Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  You know what it is: that sense of being watched. So many narratives hinge on that moment of intuition that it has taken on an air of being a trope but the fact is it happens sometimes and we all know it even though it scares us not to know why. I once read a theory that it has to do with low-grade, subconscious telepathy given off by the watcher’s brain and picked up by that of the watched, but that seems a little far-fetched to me and I say that as a pretty far-fetched thing in the world. I've also heard a theory that it has to do with subharmonic sounds or something people generate that tip one another off to their presence. I don't know what it is, but I felt it and it's not the sort of thing a vampire feels very often. When we do, well, we know it right away. It made me think of Z Day, the first Steeplechase Event: the night zombies rose out of an abandoned graveyard next to my neighborhood. That tingle had been what I felt whenever their attention turned to me: the certain knowledge something predatory was sizing me up.

  I tried not to react, at least not visibly. You don't survive your first sixty-odd years or so by being jumpy or quick to overreact. Instead, I sat there and ate my popcorn and drank my beer and as I felt those creepy crawly eye tingles on the back of my neck I focused instead on how I could turn around and look without giving away that my watcher had blown his cover. After all, I figured there could only be one person who would be trying to spy on me: the interloper, who had undoubtedly smelled me in the lobby when he also came out at intermission.

  Hell, it was half of why I went to get a snack: to give them a chance to notice and present themselves. Well, okay, maybe a third of why.

  I had almost decided I wouldn't need a reason to turn around – I was going to finish my popcorn and the intermission was going to be over – when I heard Seth call my name from across the plaza.

  “Withrow!” Seth didn't sound angry or agitated, just letting me know he was on the approach. I appreciated that. Seth is very conscious of boundaries and of politeness and that carries a tremendous amount of weight with our kind. Still, the part of me that was once a mortal man wanted to jump out of my skin. I turned around and looked across the plaza perhaps over-much, as though not sure exactly where or who had called out to me. Under the black studded leather Seth was dressed in anonymous gray slacks grown careworn and a slightly undersized t-shirt that made him look like a scrawny guy trying too hard to look tough. That was probably some twisted and over-complicated form of camouflage for him. I'd seen him fight; he could have killed everyone in the building, half of them before they'd known what was happening.

  I started to say something in response, something generic and innocuous and forgettable, when the spidey senses all of a sudden just... went blank. The interloper who had been staring at me, watching me, probably scoping me out as a potential threat, was apparently no longer interested. I left my mouth hanging open and scanned the periphery of the crowd – teenagers sneaking sips of something from hip flasks, their boyfriends with cigarettes, little kids running around – but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I even stood up and got real obvious with my looking, but no, not a single ping on the old radar. The intruder was gone.

  Seth didn't bother to ask what was going on. He just stood there and scanned the crowd, eyes moving methodically from one face to another. “Was he out here?”

  “Yeah.” I clucked my tongue at nothing, scolding myself halfheartedly. “He was watching me. But the moment you called my name he took off.”

  Seth made a little hrmph noise from deep down in his sculpted – and extremely attractive, I had to admit – chest. Too bad he didn't roll that way; not that there's much point to it for vampires, but sometimes the coffin's a little lonely on a cold night. Anyway, he didn't like that the interloper had studied me and then taken off once he heard my name. “Possible follower of the Transylvanian?”

  I drew a breath, considered my answer and then shook my head. “Nah. I think Roderick's probably cleaned them up sufficiently that there wouldn't be anyone left to care that much.” That had been the mission I’d given my cousin: destroy anyone left from the Transylvanian’s budding enterprise.

  “Could be someone who wants to make a name for himself locally,” Seth went on. He shrugged. “Play the mystery man, sneak around, brag about how he got away with it. That’s, like, Rep Building 101 when you’re new in town.”

  I glanced over at him and smiled a little. “Voice of experience?”

  Seth allowed one corner of his lips to curl upwards for half a second. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Sure,” I chuckled. I didn't give a shit how many other vampires Seth had toppled in his day. He was my second in command and he was apparently perfectly comfortable there. If he decided to turn on me I would never see him coming, and we both knew it, so there was no point sitting around being paranoid. “Anyway,” I said, with nothing to follow it. I drained the last of the beer in my bottle and chucked my popcorn bag in the trash. “Enjoy the second act.”

  “You going after him?”

  “The scent is fresh,” I said, and I hopped relatively lightly down from my bench, all three hundred fifty pounds of me. “And daylight's not getting any farther away.”

  “I'll tell Beth you said goodnight.”

  “Thanks,” I smiled, genuinely fond of both of them and able to show it in some small way for once. “But I doubt she'll notice I'm gone. She’s more checked out than usual.” I didn’t feel paternal towards Beth but she lived on my turf and I liked her and I wanted to make sure she never went off the deep end and did something bad.

  “Well, she comes and goes,” Seth murmured.

  “I know,” I said, “Let’s hope she always comes back.” I held out my right hand and Seth, with only the minimum necessary amount of hesitation, took it and pumped it once up and down before letting go.

