Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Read online

“Out of the frying pan and sucked into the damned mouth of hell,” Reeve said, swinging his sword, clearing out two of those shadowcats as he did so. This holding action was just about to fall apart, he realized, seeing a few of the hellbeasts circling wide around, trying to sneak in behind Arch. If they made it in … the whole damned line was going to fall down one by one, like Germans to Alvin York.

  *

  Hendricks knew what was coming from the side, just past Arch, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it with a shit ton of hellcats coming from his front. They were still rampaging their way down the slope in hella numbers, storming out like they were in infinite supply. He was falling back slowly with the others, trying to figure out if there was any kind of safe ground.

  Nope. He didn’t even need to look around. There was damned sure no safe ground here. These things could jump like they had a spring in their ass that was wound tighter than mouse’s cunt, and the likelihood they were just gonna back off and let the survivors of this clusterfuck alone was about as likely as him getting a blowjob from Erin.

  Goddamn, did he want another piece of Starling. What was it about scratching that itch with her that only made him want more of it and more frequently?

  A hellcat came screaming at him from just to the side of Arch, crossing right in front of the big man at a moment of ultimate distraction. Arch was already slashing up two of the fuckers and moving to try and save that damned Braeden Tarley, who was hammering one with a wrench that was doing both jack and shit to his foe. Definitely not consecrated, because the mechanic was giving the hellcat some hell of his own and it was squealing but resolutely refusing to burst into a cloud.

  The charging cat shot right past Arch and collided with Hendricks, sending a shooting pain up his leg. Thankfully it had gone kinda sideways to try and escape Arch’s attention, and even though it was squirming, it didn’t have a claw handy to tear into his ass with. Instead it just hit like a fucking Mack truck built for a toddler, and his knee gave out and his ass went down.

  “Fucking cheesedick motherfucker!” Hendricks shouted, half hoping someone would hear him and half just to shout because of how much it hurt when the damned thing rammed him. His knee had buckled and was screaming at him like he’d done a week’s worth of hopping on it and then given it a rest by ramming his sword between the joint. His ass joined the angry fray a moment later as it kissed asphalt, sending a numb sensation up his spine, compressing all the way up to the back of his neck and giving him a feeling like someone had just turned down the volume on the whole world. Or was that just a sudden ringing in his ear?

  He didn’t have a lot of time to figure it out, because a shadowcat came at him from the left, claws bared, and his sword was on his right side, angled way wrong. He ripped his 1911 out of its holster and fired from the hip, something he never cared to do because it tended to be hideously inaccurate. This wasn’t high noon at the OK Corral though, guns drawn at fifty paces; this was a fucking fiend from hell heading right into his face to snack on his nose, eyes, and probably his goddamned tongue too, and he was attached to all those parts. He thumbed the safety without a thought, the hammer already back, and just let loose, running through the entire mag in about five seconds.

  The hellcat took the rounds to the face like a dog that’s just been kicked in the gut. It made a noise that Hendricks couldn’t hear, ears ringing and his brain already numbed from the landing, its jaws wide, blackness looking therein in such a way that it made the damned thing’s shadowy coat seem blacker by comparison. The hellcat didn’t stop for long, shaking off the attack, but it gave Hendricks enough time to shift off his aching right side …

  He brought the sword around and jacked that motherfucker in the face with a good stab. There was a real satisfaction to ramming a pointy object into a demon and watching it go poof, but he didn’t have a lot of time to enjoy it right now. He ignored the stink as best he could, holding his breath even as the stench threatened to crawl up into his sinus cavity and settle there like it was the Willamette Valley for shitty smells, a promised land in which they could stink forever.

  “You enjoy that, fuckstick,” Hendricks said, and then he caught motion out of the corner of his eye. A hellcat was coming at him low, just out of his blind spot, and he wasn’t real likely to get that sword back around in time to deal with it.

