Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  “There aren’t any of them – of us – left,” the bartender from To Kill A Sunrise said. “Herman was the last of the visitors. All of us were locals until…” She looked at her watch. “Recently.”

  “And now,” Roderick said, smiling the smile I imagine he produces before murdering someone, “You have no idea what to do, because she is back, and you cannot oppose her, and you fear she already knows all of this and is going to make slow work of her revenge even if none of it was especially your idea.”

  I looked at Old Shoe, who stopped fidgeting and listened with the attention of one who knows his fate is already sealed but has no idea what it actually will be. “You know they can’t actually fix you, right?” I shrugged as best I could in my chains. “Ross lies. That’s his whole deal. He’ll probably offer you magic that makes you look ‘normal’ for longer than you can do on your own, but I bet the price is awful. I bet it requires something you find really distasteful, like you can only drink the blood of, I don’t know, babies, or puppies, or something like that, so you decide it isn’t worth it and you’re back at square one all over again – only worse, because now no one trusts you.”

  Ross arched one silver eyebrow.

  Old Shoe’s face fell. So, I guess I was right about that.

  I spoke to the rest of the vampires in the room, the ones standing around not looking at me and not looking at The Rhinemaiden and not looking at Ross. “I bet y’all wish things had gone differently, don’t you? I bet y’all wish there were more of you left, that you’d been stronger, that you’d been better at fighting. Maybe all of you together could have taken her on and won. If only you’d known she had that vial of blood tucked away, ready to resurrect her in case something bad happened. If only some of your best fighters were still in the world and here to be your champions. If only someone really strong were here and could save you.” I hoped to whatever dark powers might answer the prayers of a vampire that somebody in the room would take the hint.

  Beth looked up from her lap – she had not spoken and had not looked around – and said, “Before we die, I wish to make a phone call.”

  You will die in ninety seconds. The Rhinemaiden’s mindvoice was emotionless and matter of fact. The curtains will open and you will see the sun a final time.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely see that Sheila’s hands were fidgeting behind her.

  “Under the medieval rules of hostageship,” Beth said to no one in particular, “Hostages were encouraged to communicate in order to remind those who cared for them of the importance of compliance or cooperation.”

  “If there’s a hell,” I said aloud, “I will be waiting there for every last one of you sad bastards when you arrive.” I looked around at everyone else, all the vampires who were now stuck serving the monster they were created to destroy. “If her victory tonight teaches you anything, it’s this: death isn’t the end, even for those of us who think we’re immortal. I swear I will come back to you, one way or another, and you will all regret this.”

  The Rhinemaiden stood from her overstuffed chair and projected, with something like a hint of relish, Sixty seconds. She adjusted the collar of her dress absently and began to step down from the raised platform. Follow, slaves, she thought to the others. The time has come for us to go. The truck is waiting. The rest of you will be given the privilege of being awake to count out your final moments. So they were going to go climb into a truck and get driven somewhere safe, just like that, the end.

  What a bunch of bastards.

  Ross moved with her, still smiling that hanging-judge smile. Old Shoe looked like he wasn’t sure exactly what to do, or where to go, but he stood and started to walk behind them.

  I fought down a rising bit of panic I hadn’t felt since I was very young and – like all young vampires – tried to stay awake past sunrise. I felt that internal clock tick over, like an alarm going off, and I knew the sun was rising outside. Normally, at that moment, my eyes would slam shut and I would be dead for a few hours. Not this time. Not that morning. Instead, I felt a little like I was floating. Wakefulness persisted past the point when it should have, and my heart made a fist in the middle of my chest.

  “Give the lady her fucking phone call!” Jennifer said aloud. I thought it was incongruous but she seemed really insistent, and then I felt that spark of something underneath, the magic the technopagans do, and I heard aloud – like there were an old speakerphone in the middle of the room – the sound of a phone dialing.

  RRRRRRRRING

  The Rhinemaiden stopped walking, and everyone seemed to freeze in place.

