Unearthed (17 page)

“Pfffffffft,” Hendricks said, drawing a cringe from Arch that was almost as blatant as if he’d taken the Lord’s name in vain. “I don’t think there’s much we have to fear from some big-talking New goddamned York socialite.” There it was.

“You’re feeling a little cocky lately?” Alison asked, arms still folded. “Because I remember you after the bicyclists, a damned mess that needed help moving from point A to point B, and they weren’t even greaters. Demon royalty? Sounds like serious business to me.” She shook her head. “But I guess I’m not a vagrant demon hunter who gets his ass kicked all the time.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about throwing Duncan out of the congregation in any case,” Arch said, trying to bring things back on point. “Maybe he’s right, or maybe he’s fudging for his own reasons. I don’t know him well enough to know what he’s up to.”

“None of you knows me well enough to know what I’m up to,” Duncan said, appearing as a shadow at the far end of the barn behind Hendricks. He stood, a dark figure against a bright blue sky, perfectly still. “Have any of you asked what I want? What I’m trying to accomplish? Or have you just considered me another gear in the machine you’re putting together?”

“You knew what this machine was about all along,” Hendricks said, turning to face him. “Arch was clear from the get go. We were gonna take the war to the demons and keep Midian from getting swarmed by more evil than we could handle.”

“And I’m on board with that,” Duncan said. “You had my approval on that. But we’re not talking about that right now. When you move the discussion to Kitty Elizabeth, you’re not talking about wiping out a little smudge of darkness that’s threatening to grow big and swallow the town. You’re talking about challenging one of the aristocrats of a demon dynasty that’s been walking the earth since before your big book of beloved instructions got scrawled down.” He nodded at Arch. “She’s not the obvious evil you’re looking for. She’s bad, but she’s not the darkness that’s going to swallow this place whole. She’s way too coy for that. She’s death by inches, not apocalypse right now.”

“You do not even know what she’s capable of,” Hendricks said, shaking his head. “You don’t know what she’s up to, you don’t know why she’s here … what she’s done before.” Hendricks’s face reddened, and he looked away.

“She’s here because the rest are here,” Duncan said. “Hell’s come to town, and the salmon of Capistrano are swimming upstream as fast as they can because they hear the call deep within. She’s no different.”

“And if we trust you on this and you’re wrong—” Hendricks said.

“Then this town tips a little sooner than anticipated,” Duncan said. “Lerner and I took a bet, based on the chaos level, before he cracked. We figured a month. It’s already been longer than that, so really, you’re doing quite well.” He shivered. “But the hotspot is not growing weaker, either. It’s … maintaining. There’s an equilibrium here. More demons are coming, I can promise you that. Kitty Elizabeth’s just a symptom. She may have been big back in the days of yore, but she’s been on earth so long that her ambitions have taken a back seat to her desire for comfort. Now she’s small time. She’s more worried about covering her own ass than obliterating ours. Here in the world, she’s a big name. She’s got status. Back in the depths, she’s on a shit list. She lacks the power to accomplish anything major.”

“Then why won’t your home office let us rip her a new one and send her home?” Hendricks asked, flushed.

“Because they don’t want her back there,” Duncan said.

“This is kind of an interesting topic, how it all works down there, this hierarchy,” Alison said. “Who’s at the top?”

Duncan just stared at her, all darkness with the sunlight streaming in behind him. “Who do you think?” He took a few steps inside. “I’m here to do what I can. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. Head for another town. You wanna go make a run at Kitty? Don’t tell me about it, and I’ll just stay out of the way. You’ll all be tortured and dead within the day, but I’ll leave you to it if you want.”

“I don’t think any of us are saying you should leave—” Arch started, but was cut off.

“Yeah, why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?” Hendricks asked, and Arch flinched at the cowboy’s words for a far, far different reason than he usually did.

Lauren had days off, and thankfully they always seemed to be in the middle of the week. She preferred four ten-hour days to a traditional eight-hour schedule of five, and most of the time she got that with the ER. Most people might not have viewed that as a perk, especially when it resulted in her losing her weekends, but she didn’t mind most of the time. It left a lot of time for her to fill on Tuesdays, which she did by browsing the internet.