  *

  Arch felt like splitting his time between saving Braeden Tarley’s backside and trying to keep the shadowcats from sneaking around his own rear end was a losing endeavor, somewhere on the order of trying to run down the clock from the opening whistle of the fourth quarter when you were up big rather than keep playing and winning the way you had all along. It was defense, and he didn’t care for that at all.

  “These damned things won’t die!” Tarley howled, beating the living snot out of one of the shadowy creatures with his wrench. It was making a mewling noise, one of the most horrible sounds Arch had ever heard, and trying to rise as Tarley was hammering it over and over again where the spine would have been on a normal cat.

  Rather than reiterate the point he’d tried to make before about them needing a holy sword to fall easily, he instead said, “I’ve killed them without a consecrated weapon before. They’re just real tough to do that way.” It was true; he’d killed a demon in his own bathroom by breaking its shell. It hadn’t been easy though. Not at all.

  “Hey, Arch, behind you.” Barney Jones didn’t even shout it, just said it, loud enough to be heard—and Arch heard it, and spun right away. He slashed one in half as it evaporated, smell once again threatening to choke him. Jones was hanging out a little behind him; Arch hadn’t heard the pastor approach, but there he was, doing a little creeping behind the lines of his own, coming over to block these things from getting around behind them. He was doing a pretty fine job of it too, vaporizing two of them while Arch was looking.

  A flurry of gunshots went off to his right, and Arch flinched at the sound. Hendricks was ripping off a few rounds again, it seemed, but Arch didn’t have time to worry about that. He had three coming right at him, splitting their attention, and another going for Tarley. This was getting wild, but strangely, that fear that should have consumed him in this sort of fight, that feeling of real peril, of being overwhelmed, of having everything going wrong all around … it just wasn’t there.

  Not when they started trying to slip around the side.

  Not when he heard Hendricks resorting to the desperate use of his pistol.

  And not now, when three of them were coming at him from three different angles, trying to get him to commit and split, keep him from landing the kill on all three of them.

  The exhilaration of knowing he was fighting a holy war, of knowing that the cause was just … that was still there, though not as strong as it once was. But that healthy fear, the one that had told him that this was real, that the danger was ever present … it was gone.

  Arch realized, as the hellcats sailed toward him, gracefully slipping through the air like black holes in motion, trying to split his focus so they could split him into pieces … that maybe he just didn’t care if he lived anymore.

  And that it might just be easier if he didn’t.

  *

  Lauren was operating on autopilot, the objective fixed in her mind and all her thought driving her toward it—get to the damned car and get Molly locked away. It was the lizard part of her brain that was moving her ahead at this point, nothing else. There was no calm analysis or assessment; no time for that shit. She had to move, and move now.

  “How can there be this many demons in the woods?” Molly screamed. “Where did they come from?”

  “Hell,” Barney Jones said from somewhere behind her. “Right from the depths of—”

  “I’ve already had one sermon today!” Lauren shouted. “I don’t need another!”

  “I think you do, if you’re mistaking the word of God for Game of Thrones.” Jones shot her a knowing look. “I’m not saying that show is evil or anything, b
ut it ain’t exactly holy.”

  “Jesus!” Lauren shouted as two hellcats went scooting past, inches from her, on their way to wipe out Arch. “I fucking hate small town gossip!” How had Jones already heard about her stupid fucking eulogy slip?

  “That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain, Lauren!” Jones called over his shoulder as he put the end to another cat. “One of the ten commandments, right up there with, ‘A Lannister always pays his debts.’” Jones sent her another look, twinkle in his eye.

  “Asshole,” Lauren said under her breath as another hellcat went screeching by, howling at the top of its lungs. It seemed not to notice them, because it was bounding past without a glance their way. They were only a dozen feet from the car now, and Lauren didn’t even bother squirting the hellcat because she was low on ammo, the squirt gun getting perilously lighter with every squeeze of the trigger.

  That was some bad news, given what they were up against here.

