Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (37 page)

“And maybe take a little zip or two at my wardrobe choices in the process,” Lauren said, “because really, there’s never a moment when you should waste an opportunity to point out the things I do that you disagree with.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” her mother said, putting the car back into gear. “I ain’t got time in my day to point out all the things you do wrong.” Lauren barely slammed the door in time to let her mother drive off, pulling around into a U-turn and lurching off down the mountain.

Lauren could feel her internal teakettle boiling and sighed to let off the steam. It was pointless to hold onto it, because even if she did just bottle it up all the way home, unleashing it like a factory whistle, blowing as she came in the door, her mother would just look up at her with that faintly amused smile—
Are you still on about that? But that was ages ago!
There was a statute of limitations on every unpleasant conversation, and it was always as short as her mother wanted it to be.

Fuck it
, she said to herself. She got in her car and started the engine. She stared off the overlook, willing her irritation to be pushed off, because it would do her no good alive. One time, she goes jogging in a sports bra, gets reminded forever. All because that fucking biddy Genevieve Lane mentions to her mother than Albert Daniel—the old horn dog—was gawking at her. Not her fault that Albert Daniel hadn’t gotten laid since protesters were chanting about how many babies LBJ had killed that day. Not her fault that the shithead would probably stroke off until he stroked out, the pudgy fuck. Her legs were all right, she guessed—guys had mentioned them before in bed as being good—but nothing else was worth writing home about, certainly not her sports bra. But Albert Daniel—
aww, fuck it
.

She blew the hostility out again as she drove. It was a process, a slow one, dealing with her mother’s little sand spurs that she tossed with unerring accuracy. She could land ’em in the gap between the mental sock and shoe, and for the rest of the day they stung, no matter how much you dug at ’em. Lauren took another breath out, trying to steer back to something more productive. Back to the yin and yang of karma. Back to Molly …

… and Arch Stan …

… who was driving past her on the road up the mountain, still in his fucked-up, dented police Explorer, signaling to turn onto that abandoned road that the old mining company had left gated off.

She frowned. Reeve was gonna arrest the man, based on what she knew. It sounded inevitable. The only thing they were waiting on was lab results from that IV bag he’d apparently hung.

But he was driving his police cruiser up here on Mount Horeb?

She half expected him to hang a U-turn and come back down after her, like he could read what she’d been conspiring to do to him. She watched in the rearview, though, and his car disappeared down the road. She watched—and watched another few seconds, and then she hit the brakes. There was not another car in sight, and Arch Stan was still up there, still down that road somewhere.

She went through about three phases of thought in quick succession. The first was the extremely natural
Ah, well, fuck him, too
that she sensed came almost as much from her feelings about him as from the man himself—that bastard. The second was the deeper thought—the suspicion, the wondering
What the hell is he doing up here?

The third came with a fresh breath of annoyance, and ended as she spun the car in a U of her own, heading back up the slope with full intention of following the bastard to see what exactly he was doing trespassing on the mining company’s land. Maybe it’d give the sheriff even more reason to stick the karma Taser up his deputy’s self-righteous ass.

Arch was in the dark. It had felt like the right thing to do. He’d plunged into that mine entrance at a run, slowing only as the darkness fell and he’d had to flick on his light and draw the switchblade. He wasn’t counting on conventional threats, so the knife made sense. It wasn’t like there was a high likelihood of a bear hiding up in here, after all.

He’d found the gate to the mine ajar. Well, a little more than ajar, actually; it’d been hanging off the hinges, open wide. Tracks for more bikes than he could rightly count were all over the ground in front of the entrance. It looked like the tunnel stretched down a ways, maybe to an elevator or something else. The gate at the front of the cave was a half-butted effort to keep teenagers out, Arch figured, the product of a company that had hit the bankruptcy skids and lost everything, even the consideration for others that might have caused them to spend their last dollars on a more substantial method of keeping out trespassers. But bankruptcy was bankruptcy, and you couldn’t get blood out of a turnip. He eased down the tunnel, done with the running.

