Unearthed (14 page)

“One never knows what the future might bring,” Bill said, not turning back to him. “It’s best to keep one’s options open.” He disappeared down the hallway, and Brian heard him open the door to his bedroom gently, so as not to wake Mother.

Brian sat there for a while, thinking this one over. His dad would go out again. Brian hadn’t really been paying much attention, but he’d noticed his dad went out most nights. It had become kind of a disturbing pattern once he’d realized what was going on. So he’d go out again, and Brian would remind him of this evening, of the offer made, and it would shrink his available alibis. The fun part would be catching him in a lie. Heaven knew he’d caught Brian in enough of them; the reversal would be hilarious.

Brian sat back and planned his next move and thought about how sweet that “Gotcha!” moment would be.

The house was dark, the lack of electricity of absolutely no comfort at the moment. Hendricks was settled down on the bed, still feeling the fury running through him for what had happened that night. He didn’t have his hat on his face, not now. It was an early bedtime, because what the hell else was there to do? Arch might have wanted to practice with swords, but Hendricks was in no mood. He’d probably hack the man’s hand off accidentally anyhow.

Duncan was lying there, still and sedate, in his shirt and tie, shoes removed and squared off at the side of his mattress. Hendricks just stared at him in the dark, imagining the demon could sense his furious looks. The air was warm, the night was filled with the chirp of crickets, and there was a silence in the house itself. Hendricks was hungry but didn’t want to eat, was thirsty but didn’t want to give up his long, hateful gazes at Duncan in order to walk downstairs for a bottle of water. He suspected Arch and Alison were already asleep, though he couldn’t hear them right now, their curtained-off room downstairs far enough away to allow none but the obvious noises to seep through the darkness.

“I think your eyes are gonna burn up if you stare any harder at me,” Duncan said quietly.

“Oh, can you sense that?” Hendricks said snottily.

“I can hear you breathing furiously,” Duncan said. “You sound like a bellicose toad.”

“You got a way with words, Duncan,” Hendricks said. “Too bad none of them included telling us there was demon fucking royalty out there and that you were their toad-y. Bellicose, too.”

Duncan made no noise but his reply. “Why don’t you tell Alison you’re in love with her?”

Hendricks lay there in the darkness, cheeks burning. “That’s a fucking cheap shot,” he whispered. “And I’m not.”

“Royalty is rare,” Duncan said, that same, steady, even tone. “As a demon hunter, I figured you’d have heard the rumblings about them.”

“I don’t tend to do much talking with the demons I run across,” Hendricks said, “and this whole evening is reinforcing my beliefs in that area.”

“You feeling betrayed, kid?” Duncan asked, and there was a shifting sound from his mattress. “You just now remember that we got into this game from different ends of the board?”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said. “I guess I’d forgotten since we’d been through so much shit together.”

“You’d know all about how going through a fight pulls people together. And we are together, on ninety-nine-point-nine percent of things. It’s just that last point one percent where we’re not gonna see eye to eye on execution.”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said tightly, “as in I’d like to see to that bitch’s execution, and you’ll see to ours if we fuck with her.”

“Like has very little to do with it,” Duncan said, still whisper-quiet. “But you play the game you’re on the board for.”

“Fuck your board, I play cards.” He rolled over, his back to Duncan. “You know this lady is up to bad things. No one comes to Midian right now for the weather, not from the demon world.”

“That party tonight was pure, banal evil,” Duncan said. “It was a bunch of petties and one heavy breaking bread—or bones—together and chewing the fat.”
Literal bones and fat,
he didn’t have to say, from the people they’d let out of the cages. “Hotspots are notorious demon hangouts. They draw the chaotic elements of our kind like moths to a bonfire, and parties are a natural part of that scene. You think she’s up to terrible evil because she’s here? I think she’s just up to the garden variety, and she’s so good at hiding behind closed doors I can’t open that she’ll probably get away with it this time, too.”

“You make it sound like it’s nothing,” Hendricks spat in disgust.