  “We’re almost there!” Lauren ducked even though there was no reason, running low toward the door of the police cruiser. She spun as shots were fired, long, loud ones, and turned immediately in the direction of the sound, squirt gun raised. It was the cowboy, fending off one of the hellcats, but he had it under control, more or less. She turned back to her mission. It was right there …

  She yanked the handle and started to deposit Molly in the back seat of the car when a hellcat shot out of her peripheral vision on the right and smashed into the front windshield, obliterating it completely with its landing. It screamed inside the car, the confined space and open door acting like a funnel for the screech, causing Lauren to shut her eyes tightly against the blast of sound as though it were an actual attack. It was worse than any concert she’d ever been to, a hell noise that called to mind the image of a bridge collapsing around her as she fell into a canyon below.

  “I don’t think the car is safe!” Molly made herself heard over the cataclysmic noise.

  Mack Wellstone scooted out of the backseat and hit Lauren right in the gut with a shoulder as he did so, the kid plainly becoming accustomed to watching out for himself. The smell of sulfur hit her hard in the face, almost as hard as the sound of the demon screeching.

  “No shit,” Lauren said after taking a moment to recover. Mack was already hightailing it away from this mess, off the other side of the road and away from where these things were flooding out of the wood. The hellcat was thrashing in the front seat, pieces of stuffing raining in the car’s confines like it was snowing. Spiderweb cracks were already present in the Plexiglas divider between the driver’s compartment and the back seat, and the hellcat had only been rustling around in there for a couple seconds. Lauren’s face hardened. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  Molly just stared at her in disbelief. “How?” She yanked Lauren’s arm. “That thing just tore into the car to get to Mack. We get in our own and one of those comes in like that …”

  She didn’t really have to finish the thought, because it was obvious as slash marks started to appear in the back of the seats as the hellcat tunneled through, apparently panicked by the tight confines of the vehicle. If they got in a car and one of those made its way in, they’d be better off throwing themselves into a giant blender. And marginally less likely to die.

  *

  Erin was tearing her way through this horde of demonic kittycats, but she wasn’t having much fun doing so. She had a nasty feeling that death could swipe a shadowy paw out for her at any second, striking her from the rolls of the living. These things were starting to break through their line, and the damnation of it was, she didn’t even know if they were really all that serious about the sheer killing, or if they were just having some fun and accidentally killing as they did so. Like a bunch of kittens on catnip, and the watch were their balls of yarn.

  But the strength of these things was such that being their ball of yarn meant your ass got unspooled pretty quick. And God help you if they decided to rake you with their claws for shits and giggles, because then you’d end up like Sam Allen.

  “We’re breaking!” Reeve shouted as the line started to fold. Kitties were coming in on the side now. Not Arch’s side, because Barney Jones had moved himself over to deal with that and was doing so admirably, but the other side, the one where Sam Allen had been stationed before he’d been ripped up. Now Reeve was trying to keep them out himself but was falling back on all fronts. Erin wasn’t going to hang out up front while everyone else was moving back, nossir. She was having a hell of a time fighting these things anyway, and getting the fuck out of there before she was left exposed was right up there on her priority list with not taking one to the cornhole—at least, not on the first date. Or second. Or ever again, if she could avoid it (goddamn sweet-talking Clayton Mackey and his promises that it wouldn’t hurt).

  This, though—this would hurt a hell of a lot worse if she got it wrong. It’d be a lot worse than not being able to sit right for a few days. Sam Allen was a great illustration, his guts all strung out where the hellcats had torn him apart. It reeked of shit and sulfur now, at least on this end of the line, and Erin didn’t want to add her own to the pile.

  “What a fuckup,” she said, swinging the baseball bat low and then up to catch a hellcat when it came at her in mid-air. It dissolved into that shadowy blackness shit that they became when they’d gotten the air let out of them, and she whipped the bat back around and caught another, creating a whirlpool of ebony that popped and left her with a sulfur stink that covered up the shitty evisceration smell of Sam Allen’s corpse.

