Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Read online

He grunted, but squeezing did nothing to prevent it; she sunk a finger up his ass before he could pucker shut, and then she squeezed his dick so hard he thought she’d break it off. “I’ll tell you what your goddamned limits are,” she said, burying her finger up to the knuckle in his ass as she captured the head of his penis in her mouth again and then deep-throated him.

  It went on like that for a few more minutes as the pain in his cock subsided the longer she went, turning back around to pleasure again. She didn’t go easy on him in the other end though, putting a second finger up there, then a third, loosening him up as she went, drawing him into her with one hand and pushing into him with the other. She avoided the delicate spot of his prostate, knowing he wouldn’t hold on after that. She liked to make him suffer, after all, and she’d prolong it as long as she could.

  No, she took him in and out of her mouth agonizingly slowly, smiling when she pulled him out, torturously blowing him while working her way up to squeezing her fist into his ass. She worked the fingers in and out of his anus until she managed it. It was hardly the first time, but she could have—and had—gone much rougher rather than allowing time to work up to the whole hand.

  At least she didn’t have big hands, Pike reflected as she buried herself up to the wrist like a puppet master. She moved it, brushing his prostate, and he clenched.

  Now he was caught between pleasure and pain again, some perverse combination of the two. She was doing just enough service to him in the blowjob to keep him hanging on, watching him for signs of weakness while also keeping an eye on him to make sure he wasn’t having an entirely awful time. When she’d first started to push his boundaries in this way, he had relented mostly because she’d done so many things for him, had opened up new vistas of sexual pleasure he couldn’t have dreamed of with other partners.

  She’d also only started with one finger, and a small one at that. None of this whole-hand shit.

  But he took the good with the bad; took the endless, delicious, explosively wonderful blowjobs with the unlubed fistings, took the hours of fucking with the occasional golden shower she required of him, took the anal with …

  Well, with anal. With her strap-on. It wasn’t as bad as the fisting, at least.

  She finally let him cum, and he let loose, painfully this time. It squirted in her mouth and she devoured it as his legs wobbled beneath him. He’d been standing for so long, and she’d done a number on him all the way around. He telegraphed his collapse and she grinned, removing her hand with a little more gusto than she needed to. Pike dropped to his knees on the wood floor carefully, trying not to injure himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes that he was going to need to be gentle to himself, because she had no intention of being so, at least not tonight. She was like that sometimes.

  She unbuttoned his shirt and cast it off, kissing him. “You know what I want, don’t you?”

  He nodded, somewhat resignedly. “Yeah.”

  She snuck around behind him, clearly awakened now. “You’re not going to tell me you’re too tired, are you?” She nibbled his ear, whispering in it as she did.

  “No,” he said—but he was tired. Damned tired. He could have gone to bed right then, the sleep hormones flowing through his bloodstream, leaving him exhausted.

  “Good.” She whispered in his ear, “Let’s go to the bedroom.” And she slapped him on the ass with the hand she’d just had up it, and walked off with a stride that suggested she had plans for him—for that ass of his.

  It’d be the strap-on tonight then.

  Jason Pike sighed and picked himself up off the floor. He slid off his shoes and left his pants puddled right where they were. There was no point fighting it, even though he was tired. She was going to tax his ass tonight, in spite of her saying she hadn’t been in the mood. Well, she was damned sure in the mood now, a very specific sort of mood, one that happened at least once or twice a week, one he had long since grown accustomed to—and even perhaps, very slightly, to enjoy.

  It was the cost of his marriage.

  “Get your sweet ass in here,” Darla called, and he could hear her moving about in their bedroom, putting it on, clearly ready for him.

  “Goddamn, do I love that woman,” he said, caught somewhere between ecstasy and fear. Odds were good he’d be feeling a lot of both of those emotions until the evening was over, and he shuffled toward the bedroom in order to get it over as quickly as possible.

  *

  “Hope things ain’t got too crazy down there yet,” Barney Jones said as they whipped around a corner hard. Arch held on, the oh snot! bar tightly held in his grip. Whose bright idea had it been to let Braeden Tarley drive? The man still looked half-traumatized, and definitely favored one arm—the one that hadn’t been dislocated on Halloween. But the other half of him was made of fierce determination, his focus tight on the road ahead.

