Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 17

  A growling echoed over them, like the sound of metal scraping concrete, a bizarre howl from bizarre creatures, and then, almost as one, they poured down the slope, like shadows slipping out of the trees.

  *

  “I do love a good night of fucking,” Darla said, stretching across the bed and flopping her wrist across Pike’s face. He was tender, real tender, all around his anus, but if he gave even a hint of weakness, she’d bend him over and given him another half hour of hell, until she’d rubbed her own clit raw against the other end of her toy, so he just clamped his mouth shut. “You fuck Jenny, I fuck your ass with hand and toy … I love it all. I just love fucking.”

  “Oh yeah?” Pike pushed her hand away carefully; it wasn’t the one she’d recently had buried up to the wrist in his sphincter, fortunately.

  “Yeah,” Darla said, almost glowing as she stretched. After she’d finished with what she wanted to do to him, he’d had to get it back up and get her done, and that hadn’t been comfortable either, but he’d done it. Gingerly.

  Pike smiled thinly. It was all he could manage with the throbbing feeling in his ass.

  She flopped that hand on his bare chest again. “Seriously. There’s nothing like it after a hard day of parenting and talking baby talk and shit.”

  Pike wrung out a raw chuckle from his exhausted frame. “I thought you liked parenting.”

  “I like the thought that someday our kids are going to grow into interesting people,” Darla said. “But right now? They’re fucking boring as hell. The only good thing about them is going to the park and admiring the asses of these moms in their tight yoga pants. And every once in a while you get a hot dad in between all these skinny-jeans-wearing metrosexuals that probably had to find a sperm donor to knock up their wives.” She laughed viciously at her observation. “Or maybe they like to watch a real man give it to her, like you do.”

  Pike bristled a little; being cuckolded was her fantasy, not his, but he went along with it when she wanted him to. “Did you like the taste of Jenny tonight?” he asked pointedly.

  “I did.” She stretched again in satisfaction. “Honest to God, I don’t know where you found a hot little piece of ass like her in the backwoods of this hellhole county. The only thing that could make her any better is if she was wearing my naked thighs as her earmuffs.” Darla laughed again. “But I think we both know she doesn’t go that way, which is a damned shame.” She ran her hand—still the clean one, thankfully—over the thin layer of chest hair he sported. “Guess I’ll just have to keep getting some secondhand snatch.”

  “I asked her once if she’d join us,” Pike said, adjusting himself in the smooth, cool, silky satin sheets.

  “What’d she say?” Darla asked, now still.

  “I don’t think she took me seriously,” Pike said. “And I don’t think she swings that way. Shame, I know, because I’d love to give it to her from behind while she is burying her face in you. It’s what I was thinking about while I was fucking her over my desk today, actually.”

  “You dirty bird,” Darla said with mock accusation. “Keep talking like that, sailor, and I’m bound to get randy again. Might have to take it out on you.”

  “You might have to take it out on a dildo, I think you mean,” Pike said, “because I expect I’m about done for the night. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  She snuggled in tighter to him, pressing her sagging breasts against his arm and his chest. “I know. I’m not either. This gravity shit … I hear it only gets worse from here.” She ground her right breast against his ribs, then stopped, suddenly serious. “But Jason … if we can pull this off …”

  “I know,” he said quickly, nodding up and down on the pillow. “Getting old’s not going to be a worry if we thread our way through this particular needle.”

  “I want my body back,” Darla said, rubbing against him again. “I want your body back. Your dad bod’s okay, but I liked it better before, back when we could fuck all night and you’d still be hard again in the morning without me having to throw a finger up there to get you going.”

  Pike shuddered involuntarily. “Yeah. I miss those days too.” But maybe for different reasons.

