Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  We watched each other for a moment, Roderick watching both of us, and I changed the subject. “What’s the story on the super-flashlight? It burned him like sunlight.”

  “That’s because it creates sunlight.” Jennifer smiled just a little and didn’t even stumble over the shift in topics. I didn’t know if the pride was in inventiveness on her part or that of one of her new minions. It was clear Jennifer was the boss of the technopagans but she hadn’t bothered to explain how or why. “Well, technically it releases sunlight, but same diff.”

  “So you’re using some sort of full-spectrum bulb on ultra-bright? Something like that?”

  “No,” Jennifer said. She didn’t laugh, and I knew it was generous of her. “It’s sunlight. It’s just that simple: a tube of daylight waiting to happen. Press the button and it comes out in a directed beam.” She shrugged a little. “These guys are very good at what they do. They invent the best toys.” With that she nodded around the place at her cabal. Dan, the one from Duke, mimed a short curtsey of insolent appreciation for the recognition. He and Roderick exchanged the glance of people with a past. The air between them just about shot sparks.

  I shook my head. “Magic? Hardly seems your style. You’re a technologist: nuts and bolts and baseball bats.” Jennifer had been a professional computer whiz before she found out the monsters in humanity’s anxiety closet are real. That’s too short a summary and it doesn’t do her biography justice, but I’ve already written all that down once before.

  “Magic is just a way of getting the job done. You do a thing and you get the result you want. Sounds a lot like technology to me.” She shifted her weight to the other leg. Events had unfolded in Jennifer’s life to change her in big ways, but then, in whose don’t they? Vampires’ lives, I supposed, or so I’d always liked to think.

  “I respect your initiative,” I said, but whatever warning I was about to give her – whatever tired platitude I was going to retread and stick back out on the road of our pseudo-friendship for the hundredth time – was interrupted by three sounds from the front of the restaurant: a roaring engine, a scream from the lookout named Sheila and the thud of a dead body hitting the pavement.

  We all ducked, waiting, and after a second Jennifer crept over to the front door of the place. Roderick and I followed. We found Xi dead on the sidewalk outside, an arrow through the very middle of his heart. His eyes were open but empty, the spark of him gone forever. Now all that was left was the meat he’d ridden around. Sheila was on her knees next to him, half to take cover behind the bench on which they’d been sitting and half to check to see if CPR would be worth it. As we crowded the doorjamb, the floor still giving off the faint stench of scorched wood and charred linoleum, she looked up and shook her head. Tears welled in her eyes but she didn’t quite let herself shed them. I didn’t know if they were all this tough or if being around Jennifer had made them that way. Jennifer had seen it all and done it all by the time these technopagans met her and she could be as steady as you like through the roughest of seas.

  The arrow had a note attached, sort of: a USB stick poking out the back. It was tiny, wedged into a slot custom-made for it. I had no idea how the arrow flew straight. It had to have been made for that, weighted so the tiny little chip of computer memory would balance it rather than throw it off.

  Jennifer squatted beside Xi’s corpse, ran fingers over his hair, felt for a pulse and then closed his eyes for him. She stood back up, archers be damned, to remove the memory stick from the arrow, then turned to the remaining others in her group: Sheila, Dan and Ramon. “We need to move him,” she said to them. “Low-key, somewhere safe. We can mourn him later. Dan, you’re on. Get to work.”

  He paused a moment, staring at Xi’s form, and nodded his head. “I’ll go get the car,” he whispered before he stepped gingerly over the body, around us, and took off running across the parking lot on the awful errand Jennifer had just assigned him.

  Jennifer turned to me and pointed at Xi. “See? Your war’s here. And one of my people is a casualty. That means it’s my war.”

  “You have to leave,” I said, shaking my head. “This is way outside your bailiwick, Jennifer. These are not just bad people. These are monsters. These are the creatures your and my ancestors made up fairy tales to warn us about. They are going to do all the terrible things you can think of and then a few more just to keep you on your toes. They are not going to hesitate from a fit of morality. They are going to relish every second. This was just a warm up. This was to get your attention, not hurt you. Whatever is on that doohickey is probably just more of the same. Killing a random human is so meaningless to them, so trivial, they’ll do it to deliver a note and not say one new thing in it.” I shook my head at her, cutting off her attempt to cut off me. “Do what they’re obviously saying you should do: quit now, while you still have people left.” I pointed my finger in a wide arc to take in the others. “If they wanted all of y’all dead they would have just firebombed the place and picked each of y’all off as you escaped. They’d have to clean it up after, though, and it would be big and obvious. This is them saying you have to leave and you have to take your mess with you.”

  Jennifer stood there and stared at Xi for a moment, then shook her head. “We do have to go deal with him, and we have to do it together. For… reasons.” She sighed. “They want to control our circumstances so we behave in a way they find amenable. But I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. Not long-term.”

  “But you’re going to leave anyway, right? Even though it pains you?” I asked it but I knew I wouldn’t like the answer.

