Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Read online

“WHAT THE TARNATION IS GOING ON HERE?”

  Franklin burst out of the darkness, lamplight flooding in all around him, suddenly once more aware of pressure on his hips, his belly, rocks poking up at him and a jagged piece of pottery clenched in his hand. He let it spill from his limp fingers and crawled without conscious thought, his body pushing him backward until he rolled down the slope and into the cave, shedding the coat and the pottery fragments as he went. Blood welled up on his right hand where he’d grabbed hold of a shard, and he wiped it on his breeches, fingers against the rough cotton, without thinking about it.

  “What are you doing?” Arthur said, stalking up to him, the faint light of day mingling with the lantern hanging on a nearby hook. Arthur had his handkerchief out in his hand, probably from just finishing mopping his forehead again beneath his hairline. “Franklin … what did you find?”

  “You weren’t listening?” Franklin asked, voice coming in a croak.

  “I was outside filling the canteen at the creek,” Arthur said, edging closer to him. “I thought about what you said, and I was all set to climb in after you when I came back.” He looked Franklin up and down. “But you’re already out. Did you find anything?” He stiffened. “Did you find … it?”

  “I …” Franklin’s mouth was dry, exactly as he’d felt it in his dream, or delusion, or whatever it had been. “I don’t know.”

  Arthur stood straight in front of him, and the handkerchief slowly fluttered out of his grasp. “Franklin … did you find the vase?” His fingers inched slowly down toward his hip, where his revolver waited in a beaten-up leather holster. “Did you … touch it?”

  “I didn’t even say I found it,” Franklin said, angry and watching his friend’s hand move cautiously toward his gun. Franklin didn’t have one on his hip; he’d left it in the bundle on the back of his mule. “But thanks for the trust.”

  Arthur’s hand didn’t move, hovering above his holster. “Did you find it, then?”

  Franklin swallowed hard. “I …”

  Arthur’s gaze was hard as the stone walls of the cave. “Did you find it?”

  “There is nothing to fear,” Chester said, speaking through Franklin’s mouth. Franklin, for his part, felt shock as the voice burst out of his lips unasked.

  Arthur’s eyebrows rose, even in the low light. “Franklin …”

  “We mean you no harm,” William said, taking hold of Franklin’s tongue and using it to speak. “There’s no need to reach for your weapon, Arthur. Let us pass, and go on about your business.”

  “Oh, Franklin,” Arthur said, and his finger twitched where he held it above the holster.

  “Please don’t,” Chester said, Franklin’s eyes fixed on Arthur’s hand.

  Arthur couldn’t help it; he was not bold but he was no fool, either. Had it been Franklin in his shoes, he would have made it to the holster before Franklin covered the ground between them, before Franklin’s fingers, with newfound strength, wrapped themselves around Arthur’s neck and throttled him, staying his hand from drawing his gun all the while.

  “Let it be merciful,” Chester said. “He has little ability to harm us, William.”

  “Yet still he tries,” William said, straining, forcing Franklin’s fingers to dig into Arthur’s throat. “He’s a hateful little man, isn’t he? Hates us with all he has. And here I go, hating him right back.”

  “It is unnecessary,” Chester said, sounding faintly regretful.

  It felt as though it took days, or an age; Arthur’s eyes bulged from their sockets, shining in the dark like stars until they went glassy and his neck and wrist went suddenly limp. The eyes rolled, a final breath came out in a rattle, and Franklin’s hands let Arthur go, and his old partner tumbled to the floor of the cave.

  “This was truly a shame,” Chester said, shaking Franklin’s head for him. “It did not need to come to this.”

  “Protecting the many is our highest duty,” William said, then was silent for a moment. “I make no apologies for that.”

  “What … have I done …?” Franklin croaked, his own voice leaking out like air from a hot teakettle.

  “You haven’t done anything,” William said.

  “That was entirely us,” Chester said with muted agreement. “And … I hate to say it, but for this to work, I think it’s going to have to be entirely us going forward.”

  “For the greater good, I quite agree,” William said. “Terribly sorry, Franklin.”

  “What … what are you going to do to me?” Franklin asked, frozen in the darkness, standing in the middle of the cave, Arthur’s body at his feet. “Are you … going to kill me?”

