6
I snapped awake in my hotel bathroom the next night as the last of the sun dropped below the horizon. I walked out into the bedroom, turned on the television, and while it warmed up I ran my hands through my hair: I needed a shower, and a set of un-rumpled clothes, and it was probably time to think about taking that trench coat to the cleaners. The chatterbox was set to one of the news networks – vampires are always addicted to the news – and I paused to admire the reporter. He was an absolutely drop dead gorgeous guy and he looked very excited.
“But authorities say this was a gas leak explosion and not an act of terrorism. Later, Janine Savage will have footage from today’s scene of destruction in Sunset Beach, North Carolina.”
I blinked as the channel went to commercial. The fade-out showed an inset map of the North Carolina coastline with an arrow pointing directly at the town in which I stood. I threw my head back and bellowed Roderick’s name so loud I heard the thump when he dropped whatever he was holding in the next room over.
“Cousin,” Roderick said, but he stopped there. He was sitting demurely on the edge of the other bed in my room, his legs crossed, a mug of something hot in his hands.
“And what in the fuck are you doing with a cup of coffee, anyway? And what the fuck is going on with a gas explosion in Sunset Beach?” I pointed a fat finger at the mug. “You don’t eat, that’s my thing.”
Roderick gave me a sympathetic look. “I am not trying to steal your ‘thing’ from you. I merely wish to warm my hands. It is not real coffee or tea. It is simply hot water. I thought it would feel interesting in my hands.” He paused, considered the mug for a moment, and looked back at me. “You will perhaps be pleased to know it does feel quite good.”
I glowered at him. “Have you heard from Jennifer? Is this what they were doing today?”
Roderick smiled more softly. “Yes. She is fine. As are the rest of her crew.”
“That isn’t what I was asking,” I said.
“But it is what you were wondering.” His smile deepened. “Cousin, admit it, you like them. They have grown on you. Stop being such a stick in the mud.”
I shook a fist at him and made a growling sound, then stood up and paced back and forth. “Tell me what happened.”
He proceeded to read me an email from Jennifer, with his phone in his hand, and I made exactly the sorts of angry sounds you might expect.
I will be the first to tell you, though, I laughed when she said she ran over the cop cars. I tried to cover it, but I couldn’t. The humor overwhelmed my annoyance for a moment.
“See?” Roderick asked. “This is what I mean by agility. You and I would not have predicted such action, and we could not have executed it. The elders built defenses against the sun but had no means of preventing those defenses from being torn down around them while they slept. Now we must try something different. They are certainly on alert at this time, doubly so since they will of course know this was not the work of a vampire.”
I waved that off. “It could have been the work of thralls, or of people we’d mind-controlled into it.”
Roderick pondered it and then shook his head. “No. It is too… public. In the past, when you have killed vampires, what have you done?”
I pondered, arms crossed, pacing stopped. “I went to where they were, barged in, and murdered the bastards.”
“Exactly.” Roderick nodded. “You fought them yourself. You were direct in your approach. You did not command slaves. You did not hide behind others. They will not know who did this, or why. They are very likely to engage in missteps at this point. We must act again as quickly as possible.”
I looked at him for a moment. “I’ve got shit to do,” I said.
Roderick blinked.
“Sorry, Cousin.” I shrugged. “There’s a great honking loose end I need to tie up before we do anything else. If we’ve got agents in the field, pieces on the board, whatever you want to call it, so do they. We need to know about one of them in particular.”
“The deputy,” Roderick said. He stood then, slipping his phone deftly into an inner pocket of his white pleather jacket.
I nodded. “The deputy.”
“Might I join you?” He straightened his jacket.
I hesitated, then: “No. Roderick, this is something I need to sort out on my own.” I worried I would need to defend myself, or that he would accuse me of cutting him out of the action on something, but he nodded with perfect diplomacy.
“Then I shall work one of my angles while you are occupied. I will be available via mobile device.” He curtseyed at me and walked out.
I spent a stark thirty seconds wondering what the hell Roderick was up to.
I parked my Firebird at the Surf Sound Inn, where the bartender told me Deputy Crew Cut was staying. Rudyard, I said to myself. Not Crew Cut.
Getting the desk attendant to tell me the Deputy’s room number was trivial – vampire hoodoo, blah blah – and two minutes later I knocked three times on the guy’s door. This wasn’t exactly the most subtle approach to the guy, I knew, but I was banking on a few specific things: one, this guy would, as a law enforcement officer elsewhere, not be hugely likely to start shooting up the place since he knew how many questions that would raise with the local cops. I was also assuming he would know shooting at me with a gun probably wouldn’t do him any good anyway. Finally, I was hoping he was up on the news, too, and wondering what the hell was going on with the vampires in Sunset Beach. If I just walked up and knocked on the door surely he would realize that meant I wasn’t here to try to kill him.
The light shining through the peephole went dark for a moment and stayed that way.
I stared right into it and said, as quietly as I could while being confident he would hear me, “Deputy Rudyard, it’s me. We, uh, met earlier.”
