Unearthed (28 page)

Belzer sprinted off in the night, straight toward the front doors. She watched him, torn on what to do. This was absolute insanity, wasn’t it? To see something like this, a demon party, and watch it go completely apeshit this way? It wasn’t how they normally did things, was it? Of course, it could have been and she wouldn’t have known any differently.

Lauren found herself reaching out, taking hold of the door and throwing it open. She stood there, using the door for support as she made her decision. This was what she was here for, after all. Wasn’t it?

It was.

She started running toward the entry to the plantation, regretting all the while that she hadn’t had the good sense to just get the hell out of Midian while the getting was still good.

Arch caught motion in his scope, someone running from outside toward the front doors. That was different. He’d almost decided it was different enough to guarantee it wasn’t human when he opened his other eye to see more motion, someone else running. He lost the first target and pointed his gun toward the second, ready to squeeze the trigger when he stopped dead and jerked his hand away from the weapon totally.

He squinted and peered through the scope again, just to be sure. Was that …?

It was. Lauren Darlington was running into the party. She wasn’t exactly dressed for it, sporting blue jeans, but it was her. He watched her disappear into the white mansion and stared after her for a moment, just trying to put together exactly what it was he was seeing.

Lauren burst into the room and almost ran right into Belzer. He was standing there like a car parked in the middle of the highway, hand up, camera phone pointed. She followed his phone’s line of sight to a battle royal and paused to watch.

There was a woman in a sequined silver dress who was elbowing some demon in the face. Lauren knew this guy was a demon because he was not bothering real hard to hide it. His face was just—it was—God, it was just
demon
. The eyes were comically squinted, dark and furious with the forehead lined in a way that a normal human’s wouldn’t have been. She swore she could see glowing green from those eyes, and the dude’s teeth were something else entirely, something horrible. She wasn’t even a DDS, but she desperately wanted to fix the sharp and pointed mess protruding out of his gums.

“Fuck off!” the woman shouted, elbowing the demon in the face again. She knocked him aside and spun, raising a gun and shooting him point blank. Lauren recoiled at the sound, flinching away from the noise, the earth-shattering POP! POP! POP!

A guy in a suit came rolling along from where he was fighting a couple other demons, with a baton sticking out of his hand. He whipped it across the face of the green-eyed demon and Lauren saw it draw blood.

No, wait. That wasn’t blood.

Black, horrifying tendrils came ripping out of the demon’s wound like water pouring out of a hole in a dam. The darkness swallowed him, then retracted on itself like a serpent swallowing its tail, and the guy disappeared into the cloud of pure, living dark.

Lauren just stood there, blinking. She’d just seen it again. A demon get destroyed. She’d seen one before, but this … it was like some kind of crazy validation of everything she’d been thinking and feeling for the last month, some kind of orgasmic relief that it was really true.

“Holy fuck,” Belzer breathed. He spoke for both of them.

“Lauren?” The woman in the sequined dress asked. She looked familiar but tattered as hell, one of the straps of her dress hanging free, her hair all a mess. She was holding the gun still and turned to point it at another of the demons. She fired, and Lauren put her hands over her ears this time. It didn’t come close to blotting out the sound, but it helped. “Dr. Darlington?” The woman in the dress asked again.

“Yes?” Lauren asked tentatively. Did she know this lady? Girl? She looked about twenty-five, tops.

“I’m Alison Stan,” she said, and then it clicked. Arch’s wife, of course. She’d seen her around town, in the grocery store where she’d worked—not quite dressed like this, though. She’d gone on the run with Arch, naturally. “What are you doing here?” That gun just hung there, in her hand, menacing, ready to go off again at will.

“I’m looking for …” Lauren paused, aware of how comically stupid she probably sounded, then remembered what she’d just seen, “… demons.”

“Found some, you have,” the guy in the suit said, turning to whip another demon in the head with his baton. He struck hard, a blow across the face that caused the demon to get drawn into another of those dark explosions. Lauren couldn’t even decide what sort of movie special effect it looked like because it damned sure didn’t look like anything she’d seen in real life. She’d seen him before, at the Summer Lights festival, with the cowboy.