“Most evil is nothing,” Duncan said. “It’s not the Holocaust. It’s a human being who has zero regard for his fellow man, or places their very right to breathe below his desire to possess their stuff, their sex, their will. It’s a boring, petty thing, the evil of most men, with no grandeur or glamour. It’s ugly, it’s nasty, and it’s local, not global. That’s the evil most people drown in, and you won’t even notice it until it’s over your nostrils. It’s yelling at someone because they’re clumsy, or snapping at a kid because they got in
your
way. It’s the rise of the selfish self, and while Katlin Elizabeth is the poster child of it, she’s not going to end the world with it.”

“She’s just gonna leave a slow trail of bodies over the centuries,” Hendricks said, staring at the cracks in the wall. “And you’re okay with it. You don’t care about the little people who get caught up in her wake.” He felt sick, a very real rage causing his throat to well up with bile, gut churning into a case of heartburn.

“I didn’t say that,” Duncan said.

“Not with your words,” Hendricks said, tugging his coat tighter around him, “but you damned sure said it by deed.”

Duncan didn’t reply to that, and Hendricks didn’t have anything else to say. So they just lay there, in silence, for hours, neither one of them sleeping and neither of them saying a damned thing more.

Hendricks heard the whisper in his mind, the tickle of fingers running through his hair, like his wife’s kisses on his bare skin in the night. It ran through him with a powerful shiver, woke him from a dead sleep, the sound of his name from lips that he couldn’t see or even really hear.

Lafayette Hendricks …

He sat upright on the thin mattress, feeling like he’d missed a step and freefallen into wakefulness from a dream. He sat there, breathing hard, shaking off the effects of it.

“Bad dream?” Duncan asked.

“Yeah,” Hendricks said, running a hand over his face. “Felt like I was falling.”

“Freud said falling dreams were sexual,” Duncan said. “Something about not getting enough, I think.”

“Fuck you and fuck Freud,” Hendricks said, the malaise of their earlier argument coming back to him now.

“Probably not something a guy who was getting enough would think about, fucking a demon and a dead guy.”

Hendricks pushed himself up, grabbed his hat and let his coat sweep behind him as he left the room.

“Where are you going?” Duncan asked.

“I need some fresh air,” Hendricks said. “The air in here feels kinda heavy, what with all the lies.” He went down the stairs quietly, making as little noise as he could with his cowboy boots on the old wood. He took his time, placed his feet near the edges of the stairs to keep the warped boards from singing out with high squeaks in the night.

When he reached the bottom he went right to the front door, night swept in close all around him. He was going by feel and by the shining shafts of moonlight that came in through naked windows. The previous owners or the squatters that followed had taken everything, even the curtains.

Hendricks turned the doorknob slowly, listened to it squeal in protest as he got it two-thirds through. He tugged it the rest of the way and opened the door, shutting it as quietly as he could behind him.

The air held a promise of chill that October had yet to deliver. His long, heavy coat hung loose around him, and when he took a step, his boot heel made a
thunking
noise on the porch that made him cringe. The boots were good for a lot of things, but piss poor for sneaking. He took the last couple steps down and found himself standing on an overgrown lawn with over a month’s worth of paths carved out of the high grass by frequent use. Place had to be lousy with snakes, but they’d been lucky so far and had gradually worn it down where they walked. Mostly from the barn to the house and back, where the car was parked and tarped.

Hendricks glanced up briefly at the dark skies, the silver moon hanging overhead like a big damned spotlight. No clouds, just stars and the huge disc, looming above like a searchlight. It shone down on the thick old trees that surrounded the house, providing cover from searching eyes.

Except for the pair that was fixed on him now, of course.

Even in the bright moonlight he couldn’t see the shade of them, but the hair was red, the vivid color unaffected by the tinge of the white luminescence.

“Hello, Starling,” he said, easing through the high grass toward where she stood, a silent monument in the middle of the faded green shoots.

“Lafayette,” she said, staring at him.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Hendricks said, drawing closer. She stood there, unmoving, watching him, wearing what looked like a soft, white cotton nightgown. Sometimes she showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, but that was almost always when there was a fight brewing. Whenever she showed up in a dress, she was there to talk, not do anything. She’d done it a few times lately. “That was a neat trick, that thing where you woke me up. You haven’t done that before.” He stopped with a few feet left between them.

