Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (25 page)

He swallowed and found his mouth dry and sticky. Smacking his lips together brought new pain from his face where he’d been struck. This had happened before, but damn if he hadn’t gotten his shit kicked more times than he could count since coming to this small town. Before, demon hunting had been a hazardous occupation but not one that was quite as much of a bloodsport as it had turned into lately. He’d gone for fringe demons, causing trouble and nesting. He didn’t even see the fringe demons in this town; there were too damned many main-eventers. Big threats, big chaos, and apparently all in town for the convention from hell. This hadn’t been how a hotspot worked, at least not the ones he’d been to.

This was something new.

“You awake?” Alison’s voice cut in through the dark, causing him to shift his head to look at where her voice had come from. He was rewarded with the dormant pain in his side flaring back to glorious, horrible life and reminding him that his ribs were fucked, fucked and fucked again. No lube, with a desert-dry cooch.

“I’m awake.” Every breath brought pain, every one of them, and pain brought with it a desire to breathe, which caused more pain and made him want to scream a stream of curses into the air around him.

With that, a light clicked on, a lamp next to the bed he was lying in came to life, showing Alison Stan’s hair hanging in long, stringy strands on both sides of her face. She looked thin and tired, like the night had taken its toll on her as well. She pulled her hand away from the lamp and he caught a glimpse of black smudges on her fingers from where she’d been firing the rifle.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“My parents’ house,” she replied without emotion. He was getting used to that from her. He tried to remember when he’d first met her. She hadn’t been lifeless then; she’d been ready to tear Arch a new asshole. He hadn’t seen that side of her lately; she’d been pretty inscrutable. He wouldn’t have wanted to play Texas hold ’em against her the way she was now, and he wondered what could cause that kind of change in a person.

“We’re here alone?” Hendricks asked, just keeping himself still for a moment. He didn’t even want to think about moving, though he knew that was coming.

“No,” she said, just as sedate as ever.

“They don’t care you brought a wounded guy in a cowboy hat home with you?” he asked, shifting in bed.

“You don’t have your hat,” she said simply, just as lifeless.

Hendricks froze. “Still, injured guy in a black coat who’s not your husband. Gotta raise a few questions.”

“My daddy’s home,” she said. “Momma’s in Atlanta overnight. My brother’s downstairs, but I don’t think he’s been up to find out you’re here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hendricks ran a hand—the one not on the side where he had the broken ribs—over his face, rubbing at it and finding a couple of places north of his eyes where he had bruises. “What is he, twelve?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “Got done with college, moved back home because he couldn’t find work.”

“Must be rough,” he said, not really feeling all that sympathetic. Leaving home at eighteen had left him pretty cold to these stories he’d heard, though he knew people ooh’d and talked about how sad it was. He felt something else turn him colder. “How’s Erin?”

“Don’t know,” Alison said. There was a measurable drag on her words, like even she was feeling the weight now. “I haven’t heard from Arch.”

“She was in bad shape,” Hendricks said, thinking out loud. He hadn’t seen her, but that kind of crash … he’d heard a little of what that lady doctor had said on the scene after she’d left him. Erin had still been alive when they’d left—which had been a damned cowardly thing for him to do, he realized in retrospect. He hadn’t been thinking clearly the whole time after the crash, after that demon did his part to put the hurting on him.

She’d saved him. She’d maybe gotten herself killed to do it, but she’d saved him.

Maybe.

He forced himself up, causing more than a little pain in the process. Alison just watched him, a hint of alarm behind those dull eyes. “What are you doing?”

“We gotta go,” he said.

“Go where?” she asked.

He stared at the door, looked at it forlornly, knowing that he was about to have to do something that would damned sure piss off someone he didn’t want to piss off—if they found out about it. “We have to go see someone.”

“We don’t even know which hospital she went to,” Alison said, low and kind of comforting. “Or if she’s—”

“I know, and we’re not going there—yet.” Hendricks straightened himself up and got his feet over the edge of the bed. “We need to go talk to someone. Need to go get something.” He moved slowly, hoping the small moves would keep him from drawing screaming pain from any one of his countless injuries. “It’s for Erin.”
And for me,
he didn’t say.

