Unearthed (43 page)

“It is,” Lawrence said. “In fact—”

She whipped the knife up and stabbed him, cutting hard into the Plasticine shell of Lawrence’s face, causing his eyes to widen in surprise. “How many fucks do you think I give, Lawrence?” She stabbed him again as he staggered back, planting the blade in his leg this time, ripping into his shell and exposing a gleam of essence. He was a greater, of course, and killing him would take some time and effort.

She had neither in abundance. “I don’t understand why you people keep fighting me for control. If you would all just do—just do
as I say!
” She stabbed him again, landing the blade in his shoulder as he fell to one knee, unbalanced by his damaged leg. “If you would do what I say, none of this would have to happen!” She brought the knife down again and Lawrence tumbled to his back, Kitty inches away from him. She stabbed him again and again, each motion an expression of her fury, her impatience, her disgust at being caught up in this place, out of her routine, at the resistance encountered, at being put into her place by—by—

She let out a scream of primal fury and stabbed Lawrence squarely in the middle of the forehead, ripping aside his shell and letting more essence leak out. “Do you have any idea who I am?
Who I am?
I should be the fucking queen of this world and the next! I should have been! I was supposed to be! And you should all—all—all of you! You should do what I say!” She drove the knife down at Lawrence’s flailing arms, hacking off the flesh of his shell with each violent thrust. The sun bore down on her, the heat of the moment was heavy.

“But I’m not,” she said as Lawrence grunted in pain, “and this fucking world suffers all the more for it. You should all have a queen, terrible and awe-ful, what you deserve, but you don’t, because it’s so fucking unjust.” A hard jab ripped a hand free from Lawrence’s body, and his mewling cries increased in volume as it fell away and blackened, turning to dust. “And I have to sit back and deal with this incompetence—” she stabbed him in the gut, “—this fucking ridiculousness—” she thrust the knife into the side of his head, tearing loose an ear, “—your stupidity, your timidity, your change of loyalties—” She drove the point into the middle of Lawrence and he gasped one last time, as the black velvet of hell spurted forth to encompass him and drag it back into its loving embrace, “—This is the shit I have to deal with being the also-ran. Duchess.” She said her title mockingly, felt her face twist with it. “Queen of Earth, Queen of Hell. That’s what I should have been. What I would have been, if not for—” She caught herself. “But I could make a hell on earth, or a hell of heaven if I was in charge of it, you fucking insipid, clueless idiots.”

“Madam?” Rousseau asked, drawing her attention to the corner of the attached garage behind her. Rousseau was waiting a step behind Bardsley, both staring at her in a rather neutral fashion.

“May we be of assistance?” Bardsley asked, solicitous as always. Of course he was kissing up. He’d just watched her rage-kill a greater. He was probably quaking in his shell.

Kitty felt a big drop of sweat roll down her forehead. It wasn’t supposed to be this hot. She wasn’t supposed to be this—this thwarted. The OOC’s presence should have been comfort, but he’d gotten up in her business once and was causing her headaches. And the cowboy …

She wished now she’d kept the cowboy. Just a little longer, just a little bloodier, just a little more fun.

“The box is inside,” she said to Bardsley, getting up off the front porch. “It’s supposedly chatty. Find it for me, and I’ll bind it to my will. Let’s finish this and gain some damned status.” She stood, dusting herself off. Rolling around in a fury wasn’t like her. She preferred cooler kills, but her meeting earlier had clearly set her … on edge.

“Yes, madam,” Bardsley said, answering just like Rousseau would. Rousseau acknowledged this with a raise of his eyebrow before following Feegan Bardsley into the useless slug’s house, looking for her prize.

“One to go,” Kitty breathed, kicking at the imaginary dust that Lawrence had left behind when he’d vaped. Hopefully he’d carry the message back to hell that she was not to be fucked around with. As if that message hadn’t already been heard there, loud and clear.

Lauren Darlington did not stir from the cowboy’s side until her phone rang, jarring her out of the sleep-deprived trance that had claimed her. Not that she wasn’t at least a little used to being pushed to the limit in terms of tiredness, but this time there was an adrenaline factor that even life in the ER hadn’t quite delivered.