  “Why, you want to be there for it when all Hades breaks loose?” Arch asked as Tarley about flipped the truck over taking the next turn at ninety. He hadn’t involved himself in the watch yet, probably because Barney had been keeping him out of it. Arch considered that wise, but when they’d run out the door tonight after getting the text blast, neither of them had had the heart—or the time—to tell Tarley to get back in the house.

  “I feel uniquely qualified to deal with hell,” Barney said with a slight smile that Arch saw when Tarley brought them out of the turn so hard that Arch was whipped around enough to get a glimpse of Barney in the back seat of the pickup, bracing himself. “In a way maybe the rest of y’all ain’t.”

  “I’m gonna give it,” Tarley said, the knuckles of his ruddy, calloused hands white on the wheel. Between them on the seat lay a big old wrench, which glinted in the glare of a streetlight as they turned down Faulkner Road. Tarley caught Arch looking at it and they both stared at each other blankly for a moment.

  “You know that won’t kill ’em, right?” Arch asked. Tarley hadn’t done this before; he probably didn’t know what demon fighting entailed.

  “Good,” Tarley said, slaloming the pickup around another curve. “Because I just want to hurt ’em. Over and over. I’ll leave putting them out of their misery to y’all.”

  Arch traded a look with Barney as they went hard into the next turn, Tarley treating the truck like this was NASCAR. Pastor Jones just shrugged, and Arch wondered again just how wise bringing a man as scarred as Braeden Tarley into a battle like this was.

  Tarley slammed on the brakes and brought the truck to a squealing, skidding halt. Arch felt himself surge forward, that moment of weightlessness before the seatbelt jerked against his chest making him fear he was on his way through the windshield. “What are you doing?” he almost shouted.

  Tarley was unfazed. “The hell is that?” He pointed through the windshield.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Barney Jones said. Ahead, just around the next bend, red and blue lights were flashing, but here—here there were only the truck’s headlights, low-slung floodlamps casting additional illumination along the hard-bitten surface of Faulkner Road. And right there, just in front of them, was a patch of leaves that had been partially swept away to reveal …

  “Is that a bed of nails?” Arch asked.

  “In plywood, I think,” Barney said. “Should we get out?”

  “We need to clear the road,” Tarley said. He grabbed his wrench and was out of the car before Arch could finish telling him that this was a bad idea.

  “There could be demons out here!” Arch said, opening his own door and jumping down over the truck’s running board, hitting the hard pavement below with a thud.

  “Good,” Tarley said, striding toward the trap in the road. He reached it and stopped, giving it a shove with his foot. It made a scratching noise against the pavement, like sandpaper on a rough surface. He gave it another shove and it moved a foot or so, then another, as he pushed it toward the underbrush carefully, probably trying to avoid needing a tetanus shot.

  Arch scrambled around the side and gave him a
hand—well, a foot. Together they shuffled it off the shoulder and it toppled into the ditch at the side of the road. When it landed, Arch squatted over it, keeping an ear out for trouble, though he couldn’t hear much over the low rumble of the idling engine.

  There had to be a hundred nails driven into that plywood. It was like a makeshift spike strip of the kind cops deployed when they wanted to stop a fleeing suspect in a car chase. He hadn’t seen one since the academy, but there were a couple back at the station for use in case of emergency.

  “What do you reckon this was for?” Barney Jones asked. He’d reached Arch just as Tarley had turned around, heading back to the truck with a purpose. Arch watched the mechanic go and realized they needed to follow, and quickly, because patience didn’t seem to be something Tarley had much of right now.

  “I don’t exactly know,” Arch said, though he had a few dark suspicions about it. “Come on. We need to get to the others.” And he hurried to follow Tarley. Reeve and Erin were waiting just around the bend, after all, and they wouldn’t have called if they hadn’t thought help was necessary.

