Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  Roderick chuckled brightly out of nowhere and faded instantly to seriousness: a firework of amusement exploding and immediately forgotten. “Human, of course. They are the only society that matters. Ours is subject to their whims in every way and thus theirs is more important. Jennifer is not wrong when she says they are the natural resource on which we are dependent, you know. They are, and what happens to them affects each of us. I believe you have reflected on this yourself, in regards to the probability any smart vampire is also an environmentalist?”

  I nodded. I had said that, true. “Okay. But how does all this mean anything to the ancient vampires? Are we just trying to camouflage ourselves being here?”

  Roderick was right back to business. “Our agents will be unable to fool the enemy into believing we are all in Raleigh at all times, but that is not the goal: the goal is to give the enemy the impression of more vampires being involved than are. If we instill in them a concern there are more vampires closing in on their location than they, we may cause them to reveal themselves.”

  I leaned back against a railing and it creaked under me. From the position of the moon it was nearly 8:00. The real estate agent was running late: we’d said half-past 7:00, give or take. The house at which we waited was on the Intercoastal Waterway side of the island, with nothing but a few reeds between its back deck and the water. We could still hear the roar of the surf on the beach side, which was just a couple of hundred yards away. The wind was really tearing at the beach that night so the sound carried far and seemed closer than it was. I loved it there. I could have sat on that house’s front porch for the rest of my life. Maybe when all this was over, I thought to myself, that was exactly what I’d do. “Seems complicated.”

  “It does take some things on…” but it was Roderick’s turn to hesitate. He finally said the word in his head, but with something like irony playing across his sallow face. “Faith.” Roderick cleared his throat as though that word tasted bad. “I have these ideas for how to start but am not so foolish as to believe we can plan what will happen after that. We must simply begin and then remain flexible. We must continually use our youth to our advantage. We are less than a century in age. We are accustomed to a fast-moving world. The enemy is not. They have shown at every turn a preference for turning to the past, to old ways, when confronted with a problem to solve. We must use the advantages we have, and those include the ability to go into something a little blind. They are so devoted to planning and strategy they have literally sold their souls – so they believe – in pursuit of power so great it might be regarded as inevitable. They are risk-averse, and they seek predictability.” Roderick cocked his head and cupped a hand to his ear. “But enough. My client arrives.” I, too, could hear a car’s engine, but it was many blocks away. There were times I thought maybe that was why I liked spending time with Roderick: we could react to the things we perceived of the world, with our better-than-human senses, rather than having to pretend we’d heard nothing.

  “And what the fuck is that about? What kind of client is this real estate agent?” I tried not to sound annoyed. Roderick had told me earlier that he would explain it all in due time. I had been patient an hour earlier but now time was up. I wanted to know what the hell I was walking into.

  Roderick curled up one corner of his lip. “I am a private investigator.”

  I looked at him like he’d just farted in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. “Bull. Fucking. Shit.”

  He produced his wallet and, from it, a little identification card. “It is true.”

  I didn’t even look at the card. “No it isn’t. The requirements for that in this state are stringent to say the very damn least. There is no way you met them. I know because I looked into getting licensed maybe thirty years ago. Every vampire does.” Being a private eye is one of that variety of stories we tell ourselves about how to wile away eternity. Ultimately I think most of us try to live out every childhood fantasy and television trope and narrative stereotype we can think of until we decide to die of boredom. I wasn’t sure which one I was on at that point. I’d done the Boo Radley thing, and the action hero thing, and the political intrigue thing – back when I knocked off Bob the Third – and for the last few years I’d kind of felt I was floating around waiting for my next starring role to find me.

  Roderick looked mock offended. “Cousin, you wound me. Have you never heard of reciprocity laws? I was fully licensed in the state of Washington many years ago. North Carolina will honor a Washington State licensure with the appropriate paperwork and verifying documents.” He batted his eyelashes at me.

