Unearthed, p.14
Unearthed, page 14
part #4 of Southern Watch Series
She heard the sound of a car pulling up outside, then a key in the lock. Her mother had been out all day, filling her time however she did. Lauren suspected a luncheon with old friends, but that was just a guess. Seemed like her mother did that pretty frequently.
The door opened and filled the room with light. Lauren had had the curtains pulled and the lights off, as though someone was going to sneak up and peer through the window behind her, trying to catch her searching for demon websites on the internet. It was a guilty feeling that wasn’t quite logical, but she did it anyway.
“What are you doing sitting in the dark?” Vera asked as she came in, setting her purse to the side.
“Nothing,” Lauren said, suddenly feeling as nervous as if she’d gotten caught looking at demon pictures. That probably would go over about as well as porn, here in her mother’s house. “How was … wherever you were?”
“Lunch was lovely,” her mother said, shooting her a knowing look. “The ladies are all well, asking about you, of course. We all marvel about how times have changed.”
“Because of the invention of the wheel? I bet it’s a huge time saver.”
“You are such a smart girl, it doesn’t surprise me that it carries all the way down to your ass,” her mother said, rather snidely for her. “No, we talk about how the time was, we all wanted to marry doctors, and none of us did. Now my daughter is one.”
“Yes,” Lauren said. “It sounds like a tremendous perversion of the dream of being taken care of, doesn’t it?”
“You act like I’m not proud of you,” her mother said, looking a little wounded.
“I’m sure you are,” Lauren said, taking the sting out of her words. “So … how are the … ladies?” She didn’t really know her mother’s friends that well anymore, not that she ever did. She knew their names and a little about each, but beyond that, it was a mystery to her what they even talked about.
“They are all as well as can be expected given what’s been going on,” Vera said. “But this is interesting. There was this odd young man in the diner while we were there, jotting down things on a notepad. Well, at the end of the meal he came over and talked to us—”
“Still got that Darlington charm, huh?” Lauren asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” her mother said, “but it seems to me that I married into that name and thus its charm wouldn’t apply to me unless it were somehow an airborne pathogen.” She cocked an eyebrow at Lauren, who nodded, a little impressed. “He didn’t want to talk to us like that in any case—it turns out he was a reporter who overheard our conversation.”
“What were you talking about?”
“What’s going on around town, of course,” Vera said, like it was obvious. “All the deaths, all the tragedy. Anyway, he said he was in town to talk to people about it.”
“Like carrion to a carcass,” Lauren said.
“He had these fancy little business cards,” Vera said, fumbling with her purse, opening the clasp. “Let me see, what did it say? It sounded very sleek and modern.” She brandished the little white square. “Frostwich.com?”
Lauren felt a frown of amusement crease her forehead. “He works for a website? Like a blogger?”
“Isn’t this the modern age?” Vera asked, holding the card protectively, as though Lauren’s sharp words were going to somehow shred it. “Doesn’t everybody work on the internet these days?”
“Not all of us,” Lauren said. “Though I wouldn’t mind being able to diagnose a chancre over a Skype call rather than in person.”
Vera frowned. “What is that?”
“It’s a sore that’s a sign of syphilis,” Lauren said, glancing at the card in curiosity. “Usually, but not always, pops up on the—”
“I am now not so happy that you are a doctor,” her mother said. “Anyhow, this gentleman,” she flapped the card again, “is looking for people to talk to about what’s going on. It sounded interesting.”
“Let’s check out his website, then,” Lauren said, and opened her computer. The thin screen flared to life. “What was it again?”
“Frostwich.com,” Vera said, sitting now next to her on the sofa with a plop. “But without a ‘t’ in the ‘ich.’ Like Greenwich.” Her mother leaned in as the website loaded. It had a bright orange top bar against a white background, and the lead story was right there.
Demon scourge in Tennessee town?