  After a long five seconds, and through gritted teeth, she surprised me. “I am,” she said. “But only because I must do it. There are… things we have to do now, and we have to do them fast. But you talk about the ancients like they already hold all the cards, pull all the strings. That’s not true, Withrow, and if you act like it is you’re already giving in. Try to remember this was at least in part actually a gamble for them. They don’t know for sure whether we’ll come back here after we deal with Xi. They’re betting we won’t. We will. Already, they’ve bet wrongly.”

  “Why?” I asked it as gently as I could. They had targeted one of her underlings to get her off their case and done so in a way they knew would perfectly constrain her choices. They would do it again and again if they had to and they would make it more painful every time. They had no compunction against making life pure hell, whether for one mortal or for a thousand, purely as a political tactic. Hell, look at the meth head slave they’d had. They did this shit for light entertainment. They always had. These were the guys in the castle on the hill, looking down at the villagers with their pitchforks and their torches, who smiled to themselves in the firelight of a peasant uprising because now they had an excuse to cull the human herd.

  Jennifer fumed, silent, for just a moment. I wondered if a little of her anger were at me for challenging her in front of her people. “For the same reason you’re here,” she said, her voice low. “You can talk all you want about your duties as boss or whatever, but you’re here for one reason alone: revenge. They killed your friend back in Kills River and now you want to make every last one of them pay.” She looked me right in the eye as she said it. “And either you’re going to let me in on that action or you’re going to have to race me to take your shot, because they have just turned my high-minded little quest to defend humanity from monopolistic predation into a desire for some extremely personal revenge.”

  We held each other’s gaze for a long few seconds and then I nodded. “Now that is a reason I can respect,” I said.

  What neither of us asked was how the elder vampires had known the technopagans were there at all. They must have, of course, if they had been prepared to kill one in order to send a message to the others. It wasn’t just a message for the technopagans, either. It was at least a little bit a message for me, too: care about humans, get involved with them, and we will make them suffer. The ancients kn
ew about all of us and were willing to sacrifice a couple of worthless assets in order to send us a message.

  Dan backed into the drive in a small SUV and the back hatch popped open. Roderick walked out onto the porch and helped the others lift Xi, very gently, and carry him down the steps to set him inside. They carried him like a sleeping friend they didn’t want to awaken, never looking away from his face. Roderick and the technopagans cradled Xi like a child they all had loved. Something important occurred to me as I watched them move their friend with my cousin’s help: Roderick could have just carried Xi for them, but he didn’t. Roderick assisted, but he still let them have the experience of caring for their dead friend. He was a part of the situation without dominating it. They set Xi in the back of the little black SUV, stepped back, and closed the hatch with all the somber ceremony of sealing a casket.

  “Let us deal with his body,” I said to Jennifer. Yes, I was missing my own point there, with the whole part of the situation without dominating it thing, but I felt like if they were going to get killed in vampire business then I owed them something and it was what occurred to me in the moment. Jennifer’s eyebrows went up a little. I went on. “We’ll do whatever you say, down to the letter, in terms of how we handle him. But fuck it. Fuck them, the assholes who did this. If they want to drag us both down together, let’s fight them together.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth, but I meant them with every part of my being. “If they’re going to try to kill you, to kill your people, then goddamn it, let’s make them wish they’d left you out of things altogether instead. Last I checked, we’re pretty fucking good when we fight back to back.”

  Jennifer blinked at me, decided I was serious, and held out her hand. “Deal.”

  I shook. She had the textbook perfect grip: firm but not strangling. Jennifer was born to lead. There was a time when I reflected on how dangerous The Bull’s Eye would have been had she become a vampire. Jennifer, I realized as we clasped hands and pumped twice, then held it for a second to seal our shared sincerity, would be ten times more formidable were she granted eternal life. Before I let go of the shake, I nodded and echoed her response: “Deal.”

  “But I can’t actually let you handle his body.” Jennifer rocked her head back and forth. “We’ve got that part. We’re not just burying him. We’re… trying something. But it would be damned nice to know whether anyone follows us, or comes in here after we’re gone, or anything like that.”

  Ten minutes later, Roderick and I were sitting two blocks away in my Firebird. We were waiting for Jennifer and the technopagans to drive off in their SUV so we could see what happened next. Roderick was sketching in a small notepad beside me, but every time I glanced over he closed it so I let it go. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I wanted to listen to the radio, but another vampire might have heard that, even over the distant, sing-song waves, so I made do with listening to them instead.

  “It is always possible,” Roderick said without preamble, “That the elders thought Xi to be a vampire. A wooden arrow through the heart? It is a tad, as they say, ‘on the nose,’ and at the same time it would work on either human or vampire. It is a hedged bet. From the street they perhaps could not tell one way or the other.”

  “It’s ambiguous,” I grumbled out the side of my mouth. “But I think these guys know what they’re doing. Any ambiguity in their actions is probably intentional. I’d bet they have dossiers on all of us – us and them, the technopagans – and they want to leave us standing around second-guessing each other rather than chasing them down the street. They killed that poor bastard to thin out the opposition on hand and keep the rest of us busy, and if you ask me…” I turned a little to look sidelong at Roderick again. “That means they’re about to do something big.”