I let my vampire senses wash out across the door, and under it, and all around me. Sounds started filtering in I’d previously been unconsciously filtering out: bugs in the spring air, bats flapping in some scrub trees nearby, water lapping at the shore of the Waterway a mile from here. I could hear Crew Cut breathing on the other side of the door. He was taking short, shallow breaths, the kind taken by a frightened person in the dark.
I could also hear – and smell – what smelled like a barnyard kept in a shoebox under a bed. There were the accumulated and varied stenches of a dozen different animals in a place that needed some serious airing out.
I leaned close to the door, knowing how people are: he would have his ear pressed against it. “Deputy,” I murmured. “I am not here to try to harm you. If I wished to do so, I would remove the door, kill you, and get it over with. I want to talk.”
The silence continued, but I heard him hold his breath for a couple of heartbeats.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “I think maybe we have the same enemies. Please. I am…” I sighed. “I am begging you. Open the door and let me in. I’ll swear on a stack of bibles I’m not here to do anything else. Right now, I promise, I will not use my powers to sway you.”
A few more heartbeats.
“I want to help you.” I paused. “At least, I think I do.” I hesitated again but plunged ahead. “And let’s be honest, if I wanted to use my powers I already would’ve done so.”
Another few seconds of indecision passed.
“C’mon, man, I want to know why none of us goes to Charlotte.” I licked my lips. “I want to know what’s hiding there. And I think you know, because that’s where you got mixed up in all this. That’s where you were the last time your life seemed normal.”
The deadbolt slid back and the security chain was removed from its hook. They were meaningless to me, of course, but mama raised me to knock first when it’s an option. Crew Cut opened the door and looked me right in the eye. “I know what you are,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “You told me that already.”
“What do you know about Charlotte?” The way he asked it, it sounded like a challenge, lik
e he wanted a password or like he already didn’t believe my answer.
Behind him, in the room, I saw the walls of the cheap motel were covered, stacked to the ceiling, with metal wire cages containing animals: chickens, lizards, at least a couple of rabbits, a snake in a glass aquarium with magic marker writing all over it, a puppy. The wires of the cages were not the perfect grid patterns one would expect. They were haphazardly bent into patterns even I could recognize as being of occult significance, all obviously done by hand and in a hurry. They had the look of something done on the fly, in desperation, out of fear. Of all the animals jammed into that room, the roosters in particular were arranged in a geometric pattern and their cages were like starbursts of wire and gold paint. The hens were in another pattern, in cages in a complex, curving configuration that made them look like the wire itself was captured in a motion blur. The snake’s aquarium had astrological symbols all over it like you see on cheap jewelry at that store in the mall that sells all the teeny-bopper goth stuff. There was also English writing on it, but it was backwards, as though for the snake itself to read.
The rabbit cages were painted bright red and sky blue, and there were crystals hanging from them by long strands of regular old brown twine.
In the second I had to look, I kicked in the super speed so I could take in more, and to my growing horror I realized not a single one of the animals in these cages looked healthy. The rabbits were all foaming at the mouth and twitching. The snake’s scales were dull and mottled in patches here and there. The chickens were missing feathers. The cat was one of that kind born with two faces.
The puppy had six legs: two of them were vestigial and stuck out at odd angles to the rest.
A bunch of the poor things were hooked up to intravenous fluid drips and looked like they were knocked out on drugs. Not a one of them looked happy. They were at best catatonic. At worst they were shivering in fear. This wasn’t a barnyard; it was the veterinary equivalent of a hospice ward. My first thought on seeing them was to wonder how no one complained about the sound. Now I realized none of these animals were healthy enough to make noise.
In the middle of the wall, with the dozens of animal cages arranged to frame rather than to obscure it, was a map of Sunset Beach. There was a grid pattern drawn over it and in front of the whole thing was the biggest aquarium I’ve ever seen outside an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Unlike the animals in the cages, the fish and plants in the aquarium were absolutely thriving.
I snapped back to normal speed so I could talk to the Deputy but my eyes stayed on the aquarium for another couple of seconds. There were huge streaks of vividly colored algae or moss or bacteria or something. Whatever it was, it looked like a strep throat test gone horribly wrong. Emerging from the base of the tank was a giant coral growing – maybe groomed – into roughly the same dimensions as the map of Sunset Beach and there were at least a dozen kinds of fish swimming rapidly backward and forward. I wondered what had them so agitated, as they looked like they weren’t sure whether they were chasing something or running away. Some were tiny, some were slightly bigger, and all were colors I could only call violent: bright yellows, vicious reds, with spots of neon blue and purple and stripes of black. They formed a living kaleidoscope. As a school of tiny ones swam past the bottom like tiny jets in formation, I saw something flat and ugly pop out of the mud and sand along the bottom. It snatched one of the tiny blue fish with its flat, ugly jaw. This didn’t look like the sort of aquarium you want to sit in front of and meditate. It looked like a gladiatorial free for all.
For a second, all I could think of was that converted garage in the house the real estate agent had shown us, and I turned to look Crew Cut in the eye. “Life,” I said.
“What?”
“Life magic. They’re using death magic – ritual sacrifice and bones and blood and all that jazz – and you’re using living things. You’re trying to keep them from finding you. Or – no, not only that. Am I right?”