His light fell over dark rock, stone bereft of value. Supports lined the walls, designed to keep the world from falling in around him. There wasn’t much to see—yet—but his eyes kept track of it all. The smell of cave air would have been a little dank, he figured, but for the opening behind him. He very carefully did not look back, knowing that the sight of sunlight would blind him for seconds, and Arch was now fully aware that even a second’s blindness was far too long when one was dealing with demons.

He came to a carved split in the rocky tunnel about a hundred yards in and found himself faced with a choice of which way to go. The cool air crawled up his arms, causing his skin to tingle in a way he surely wouldn’t have felt were he still standing out in the hot sun. Which way to go, that was the question. It didn’t take him long to decide, because lingering about was surely a fast way to get himself made into a ripe target for ambush. He headed right, flashlight beam bouncing its way in front of him, revealing nothing but rock walls and the detritus left behind by a mining company on its way out.

The tunnels were wide; he couldn’t reach from wall to wall if he’d tried. They were open channels bored into the earth, and the cut tracks on the ground indicated where the mining company had transported the minerals out of the earth with steam locomotive hauling cars. Arch minded his steps as he walked into the silence.

His footsteps echoed, but at such a low resonance that he wondered if they could be heard down the shaft. He slowed his pace, listening, but the sound of a faint dripping in the distance overcame the soft steps. He became aware of his own breathing, even though it was quiet.

His flashlight beam caught the first hint of something foreign in the rocky tunnel, and Arch stopped short. He stood there, the pale light stretching across the dusty tunnel floor until it found a lump, something cloth-like that reminded him of a cocoon. He stood there, hesitant to even move, waiting for something else to stir, as though the mere light could awaken something in the darkness.

He heard something and froze, that crash of fear like a cymbal in his head. He straightened, a pang of awareness running down to his stomach. He was vaguely aware that he’d frozen at the thought of some trouble and told himself that it was natural, that he needed to listen. He needed to know where it was coming from before he could deal with it.

Arch listened, listened hard, waiting for some subtle clue about its location. Was it a demon? A drip of water? The hand on the flashlight shook, and even the knowledge he’d fought a demon that breathed fire at him—on him—did nothing to bring him warmth as he stood there in the dark. It had been a bad idea to come here, he knew that now, not just in his mind, but his gut, which had told him just moments ago to charge into this. The beam shook on the cloth object in front of him, fooling him for just a second into thinking it was moving.

There was a quiet scrape of something and this, he knew for sure, came from behind him. His head snapped around, and he could see no hint of the entrance and the bright sky somewhere above. He could see nothing, not really, like he’d turned off the lights around him and stood in the dark. His hand sweated on the flashlight, felt it slickly in his palm, the ridges feeling almost ineffectual against the tangible proof of his nervousness—his fear.

He almost shouted “Hello!” but remembered himself. There was reassurance in that word, in hearing it echo, in hearing someone else repeat it back. But he kept it in, knowing that here in a mine that had so recently harbored demons, reassurance was not what he was likely to find.

Arch’s eyes adjusted, and now he could see the faint light somewhere down the corridor. Outlines were visible, the dark of the mine broken just slightly by his flashlight’s beam and the far-off promise of daylight somewhere around a curve in the distance.

His breath came slow, controlled as he drew it while measuring his fear with each exhalation. Nerves were a killer in a place like this. It was a mine, after all; demons weren’t the only things in a place like this that made noise. Natural things could do it as well, like water seepage and bats.

Arch brought the flashlight around slowly, casting light over craggy walls and dark stone clefts, until it was shining back up the tunnel from whence he’d come. Coming here still seemed like a bad idea, he reflected as he turned the beam around, and as it fell on a face in the darkness he was struck from behind, a scream filling his ears as he hit the ground and the flashlight rolled out of his grasp, casting his whole world in flashes of light for a moment before it stopped.

“Mandy?” Hendricks asked, repeating it like he hadn’t heard it. He stared at the girl, bald as Lex Luthor, her skin wrinkled like she’d been a sun worshipper her whole life, that leather handbag look to it. He was still leaning heavily on Alison and she on him, and it surprised him that they weren’t both flat out on the ground because she sure as shit didn’t look strong enough to bear his weight.