  RRRRRRRRING

  Slowly, the Rhinemaiden started to turn to look at Jennifer.

  The phone picked up.

  “Beth?” The voice on the other end was Seth’s.

  “Baby,” Beth said, her voice dreamy and far away, “I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  The eyes of many other vampires in the room – and Ross’, too – went wide in recognition. After all, Ross didn’t really make them forget Seth existed. He just made them think Seth was gone.

  “Just tell me where you are,” Seth said. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t asleep yet, but of course, we were on the coast and he was to the north and west of us in Raleigh. The sun comes up in Raleigh a full sixty seconds later. “I’ll come get you.”

  Who is that?

  Sheila finished whatever she was doing, and with a roar like an animal she stood up and tore apart like paper the zip ties holding her wrists together. Blood shot out of her hands and wrists in all directions, tiny hot flecks of burning red like puddle-splash from a passing car spraying across us in both directions, and with wild eyes she shouted, “Corrosion!” Another ripple of magic washed across the room, and I heard the sizzle as the blood ate away at everything it touched.

  Where it touched my clothes, piping streams of smoke shot out.

  Where it touched my skin, pain like molten metal being poured over me erupted from my flesh and I couldn’t contain the involuntary yelp of agony. Beside me, Smiles produced a gut-wrenching howl and tried to get away.

  Where it touched my chair, I felt the metal buckle underneath my weight.

  Where it touched the chains binding me, I felt them fall away.

  Then a lot of things happened all at once.

  Roderick and I both spun up to super-speed at the same time. His arms flexed like a thin longbow underneath that white jacket – now smoking and looking like it might melt away altogether from the gout of Sheila’s blood across it – and he struggled to shred the chains.

  Mine had taken a direct hit and so I felt them give a little when I tore with all my strength.

  Smiles snapped the chain holding him to me and started to leap for Ross.

  Crew Cut screamed but couldn’t get his restraints off. He looked like his shoulders might rip themselves out of the sockets if he pulled any harder, the veins in his neck bulging, the blood rushing to his face.

  Marty closed his eyes and prepared to die.

  Beth stared into the middle distance, that dreamy look on her face, her mouth moving as slowly as all hell as she tried to tell Seth she loved him.

  Dan, in freeze-frame as he rolled out of the chair he had been in, was turned to dive into the row behind us.

  Jennifer, slow as molasses, shouted, “Fast fucking forward,” and was suddenly moving as quickly as Roderick or I.

  Old Shoe, damn his traitorous hide, was physically leaping for The Rhinemaiden, catching her off-guard.

  Sheila was standing, arms outstretched, head held high, eyes locked open to gaze at something near the ceiling, and at the pace I was moving I could hear the pops and bursts as the blood in her veins started to eat at her own flesh, combusting against the air.

  The technopagans might have been electronics fetishists – like the Book People said one time, they were kids who liked to bring their toys to the dinner table – but they were also the real deal. They used magic, and that all comes down to power,
doesn’t it? The Rhinemaiden asked who dared to use our powers against her. Crew Cut used the blood of the living to hide himself from his former masters, and from the vampires here who didn’t even know to look for him in the first place. The vampires of Sunset Beach used blood upon blood, buckets of it, to try to find the location The Rhinemaiden died.

  In the end, blood is the magic we all know, even you, the person reading this. It’s the thing we all recognize is powerful and necessary. It’s the thing the bravest among us shed to save another.

  Blood is the sacrifice that gets results every time.

  Jennifer was up and running, and as Smiles leapt through the air for The Rhinemaiden, and Ross tried to speak, and my chair fell to pieces underneath me as I stood, and Dan also achieved super speed and dove for cover, and Old Shoe got a hand on one of The Rhinemaiden’s arms with terror in his eyes, and Dog grabbed Roderick’s chains in his teeth and pulled, and Roderick’s eyes turned blood red as he screamed, and Jennifer executed a perfect parkour jump onto the edge of the dais, and up, shouting light as a feather as she did so –

  Jennifer grabbed onto one of the curtains by the edge, and pulled, hanging from it as she shouted heavy as stone so that the curtain began to peel away and sunlight began to pour down the side of the far wall and spill into the room

  Sheila’s body began to erupt like a water balloon full of fire and light

  I turned to Ross, looked him right in the eye, and flipped him two birds with the last moment of my eternal unlife.