Lauren caught motion out of the corner of her eye and only had a second’s notice to shout her warning: “Look out!” But it was too late; a demon came right from behind and slammed into Alison Stan. The pistol went off as the guy dragged her to the floor.

“Shit!” Bill called, and Arch waited for the explanation. It didn’t come.

“What?” Arch asked.

“Demon’s on Ali,” Bill said, terse, his voice laden with enough tension to grind pure stone into gravel.

“Is she okay?” Arch asked. He didn’t get an immediate answer there, either.

The guy with the baton was busy as hell, three demons on him, and Lauren watched Alison Stan hit the ground from a suckering tackle that knocked her cold. Lauren knew what a concussion looked like, knew that any trauma to the head that turned out the lights was an immediate candidate for that. Getting knocked out wasn’t the easy solution to problems like in the movies; it could cause brain damage or death, and at the very least your head was gonna be fucked up for a while after being hit hard enough to drop you.

The demon hit Alison Stan hard enough to drop her. Her head hit the tile hard enough to open up the scalp, to let dark, venal blood well up from the capillaries on her forehead, to start it dripping down her face. Her eyes closed without so much as a flutter, and the gun went skittering across the floor as she hit, a lump of metal struck from a limp hand.

Lauren watched it all happen and remembered Molly in the Ferris wheel, screaming to beat the band. Lauren had been stuck below, what felt like miles below, helpless, while her daughter was attacked by a demon.

How many people had died in Midian now? Close to a hundred? More? She hadn’t picked up a paper to confirm a death toll in weeks. Didn’t want to know. Nobody wanted to know, really. Nobody wanted to believe.

She watched a demon take Alison Stan to the ground, and she believed.

And she was pissed.

Lauren Ella Darlington, M.D., felt a rage come over her that bludgeoned her reason, deadened her drive for self-preservation, and made her mad as fucking hell.

She screamed as loud as she could and went at that demon like he’d been the one that attacked Molly. And she watched his glowing green eyes widen in something approaching panic as she charged at him.

Another shot flared down the line as Bill ripped off a blast at some unseen foe. This one seemed headed toward the back of the mansion, a little off-center from where he’d been shooting into the structure before.

“Bill?” Arch asked. “Bill?” he called, down the line, covering his mike.

“Might wanna cover the exits, Arch,” Bill said tightly. “I just saw Kitty Elizabeth get in a car out back. Damned near missed it. I heard something slam and only saw her once she was about to get inside.”

“You get her?” Arch asked.

“No,” Bill said after a moment.

“And Alison?” Arch asked, trying to get the man to focus.

“It’s … complicated,” Bill said. “She’s down. Duncan and another lady are in a scuffle with one last demon, but they look like they got him under control.”

Arch’s heart seemed to stop. “Is she all right?”

There was a long moment of hesitation, and he couldn’t tell whether his father-in-law genuinely didn’t know or he didn’t want to answer truthfully. “I think we’ve done all we can do from here,” Bill said. “Need to head in.”

“All right,” Arch said, and was up in a hot second. “Let’s get going, then—”

He heard the crack of the branch under a foot a second before he made it all the way up. The sound of someone moving behind him, of a heavy footfall attempting to muffle or sneak. Arch had the rifle in his hands, trying to haul it up with him as he rose, and it slowed him, threw off his balance. He tried to spin, but it was a comically slow maneuver. He had it almost halfway around and was starting to raise it up to aim when he heard the voice. It was cold. It was calculating. It was …

… familiar.

“Drop the cannon,” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve told him, his pistol already pointed right at Arch’s chest. “Because I don’t need much of an excuse to kill you right here, Arch.”

Lauren surveyed the damage. She had a small laceration across her forearm, pretty superficial. Might need a bandage. She’d tangled with that demon in a nasty little swing, a tooth-and-nail sort of fight where she didn’t really know what she was doing. She’d gotten in one fight in school, but that had been a long time ago. This was a pure-rage assault, punches against a hard and unyielding skin, fingers gouging the demon's eyes, whatever she could do to vent her spleen at him.

It had worked, too. The demon didn’t seem to know quite what to do, couldn’t lay a fist on her, she was so close in, and he’d been too flustered to simply grab her and throw her down. She’d gone at him for a good five seconds, and then she felt the surge of darkness as he collapsed in on himself, disappearing right out of her grasp.