  “Okay,” I said, waving that away, “Fine, whatever, still bullshit, but how have you gotten a client?”

  Roderick brushed his white-blond hair back off of his forehead. He’d taken it out of the ponytail he wore much of the time and let it fall around his shoulders and over half his face. “Craigslist,” he said as though explaining water was wet.

  We saw a smart little import sedan with origami taillights and an unbuttoned collar of a sunroof glide up the dark street, cutting us off. It signaled just once before wheeling onto the pebbled drive. A woman of a certain age with hair as stiff as a board and a big gold sport coat climbed out from behind the driver’s seat and gave us a friendly wave.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” she cooed at us as she walked up. She was wearing sandals to match the beach-town vibe but they were also heels in case we had money. We did, of course, like I explained before: we were vampires who survived our first couple of decades and now we were basically set within certain limits. In my case, Agatha, my maker, made sure my work was “discovered” after my “death” so it would be valuable – and that value was compounded by the assumption of limited availability of my body of art. I’ve been painting up small fortunes ever since. At the same time neither of us particularly dressed like we were walking moneybags. Roderick is more fashion-forward than I am, but also a little 1970’s glam. Vintage may be expensive but it’s also by nature old. A random person on the street would be just as likely to mistake us for a couple of low-rent club kids. From an uninformed perspective, we both looked like 20-somethings in secondhand chic.

  The real estate agent kept talking as she walked up. “I do hope you haven’t been waiting long. Thank you for answering my ad.”

  She looked between us, not sure which of us was the person she was here to meet. I started to ask what she meant by her ad, but Roderick cut me off.

  “Good evening.” Roderick’s eyes were sly slits and he smiled just enough to let her know he was a little pissed off at her lateness but he would eventually forgive her. “I’m Roderick Surrett. This is my cousin Withrow.”

  “I’m Beatrice.” She shook Roderick’s hand, but pulled away too quickly to hide some small surprise. I figured it was his skin temperature. We’re always colder than the living. It shook her sufficiently that she didn’t even offer to shake my hand. “Do you mind if we speak inside?”

  “Of course,” Roderick replied. We stepped out of the way while she unlocked the door and led us into a dark beach house. Smiles and Dog followed us, silent the whole way. Beatrice didn’t make any moves to pet them or acknowledge them, and they didn’t bother to sniff or growl or bark. That put me at ease right away. If they didn’t think she was a threat, she wasn’t.

  The inside of this house was almost angrily forceful in its good cheer. There were pastels as far as the eye could see, with stairs up to a roof deck and three bedrooms off a central living area. The overstuffed couches probably weren’t as comfortable as they looked and they appeared to have had a litter: at least a dozen throw pillows were lined up perfectly on each, all brightly shaded, absolutely none of them much bothering with matching any of the rest. It looked like a bowl of Fruit Loops had puked up a furniture store.

  “Let’s speak in the living room,” Beatrice said, then put a finger to her lips to keep us quiet. In the living room, she flipped the power switch on a stereo mounted on the wall. Distant jazz began t
rickling through speakers mounted around the room. Beatrice pointed around the room and held a hand to her ear to mime listening. Then she pointed at the radio and gave us the thumbs up. “We should keep our voices down,” she said. Hers was very quiet. I could hear it fine, of course, but a human would have had real trouble. I arched one eyebrow, but I didn’t say anything.

  We settled into our seats and Roderick gave her a comforting smile. “So,” he said. “Tell us the problem. You said in your ad you needed to engage someone to investigate something particularly unusual and you required an investigator with an open mind. I like to think,” and here he pressed one hand to the center of his chest, “I have a more open mind than any other private investigator you can find.”