  “It's been a long time since we've had trouble right around home,” he said, voice low. “I hope we don't have it again anytime soon.” The scent of a new vampire had spooked him more than I would have guessed. To me it was an annoyance; to Seth it was a cause for genuine worry. I wondered again about that phrase I’d heard in the memories of the Transylvanian: “the last war”. I wondered when it was and how much of it Seth had seen. For some reason, however, it didn’t even occur to me to ask.

  “Don't worry,” I said instead, shaking my head. “I doubt he's one of Bob's and if he is then we'll just kill him, too.”

  Bob had been the boss of North Carolina before me, and a right bastard, and the third in a long line of Bob’s stretching back as far as anyone remembered. I got the gig for myself by taking the last Bob out; then his chauffeur and all of his spawn; then I burned down the house they’d lived in. After that I put out the word I was king of the hill and anybody who disagreed could come talk to me but they might want to bring every friend they had. No one took me up on it.

  I would have been only too glad to dust every single vampire who was loyal to that self-satisfied old ball of crap. I killed him on the side of an abandoned stretch of dark road because I wanted him to know who’d done it and I wanted him to die alone. Plenty of people referred to it as “Withrow’s coup” but in my heart of hearts I considered it a successful slave rebellion. We had been expected to kowtow and suck it up and give Bob all the best hunting rights and ask his permission to zip up our pants every time we took a piss. I’d tolerated more than my share of that by the time I'd been in Raleigh for forty years.

  Once I was sure no one was aiming for an open confrontation I set about the business of killing every vampire I could get my hands on who had any relation to Bob the Third. After I’d run out of them I started going after the maybes and the kindas and then I’d simply started killing off possible mortal relatives of the last. There weren't any little Boblings left to pop up and make a bid for revenge. I spent years making sure of that.

  I'd killed so many of Bob's line I wasn't sure I could tell Seth – another vampire, my second in command – how many without sounding a little crazy. He'd never kno
w the miles I put on my old Firebird just chasing rumors about self-important little pipsqueaks who happened to be named Robert or Rob or Bob or Bobby and how many whimpering little lives I'd ended just to make sure there was no chance any of them would ever turn out to be related to the Raleigh Bobs of old.

  Seth studied me as I let all that run through my head and I wondered if he were telepathic. That would be a shitty thing to find out the hard way, I said to myself, and then I realized if he were telepathic then he'd just heard that, too. Even though he didn't show any sign of anything, I couldn't resist letting myself laugh a little, just once, which got something like quizzical uncertainty out of him. That's the way it is with us: always playing the weird little angles against one another, even against the ones we almost sort of think of as our friends.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I'm going to go look for him. See you around.”

  “Later,” Seth mumbled, and he strolled back inside as I moseyed down the sidewalk and around a corner into darkness, nostrils wide, trying to find a hunter in the streets of night.

  3

  Durham started out as a tobacco town. When I was alive it was the place Chesterfields were made. You probably don't remember Chesterfields, but they were a major brand when I was a kid. I remember the slogan: “Blow some my way.” These days I don't even know if they're still around. Plenty of vampires smoke – not exactly a big risk of cancer when you're dead – but lately it's gotten so damned inconvenient. It used to be a great way to remember to breathe or to cover for not having misty breath on cold nights, that kind of thing, but now it's just not as useful because you can't do it any damned where you like. I guess that's for the best. I don't have any special love for carcinogens in the food chain. I gave up the cover of smoking years ago when they started outlawing it in bars. All the good brands are gone anyway.

  I set off up the hill on Morgan Street, headed northwest through downtown. Durham is a small city of huge old cigarette factories and tobacco warehouses, some renovated and turned into condos and others sitting there waiting for a second career to arrive while they crumble in slow silence. There are more of the latter than the former and the empty ones are the tallest by far: huge slabs of brick and concrete standing mute in one another’s shadows. They’re skyscrapers compared to the rest of the two- to four-story buildings that make up Durham's downtown. Durham is not a real metropolis. It is not some expanse of cloud-clawing glass and steel. Durham is just a town, but a town with a lot of history and a lot of money and a couple of huge, renowned universities sitting behind miles of low rock walls in opposite corners of town.

  The tobacco company that made Chesterfields and the college that turned into Duke were both started by the same people. Duke does a ton of medical research now, so Durham is called the City of Medicine. A city of medicine framed in tobacco buildings is just about right in a lot of ways as an emblem of the South, of North Carolina, of the twentieth century. The other big institution is North Carolina Central, a major historically black university and one of the very best law schools in the southeast. Squatting all around it are blocks upon blocks of lower- and middle-income African-American neighborhoods white people tend to lump together, entirely inaccurately, as the “ghetto”.

  Morgan Street met Main Street at the top of the hill. The scent of the interloper seemed to turn right down Main, towards the part of town that catered to Duke: a bunch of great restaurants and a record store and a gas station or two. I sighed and stuffed my hands into my pockets. Colleges are like vampire flypaper. They seem like such a great place to crash. The bars and tiny rock clubs and countless parties that pile up around them like suckling pigs look like the easy pickings we're all always happy to find, but it’s a false allure.

