. More like a jog to a human, where it would look like he wasn’t trying too hard—just a little. It wouldn’t do to break into a full-on demon sprint and scare the shit out of the locals by tear-assing after a young girl like he was some kind of stalker. Even though he kind of was.

He slowed to a faster walk as he caught up to her. She was skimming the edge of the square, still caught up in her own head and letting her feet walk for her on a path she probably walked every day. He watched her long, dark hair bob and sway as she walked. She had a little bit of a duck-footed thing going on, turning out the toes at a forty-five degree angle with every step. Mick liked that; it was cute, too. He could tell he had a little infatuation going for this girl.