  “Such as?” Roderick was staring into the distance, down the long, shadowed street.

  “Such as moving the Rhinemaiden.”

  “Or taking her out for a test drive.” Roderick licked his lower lip very slowly, once, from left to right.

  I dug around in the pocket of my trench coat before remembering I didn’t smoke anymore. “Yeah. Or that.”

  Roderick swiveled his eyes my direction without actually looking at me. “Good,” he said. “I grow restless with waiting.”

  I nodded. We were both going stir-crazy. At least a demonstration of violence would give us something to do.

  “I know I said it was dumb,” I said to Roderick while watching the street, “But I really liked the whole sneak-in-and-pretend-to-be-the-auditioning-band thing.”

  Roderick smiled at the night. “Thank you, Cousin.”

  “Too bad about the actual band, I guess.” I shrugged. They would eventually manage to escape their bonds, it turned out, which was pretty awkward when I saw them on stage in Raleigh a month later.

  “What will you do when Jennifer returns?” Roderick smiled very faintly when he asked it and I couldn’t tell why or what was in his head.

  “I’ll hope like hell she doesn’t get herself killed,” I said. I tried to shrug it off, but I couldn’t. Roderick wouldn’t have bought it anyway. I felt protective of Jennifer and I knew it. That was a part of why I’d tried to keep her out of our business: I didn’t need to worry about her on top of everything else. I had siblings, long ago and far away: siblings whose names I remember but whose faces are lost to time. Jennifer was the closest thing I’d had to a human friend in a while but she was the closest thing I’d had to a sister since I was alive. I needed to avoid letting that be used against me, though. This was the start of a war between monsters and a part of me knew the winner, likely as not, would be the baddest monster around.

  Roderick was silent for a moment, still staring into the distance, and then blinked. I turned my eyes in the direction his own were pointed. “There,” he whispered. “In the darkness.”

  There was someone hiding behind a nearby palm tree, looking in the direction of the restaurant, and for just a moment I saw the stars reflect in the glass of their binoculars.

  It was so dark where they stood I couldn’t even see them with a vampire’s eyes. Well, I could see them, but I couldn’t make out any significant details. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman, or a mortal or a vampire. It occurred to me that a vampire with a pair of binoculars would be a little like taping a magnifying glass to a telescope. There’s no such thing as a vampire with bad eyesight. The big flush fixes all that sort of stuff. We’re predators. Our eyes are special. I’ve met vampires who keep their superfluous old spectacles around, from mortal days, as a reminder of what they gained in return for what they gave up.

  “Mortal,” I whispered, but I realized Roderick had spoken at the same time:

  “Vampire,” he said.

  We looked at each other for a moment and we both grinned. We’d have fun figuring out which of us was right. I yanked the knob for the headlights so that I flooded the street with the brightest lights you can get installed on an old car like mine without melting the wiring or breaking the law. The figure was thrown into sharp relief: it was – or appeared to be – a young man, military cut, narrow frame, and he would have dropped the binoculars if they weren’t on a string around his neck. The look of surprise on his face was priceless, and I gave out a guffaw of victory: clearly he was a human.

  The kid didn’t freeze on us as I’d figured he would, though. Instead, he ran: spun on a dime and leapt in a single bound over a fence between two of those elevated beach houses and was gone. Roderick clapped his hands in glee and pulled out the fancy flashlight the technopagans had used before. “Now to try my light,” he said.

  I was already cranking up the time dilation my blood afforded me, my foot on the pedal and my hands turning the wheel to guide us into the street in the somewhat float-y feeling you get when you drive a vehicle moving at normal speed but all your observations and reactions are spun up to turbo. I looked at the flashlight in my cousin’s hands. “Wait, that’s the…” I gulped. I felt like t
he guy who pulled the pin on a grenade and was trying to remember which number comes after two. “Holy shit, Roderick!”

  He waved to dismiss my worry. “Yes, it is their sunlamp. Please put me within flashlight range of that vampire.” He paused and giggled. “I wonder what flashlight range is?”

  I swung the Firebird’s tail around a curve like a drift of molasses and gunned it, pushing us forward on a great surge from the roaring engine. Roderick rolled the window down and leaned out as we started catching up to the guy. That surprised me: the Firebird is fast, but many vampires can run just as fast as any car.

  In a few long moments we were almost up to the kid and Roderick’s fingers started fiddling with the many buttons and switches on the flashlight. Throwing my left arm over my own face and eyes, I held the wheel steady as he finally found the on/off switch on the sunlamp. That vampires were using something like that – a tube of instant electro-magical death for anyone such as ourselves – seemed insane, but that made it so perfectly Roderick I couldn’t have imagined him coming up with anything else for us to do. Of course Roderick went back in there and found the flashlight after he took it away from Ramon. Of course he hung onto it. Of course he managed to hide it on his spindly frame in some way even though it was the size of one of his own arms.