“I needed to speak with you,” she said. “But I didn’t want to talk to the demon.”

“All you have to do is say you want to talk to me privately,” Hendricks said. “Duncan’ll leave it be.”
Probably
, he didn’t say. It wasn’t like he really knew the OOC, did he? Tonight had been a rude reawakening to that little fact.

“I want to talk to you privately,” she said, as wooden as ever. She spoke in a tone that made Hendricks think of robots from old movies, like if someone clubbed her hard in the head, gears would grind and metal would show beneath parted skin.

“Well, you would usually say that before you get someone alone, just for reference.” He found himself smiling; it was always a challenge, communicating with Starling. If she was an honest-to-whoever angel, she hadn’t been in the world in a long damned time and didn’t know how to talk to people. It was hard to tell what she knew; sometimes she’d come armed with information he couldn’t have guessed at in a million years, but she also got tripped up on the most elementary things. He doubted she could have ordered a meal through a fast food restaurant’s drive-thru if she was forced, and forget trying to get her to use a phone. Put a spear in her hand and she could skewer someone pretty good though, he guessed. That probably counted for more in their current situation anyway.

“There is a threat,” she said.

“Kitty Elizabeth?” he asked, unsurprised. He glanced around to see if by chance Arch or Alison had followed him out. Didn’t look like it. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He could still feel that sick sensation in his stomach, lurking there at just the mention of her name.

“She is searching for something.” Starling’s dark eyes kept with him the whole time, he could see it out of his peripheral vision.

“What’s the MacGuffin?” he asked, looking straight at her. When she registered a lack of reaction to his question, he changed his approach. “What’s she after?”

“It is hard to say,” Starling replied, toneless.

“Hard to say?” Hendricks asked. “Because you don’t know what she’s after? Or because you enjoy watching me and mine chase our tails while we work it out for ourselves?”

“This place holds many secrets,” Starling said.

“Not really an answer.”

“Perhaps not the answer you seek,” Starling said, “but it is an answer.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that point,” Hendricks said, forcing a smile. “But I got it: Kitty the Demon Duchess is looking for something nasty. I’ll put that right on the top of my priorities list.”

“You would do well to heed my warning.”

“I’d do even better if I knew what the fuck you were actually warning me about.”

She studied him intently for a moment. “You are not ready.”

“You keep saying that,” Hendricks said, “but you keep coming back anyway. If I’m not ready, I kinda wish you’d just leave me the hell alone until I’m done baking or whatever.” He raised a hand and waved her off. “I’m gonna go try and sleep. If I can put aside your vague and dire predictions of upcoming calamities—”

She was suddenly in front of him, blocking his path back to the house. “Who do you trust?”

Hendricks looked back, tried to figure out if she’d just moved fast around him or if she’d disappeared and reappeared. He hadn’t ever seen her do the latter in a fight, exactly—before a fight or after one, yep, she’d done it. But teleportation felt like the kind of thing that someone would use more often if they could. His eyes snapped back to her dark ones. “I’m having a little trouble trusting anyone at the present moment.”

“You should trust me,” she said.

“You should tell me more,” Hendricks said. “Because trust is a two-way street, and thus far all you do is show up to help me in fights and spout some pretty fuzzy prophecy-type stuff my way. I’m not complaining for the help, but the ‘could-mean-any-damned-thing’ warnings I could do without. For example, you could say, ‘Some douche is summoning an epic evil into a cow,’ or ‘there’s a guy who jizzes flaming petroleum that’s going to try and flood the whole town,’ or even ‘some horny carny is going to knock up a local girl and you’ll be beset by an infestation of non-chocolate devil dogs in nine months.’ Anything specific, really, and more helpful than ‘There is trouble.’” He stared at her, that blank expression. “Any of this getting through to you?” He waved a hand in front of her face and got the vague sense she followed his motion with her dusky eyes. “Hello?”

“Hello,” Starling said.

Hendricks stood there, waiting, for another moment, then shook his head. “I give up.” He started to trace a path around her, but her hand lanced out and grabbed him by the bicep, fingers grasping him through the rough skin of his coat. “I think you should take your warnings to someone more disposed to patience next time,” he said.