  Beatrice looked around as though checking the corners for eavesdropping shadows. “It’s a client,” she said. “Actually, a set of clients. They’ve rented under the name of a corporation. They rent longer-term, a few weeks at a time, even a month or two, and they pay cash up front. No one complains about them from nearby. No one even knows they’re around. They aren’t just quiet: they’re silent. They’re practically ghosts. They’re ideal in a lot of ways, and this has been an even tougher winter than normal so I don’t want to complain. But…”

  Roderick nodded at her, and his eyes took on that half-lidded, half-glazed look. I could feel his mind reach out to analyze hers. “Go on,” he said.

  “They’re weird,” Beatrice said. The words came out fast, pushing each other out of the way. “I think maybe they’re perverts.”

  “Why?” It wasn’t my job, but I couldn’t help sticking my nose in. “They leavin’, like, slings and shit when they go?”

  “Something like that,” Beatrice said. Tears welled up in her eyes all of a sudden and that caught me by surprise. The cast iron hairdo and the gold sport jacket and the wicker chair heels told me she was all business all the time. I could practically hear the competing emotions tumbling around inside her guts, though. She was really torn up. It reminded me immediately of someone I’d seen just like this, a year before. He’d had a twin brother. They crossed paths with a vampire, and a few weeks later they died from it, but before that happened they had plenty of opportunity to realize just how completely fucked up their situation was. Beatrice went on. “But much worse.” She drew a breath but it shook. “Much. Worse.”

  Roderick nodded. “And you wish me to…”

  “Find out who they are,” she said. “They sign the rental agreements with names, of course, but I suspect they’re false even though we’re able to run credit checks on them. Find out what they’re doing when they come here and why. I’m…” Beatrice drew up some inner strength. “I’m scared of them. Find out what they want. If they’re just coming here to do… what they do, well, perhaps someone can suggest another town. Perhaps they’ll just go elsewhere. I just want to make sure they’re not here doing something bad.” She swallowed whatever surfaced alongside that word. “Oh, who am I kidding?” She laughed just once: ha. “They’re doing something bad. Find out what, and find out some dirt I can use to get them to go away.”

  Roderick cocked his head. “What is it they do that has so upset you?”

  Beatrice started to speak, but stopped herself. “I’d better just show you.” She stood and walked to the front door. “We have to go down to the garage for this.” I had the sense she was putting on a brave face for us. A pit was opening up in my stomach. I had a feeling we weren’t just going to find someone’s kinky playroom in the garage. I had a feeling it was going to be a whole lot more than that.

  We walked down some steps and into a side door. We were in a single-car garage, but there should have been room enough in here for two or three. There were three garage doors on the front of the house at ground level. Beatrice gestured to the opposite wall. “The first bay has been preserved for automobile storage,” she said, “But the other two have been walled in and given a concealed entrance. Originally there were similar spaces in a couple others of our properties. Mostly they were used for secure storage of personal goods: a place to put the furniture the owners didn’t want renters to fuck all over.” Her mouth twisted a little. “My apologies for the language. This is all rather stressful.” She patted her hair as she apologized. Appearances, in her line of work, can be everything.

  Roderick surprised me by reaching out and taking her hand, right there where they stood, and looking her in the eye – they were the same height – to say, “Do not apologize for speaking the truth to us. Research has shown persons who curse are more reliably honest. When you let slip the façade of propriety, you begin to tell me what I need to know.” Again, I felt his mind reach out for hers and do whatever it is he does. She relaxed a little, and she gripped his hand in return. He murmured, his voice distant, “What did you discover inside this one?”

  Beatrice was a lot more at ease than she had been, but she still struggled to tell us. “Hinson’s people seem to have made some modifications.”

  Hinson? That was the first time I’d heard that name. Roderick and I exchanged a glance.

  “Have you spoken to Hinson about this property?” Roderick’s question was asked in the most neutral tone available to him: polite inquiry, like he was asking directions.

  “No,” she said. “I’m afraid to mention it. This is just one of the ones on their list.”

  Their list. I found myself wishing I had a notepad to write this down.