  “Good gracious, no,” Chester said.

  “You’re going to be one of us, now, Franklin,” William said, and the light started to recede from Franklin’s eyes, the cave fading around him. “One of the many, you see. As Chester told you, we are Legion—”

  The smells of dust, the taste of chalky broken rock receded into the depths of memory, and the stars that had pulsed in the blackness around Franklin grew brighter. He could hear other voices now, a thousand, a million of them, and it reminded him of a New York night, the avenues all alive with conversation and laughter. Some among them were happy, some were sad, but the feeling of being in the cave with Arthur’s body at his feet began to grow distant, like an old memory of those city nights. He could hear conversations behind William’s voice, behind Chester’s, and he receded into the midst of all of it like sinking into a warm bath.

  “That’s the spirit, old chap,” Chester said as Franklin Dewitt dipped into the depths of the many. “Part of the crew, then.”

  “I suppose that’s an appropriate analogy,” William said, “as it seems we’ve press-ganged him into joining us.” He turned Franklin’s eyes toward the light at the end of the tunnel—

  No, not Franklin’s eyes. Not anymore.

  “Come on, then,” Chester said, and they started to move. Daylight was waiting. The world was waiting. “I may not want to be here, but there’s little choice now.”

  “Well, try and enjoy it just a bit,” William said, and he split the lips of their new body in a smile. “You know, if you wanted to try to be accommodating once more.”

  “Don’t think I’ll go along with you on every occasion,” Chester said, smoothing his hands down the cotton shirt that they wore on their new body. “But perhaps just this once, again …” And he went along with the smile, stepping over Arthur’s body as they all walked out to join the world that they had been cut off from for oh so long.

  1.

  Midian, Tennessee

  Present Day

  “Same shit, different day. That’s what you Marines call this, isn’t it?”

  “I think we generally just call it being outnumbered,” Lafayette Hendricks said from beneath the brim of his wide cowboy hat, staring out at the dozen demons that were stacked up in front of him.

  “Simple, yet descriptive.” The demon named Duncan had shed the suit that he had so typically worn in the past. Now he was clad in a t-shirt with the words “I’m Not With Stupid Anymore” plastered across the front. Hendricks approved, but then he hadn’t been the biggest fan of Duncan’s last sidekick. That guy had been a dick.

  Dusk was settling over the quiet neighborhood in Midian, Tennessee, the sky a bright orange as Hendricks and Duncan stood on a playground, a bevy of demons lined up between them and a grade-school-aged kid who the dirty dozen had been encircling before the two of them had rolled up in Hendricks’s SUV to square off. The kid looked scared shitless, face half-hidden behind a thin, circular piece of jungle gym that he was peering out from behind, his normal world having taken a detour right off the fucking track.

  “I thought it captured the feeling of the moment pretty well,” Hendricks said, fingering the sword in his hand. It was a thin, sharp piece of metal a couple feet long, no more than an inch across. Every single one of the demons hanging out on the playground was staring at it. Well, it or Duncan’s baton, whi
ch the demon had in his hand, a little cylinder six inches long, spring-loaded, Hendricks knew by experience, and not deployed just yet.

  “It smells like fear up in this piece,” the lead demon said, sniffing the air. Probably theatrically, Hendricks figured. When they’d pulled up, he’d been looking like a twenty-something grunge guitarist who’d washed up from Seattle or somewhere, lank brown hair coruscating down in messy tangles, tattoos spilling out of his short-sleeved shirt. He had a little bit of a smell about him, too, like he was trying to articulate “grunge” in a very literal sort of way.

  “Really?” Hendricks asked. “Because to me it smells like unwashed, too-old broc’aminn playing like he’s trying to get himself a piece of something too young for him.” The lead guitarist’s face rippled, revealing darkness behind it, like his skin had turned liquid and dark, a pond disturbed by a thrown rock at the surface. Broc’aminn were one of the nastiest kinds of demons Hendricks had ever run across. Lots of demons liked children, but broc’aminn weren’t shy about all the nasty things they did with them. Most kinds would just eat the kids and get on with it. Not a broc’aminn, though.