Alison just looked at him, and he could tell she was sizing him up, figuring out if he was delusional. “Where are we going?” He liked how she just sort of got on board for the plan.

“We need to go see Wren Spellman,” Hendricks said, shifting again so he could put both feet on the ground. This he did without causing too much pain, again. He knew at least some was coming, and he was readying himself for it. He’d have to force his way through, because this—this was too important to even think about waiting on.

“That guy that Lerner is always bitching about?” Alison asked, and he caught a faint furrowing of lines in her brow. “The one who’s selling all these demons runes so they can hide from him and Duncan?”

“One and the same,” Hendricks said, and he started to stand. Alison was up on her feet in a hot second and helped him. “We need to go see him, and now. Then we need to figure out where Erin is and get to her immediately.”

“Why?” Alison asked. “What can this Spellman do for her that’s so important?”

Hendricks steadied himself and felt the pain start the minute he tried to take his first step. Alison had an arm slipped around his, but she wasn’t giving much support. She probably couldn’t, because he was damned heavy. It didn’t matter; he could have walked to Spellman’s house in the country right now if he had to. “Save her life,” Hendricks said. “Spellman can save her life.”

Lerner was lying still on the bed in the hotel room. Duncan was nearby, on his own bed. Not lying down, though. He was sitting up, staring at Lerner like the black flames were going to consume him at any moment. That motel smell was hanging in the air. It lived there, after all, something like a sense that the place had been scrubbed but that some dirt each guest left behind was going to linger, forever, in the smell. It was a weird thing, but it was true of every motel Lerner had ever stayed in.

Duncan was like a stone. Like a stone sitting on the bed, absorbing all the energy in the room. More like a black hole, Lerner supposed. It sounded better, given what Lerner knew about astronomy. It had gone on far, far too long. Better to call it out than let it fester. “Stop being so damned grim,” he said.

“You’ve got a crack,” Duncan said tonelessly.

“I know I’ve got a crack,” Lerner said, “because I’m the one with the crack. This is not the end.”
Necessarily
, he didn’t add.

“But neither is it good,” Duncan said. “It’s not like you have a body that heals itself.”

That was true, Lerner had to concede. Once cracked, you were always going to be at a higher risk of breaking open, and that only led one place. And it was not a good place. “I’m not busted open just yet,” he said. “Maybe we can epoxy me closed.”

“Epoxy?” Duncan asked, a note of disbelief in the way he said.

“Something,” Lerner said. “You know, I watch these medical shows—”

“I don’t think you can epoxy a shell.”

“I don’t think it’s ever been tried,” Lerner said. “It’s above my hip, in an area that doesn’t flex much—”

“And if it flexes just once and breaks the epoxy hold, you’re dragged back to hell in a wash of flame.”

“Which might happen anyway,” Lerner said. “Better than sitting here for the rest of eternity, staring at the ceiling and watching Dr. Phil during the long-ass days.”

Duncan was quiet for a bit after that. “You could always try and prevail on the home office—”

“I think we both know how that would go,” Lerner said. It wasn’t the sort of thing one asked for. It was the sort of thing you wrote a report about and hoped they didn’t notice. Which was probably a faint hope, in any case. It wasn’t like nobody read those things. They read every one and you hoped they got the right impression out of them.

Duncan was quiet again. “Epoxy?”

“Go to the store and pick some out,” Lerner said.

“I let Alison keep the car, remember?” Duncan asked.

Shit. Lerner had forgotten. “What, are your legs cracked? You can’t walk to the store? Rogerson’s or whatever it’s called? I’ve seen it on the highway that runs through town.”

Duncan kind of paused. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Lerner chuckled. “Believe me, I’m not going anywhere ’til you get back. And I ain’t moving, either. So hurry, will you?” He fumbled with a hand outstretched toward the nightstand. “I get tired of Dr. Phil pretty fast, and I suspect this motel has a low limit on the number of channels.”