Duncan hummed a few bars of something, and Hendricks cocked his head over to the demon. “
Mandy
,” Duncan said. “The Manilow song?”

Hendricks glanced at Alison, who shrugged. “Who the fuck is Manilow?”

“Kids these days,” Duncan said. “Mandy … what are you doing here?”

“I live here,” came the ragged response from the fire lady.

Hendricks raised an eyebrow and surveyed the square again. He’d seen shittier shitholes but not too many. He’d broken down doors in Ramadi that looked more livable than this place—and that was after he and his boys had plowed through. “I’m a little surprised anyone lives here,” Hendricks said, holding back the honesty—because it felt like it might firehose out, irritating that girl and her flaming devil dogs. And he didn’t feel like fighting quite yet.

“Lots of people used to,” Mandy said. She sounded a little hollow, a little high-noted mixed with some scratch, like she hadn’t used her voice in a while.

“What happened to them?” Alison asked, and Hendricks gave her a frown. Didn’t she already know?

“You were here before,” Mandy said, staring at Alison with hollow eyes. They were taking it all in, those eyes, but Hendricks had a doubt that it was all making sense to the brain behind them. Mandy looked about eighty percent checked out, by his reckoning. The lights were on, maybe, and that was about it. “You came last time.”

“I came last time,” Alison agreed. “I saw you, from a distance, before we ran. But I didn’t talk to you.”

“No one talks to me,” Mandy said.

“Better than hearing voices, I guess,” Hendricks said. He regretted it as those empty eyes took him in for a minute.

“You look a little like him,” Mandy said, and her bald head went to a forty-five degree angle as she surveyed him. “I think.” She paused and put a burned finger up to her cracked lips; Hendricks could see the dried skin flaking off in a way that suggested to him that a whole fucking tube of Chap-Stick could not fix the dryness problems this lady had. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”

Hendricks wondered how long they should indulge the crazy cat-lady—minus the cats. He landed on, “At least a little longer,” when his eyes fell across the flaming dogs again. They were just waiting, like a command barked would send them leaping forward. Hendricks’s eyes darted to his sword, then back to the dogs. Nope, not great odds. He did not favor them. Walking out would be a lot better. “Who is he?” he asked, trying to sound interested while he worked on a backup plan. None was forthcoming.

“He—” she snarled, “he’s the one who—” She made a guttural noise in her throat that reminded Hendricks of a dog growling. He eyed the flame dogs and decided that nope, it was coming from her. He shot a sidelong glance at Duncan and noticed the demon was still taking it all in, not making a hostile move. The baton was still in his hand, though, which was either a good sign or a damned bad one.

Mandy made a new sound, now, a high, whining one, and it took Hendricks a second to realize what it was.

“She’s crying,” Alison said a second after he got it.

“You’d be crying, too, if you had what I had,” Mandy said, turning those blank eyes on Alison again. “Did you ever have a man … who took everything from you?” Her eyes fell to Hendricks. “Well? Did you?”

“I’ve never had a man, no,” Hendricks replied, regretting his glibness as soon as he’d said it.

It seemed to fall right off Mandy, who focused back on Alison. “Have you?” Mandy asked.

“I have a man, yes,” Alison replied, a little carefully to Hendricks’s ears. He didn’t have to try hard to wonder why; Mandy sounded a little on edge. Well, actually, she sounded like she was on the edge of the cliff standing on her tippy-toes and leaning over, trying to give the abyss a big damned smooch.

“Is this him?” Mandy nodded at Hendricks.

“No,” Alison said.

“What about him?” Now Mandy sounded tired, as she laconically gestured at Duncan.

“Definitely not,” Alison said, and Hendricks cracked a smile at that one. “My man’s not here.”

“I had a man once,” Mandy said, and she’d settled back into a trance-like state where her eyes were fixed on the red-black sky. “He’s gone now.”

Hendricks’s mouth spoke again before his brain could get a grip on that slippery weasel. “Can’t imagine why; it’s such a lovely town you have here.”