  Also, they were pack hunters, which Hendricks acknowledged with a look around at the guitarist’s fellows. The fact that there were an even dozen was mildly worrisome.

  “You’re doing the math, aren’t you, demon hunter?” Lead Guitar asked with a smirk on his demon face. “It’s not in your favor.”

  “Yes, I do math,” Hendricks said, nodding, fingers on the leather hilt of his sword, running a finger along the metal crossguard. “It’s a thing we humans have spent time on, like evolution. Helps keep us out of trouble. You don’t meet too many graduate physicists that are cannibals, after all. Mostly idiots like you, really.”

  Lead Guitar looked around, smirking with those ugly extended lips, revealing a mouth full of way, way too many teeth. He breathed, and Hendricks almost had to take a step back from the smell. “I’m not a cannibal. I’m a meat eater.” He ran a long tongue around his mouth like a lizard, lasciviously. “I’m a meat lover, in all the ways you can imagine.” His eyes blinked sideways. “But I like my meat tender, so if you and your empty shell will just motor along … me and my buddies will give you a pass, just this once.”

  Hendricks didn’t take to sentimentality too easily, but he threw a glance at the kid hiding behind the jungle gym. “Hey, you. What’s your name?”

  The kid flinched, frozen like he’d been in the perfect hiding spot. “J-Jacob.”

  “Jacob,” Hendricks said. “You doing all right over there, Jacob? You’re scared, aren’t you?” Jacob could only nod. “That’s good,” Hendricks said. “That’s smart. Because these are very bad guys, and they mean to do very bad things. My friends and I are going to help you, but Jacob, I need you to listen.” Hendricks looked him right in the eye, talked past the herd of broc’aminn like they weren’t there. “When you get your chance, Jacob, I need you to run. Don’t be afraid they’re going to catch you. Just run when you get a chance. Okay?”

  “What chance do you think this little lamb has got?” Lead Guitar asked, laughing, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “We’re demons. We can run him down.”

  “My friends are going to help you, okay, Jacob?” Hendricks asked, not breaking eye contact. He received a small, terrified nod in return. “Okay, then.” And Hendricks shifted his attention back to Lead Guitar. “All right. You ready to get this gig underway?”

  Lead Guitar just chuckled low. “You got a real death wish here, demon hunter. Maybe I’ll just leave you half-alive for some scavengers to come collect. Maybe it’ll be one of the yargraad nesting in the hills. I could open up your belly, tear up your vocal chords, leave you rotting in the night for them. They eat you insides-first, you know.”

  Hendricks glanced at Duncan. “I think I’ve heard that about them. Did you know there were yargraad in them thar hills?”

  Duncan shook his head, his features softening in the waning light of day, all orange and glorious through the clouds on the horizon. “I did not. Someone should write that down. We could go after them next.”

  “Oh, bro, you guys are suffering from serious false confidence,” Lead Guitar said, and a few of his cronies chortled behind him. “It’s like you don’t understand the lay of the land, the state of things.”

  “And it’s like you don’t understand the meaning of words,” Hendricks said, shrugging lightly. Lead Guitar cocked his head. “I mean,” Hendricks went on, letting a slight smirk bleed out, “you didn’t even notice I said friends, plural … ANGEL, you ready?”

  The roar of a fifty-caliber rifle rocked the quiet night, and one of the Dirty-Ass Dozen, as Hendricks had already taken to thinking of this little band of shitters, took a hit to the chest that slammed his back into the ground like he’d been hit by a missile. He snapped, his legs folding and knees nearly hitting him in the face as he made hard contact with the grassy park ground.

  “I guess she’s ready. And that’s our cue,” Hendricks said, charging into battle, Duncan a half-step ahead, his sword raised and ready, the Dirty-Ass Dozen’s wide demon eyes looking around in shock as the two of them came in fighting.