  *

  Hendricks brought the SUV to a squealing halt after another ugly curve, his headlights catching the two police cruisers and the wrecker laid out in the middle of the road. There was another vehicle pulled off to the shoulder, dimly lit under the flashing glare of red and blue. It was a civilian car, not one of the watch’s.

  He hopped out of the purloined SUV as Erin turned to look at him. Her face evinced relief for about a half second, then got hard again. “Didn’t know you were coming,” she said, sounding about as pleased to see him as if he were a demon.

  “You call, I come,” he said, then regretted his choice of words immediately as soon as they were out. Her eyes narrowed as if wondering if the double entendre was deliberate. He changed the subject. “What’s the situation?”

  “The Situation is a guy from Jersey,” said Sam Allen, a tow truck driver carrying a tire iron that Hendricks hoped had been consecrated. It was getting damned hard to tell what was consecrated nowadays, with the watch resorting to all sorts of weird-ass weapons. Erin had a bat with nails driven through it over her shoulder, like she thought she was onThe Walking Dead, or maybe just trying out for a fucked-up softball team.

  “Abandoned car,” Reeve said, “blood on the inside. Belongs to the mother of the kid you rescued from the woods earlier. Don’t mean to seem squeamish, but we’ve seen motion in the woods.”

  Hendricks stared at Erin, who was still giving him that look like he’d stuck his hard-on up her ass without warning. She seemed to be daring him to say something ugly in response to that, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. “Reasonable precaution,” he said, taking care to strip any sarcasm out of his reply. “Any sign of the kid or his mom?”

  “No—” Erin started to answer, the thinnest hint of relief showing through on her face before squealing tires sounded around the curve ahead and a pickup truck came rocketing to a stop, missing Erin’s squad Explorer—Arch’s car, usually, but they were sharing it now—by about half an inch.

  “Found a trap in the road back there a hundred yards or so,” Arch said, jumping out of the passenger side. He seemed mostly business, but also maybe a little relieved for some reason as his feet hit terra firma. The big bastard even stepped down from the truck without needing the running board, something Hendricks decided he wouldn’t care to try if he was riding in that sucker. “Bunch of nails driven through plywood.”

  “Explains the pancake nature of these tires,” Sam Allen said, motioning toward the abandoned car. “Four flats at once? That ain’t usual.”

  “I seen that happen to your momma’s car before, Sam,” the driver of the pickup said as he came hopping down. Hendricks didn’t know the man well, but he knew his name was Braeden Tarley. He’d caught the sad-ass story after the square, about how the man had lost his daughter to the demons. “Hard to say what caused it, but it happened as she was pulling out of KFC. Couldn’t understand her when she tried to explain, because she had a dozen biscuits crammed in her mouth. Frame was bent like a damned U too.”

  “Dick,” Sam Allen said with a good-natured smile. There was an aura of relief about the tow truck driver, like he was glad to hear his friend make even as obvious a joke as a “yo mama so fat...”

  “I know you like the dick, Sam, but I ain’t in the mood,” Tarley said, sweeping on past the tow truck driver with a slap to his shoulder. Sam Allen just grunted his amusement. “Where the demons at?”

  “Ain’t seen any quite yet,” Reeve said, easing in. They were forming a small perimeter now, using the vehicles as cover, like circled wagons. Hendricks didn’t love that idea, because demons didn’t really use ranged attacks or guns, so cover was more or less useless. The vehicles were just an obstruction to seeing anything coming. He was about to say so when Reeve shouted, “Mack!”

  A rustle in the underbrush up the slope from the road caused Hendricks to whirl. He had his sword out already and noted the other members of the watch had their weapons in hand too. Good instinct. His eyes played over the tree line until they were drawn to motion, a small figure springing free from a bush and warring with gravity as he came down the slope, fighting not to go tumbling.

  Yeah, that was Mack, all right, and he was hauling ass.

  “What is it, kid?” Hendricks asked, already advancing on him. Erin was moving too, and so were Reeve and Arch, hurrying forward around the abandoned car to try and meet the boy as he came skittering down the slope, arms pinwheeling, reminding Hendricks of a time he’d chased a couple demons down a hill, probably not too far from here.

  “Something’s out there!” Mack shouted, gasping as he ran down the hill.