Lauren stared at it in silence for a moment, her mouth slightly agape. She felt the sharp sense that her spine had gone perfectly straight, like she’d been caught with the windows open, like someone had snuck up behind her and there was a money shot right there on the screen. She slowly turned her head to look at her mother, who was reading the headline with squinted eyes. She sat there in silence for a moment then said, “Well, that’s disappointing. He’s a crazyass.” She glanced over and met Lauren’s eyes, looking a little huffy. “Don’t say it.”
Lauren was almost too stunned to reply. “Say what?”
“I don’t know,” her mother said, getting up and heading out of the room, “but I’m sure you’ve got something smart to say.”
Lauren, for her part, just stared at the banner headline for a moment more before looking down to see that her mother had left the little card next to her on the sofa. With a quick glance to see if Vera was watching, she pocketed it, noting that it had a telephone number right there on the card, like an invitation waiting to be answered.
*
Hendricks was feeling that sense of something breaking within him as he tossed out the “fuck off” to Duncan. It was that gut-deep desire to drive over the cliff out of spite, to do something reckless and to hell with the consequences. He’d crossed the emotional Rubicon by wading through the waters in a fury and was done with it; he stormed out of the barn past Arch and Alison without even bothering to cast a look back at the OOC to see if his furious jab had landed.
“Hendricks!” Arch called from behind him. Hendricks was almost to the porch, plunging through the gap in the long grass like he didn’t care it was there, hem of his coat billowing out and dragging against the edges of the narrow path. He was sweating, not from the early morning heat, but from fury. As if he were a kid again, he just wanted to get back to his room and lie down on the bed and stew, to think about the origin of all these roiling emotions.
“Nothing to say I haven’t already said, Arch.” Hendricks hit the old wooden steps hard enough to make them squeal louder than usual, his boots making a clomp! clomp! clomp! as he ascended onto the porch.
Arch made it to the bottom of the steps just as Hendricks was opening the door. He paused as he opened it, looking back to see Alison tearing across the trail toward them at a jog. He made a split second decision, assessing the situation, and coming to the conclusion that he could either face them here or let them chase him all the way to the room. It hadn’t been the wisest strategic retreat, picking the path back to the house they were all currently sharing, though he hadn’t really been thinking it over at the time. He’d just fired and gone for cover, that was all.
“What the hell, Hendricks?” Alison said as she steamed into range. She had her arms folded across her chest, her teeth bared when she finished speaking. The fury smoked off that girl like heat off a barbecue.
“I said what I was thinking.” Hendricks made no apology for it. If they couldn’t see it, they were blind.
“He was honest about his ties,” Arch said, like it was all justifiable. “He didn’t try and hide them.”
“He didn’t mention this once before now?” Hendricks asked, still in a state of disbelief that they could deny the evidence of their own fucking ears and eyes. Hadn’t they seen that Duncan was hiding things? Didn’t they know that he was clearly holding out on them?
“I expected you to have a cooler head about this,” Arch said, “given you’re the one who wanted to work with Duncan and Lerner to begin with, back when I thought all demons were evil.”
“It’s too fucking hot for a cool head,” Hendricks said, wiping his brow. “He hasn’t told us about royalty before now. He hasn’t told us about his obligations to defend them—”
“Which he has explained, totally calm and rational about the whole thing,” Alison said. “It’s you who’s being unreasonable because you’ve got an unresolved hard-on.”
“Please stop talking like him,” Arch said to his wife, voice low and plaintive.
“I’m just calling it like I see it,” Alison said. She turned back on Hendricks, eyes afire. “You’re mad at Duncan about holding out? Fine. Who are you working for?”
“I work for my own damned self,” Hendricks snapped.
“Really? Then who mailed you Arch’s sword?” Alison asked. She had a bitter, twist-the-knife smile.