  “You gonna make your peace with Reeve?” Darla asked, propping up on an elbow to survey him better. “You gonna keep kissing his ass to get his little brigade of holy terrors out of the way? Just for a little bit, you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” Pike said. “And yeah, I’m kissing his ass. As best I can, anyway. He’s suspicious, of course—”

  “Of course he is,” Darla said, leaning up, letting her tits hang right in his face. They’d been a lot smaller, more pert, before she’d had the kids. Now they dangled a little, reminded him of cones that pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle. Her nipples had stuck straight out before. “You dicked him over hard and set up a massacre on Halloween. He’d have to be a grade-A fucking moron to ignore all that when you say a couple of sweet things to him about—what, the budget?” she scoffed. “I mean, he’s probably dumb, but I doubt he’s that dumb. And as long as he’s been in law enforcement, I doubt he’s gullible. Met a few too many liars to survive and thrive, even in Midian, without figuring out how to smoke them out.”

  “Yeah, he’s no fool,” Pike said. “But I think he wants a little diplomacy. Maybe he wants to believe the best of people. And I can work with that—at least for a little while. All it’ll cost me is a little pride.”

  “What’s pride?” Darla said, slapping him in the chest with the hand she’d just stuck up his rectum. She laughed, her face going blood red from chin to hairline, leaving pale, white traces where her hair met her scalp. She cackled loudly, that funny sound she made when she got real tickled.

  Pike took his eyes off her long enough to stare down at his bare chest where she’d slapped that dirty, ass-smelling hand. She just kept laughing, and he was damned near ready to throw up. Gross.

  *

  “Well, here we go,” Hendricks said as the shadowed beasts came rolling down the hill like an evening thunderstorm. They sounded like danger, that clang of a thousand hissing voices distorted by demon voice boxes making a high-pitched cry that caused even his spine to shudder. Yeah, Hendricks, veteran of Ramadi, kicker down of doors, the man who died in New Orleans at the hands of a couple punk demons—even he got the chills listening to the sound of these demon cats ululate, like hell’s own army of jihadis rolling down at him on four legs.

  They bounded with a fluid grace, these cats, which was a creepy thing to watch. He’d seen animals in zoos, had a couple cats that hung around his house when he was a kid catching mice and birds. They moved fluidly too, but not like these things. There was definitely something otherworldly about the way they bounded, almost too smooth for the human eye to follow.

  “You guys maybe should have mentioned in your text that everything was going to shit out here!” Lauren Darlington screamed behind him. Hendricks heard the faint sound of feet pattering against the asphalt; he presumed the doctor was rushing to evac her daughter. It was never smart bringing civvies into a war zone, which was one of the reasons he’d worked alone.

  The smell of sulfur was rank, sweeping down with the cats like a foul wind off the embankment, like ten thousand corpses had rotted in the woods with old eggs bundled up in their carcasses for extra flavor. Unbidden memories rose in Hendricks’s mind of running his tongue over dead flesh, over a clit that was rubbery and stiff, unnatural—

  He shuddered again, gagged right there, and steadied himself.

  “You gonna be all right?” Arch asked from next to him.

  “Hold tight in formation!” Hendricks said, trying to get back to a level place. He was a loner, not a leader, but spitting that shit out helped him stop thinking about the stupid shit he shouldn’t be thinking about with death charging in at them. That was the shit that got people killed, head up their own asses, thinking about a Jody back home when they should have been focused on kicking down a door and clearing corners.


  “What formation?” Braeden Tarley shouted. The man was brandishing a wrench, face all twisted and pissed off. Hendricks had seen that look before too. Hell, he recognized it from his own face after he started demon hunting.

  “Hang together,” Reeve said, taking over for Hendricks before he could spit out some clarification for the dumbass. “Watch each others’ backs—”

  The sheriff didn’t even get a chance to finish that happy thought, comrades in arms looking after each other and all that happy shit, because there came the shadowcats, teeth and claws glinting in the day’s last light, and that shadowy essence rolling like a black cloud beneath their skin.