  Going that direction meant walking down a shadowy street framed by overhanging tunnels between abandoned factory buildings. Chutes just big enough for a man to crawl along connected all the buildings to one another, four or five stories above the sidewalk. I imagined carts full of Chesterfields being rolled from one end to the other, a team of men hunched over in a too-small space shoving it along toward their counterparts at the other end. The recipients would be waiting to empty it into some great machine, everyone's mind on the carton of free smokes they got at the end of the day to hand around to their friends.

  It didn't bother me even a little to consider that the intruder might be waiting for me in those shadows. I like being able to be direct about things, even if it means walking into an ambush.

  The old Liggett Meyer factory was two blocks long and two blocks wide with a giant quadrate cross of street and alleyways at its center. I strolled down it, listening to my own boots clack against the brickwork of the sidewalk, hoping like hell I’d hear the scuff of another’s shoes coming out of the darkness to attack. There was no better place for it in all of downtown: quiet, dark, abandoned, feared. There were condominiums nearby in what used to be warehouse space but they had a couple of buildings shielding them from the complex industrial corpse I was navigating at the moment. Two people – or two vampires – could fight and scratch and holler all night without a respectable soul so much as rolling over in their sleep.

  One step, and then another, and then a dozen more; I crossed the intersection after pausing to gaze into the deepest shadows with a vampire’s piercing eyes. Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. There weren’t even rats down those alleys because there weren’t any people around anymore to leave trash for them to eat.

  With a few more steps I was back in the light. There were people all over the damn place. The sensory crush of mortals and food coming from the restaurants around Brightleaf Square was too much for me to be able to dissect in search of one specific scent. I walked on past them, nose alert, but the fish-fry place alone was enough to scrub the air of any useful trail I could follow. It was like trying to find a fingerprint under three coats of paint. I gave up bothering. There was only one really notable thing on up this street anyway: Duke University and its false promise of easy co-ed prey.

  The reason colleges and universities are such terrible places for vampires these days are manifold, but I'll run them down briefly. First and foremost is the Internet. Once upon a time a vampire who had been turned at the right age could spend decades in the isolated ecosystems prone to formation around a college. Live near campus, go to parties and make new friends every four years; lather, rinse, repeat. The high churn in student populations meant one could have the best of both anonymity and identity: a persona one maintained believably and which was then forgotten by countless generations of students on a four-year cycle.

  No more of that these nights. Now everyone stays in contact forever with old chums. I guess a really dedicated vampire could maintain online identities for each of their various cover stories, recycling them every few years, but it's already too much work trying to maintain one false identity in the real world without the Internet getting involved. Every twenty or thirty years we’re up to our belly buttons in transfers of property, fictional heirs, supporting legends, mortal paperwork, birth certificates, death certificates and on and on and on, and it all has to be done again just as fast. Trying to do the social media stuff on top of all that – changing names, setting up new accounts, untagging all those party photos and blocking everyone we used to know – is just crazy. Jesus, I hadn’t thought of it before, but were we all setting ourselves up for trouble by avoiding social media now? In thirty years, would it be suspicious not to have a whole online life already documented? The fixers – vampires and cooperative mortals who get paid to do the heavy lifting on that stuff – were going to make a million bucks.

  Reason number two to avoid a college campus is the modern obsession with cameras. Every kid on every college campus has a camera built into a phone. Roderick is the one who explained this part to me: they take pictures all the time and post them willy-nilly and bang, the wrong picture is everywhere and nowhere. Anybody can find it and nobody can make it go away. Then there are all the cameras owned by
the school itself. You don't need too many instances of shootings or muggings or lawsuits to convince the Board of Trustees pervasive surveillance cameras might be cheaper than paying out when someone’s precious snowflake gets shot up by their crazy ex.

  So, despite being covered in nubile men and women quite comfortable making out with a total stranger and waking up the next morning feeling drained, remembering nothing, cameras and paranoia and social media have conspired to make a college one of the most dangerous places available to vampires. If they only knew the favor the powers that be have done themselves.

  Two blocks later I was standing right next to the campus of Duke University. I'd hoped I'd get the scent back by the time I got away from the fish-fry but no such luck. I could smell nothing but crisp autumn air and willing teens. I sighed and ambled off down the gravel path that bordered Duke's campus. I was just killing time by then: no point in trying to hoof it back to the theatre for the rest of the second act and no target left to track, so why not enjoy a walk while I had the chance? It was a lovely evening, and even though I knew better than to feed on a college campus it was still fun to window shop.

  Mainly, I think I just wanted some time alone. Vampires have plenty of that, of course, but now that I knew there was a stranger in town who seemed to be avoiding me, I knew I probably had a problem to solve. If there was new trouble to be had, the moment of respite I could take now was going to be all on its own over the next little while.

  Duke's campus contained huge swaths of protected forest extending long fingers of green all over any map of the town. That was all called Duke Forest, of course, because if rich people are good at anything it’s putting granddad’s name on everything in sight. Some of the forest’s acreage wasn't anywhere near the university campus but enough of it was contiguous that a walk from one end of Duke to the other – from East Campus to West – could take me through a huge chunk of lonely and quiet and delightfully dark places. I set off at my usual plodding trudge, slipping past a few of the freshman dorms and the world's ritziest steam plant.