“A priest from Houston, Texas,” Hendricks said. It was true in literal fact, if a bit loose with the full circumstances. “He spent fourteen hours blessing it through some complicated ritual—”
“Really?” Her face knit up in disbelief, eyes rolling. “Can you smell the bullshit as it spills out of your mouth or are you too busy trying to pretend it’s just words? You’re lying, Hendricks. You have someone else behind you, hand up your ass and choosing your direction. Someone pushed you into town here, and we all know you’re still talking to them from time to time—”
Hendricks felt a surge of rage that made him want to leave, but he forced it down. “Because I had someone who mentored me once upon a time? Who drew me into the world of demons and showed me what was what? You think that results in some kind of divided loyalties?” He tried hard not to look at Arch as he said all this, acutely aware of the severe dissonance that was ripping at his mind at the moment: Archibald Stan is the man who will bring about the end of the world, he heard in his head, clear as the voices of those speaking to him right now.
“Because you’re holding out on us,” Alison said, hugging herself even tighter. “Because you’re having a little pissy fit like a spoiled toddler at Duncan for not telling us every single thing he knows while you’re clutching onto a big damned secret of your own like it’s a life preserver and you’re in the middle of the ocean.” She looked at her husband, then at Hendricks. “We’ve all got secrets—”
“What?” Arch asked, looking at each of them in turn. “I don’t have any secrets. What secrets are you keeping?”
“Not now, sweetie,” Alison said quietly. “Point is, we’ve all got pasts. We don’t have to sit down and have a share-a-thon and dump out our whole life stories on the table if we don’t want to. I don’t need to know about what happened with your wife in order to work with you on this. I don’t expect you to take emotional laxative and drip your feelings out everywhere you go in order to kill demons with me, and asking Duncan to tell us his whole life story is an invasion of privacy, just the same as it’d be if I was demanding you tell me everything about how Renee died.” Hendricks felt the burn of that one, saw the light in Alison’s eyes as she said it. She held it there just long enough to make her point, like a lit cigarette against his flesh, then pulled it away before it could leave a permanent mark. “I know you enough to know we’re on the same side. You can’t tell me you don’t know enough about Duncan to see he’s down for killing demons and helping us fill in gaps we can’t fill for ourselves.”
Hendricks waited a minute before speaking, waiting for the sting, that pride-struck humiliation to fade a tinge. “I don’t trust him. We make a move on her, he’s gonna come at us. And he’s been in our blind spot for a while now. Imagine if I’d taken a run at her and got her before he came into the room last night. By his rules, he would have had to kill me, wouldn’t he?”
There was a pause at that. “Maybe,” Arch said slowly, like he was admitting to something he didn’t want to. “This duchess—she’s just another demon, you know. Why are you so fixated on her?”
Hendricks looked from him to Alison, saw her nod of understanding. “She’s the itch he can’t scratch,” she said. When Arch looked at her, she went on. “Ever have someone tell you, ‘No, you can’t do that’?” Hendricks just kept his mouth shut. Let them think that if they wanted to; it was better than any explanation he could have come up with shy of the truth.
“I’m a cop,” Arch said. “Or was.” There was some consternation there. “My job was to tell people that and to slap their hand or drag them away when they did it anyway.”
“I don’t like being told what to do,” Hendricks said, letting his fingers drift up to feel the scruff on his cheeks.
“Funny sentiment coming from a Marine,” Arch said.
“I don’t have to take orders anymore,” Hendricks said. “I got a bad feeling from this lady, even absent Starling’s warning. I feel a compelling desire to stab her in the belly and watch the black vortex do its thing.” He looked at the weathered and warped floorboards of the porch. “This thing—it’s gonna blow up, mark my words. If he’s sworn to his duty, and we fall on the other side of that by accident, it’s gonna be a problem. He told me himself he’s on the game board from a different side, and we all forgot that because we were happy to have the help.” He looked up at both of them in turn. “It’d be real smart for us not to forget that again. Because as much as I’m a fan of getting help, I’m not a real big proponent of getting knifed in the back.”
“Good thing he doesn’t carry a knife, then,” Alison said. She stood in place another moment before turning away back to the barn, presumably to talk to Duncan.