  “Anyway,” she said, and her mind snapped back to itself like a rubber band, “Let’s get this over with.” Her hand went to the back of a standing utility shelf set just a fraction of an inch from the wall. A manicured nail swept over something just out of view behind it and a click sounded. The shelf and the segment of wall to which it was attached swung inward, hinged, just a fraction of an inch. The smell of dust and a little mold wafted out. Behind it was the smell of dried blood. Any vampire would recognize that smell. It was strong, and old, and it stank. Beatrice’s features stiffened. Reaching into the darkness behind the hidden door she found a switch and flipped it. Fluorescents flickered to life.

  I looked in over her shoulder. It was a big room with the same concrete floor as the rest of the garage but it also had half a dozen twin beds, all stripped of linens. It was hard to imagine a bunch of elders, so spoiled, so accustomed to mastery over those around them, also bunking up here.

  In the center of the room was a rough circle. It had been chalked, first, then drawn and redrawn in candle wax and blood and what looked like tufts of hair or maybe fur. There were bones in the middle, piled haphazardly, and all over the floor and the walls were pools and splashes of what was unmistakably dried blood, some old and some less so. Whoever or whatever bled all over that room had done so with a lot of violence, torn limb from limb, ripped open by ravenous teeth and claws. The bones were too small to be human – or at least, too small to belong to an adult. Maybe they had belonged to animals, but my money was on not. There had been rituals in the circle – lots of them. The vampires staying here kept the room sealed up from the sunlight and when the day came they snuffed out their candles and went to sleep in squalor before getting up and doing it all over again. If Hinson was a corporate account, with multiple houses rented, I wondered how many of them there were. Were they using all the houses at once? How many elders were there? And where had these gone?

  On one of the walls was a giant map of North Carolina, like the kind you’d see in a rest stop on the highway: all the major roads marked, and a bunch of local attractions set around it like a frame. Blood had been sprayed all over it in the course of the murders these fuckers had committed.

  On the wall opposite was a giant map of Sunset Beach, hand drawn but recognizable, and it, too, had been painted in the blood of victims. It stuck in my craw, how arrogant these bastards had been: going to the trouble and risk of finding victims only to rip them to shreds in their own den, with no respect for themselves or for their own space, and then on top of all that they wasted that much b
lood? The sheer ostentation of it – the conspicuous consumption – just ate at what was left of my heart. I fucking hated these assholes.

  Beatrice was very carefully staying composed and not looking into the room. Instead she was looking at a spot on the opposite wall. I thought again of those twins back in Durham – the ones who were the victims time and again of a vampire who loved to make them suffer. They seemed strong in the face of such abuse, but Beatrice was making them look like total wimps. She barely showed any emotion. Either she was already half-crazy just from knowing this or she was made of solid steel. I wondered how long it had been since she finally consciously admitted to herself she was, in her capacity as a real estate agent in a happy little beach town, actively assisting some boogeyman and his buddies as they turned her town into a patch of terrified hell one secret-passage garage bay at a time.

  We aren’t supposed to cozy up to the world of the living and negotiate a long-term lease. They’re supposed to be afraid of us. We’re supposed to make them stay away.

  Roderick stepped into the room and I followed. While he picked up the mattresses of the twin beds – old mattresses, bare metal frames, like a stripped cabin from Camp Kills-a-Lot – I stepped into the circle and started examining the pile of bones. I wasn’t any sort of expert. I had no idea where they came from, other than they were too big to be a chicken and too small to be a man. It occurred to me the technopagans might be able to do something with them, though.

  I crouched there, looking around at the circle, my trench coat spread out around me. Smiles and Dog had followed us downstairs in perfect silence and now sat in the dark garage, looking in: two sets of eyes reflecting red from the lights in the room. When I picked up one of the bones, Smiles produced a noise somewhere between a growl and a whine: a grating little wince. I thought about putting the bone back, because that could not possibly mean anything good, but then, what did I expect? We knew we were dealing with ancient vampires who turned to some kind of twisted blood magic to try to gain the upper hand in a war they lost over a century ago.