  *

  Arch could see the threat coming, plain as day, but somehow he didn’t care all that much. If he lived, he lived, and he’d go on fighting. If he died, well, he died, and he’d go down fighting. The tickle of the cool dusk air across his skin didn’t bring any fear with it; if anything, he was anticipating the coming battle. His sword was clutched hard in hand, knuckles wrapped around it tight, raised and ready to start the fight proper.

  He had it in mind to stab rather than whack, figured the way they were coming at him, he’d get more mileage if he thrust rather than swinging it down like he had to behead these foul things. He didn’t; he just needed to let a little air out of their balloons, and they were charging in plenty fast to impale themselves on his weapon without him having to do much about it.

  The first came leaping at him and Arch went low. They moved fast, faster than him, but once they were in the air, they were committed, and he swung his sword’s tip around to greet the shadowcat.

  It got a look on its face like it was intelligent enough to know what was coming. It barely touched the tip when it screeched like metal on metal, then evaporated in a cloud of smoke. Arch tweaked the tip subtly to the right and greeted another one of these cursed things. Three leapt at him as the sulfur cleared from the first one, and this time he swung the sword.

  The blade caught one in the belly and vaporized it, another in the ribs and it went to smoke; the last he hit with the edge and it curled into black puffs of rank sulfur just in front of his face. He inhaled it and coughed, eyes burning from the stink but unable to spare the time and attention it might take to really focus on expelling it from his body.

  There was no time for that. Two more came at him, and Arch eyed them through the tears that were welling up from the smell. He’d never had a demon blow up quite that close to his face before, or if it had, he’d never had it smell like that. They stank, but these demon cats were somehow worse. “What have you been eating?” he asked as he spun to deal with another one coming at him from a forty-five-degree angle, heading for his ribs. He caught it in the face with the tip of his sword just in time.

  As many of them as there were, as immediate as the threat was, somehow Arch’s head was a turn back, at that device they’d discovered in the road. Who would have planted such a thing? To what purpose?

  And what did it have to do with all these demon cats?

  *

  Erin was swinging for the fences. It was a little like playing a game of kickball with four thousand yipping dogs. They were everywhere, absolutely fucking everywhere, leaping and biting and trying to rip her to pieces. She’d lost a little skin on her elbow, the road rash sensation burning like crazy. One of them had missed her face by the width of a kitten hair, flying by as she ducked. That sucker had slammed into the side of Sam Allen’s wrecker and left an indentation the size of an exercise ball.

  “Motherfuckers!” Erin swung the bat, not putting a whole lot of backswing in it because she didn’t have a ton of space to swing this time. Lauren Darlington and her daughter were just behind her, the girl doing a hell of a lot less screaming than the mom.

  “I should have left you with the hookers to learn about BJs and rusty trombones and God knows whatever else!” Dr. Darlington screamed as they went past behind her, fleeing for a vehicle. Erin didn’t have the conscious thought to tell them that this was a stupid idea, because if one of these things could put a dent in Sam Allen’s door the size of a jumbo deluxe manhole cover, they weren’t going to have any issue blasting through a car window.

  “What’s a rusty trombone?” Molly Darlington asked as a light splatter of water hit across the back of Erin’s neck, cool and refreshing. Something screeched like a speaker on overload at a goddamned rock and roll concert, and Erin turned her head in time to see a hellcat bursting into flames with a squeal like it had just had its balls dipped in acid. “Never mind! Learning about putting penises in your mouth would be a lot less dangerous than this!”

  “What the fuck is wrong with this town?” Erin muttered, burying nails in the side of a cat then reversing her swing and clubbing the shit out of another shadowcat as she brought it back over her shoulder. Even a privileged little prissy cunt like Molly Darlington was learning some fucked-up lessons about life now.

  *

  “God, let it only be one penis in your mouth!” Lauren shouted to—well, probably to everyone because she was having a hard time keeping her calm.

  “At a time?” Molly fired back. They were scrambling toward the police cruiser, toward the illusory safety it provided. Mack Wellstone’s face peeked out of the back, eyes wide as he took in the shitshow going on around them.