  I heard the glass of a window shatter as Jennifer’s weight pulled down not just the curtain but the whole framework holding the glass dome in place above us.

  In the corner of my eye I saw dust drifting lazily in the light – sunlight, golden and pure and terrible as anything I have ever seen in my whole life, worse than all the blood I’ve taken and all the lives I’ve ended and all the suffering I’ve caused or cut short – and I knew it was over, that this was the end, that I was absolutely going to die but by all the demons in Hell and whatever ones escaped it I was sure as shit going to take every last one of these bastards with me –

  There was the sound of a chime, like someone struck a gong underwater.

  There was a hand on my shoulder.

  Everything turned grayscale around me.

  “Withrow,” Seth said beside me. “Come on. We need to walk home.”

  I turned and looked at him, and looked all around us. Roderick was standing, with Dog by his side. Smiles was growling at the tableau version of Ross, grimacing at me in the space between two moments.

  Beth was standing beside Seth.

  Marty was blinking at everything around him.

  Dan was frozen on the other side of some chairs.

  Jennifer was hanging mid-air, paused perfectly as she executed an acrobatic spin to wrap herself in the curtain she had grabbed at the peak of her jump. Rays of sunlight stuck through the roof all around her, into the room, like beams of half-solid lumber smashing their way through the glass.

  “Why are we not dead?” I said it aloud, but I knew the answer: Seth, and his power to stop time. He used it in Raleigh, awake in the last minute of local night, and walked here on borrowed time. He hunted until he found us – found Beth – and now he was going to walk us all back home in that not-time he had in such plentiful supply, in which everything was gray and we were safe.

  “Thank you,” I said to Seth. “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, thank you.” I took his hand and pumped it up and down, and I won’t lie to you. I felt a great big drop of blood well up and roll like a tear down the front of my face.

  He smiled a little. “No sweat. Come on.”

  “What about Dan?” Roderick said this with pursed lips, not quite ungrateful but not willing to let his boyfriend – not-boyfriend, whatever – die here with the others without at least asking.

  “They have helped us many times here,” Beth said to Seth.

  Seth shrugged and walked over to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and the kid turned pink and fell to the floor screaming.

  It took some explaining, but eventually he came and stood with us.

  “Now Jennifer,” I said to Seth, looking up at her, frozen in mid-air.

  He looked at me with his brow wrinkled up. “How do we get to her up there?”

  I reached up and clapped my right hand on my own left shoulder. “Hop on,” I said. “We’ll form a human ladder.” I paused. “Well, technically a vampiric ladder, I guess.”

  Seth looked at me like I’d had a stroke and spoken in tongues, but thirty seconds later I was taking little steps one direction, then another, while Roderick urged me to remain steady and Beth silently gripped him with her legs around his shoulders, and Seth stood on tip-toe on her to reach up and touch Jennifer.

  She moved again, like a movie un-paused, and landed screaming in Seth’s outstretched arms. Some of the glass around her moved with her, but I noticed it froze again in mid-air just a few feet away.

  “Huh,” I said, and looked at Roderick. “Okay, that is creepy as all hell.”

  “This gives me an idea,” Roderick said, and he and Dan started picking up the shattered, gray, frozen remains of the chairs in which we were seated before, and then The Rhinemaiden’s makeshift throne, and threw them as hard as they could at the dome overhead.

  The objects all re-froze in mid-air, inches from the falling curtains and the windows beyond.

  I turned to look at the dais, where The Rhinemaiden was frozen and Old Shoe was gripping her, frozen as well, just starting a grapple there was no way he would win.