The internet was a funny place. Porn, porn, supposedly as far as the eye could see. She didn’t tend to do any looking for that, though. Lately she’d been searching for demons, for anything about demons. Unfortunately, Google had been rather helpless in this regard, sending her to site after site that looked promising but took a left turn into kookypants territory before she’d even read past the landing page. Six weeks of this had been so maddening that she barely even wanted to look anymore.

She gently set aside her laptop computer, a thin, near-weightless thing compared to the old models she remembered that weighed a ton and took forever to boot up. This one started with a purr and was ready to go in seconds. That was useful for those moments when she had a thought and needed to search quickly, before it escaped. Which was a danger that she didn’t remember facing in her younger, less-stressful days.

She heard the sound of a car pulling up outside, then a key in the lock. Her mother had been out all day, filling her time however she did. Lauren suspected a luncheon with old friends, but that was just a guess. Seemed like her mother did that pretty frequently.

The door opened and filled the room with light. Lauren had had the curtains pulled and the lights off, as though someone was going to sneak up and peer through the window behind her, trying to catch her searching for demon websites on the internet. It was a guilty feeling that wasn’t quite logical, but she did it anyway.

“What are you doing sitting in the dark?” Vera asked as she came in, setting her purse to the side.

“Nothing,” Lauren said, suddenly feeling as nervous as if she’d gotten caught looking at demon pictures. That probably would go over about as well as porn, here in her mother’s house. “How was … wherever you were?”

“Lunch was lovely,” her mother said, shooting her a knowing look. “The ladies are all well, asking about you, of course. We all marvel about how times have changed.”

“Because of the invention of the wheel? I bet it’s a huge time saver.”

“You are such a smart girl, it doesn’t surprise me that it carries all the way down to your ass,” her mother said, rather snidely for her. “No, we talk about how the time was, we all wanted to marry doctors, and none of us did. Now my daughter is one.”

“Yes,” Lauren said. “It sounds like a tremendous perversion of the dream of being taken care of, doesn’t it?”

“You act like I’m not proud of you,” her mother said, looking a little wounded.

“I’m sure you are,” Lauren said, taking the sting out of her words. “So … how are the … ladies?” She didn’t really know her mother’s friends that well anymore, not that she ever did. She knew their names and a little about each, but beyond that, it was a mystery to her what they even talked about.

“They are all as well as can be expected given what’s been going on,” Vera said. “But this is interesting. There was this odd young man in the diner while we were there, jotting down things on a notepad. Well, at the end of the meal he came over and talked to us—”

“Still got that Darlington charm, huh?” Lauren asked.

“I’m not a doctor,” her mother said, “but it seems to me that I married into that name and thus its charm wouldn’t apply to me unless it were somehow an airborne pathogen.” She cocked an eyebrow at Lauren, who nodded, a little impressed. “He didn’t want to talk to us like that in any case—it turns out he was a reporter who overheard our conversation.”

“What were you talking about?”

“What’s going on around town, of course,” Vera said, like it was obvious. “All the deaths, all the tragedy. Anyway, he said he was in town to talk to people about it.”

“Like carrion to a carcass,” Lauren said.

“He had these fancy little business cards,” Vera said, fumbling with her purse, opening the clasp. “Let me see, what did it say? It sounded very sleek and modern.” She brandished the little white square. “Frostwich.com?”

Lauren felt a frown of amusement crease her forehead. “He works for a website? Like a blogger?”

“Isn’t this the modern age?” Vera asked, holding the card protectively, as though Lauren’s sharp words were going to somehow shred it. “Doesn’t everybody work on the internet these days?”

“Not all of us,” Lauren said. “Though I wouldn’t mind being able to diagnose a chancre over a Skype call rather than in person.”

Vera frowned. “What is that?”

“It’s a sore that’s a sign of syphilis,” Lauren said, glancing at the card in curiosity. “Usually, but not always, pops up on the—”

“I am now not so happy that you are a doctor,” her mother said. “Anyhow, this gentleman,” she flapped the card again, “is looking for people to talk to about what’s going on. It sounded interesting.”