He blinked. I shouldn’t have gone straight to the heart of things like that, but something about it jumped out at me and I couldn’t stop myself from saying it as soon as the idea entered my head.
I put my hand against the door when he tried to close it again and changed subject back to the reason why I was there. “No, I’m sorry. You asked a question. What do I know about Charlotte? Damned little. Nothing, to be honest, except it hurts my head to think on it too long.” I tried to give him a sincere shrug. “Really, I’m not here to do anything to you. You’re after the ancients. And so am I. I’m one of the young vampires: the modern ones. I don’t want to rule the world. I want to be ignored by it.” I tried harder to look sincere, which is the hardest thing in the world to do when one is actually entirely genuine. “Look, I don’t believe in gods or Jesus or any of that shit, but I will swear on anything you put in front of me that I am opposed to the same vampires as you and I think we will get a lot further down the road if we work together instead of apart.” I took my hand from the door and held it out to him, offering it to shake. “My name is Withrow.”
Deputy Rudyard stared at my hand like it was a fish on a stick.
“I know people who can help you with this stuff,” I said. I gestured beyond him, at his room, with a nod of my head and a glance of my eyes. “We can help each other. I think the ancients are what’s in Charlotte: like, that’s their base of power, at least in these parts. I think Charlotte is their actual den.”
Deputy Rudyard still didn’t shake, but he did look at me. “They’ve made some of you stay away,” he said. “They’re afraid of what will happen if some of you go there.” He twitched a finger. “I mean, anyone who knows about them.”
I nodded. “Please, Deputy, this is the stuff I need to know. I want to stop them, just like you do. And I know people who would want to help you protect yourself. I would want to help you protect yourself. Please, man, let me in. Let’s share what we know.”
His eyes narrowed at me and his grip tightened on the edge of the door. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “I know better than to believe any goddamn one of you. I know just enough to know that. Even if what you said was true, and there were vampires who were against other vampires, what good would it do me to help you? Do you think you’re the good guy? Do you think you’re the nice vampires?” He smiled at me in a twisted, mocking way, showing the cruelty of someone already wounded. “There are no nice monsters. There is no middle ground, no gray area you can tell yourself you occupy in the least immoral way possible. And that’s even if I believed you.”
I started to get my hackles up and said, “Well, son, let’s not rush to –“ but he cut me off.
“This isn’t a vegetarian giving someone a hard time about a hamburger.” He looked at me with the coldest eyes I’d seen in a mortal in a long time. “You are a predator, and I spent most of my life as one of the prey, and I am turning the tables on every last one of you, one dead vampire at a time. You’re all in it together in the end, and you’re together against me. At least I have the decency to be honest about things.”
He tried to force the door past my grip, but he was the irresistible force and my foot was the immovable object. It splintered and caved in at the bottom corner. We both looked down at it for a moment and then I looked back up at him.
“Tell me who made you a thrall, Deputy,” I murmured, “And let’s go kill them together.”
He looked back at me. “I’m going to have to repair that now. Just leave.”
The two-faced cat almost – almost – stirred in its medically induced slumber, and that was too much for me. This guy could be a dumb asshole all he wanted as long as it was on his own dime, but the critters in the cages were a bridge too far. I wanted to pop this asshole’s head off and then call a vet’s office. How dare he stand there and lecture me about the cruelty of thinking being while he kept dozens of souls in cages around his own goddamned bed?
I couldn’t just murder him on the spot, though. Too many pe
ople might have seen me. I could hoodoo deskman downstairs but I didn’t have time to mind-fry the whole motel. Besides, one of the first rules of being a vampire is, don’t murder a cop. The Transylvanian had ignored that at his own peril, even if I was the instrument of karma in that particular situation.
I stepped back. Crew Cut closed the door.
I walked back to my car and climbed in.
For just a second, when I glanced in the rear view mirror, I thought I saw a woman in a gray dress behind my car. When I turned around to make sure she moved before I backed out of the space, there was no one there.
I breathed in once and out again, fast, through my nose: a sound of frustration and annoyance. I was not going to get drawn into some half-assed ghost story when my plate was already this full.
Okay, so Crew Cut had his own set of prejudices and no special reason to believe me. I started wondering whom he would believe, as I realized immediately he had information I needed. That setup he had in there, and the fact he was still alive, told me he had figured out a way to stand opposed to the ancients without getting waxed by them. I even had a theory cooking on where he got that thrall strength. If I couldn’t convince him with a friendly visit, though, I either had to work without him or I had to find someone who could convince him in my place.
As I drove off, I started trying to run down the list of allies available to me. There was Roderick, of course, and there were Jennifer and the technopagans. I was trying not to think overlong on whether they were a little too tight, because that’s the kind of suspicion that can gnaw at a good thing and I know myself well enough to realize I run a surplus of suspicion anyway.
There were the vampires of Raleigh, whom Roderick had already decided we had to have. They were no use to me in convincing Deputy Crew Cut to help out, but they might be useful against the elders if it came down to a bare-knuckle fight. The last time I’d fought one it had taken two vampires and two humans to take him out and it had still been a close thing.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 10