She glanced at Hendricks, who twitched upon the mattress as her phone trilled, making her wonder how he was hearing it in his unconsciousness. She had yet to speak with the man, really, and if she’d felt even slightly in control of events—like if she were his doctor, at the hospital—this would have been driving her mad. As it was, it was almost like Let Go and Let God, or however Arch would have said it. It felt out of her hands and somehow less frustrating for it. Or maybe that was the lack of sleep talking.

She pulled the phone up to her ear and hesitated before answering it. Talking on a cell phone in front of people still felt rude to her, but she acquiesced to the need to talk when she saw it was Molly calling. “Hello?” she answered.

“Did you get lucky?” Molly asked, as chipper as if she’d gotten a full night of sleep.

“Really inappropriate question,” Lauren said.

“With the demons,” Molly said, a little frustration seeping through.

“Still not a great choice of words,” Lauren said. “There actually weren’t any hookers at the party.”

“Augh, I give up,” Molly said. “What happened? Where are you?”

“With the …” she looked at the sheet, as if she expected it to be pulled back to expose the entire group, looking at her. Which couldn’t happen, because Arch and his wife had left, and so had Bill Longholt and his son, both groups on separate missions. “I don’t know. With the people who are fighting this fight.”

“You’ve joined the resistance,” Molly said with far too much enthusiasm for the hour. “It’s like you’re in France in World War Two!”

“I feel like there should be more croissants,” Lauren said. “Or any breakfast food at all, actually.” Her stomach rumbled at the reminder.

“What are you doing?” Molly asked. “Like, right now.”

“Doctor stuff,” Lauren said. “I’m taking care of a …” She glanced down at the man called Hendricks, his face slack. He grimaced in his sleep and shifted, moaning out. “I’m taking care of the guy in the cowboy hat that—”

“Like I wouldn’t remember him,” Molly cut her off, voice deep with concern. “Is he okay?”

“Not so much,” Lauren said. “He’s had a rough night.”

“How rough?”

Lauren felt a lump in her throat. “About as rough as yours would have been at the Summer Lights Festival if he hadn’t been there to distract your date.”

“Oh, damn,” Molly whispered. “How …?”

“I don’t … want to get into details,” Lauren said. “It’s … crass and nasty, and not something I want to think about, let alone inflict on my sixteen-year-old.”

“Okay,” Molly said. “When are you coming home?”

“When I can,” Lauren said, reaching up to brush stray hairs out of her face. She felt like her raven mane might have gained a few more greys tonight. “I don’t know. There are things going on here that I don’t fully understand. There was some kind of confab earlier that I didn’t fully catch, but it sounded … dire.”

“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” Molly said.

“Go to school,” Lauren said. “Be normal. And … watch out for yourself.”

“I can do two out of three of those,” Molly said. “The normal bit … kinda tough to achieve now that I know about the ‘d’ word.”

“And keep your hands off the devil’s doorbell,” Lauren said. “You know God kills a kitten every time you touch yourself down there.”

“If that were true—”

“La la la la,” Lauren said. “I can’t hear you.”

There was a pause, a heavy silence. “Take care of yourself, too, Mom.”

“Will do, daughter o’ mine,” Lauren said and hit the end button. “Will do.” She let the phone fall to her side, felt the cramping pain in her lower back from sitting on the hard floorboards for hours on end.

The curtain stirred and Lauren followed the motion to its source. The redhead was standing there, one dusky eye exposed, watching either her or Hendricks—she couldn’t tell which. “You might as well come in,” Lauren said.

The redhead moved the curtain side long enough to pass in then let it fall behind her. Lauren caught a brief glimpse of Duncan sitting like a stone statue in the kitchen, Belzer across from him in a slumped posture. What the hell was that about?

“I remember you,” Lauren said to the redhead. “But I can’t recall your name.”

The redhead cocked her head. “Starling.”

“Uhhh … is that a stage name?” Lauren asked. “Because … no. I know that’s not your name.” She searched her memory. “Lucy? Wasn’t that—”

“I am not Lucia,” the redhead said. “To confuse the two of us is folly.”

“Well, you’re the spitting image of her,” Lauren said, adjusting her seating. “Don’t worry, I can’t say anything. Doctor-patient privilege and all that. But I remember you from the ER. Can’t blame you for choosing a new name. I’d want a fresh start, too, if—”

“I am not who you think I am,” the redhead said.