  *

  “ANGEL has two breaking off to go after the kid,” Alison Longholt Stan said into the Bluetooth headset in her ear. The microphone was unobtrusive fortunately, because she needed wires interfering with her shooting like she needed a kick to the ass from a mule. She drew a bead through the scope on the massive Barrett rifle, leading her target by a little bit, and gently squeezed the trigger after blowing out her breath slowly. She watched through the scope as one of the broc’aminn was launched sideways. She figured she’d pegged him in the shoulder pretty good by the way he flipped and hit the dirt. She was actually impressed she’d hit him; the twilight hour didn’t exactly lend itself to great lighting. It was too dim to see well at a distance, and too light for her to switch to the night scope. “Make that one.”

  Alison took a sniff of the late October air as she readjusted to try and draw a bead on the other runner. Looking through the scope, she didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on with Hendricks and Duncan at the moment. She hoped it was going well, but she didn’t have the mental space to give it much thought. She had one mission, and it was to stop any strays from eating or killing Jacob Arnold while Hendricks and Duncan distracted the others. It was a mission that had been assigned in a hell of a hurry, with a conferencing phone call as they’d rushed to the site, warned by Duncan’s strange sense of things. She’d heard Hendricks call it “an op laid on a little too quickly,” and that seemed to fit her conception of how it was all going. She figured her daddy or Arch would have called it a “hurry-up offense,” and that also worked.

  “This is not going so good,” Hendricks called through the headset, and Alison could hear the muffled sounds of a struggle, heavy breathing that could only belong to the cowboy, through her earpiece. “Any chance we can get a little help here?”

  Alison fired again, the reverberation of the fifty-cal shot running through her whole body. She was perched on a roof across from the park, lying prone on the flat roof of an open carport. Pebbles were eating into her chest through her shirt and jeans, but they were a minor discomfort compared to what she knew would happen to Jacob Arnold if they failed. She watched the demon in her sights take the bullet to the shoulder and buckle, tossed like he’d just performed a gymnastics maneuver into a flip, landing hard on his back. She gave it a second to be sure both her targets were at least down before she swung the rifle around to where Duncan and Hendricks were up to their balls in the other nine or so bandmates, and it took her less than a second to make her assessment.

  “No shot here, COWBOY,” Alison said tightly, taking her finger away from the trigger, pointing it up at a forty-five degree angle. “ANGEL can’t do anything without hitting you.” She felt a numb sense of worry settle over her. “OOC?”

  “I’m a little busy!” Duncan shouted, and Alison watched t
hrough the scope as one of the six demons piling onto Duncan turned into a blast of black hellfire as he disappeared back from whence he’d come.

  “Don’t sweat it, COWBOY,” came a cool voice breaking into the line, one as familiar to her as any she’d ever heard in her life, “We wouldn’t leave you out to dry. BULLDOG and SOCRATES are in play, which means the Army is coming to save your ass again, Marine.”

  A pickup truck thumped as it mounted the curb and churned up the park grass, speeding toward the fight. It slammed into a small knot of the broc’aminn as Hendricks threw himself out of the way just in time. Alison counted at least three of the demons hit by the old pickup as the doors flew open and her father and brother leapt out to join the fight.

  *

  “I still say your brother’s code name should have been BONG HIT,” Hendricks muttered as he got back to his feet, sweeping his long black drover coat behind him as he lashed out with his sword and struck down one of the broc’aminn while its back was turned and it was gawking at Brian Longholt’s stumbling dismount from the passenger side of the truck.

  “You got a real gratitude problem,” Brian Longholt said, his faux-hawk looking particularly pointy today. He moved sideways awkwardly, raising his Roman gladius to parry a demon attack. The broc’aminn that came at him seemed even more awkward than he, which worked in the stoner’s favor; Hendricks watched the dumbass cut himself on Brian’s sword and then dissolve into a black burst of hellfire tinted slightly orange by the sunset.

  “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you,” Hendricks said as Bill Longholt came out swinging from around the driver’s side, the older man with a cavalry saber clenched in his fingers. It looked old, like maybe Civil War vintage. He vaped a demon with it as he stalked off toward Jacob, who was still hiding in the shadow of the jungle gym, peering out in stunned horror at the battle going on in front of him. Hendricks watched Bill end the dreams and lives of the three broc’aminn that his daughter had knocked down with the fifty out of the corner of his eye as three more of the damned demons came at him and Brian. “It’s more like … SOCRATES? Really?”