Hendricks waited until she was almost there before he spoke to Arch again. “You know we can’t trust him anymore, right? Not a hundred percent, at least.”
Arch just stared past him, eyes on a point in the distance, somewhere beyond the worn and hanging wooden siding on the house. “I don’t know if I fully trust anyone anymore, now that all this has happened,” he said. He cast a quick look back at Alison’s retreating back. “Except my wife, of course.”
Hendricks felt an uncomfortable buzzing in his stomach at that, a sense that he should shut up, which he promptly ignored. “I don’t know that I’d even trust her all the way,” he said and stepped through the open door into the house. “After all, she did just say she had secrets.” He let the door slap shut hard, not really wanting to see what kind of impact his words had had on Arch.
*
Kitty was lounging on the fainting couch, keeping one eye on her new pet, which was moving—not quite slithering, but not quite crawling—across the floor in the parlor, a strange sight if ever she’d seen one. It was a severed arm, after all, and watching it move of its own volition was a disturbing sight even for her—and she’d opened up the innards of humans and thrown them in the air like confetti on more than one occasion. Just because.
Rousseau arrived presently, silver tray in his hand with a cup atop it. The silver tray wasn’t strictly necessary, but there were standards to observe, formalities and expectations to cater to. There were certain ways to deal with a duchess, and bringing her drink on an entire tray was one of them.
“You have a visitor, madam,” Rousseau said in that ratty, classless accent of his.
“Here?” Kitty asked, taking the cup from the table where Rousseau had set it. She sniffed; it was a blend of tea that demons preferred, something rich and earthy that would probably kill a human. She should test that when next she had one. “Someone’s come to see me here?”
“Word is spreading of your arrival,” Rousseau said, dipping low. “Locals and visitors to town are looking to curry favor, make acquaintance.”
“How tedious,” she said, looking back to see the hand grasping at a bookcase to try and ascend it. “And now they’ve taken to inviting themselves into my home.” This was not unexpected, really, but it was annoying. She had things to do, after all, tea to drink, dismembered arms to watch; and having to converse with some freshly enshelled grellnar was a torturous proposition.
“This one comes bearing a gift,” Rousseau said, in a voice that she recognized as him trying to entice her.
“Well, that’s a start,” she said, taking a sip of the tea. It was still hot. “Tell them I’m very busy preparing for something, but I could certainly spare five minutes. Emphasize the time limit.”
“Of course, madam,” Rousseau said, bowing his head slightly. “Back in a moment.”
She waved him off, though it was unnecessary. She always made those motions, as though it were her way of controlling her world, or seeming to. She’d examined herself in some detail over the years, come to many conclusions about herself and what she wanted and how she chose to operate. It didn’t even bother her to think about how much she enjoyed shifting the pieces around, even through obvious gestures like that one. It was a simple command, a test of authority that she always relished. You, go over there. And they followed. She never tired of it, not even after all this time.
Rousseau returned shortly, a demon with hard lines on his face in tow. The man was dressed in a suit, impeccably tailored. New money, she figured, looking for old credibility. She didn’t particularly care for this type, but they had their uses. This man had deep wrinkles in his shell, so deep under his eyes they almost looked like scars.
“Duchess Elizabeth,” he said, speaking with a very continental accent, “I greet you and welcome you to the state of Tennessee.” He bowed his head appropriately, though she preferred her men to kneel at almost all times. This was all right, though; she always drove them down eventually, and once they’d bowed properly, they never really came up again.
“I thank you,” she said, not bothering to get up from where she sat. She raised a hand, her command for him to look up at her, and he followed it. More of the same, she thought. Perhaps she did tire of it. Perhaps half the fun was in breaking the will, asserting the power. She’d seen that with the humans she’d worked on; every once in a while one came back at her with a failure to obey. Those were always the greatest joys. She did like a challenge every now and again. “What brings you to my doors, Mister …?”