That other guy, the one in the suit, he was that federal agent she’d seen for about two seconds up on the mountain, when he’d flashed a badge at her. He stood there, baton in hand, on the other side of where the demon she’d been grappling with had been. He looked ragged, his suit torn, sleeve shredded. “You okay?” he asked.

She’d taken her assessment. She was fine as wine, which she realized she would not say no to a glass of right now. “As okay as I can be considering I just tangled with a demon. That’s something.”

The guy raised an eyebrow. “And survived. That’s everything.”

“Wow,” Belzer said, causing her to spin around to look at the journalist. He still had his phone out, filming. “Wow. This is just … this is so …”

“Alison?” the guy in the suit asked. He dropped right there to check on Mrs. Stan. Lauren just stood there for a second, stunned, then remembered she was a doctor and fell right next to him, brushing the blond hair back from Mrs. Stan’s eyes. She was so damned young; too young to be a Mrs., right?

“I got this,” Lauren said to him, nodding as she started to assess the damage. “Scalp lac. It’s a bleeder. She took a hard hit, probably concussed.” The eyes fluttered open, and Mrs. Stan looked at her blearily. Her pupils were big and black, like a miniature version of the vortex that had just sucked that demon back to hell. “Definitely concussed.”

“Hendricks,” the guy in the suit said, standing up. “That idiot. That fucking idiot.”

“How you feeling?” Lauren asked Alison, who just stared at her blearily.

“Is it morning?” Alison asked, voice thick with tiredness.

“I need to get her out of here,” Lauren said. “She needs medical attention.”

“We’re kinda light on time,” the guy in the suit said, standing up, baton back in hand. He started to stride off across the room, toward the far corner where a recessed hallway led into darkness.

“Where the hell are you going?” Lauren called after him.

“We brought someone with us,” the guy called back to her, not breaking stride, and starting to jog away. “We got separated in the fight when he went to confront Kitty Elizabeth.”

“Who’s Kitty Elizabeth?” This from Belzer, who was hovering over Lauren’s shoulder with that goddamned phone, filming away.

“Yeah,” Mrs. Stan said weakly, “who names their fucking kid Kitty? That’s gotta be like a … complex-inducing thing, am I right?”

“Watch her for a minute,” Lauren said to Belzer, knocking his phone aside. She stared him right in the eyes, saw the surprise there. “Watch her. Don’t let her get up. Call out to me if she starts to lose consciousness.”

“Where are you going?” Belzer asked as she stood.

She looked down at him. “Following the …” she waved at the guy in the suit, “… following him.” She took off at a jog toward the hallway. The guy had already disappeared around the corner.

Lauren heard her shoes make that soft, sucking noise of the rubber tread against the tile with each step. The lighting in this place was lovely, like something out of a fancy restaurant. It even smelled like a restaurant, the probable consequence of the buffet table in the corner of the room. Silence greeted her ears save for her own movement, and Belzer’s quiet murmurs behind her.

Lauren turned the corner and found herself in a short hallway. Double doors were open ahead, a lit room that looked like a library or lounge laid out in front of her. She slowed as she crossed the threshold, and the man in the suit just stood there like a big damned pillar holding the place up, right in front of the doorway.

“What the hell?” Lauren asked, stepping inside. The lights gave the room an almost candlelit aura, an orange glow from electric candelabra on wood-paneled walls. Bookshelves lined most of the surfaces, filled with old, leather-bound volumes and newer ones that weren’t leather bound but seemed to be missing their dust jackets, probably for effect.

In the middle of the floor, just in front of a loveseat lay a single object, one that she recognized because she’d actually held it before, although the hilt had looked a little different at the time.

A sword.

The guy in the suit had a phone out already, had it dialed and up to his ear quicker than a hiccup. “Arch, Kitty Elizabeth has Hendricks.” He waited a second. “Arch, do you hear me?”

Arch heard. He stood there with the cold metal of the handcuffs draped around his wrists, his face against the chill steel of his old Explorer’s hood below his cheek, legs spread. “Arch?” Duncan’s voice blared in his earpiece.