  “Lotta things out there, probably,” Hendricks said, hustling to be first as Mack hit flatter ground and surged past him, not slowing as he made a beeline for Reeve. Hendricks raised an eyebrow as the kid hid behind the sheriff like the bald man was his mother’s skirts or something. He stopped short of grabbing Reeve around the waist, at least. Not that Hendricks would have blamed him. Losing your dad would be bad enough, but the fact this kid’s mom was missing now too, and nothing but a bloody steering wheel to show for it? Beyond shit luck. Midian luck, as Hendricks was starting to think of it.

  “What happened to your mom?” Arch asked, stopping between Hendricks at the start of the embankment up to the tree line and Reeve, who was still hanging not far from the ditch off the shoulder of the road. The sheriff was standing still now, focusing all his attention on Mack, putting a gentle hand on his arm, trying to calm the kid down. At least Arch wasn’t yelling at him.

  “It was some chubby guy,” Mack said, surprisingly coherent. He wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying, wasn’t doing anything besides hiding behind Reeve and breathing hard from his run. “We pulled over after the flats, and there was this other guy parked. He smashed my mom’s face into the steering wheel. I ran.” He seemed pretty even about it, all things considered. Not everyone could witness their mom getting assaulted and avoid going to pieces.

  Reeve spoke slowly. “Mack … did you see what happened next?”

  Mack shook his head. “He chased me into the woods. I hid in a log until—until I heard those things coming—”

  “What things?” Erin eased up next to Reeve, muscling in on his territory.

  Mack pointed right at Hendricks, then Arch. “The ones from this morning.” He took a breathless gasp. “The ones that got my dad. I can hear them out there.” His voice dropped low, and now he pointed back up the embankment toward the woods. “They’re coming.”

  *

  Lauren came rolling up on the scene just as Reeve was manhandling that kid from earlier up out of the ditch next to the shoulder of Faulkner Road. She peered, bringing the car to a stop as Reeve carefully opened the door to his squad car and pushed the kid inside, saying something she couldn’t hear before he shut the door. He’d been wearing a mask of gentle reassurance, but it vanis
hed the second his back turned on the car, and Lauren got out just in time to hear him start barking.

  “How many of those things do you s’pose there are out there?” This was directed at Hendricks, who was definitely lacking his usual cockety-cocksureness, coming back onto the road with his sword drawn and a wary look cast all around, but especially at the shadowed tree line overlooking the road from up a nice slope.

  “We got three of ’em this morning,” Arch answered for the cowboy. Tense, tight, pissed off. Lauren was feeling a little softer toward the big man since Alison had died, though she was far from his biggest fan.

  “Three of what?” Molly chirped, already out of the car. Lauren blinked at her; something had changed in her calculation since showing up here. Something about the sheriff’s bearing was all wrong. Too tight, too tense, especially given how many of them were here.

  Sheriff Reeve did a double-take at the sight of Molly, but to his credit, he answered. “Demon cat-things that Arch and Hendricks faced off against this morning.” He cast a molten-lead look at Lauren. “Is this bring-your-daughter-to-work day? Because you might have picked a bad one.”

  “I was starting to get that feeling,” Lauren said, her stomach clamping up again. God, it was like someone had wrapped a rod around her upper intestines and was rolling it hard, trying to squeeze the juice out of both ends. “How bad are we looking at?”

  “Uh … real bad,” Erin Harris said, and everyone looked at her, which was a mistake, because she was pointing up at the tree line. The second of delay as everyone processed her motion, then followed her pointing finger up to the tree line, where there was nothing but shadow—

  No, wait. Shadows.

  Hundreds of them.

  “Fucking shit,” Hendricks said, brandishing his sword.

  “Funky butt loving,” Arch said, and everyone stopped, breaking their gazes from the shadowy demons to look at him.

  “I’m gonna go with the cowboy on this one,” Lauren whispered, staring up at the hundreds—thousands?—of demons staring down at them. With a shaking hand, she drew her squirt gun filled with holy water and pointed it. Right now she was wishing she’d brought the heavier version, with the dual water tanks to strap to her back.