“Okaaaay,” Lauren said, conceding. “What did you want me to call you? Scarlet?”

“Starling.”

“Fine. Right. Starling it is.” Lauren yawned, uncontrollably. “How’d you get caught up in all this?”

The redhead—Starling—looked at her blankly. She seemed to do that a lot. Maybe she’d suffered one of the seemingly ubiquitous head injuries that this bunch seemed to be afflicted with on a constant basis. “I am squarely in the middle of it,” she said at last.

“You can say that again,” Lauren agreed. “I thought Archibald Stan was going to trip over himself trying to get physical with you. Figured maybe he’d even hit you or something.”

“That would be ill advised.”

“It’d be nice to see his sterling perfect reputation take a hit, though,” Lauren said. “No offense. But him being a woman beater? Oh, the cracks in his facade would be showing then.” Starling stayed quiet, shifting her gaze to Hendricks. “Do you know him well?” Lauren asked after a few minutes.

“I know him better than anyone,” Starling replied coolly.

“Better than his girlfriend?” Lauren asked. “Erin?”

There was a sudden, violent change in expression that blossomed and faded in the course of seconds, flushing the pale cheeks with enough red she could have been called “Scarlet” before they returned to snowy white. “She is of no concern.”

Lauren caught the vibe, and it reminded her of the Miranda Lambert song “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” for some reason. Probably because of the crazy. The anger that had risen was almost tangible, like she could feel it wash over her when the mention was made. It rolled off this Starling in waves of heat, and made Lauren want to step back. “All right, then,” Lauren said simply, having no desire to push it any further. Erin was a fucking mess anyway, and she suspected that if there was enough of Hendricks left, mentally, to fill a shoebox after this trauma, it certainly wasn’t going to aid their nascent relationship growth.

“Mmmm,” Hendricks grunted, bucking in the bed, eyes fluttering. Lauren leaned over him, putting a hand on his face. He still stunk of that sulfur, like it was cigarette smoke settled into his pores after decades of puffing. She ran light fingers over his sweating forehead, and they came back reeking of brimstone.

“Hey,” Lauren said, trying to capture him with the sound of her voice. “Can you hear me?”

The eyes fluttered closed again, and he seemed to settle back into an uneasy sleep. Lauren shook her head and turned to say something to Starling, but the redhead was gone, the curtain not even fluttering, as though no one had moved it at all.

“I don’t understand what we’re doing now,” Brian said, shaking his head as they bumped along on a back road in his father’s truck.

“I think you’d be better off at home,” Bill said, placing sunglasses over his eyes to ward off the rising sun. It also had the additional effect of masking his emotions—well, muting them a little, at least. “Why don’t I drop you off?”

“Why would you?” Brian asked, yawning.

“Perhaps you could use a nap,” his father said.

“Perhaps you could,” Brian said. “You’ve been up all night, too.”

“At some point, you have to ask yourself why you’re following me around.”

“Because it’s been just so enlightening thus far,” Brian snapped. It had been enlightening, but probably not in any good way. After all, he’d met at least half the crackpots in the county in the last day and figured out that there were a few in his own family. He’d always thought of Arch as a level-headed guy and Alison was … well, she was Alison. Just another Midian resident, a daddy’s girl who kept her expectations about as high as she could imagine them. Which, to his mind, was about as low as the limbo pole near the end of the competition. But they were suitable expectations for this town, this county, this state. She’d gotten married, and soon she’d go to work filling up the world with babies.

It was his father that was the real revelation. They’d had more arguments than he could count since he’d come back. Before, too, but now he had more ammunition for it. He’d always, somewhere inside, assumed his father had something close to his own intellect, but that he’d been so busy playing good ol’ boy that he’d just put his critical thinking skills aside somewhere along the way. This night, though? His father had proven himself every bit as susceptible as anyone else to the mass delusion Brian had settled into believing organized religion was.

“I suppose you philosophy majors are always seeking enlightenment,” Bill said. “Though you seem curiously intent on heaping scorn upon me.”

“Let’s not call it scorn, per se,” Brian said, dancing around the subject a little. “Let’s go with … uh … sarcastic skepticism.”

“I thought you were against torture,” Bill said, “but here you are waterboarding the hell out of your semantics.”