  “Holy Christ, fall back!” Reeve said, and he bumped into her, giving her a rough shove that he probably didn’t mean anything by, but which damned near got him a bat to the side of the fucking head. Erin’s brain was processing everyone as a threat right now, and it took a hard pull on the mental reins to keep from attacking him.

  Reeve shoved past her as he slashed his way through two more of those hellcats. A swarm of them were after him though, at least a dozen. Erin started to go after him, not for revenge this time but to help, but something swiped low across her shin and she screamed, because holy fucking shit! the pain was suddenly worse than anything that lying Clayton Mackey had done to her ass.

  It was a small gash, the tear across the front of her pants leg, but it was already running dark crimson in the twilight, and she staggered back, trying to keep from keeling over there and grabbing at it like a kid with a skinned knee. This was a fuck-lot worse than a skinned knee though, a gashed-up shin. The hellcat that had done it had already moved on, joining the scrum that was forming in front of Reeve. They smelled blood with him, apparently, the weakest link, because he was swinging hard, clearing out the space in front of him, falling back to the police cruiser and slamming his back against it in retreat, exhaustion obvious as the sweat poured down his face, and the strain showed when he took his aim at another of those fucking things and gave it hell with a hard swing.

  He was failing though, and he knew it. He was panicked too, giving it everything he had in order to kill the hellcats stacking up in front of him to leap. They were coming low and high, and fast as fuck too, the slippery little shits. He was barely staving them off, and Erin was about to hobble toward him to help when she caught motion out of the corner of her eye streaking toward her—

  It wasn’t a hellcat, thank God.

  It was a fucking car—a pristine white Land Rover, the squeal of its tires on pavement only a few feet away as it streaked past, aimed right for the pack of hellcats in front of Reeve. She caught a glimpse in the window as it shot past, and it looked a hell of a lot like Ms. Cherry was waving at her from the passenger seat and Casey Meacham was in the driver’s seat.

  Which would explain why she thought she heard someone shout, “DIE, MOTHERFUCKERS!” as it went past, slamming into the pack of hellcats in front of Reeve and sending them flying through the air like a kicker sends a football on a good punt.

  Reeve just sat there against the cruiser,
chest heaving, Casey drawn to a stop in front of him. The window rolled down and Ms. Cherry popped her head out. “How are you doing, Sheriff?” she asked.

  “A little better now that you’re here,” Reeve said, and then a hellcat claw ripped out of the cruiser beside him, nearly cutting his ass in two. Reeve scrambled away, fumbling for his weapon and thrusting his back against Ms. Cherry’s Rover, jabbing at the hellcat in the police cruiser and catching it on the paw. It screeched and dissolved, and the police cruiser’s door fell off where it had ripped it off the hinges. “Never mind that bit about being better,” Reeve said. “I think I might still be kinda fucked up.”

  *

  Lauren was about ready to hyperventilate, panic, freak out and maybe die of an overactive heart when Casey and Ms. Cherry came screaming up and smashed into a pile of hellcats, sending them flying through the air like confetti. One of them hit a tree squarely and dissolved, shell broken, a demonic piñata spilling darkness for half a second before it was gone.

  “Fuck yeah!” Molly shouted, pumping a fist as the hellcat trapped in the police cruiser ripped its way out the other side and was promptly killed by Sheriff Reeve, who thumped against Ms. Cherry’s car. Molly had her head down and so did Lauren, like they could duck and cover on this side of the car and somehow it’d be all right, like these fucking things weren’t scrabbling all around them.

  Oh, here came one now.

  “Watch your mouth!” Lauren shouted, dousing the incoming hellcat as she yanked Molly up.

  “Oh, for fucking real?” Molly asked as Lauren steered her around the trunk of the car. “Sam Allen is torn in half over there, and you’re still worried about me saying the F-word and talking about blowjobs?”

  “I’m trying to protect you!” Lauren squirted at a demon that slithered past, like it was trying to keep its head low. It screamed at the contact of the holy water and flopped down on its belly, burning up and smoking off a second later. “From everything!”