  “I can’t save him,” Seth said. “He’s touching her. If I put him on borrowed time, it’ll affect her, too.”

  I was silent for a long moment and then I shook my head. “I didn’t want you to save him. I wanted one last look before he dies.” I turned around and surveyed the scene. “Okay. Now we walk home,” I said.

  “No,” Jennifer said. “Not yet.” She walked up to Sheila, who was frozen still in time, the blood in her veins turning to fire, a look of eternal anger and eternal pain on her features.

  “If I unfreeze her,” Seth said, but he trailed off.

  “I know. She dies.” Jennifer reached up and scratched her own nose.

  “And so do we. But if we leave her,” I said, gesturing around, “Maybe she injures these assholes enough they can’t get away in the split-second they’ll have before the light hits them.”

  “She saved us,” Jennifer said. “She spilled her own blood to free us all.”

  “Yes,” Roderick said.

  Dan asked, very quietly, “May we touch her?”

  Seth nodded. “Just me – I can’t.”

  So that’s how four vampires and two witches gathered in a circle and gave Sheila a group hug in the time between her last moments alive. Each of us thanked her, some with words, some with promises, some with a nod of the head.

  Jennifer pulled out her phone and took a picture. “Now we walk home.”

  The last time I stood in sunlight was January 10th, 1947.

  It was a Friday. At least, I think it was. It felt like a Friday. Agatha told me to spend my last day doing things I loved, so that morning I got up early, ate a big breakfast at a diner in downtown Asheville, and went to the movies. I know, movies on the morning on my last day in the sun, but I’ve always loved going to the movies. I went to see The Ghost of Frankenstein. It was old already, then, so it played in the mornings in a low-rent theater downtown. (In later decades, that theater became a porn palace and, last I knew, an evangelical church featuring snake handling.)

  That afternoon, emerging blinking into the sunlight, I was so determined to be rid of daylight and life and the world in general that I tried to find other ways to hide from the sun: I went to the library. I went and had lunch in a big, dark restaurant I couldn’t really afford. I went to a department store and got measured for a suit I didn’t intend to buy.

  In the late afternoon, with barely two hours of day
left, I realized I was about to lose my chance to paint in sunlight. I would never again get the most natural light possible for my work. I ran ten blocks back to my apartment, about to have a heart attack the whole damned way, and I dragged an easel and my oils and a couple of brushes out onto the roof of the appliance store over which I had my shitty studio apartment. I painted fast, imprecisely, getting my colors muddled with each other. I spent the last hour-forty-five minutes of my last day on Earth painting my city – back then it was more of a town – nestled in a bowl of blazing pink and orange light, like it had been set in a fire growing cold.

  The wind was terrible that day, and it was threatening snow, but the weather never delivered. I sat up there, my hands shaking from the cold, my mouth and face wrapped in a scarf, my hair blown all over like that of a madman, trying like hell to work the oils before they dried in the wind, and in the end I had one of the most impressionistic pieces I’ve ever done.

  When the last of the light died, I wasn’t quite finished. There was one corner undone. But the light was gone, and I couldn’t see a damned thing, so I set my brush down and sat back and sighed through my scarf.

  An hour later, I was dying in the bathtub of a hotel room, with Agatha chanting by my side.

  Nearly seventy years later, I stood in the lobby of a run-down observatory about to be destroyed by the explosive demise of a half-dozen vampires.

  I hesitated in the gray darkness of the lobby. I knew, intellectually, that Seth walked here through this frozen not-light, this gray expanse suspended between moments. That didn’t make it easy to step into it.

  “Come along, Cousin,” Roderick said from beside me, and he took the sleeve of my trench coat and pulled so we stepped into it together.

  I didn’t explode.

  Neither did he.

  I looked around. Things in that suspended state weren’t exactly sun-drenched. They were more like a brighter shade of gray. Still, I knew – I knew – I was doing something that was supposed to kill me.