Lauren felt the bump as the ambulance turned onto the interstate. The sound of the engine accelerating was muted, probably because of good insulation in the back cabin. The paramedic was keeping a decent eye on things, so Lauren just sat back in the jump seat watching Deputy Harris’s vitals. She didn’t know the girl very well but that didn’t matter. She was from Midian and she wasn’t on the list; that was enough to keep Lauren fighting hard for her.

Like it would have made any difference if it had even been Arch Stan on the gurney. She’d still be here, still trying to keep him alive, too. That ass.

The monitors beeped and beeped and beeped, a steady rhythm indicating the deputy’s pulse and oxygen were still in the acceptable range—for now. Lauren had her doubts how long that would last. Harris almost certainly needed surgery, but she needed to stabilize first. They had her head wrapped up in a collar to prevent spinal damage because that shit would put a kink in the rest of the girl’s life. And she really was still just a girl, Lauren thought, still a teenager, right? Right. Whole life potentially still in front of her.

“Lucky thing there was only one person in the sheriff’s car,” the paramedic said, breaking Lauren out of her thoughts.

“There wasn’t,” she said, still looking at the monitor. Wait, what? There was another person in there, wasn’t there? Shit, how did she forget that? “There was a federal agent in the car with her. And some other guy got hurt riding with the other deputy.” Had she seriously gotten so focused on Harris that she’d forgotten she’d treated two other patients at the scene? And they’d both left, against medical advice—and any sane thinking. Both of them, gone. She hadn’t even realized it. Where the fuck was the common-sense emergency room doctor on that one?

The paramedic let a low whistle. “Guess they were lucky if they both walked away, huh?”

She didn’t respond. The guy in the black coat had barely been able to walk. The federal agent had been lying on the ground, unable to move when she first examined him. But they’d both gotten up and left the scene to pursue the fugitives? The suspects?

But they hadn’t even gone the same direction as the bicyclists, had they? She hadn’t heard them pull their car around the wreck, had she? Could she have been so focused and tuned out to her surroundings that she missed that, too?

What the fuck?

She wanted to give it more thought, try and hash her way to a reason for that supreme level of incompetence on her part, but the monitors started beeping to indicate that Deputy Harris’s heart rate was crashing, and suddenly she didn’t have an ounce of thought to devote to that mystery anymore.

Reeve had listened to Arch’s story without interrupting him, not once. Arch was trying to decide if that was a very good thing or a very bad thing, and he hadn’t really landed on which yet. The old Reeve, the one he’d known before demons started showing up in Calhoun County and wreaking havoc, would have reacted one way, and it was a fairly predictable way.

This new Reeve just stood before him, almost impassive, watching Arch stone-faced as he spun a tale of two federal agents who had asked him and Erin for help, then led them in a chase down a mountain against bicyclists on the run for reasons that hadn’t been elaborated on by the agents—save for to point the finger at them for at least some of the deaths in Midian. Arch wasn’t proud of it, but at least his lies were mostly truthful. He was really just leaving a lot out of his story, that was all.

Because a lie of omission wasn’t a lie—except for that whole part of it that was plainly stating it was a lie.

“Well,” Reeve said once Arch had finished. And then he stopped, just stopped like “Well” was all he had to say on the matter.

It did not sound good to Arch. Not at all.

Reeve just stared at him for a minute and then drifted back toward Fries’s car, which was how he’d gotten to the scene. Arch spared a glance back at his Explorer, and it looked like it had been through the mill. The ringer, too. Dings and damage to the bumpers and huge scratch on the left side where something had ripped it up. Not as bad as the sheriff’s own car, which was being winched up onto the back of the tow truck after being righted. The roof of it alone looked like aluminum foil that had been crumpled off the top of a casserole dish.

Arch just sat there, watching the car and stealing a look at Reeve every now and again. The sheriff had eased into the front seat of the cruiser and was on the radio. Arch could see his lips moving, but couldn’t hear a word of what was being said.

And that concerned him more than a little.

Mick had been waiting at the Surrey Diner for Molly for an hour after she’d promised to show up. It wasn’t exactly a tough thing for him to do, since he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He was just hanging there, drinking free coffee refills and getting the increasingly unpleasant looks from the waitress for doing it.