  “EVER!” Lauren shouted, encouraging Molly along with a hand on the small of her back, the other pointing the squirt gun loaded with holy water at anything that came close. She squirted a hellcat surging at Sheriff Reeve while his back was turned, and she caught it flush, a blast to the face that caused it to burst into flames and then evaporate into darkness. “I hope you find one guy that you really love, and that when you put his dick in your mouth, it’s the first and only dick you ever put there or anywhere else on your body! Including in your hand! And you can wait until a reasonable age, like maybe or fifty or seventy—it’s the new thirty—until you lose your virginity.”

  “When did you go Puritan on me, Mom?” Molly shouted, hunching her shoulders as she ran, like that would protect her, keeping her head down. “You were always the one that made fun of those other moms, the ones who practically bought their daughters chastity belts and locked them in high towers and never let them hear the word ‘vagina’ while you were dropping it in casual conversation and talking about what an innovation the pill was to modern life—”

  “Jesus,” Sam Allen said, turning his head to look right at Lauren. “That’s a mighty fucked-up upbringing—”

  A hellcat shredded Sam across the back, screeching as it hit him, claws flashing in the scattered headlights reflecting off the road. Sam Allen’s upper torso went rolling off and his lower body fell a second later under the furious onslaught of two hellcats. Blood sprayed at Molly and Lauren, spattering them like they’d walked into a PETA demonstration wearing full mink.

  Molly screamed as Lauren turned her squirt gun on the hellcats that had shredded Sam. A little piece of his entrails was thrown into the air as the hellcats screeched and burned, bucking wildly. It landed in Molly’s hair, and to her credit, she didn’t scream, though Lauren wondered if she even felt the wet, slick piece of intestine tangled in her hair to the right of her face.

  “I’m not winning any mother of the year awards today,” Lauren said, yanking Molly back a step as a hellcat sailed in front of them, clearly anticipating them running. Lauren smacked it as it went by, causing it to twist and spasm in fury, a lot like a regular cat that went nuts for no apparent reason.

  “Seriously,” Molly said, looking right at her. “You’re fucking losing it, Mom. Why does it matter what hookers teach me about sex right now, with all this shit going on?”

  “Because it fucking does!” Lauren screamed and pushed her again toward the police cruiser, Mack Wellstone waiting just inside. Lauren’s heart was beating at a million miles an hour, and she snapped off another shot, laying down a line of holy water fire at a trio of hellcats trying to run over Sam’s corpse. They s
creamed and burned, and in Lauren’s head it felt like she was doing the same, the same words repeating themselves in her mind over and over again: Just let me get her out of here and safe. Just let me get her out of here and safe …

  *

  “WRECKER is down!” Reeve shouted when he saw Sam Allen get ripped in half by those motherfucking demons. He would have hoped he’d be detached about it, but he wasn’t detached at all. The blood was ripping through his veins so hard his temple was throbbing, the sound like a drumbeat in his head. The Darlington girls were heading for the cruiser where he’d shoved Mack Wellstone, which didn’t seem like such a hot idea to him, but he didn’t have a lot of time or mental space to think why it wasn’t.

  The goddamned hellcats kept coming too, another wave of them rushing down the hill. He imagined them lined up from here to the county line, and it made him shiver as one of them just about took his legs from beneath him. He nicked it just in time, and it vaporized with a hiss and screech, reminding him of back when he and Donna had cats and he’d stepped on one in the middle of the night. He’d never liked those damned things, always been more of a dog person, and this was cementing it for him.

  “They’re trying to flank us!” Hendricks shouted. Reeve spared a glance out of the corner of his eye and saw the cowboy was right. They didn’t have a very wide line, after all, just the few of them, and Sam had already fallen. Funny how he’d walked into this thinking they were making a show of force.

  Now Reeve figured they were making a last damned stand. That was how fast this thing had turned on them.