“Let’s check out his website, then,” Lauren said, and opened her computer. The thin screen flared to life. “What was it again?”

“Frostwich.com,” Vera said, sitting now next to her on the sofa with a plop. “But without a ‘t’ in the ‘ich.’ Like Greenwich.” Her mother leaned in as the website loaded. It had a bright orange top bar against a white background, and the lead story was right there.

Demon scourge in Tennessee town?

Lauren stared at it in silence for a moment, her mouth slightly agape. She felt the sharp sense that her spine had gone perfectly straight, like she’d been caught with the windows open, like someone had snuck up behind her and there was a money shot right there on the screen. She slowly turned her head to look at her mother, who was reading the headline with squinted eyes. She sat there in silence for a moment then said, “Well, that’s disappointing. He’s a crazyass.” She glanced over and met Lauren’s eyes, looking a little huffy. “Don’t say it.”

Lauren was almost too stunned to reply. “Say what?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said, getting up and heading out of the room, “but I’m sure you’ve got something smart to say.”

Lauren, for her part, just stared at the banner headline for a moment more before looking down to see that her mother had left the little card next to her on the sofa. With a quick glance to see if Vera was watching, she pocketed it, noting that it had a telephone number right there on the card, like an invitation waiting to be answered.

Hendricks was feeling that sense of something breaking within him as he tossed out the “fuck off” to Duncan. It was that gut-deep desire to drive over the cliff out of spite, to do something reckless and to hell with the consequences. He’d crossed the emotional Rubicon by wading through the waters in a fury and was done with it; he stormed out of the barn past Arch and Alison without even bothering to cast a look back at the OOC to see if his furious jab had landed.

“Hendricks!” Arch called from behind him. Hendricks was almost to the porch, plunging through the gap in the long grass like he didn’t care it was there, hem of his coat billowing out and dragging against the edges of the narrow path. He was sweating, not from the early morning heat, but from fury. As if he were a kid again, he just wanted to get back to his room and lie down on the bed and stew, to think about the origin of all these roiling emotions.

“Nothing to say I haven’t already said, Arch.” Hendricks hit the old wooden steps hard enough to make them squeal louder than usual, his boots making a
clomp! clomp! clomp!
as he ascended onto the porch.

Arch made it to the bottom of the steps just as Hendricks was opening the door. He paused as he opened it, looking back to see Alison tearing across the trail toward them at a jog. He made a split second decision, assessing the situation, and coming to the conclusion that he could either face them here or let them chase him all the way to the room. It hadn’t been the wisest strategic retreat, picking the path back to the house they were all currently sharing, though he hadn’t really been thinking it over at the time. He’d just fired and gone for cover, that was all.

“What the hell, Hendricks?” Alison said as she steamed into range. She had her arms folded across her chest, her teeth bared when she finished speaking. The fury smoked off that girl like heat off a barbecue.

“I said what I was thinking.” Hendricks made no apology for it. If they couldn’t see it, they were blind.

“He was honest about his ties,” Arch said, like it was all justifiable. “He didn’t try and hide them.”

“He didn’t mention this once before now?” Hendricks asked, still in a state of disbelief that they could deny the evidence of their own fucking ears and eyes. Hadn’t they seen that Duncan was hiding things? Didn’t they know that he was clearly holding out on them?

“I expected you to have a cooler head about this,” Arch said, “given you’re the one who wanted to work with Duncan and Lerner to begin with, back when I thought all demons were evil.”

“It’s too fucking hot for a cool head,” Hendricks said, wiping his brow. “He hasn’t told us about royalty before now. He hasn’t told us about his obligations to defend them—”

“Which he has explained, totally calm and rational about the whole thing,” Alison said. “It’s you who’s being unreasonable because you’ve got an unresolved hard-on.”

“Please stop talking like him,” Arch said to his wife, voice low and plaintive.

“I’m just calling it like I see it,” Alison said. She turned back on Hendricks, eyes afire. “You’re mad at Duncan about holding out? Fine. Who are you working for?”

“I work for my own damned self,” Hendricks snapped.

“Really? Then who mailed you Arch’s sword?” Alison asked. She had a bitter, twist-the-knife smile.