Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  You don’t even want to think what a hellhound goes through when its maker dies.

  Dog eventually walked right up to Smiles, just as pretty as you please, sniffed all up around Smiles’ muzzle for a minute while Smiles sat stonily still, and then licked him on the face.

  After that was done, they were instantly the best of friends.

  Neither Roderick nor I sighed with open relief but I could feel it in the air. “1970?” I gestured at the DeVille. I love old cars. I’d seen it in Seattle but we hadn’t much talked about it.

  “1971.” Roderick smiled at me, pulling a leash out of a steamer trunk he had stowed in the Cadillac’s back seat. He nodded towards the log house. “This place is marvelous, by the way. I would not have even seen the driveway if you were not standing down there.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. Need help with anything? Luggage?”

  “Oh, heavens no, I will be staying downtown,” Roderick said. “I have already checked in at the place on Main Street, the one that used to be a bank?” He waved a flutter of fingers to dismiss the notion of crashing here. “It is only a couple of blocks from the other end of this trail and I am, if nothing else, a man accustomed to his creature comforts.”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself, but you’re welcome to stay here. It’s a lot darker in here than the average hotel room.” I coughed. Roderick likes to push the limits. He always stays in hotels, which all in all are kind of a dumb place for a vampire to go if there are alternatives. I mean, we can always sleep in the tub but it still feels risky. Remember that the next time you see a news story of a hotel abruptly going up in flames in the middle of the afternoon: housekeeping might have simply opened the curtains in the wrong room.

  Roderick smirked in response. “Cousin,” he said, “The offer is appreciated but I like my freedom. It is simply how I am wired. Now, let us go and find a good place to get robbed.”

  Technically, the American Tobacco Trail closes at dark. All that means is the cops will scold the people who prefer to use it at night if something actually happens to them. While waiting twenty minutes for Roderick to arrive I’d already seen half a dozen joggers and dog walkers make their way along the trail behind the house. At night, to human eyes, it would be nothing more than a pitch-dark tunnel through the shadows of trees. It must have felt like it was a hundred miles from civilization, even though for most of it one or another back yard was only a few dozen feet away.

  There are parts of it, though, that are genuinely remote: places where it veers away from the safety of suburbia and treks out through the middle of woods too uneven and inconvenient to be developed into anything. Roderick and I started to take Smiles and Dog with us as we walked but we worried they would scare off any potential attackers. We wanted to look utterly vulnerable and neither of our dogs would do much to contribute to that.

  Instead, we strolled alone with no flashlights and chatted quietly with one another about this and that: all the wet weather we’d had that summer and how things were going in Asheville. Roderick was there as my monitor and enforcer. He’d tracked down the last of the spawn of a former enemy and bumped them off one by one. Now he kept his eyes and ears open for new trouble. He filled me in on the local politics and other gossip as we walked. I told him all about going to see the production of Dracula with Seth and Beth. Roderick was pleased at my social activity and fascinated by the notion of children playing at being vampires. With a darkly humorous lilt he sang, “I believe the children are our future…” and we both laughed with silly voices. It was the most relaxed I’d felt in a month.

  Conversation wound around to The Bull’s Eye and to El Diablo, as all conversations in Durham at that time seemed eventually to do. I suggested a vampire would make a natural super villain – strong, fast, often remorseless – when Roderick countered with something I found surprising.

  “No, no, Cousin,” he purred. “We make far better heroes than villains.”

  “Why heroes?” I chuckled at the thought of a vampire in spandex and a cape.

  “For all the reasons you listed.” Roderick stated this as though it were the most obvious of things: water is wet, up is thatta way, and so on. “Plus the fact we would be unexpected.”

  “Remorseless isn’t something I think most people like in a hero.”

  “Tell that to the writers of 24,” Roderick mused. “In our modern age, so damnably aware of implications and privilege, so called upon not to be constant assholes to one another on the big things such as race or sex and, we discover, so terrible at it, I think we seek escape in a number of ways. One of the most common I observe in humanity’s patterns is the eagerness with which they can be assholes to one another about the small things instead, as though there were a pressurized system of rudeness and insult circulating within them which must ultimately escape through one or another of the fissures in their psychic device.”

  “I think,” I slowly replied, “You may be choosing to misremember how much we were all jerks to everybody back in the day.” I shrugged. “People aren’t meaner now. We just notice it more.”

  “Why?” Roderick’s question was sincere. I noted that real curiosity about human behavior and filed it right alongside the way in which he referred to mortals as them. I made special note of it in my cousin because I’d started noticing it of myself.

  “People have more opportunities to document,” I said. “Used to be, you could just flip a guy off on the road and keep driving and never think about him again. You’d never know who he was or why he cut you off and that was okay. You could just react and let it go and you were allowed the opportunity to forget. Now you get your picture taken and somebody tweets it and the next thing you know your one moment of forgettable annoyance has gone viral. We don’t get annoyed or express it any more often but we spend way more time processing it.” I shrugged. “At least, that’s how it seems to me. Otherwise, sure: I guess we’d make okay superheroes, too. Not being expected to be a hero may come in handy, I guess.”

  Roderick made a murmur of thoughtfulness. After we’d walked a few yards, he abruptly glanced at me and asked, “So, what would your superhero identity be?” The corner of his lip turned up in a twist.

  I laughed and shook my head. “I have no idea. Why, what’s yours?”

  Roderick answered so quickly it was obvious he had thought about this long and hard. He smiled widely, lips pressed together in a thin line curved with pleasure. “’Just Dandy’,” he said, with a flourished little tug of his perfectly rolled pink Oxford sleeves.

  I threw back my head and laughed so hard a neighborhood dog started barking.

  “I also have one for you,” he said. “You would be ‘Good Old Boy,’ my teammate and relation.”

  I blinked at that. “Good Old Boy?”

  Roderick shrugged and looked a little annoyed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was with me or with his own suggestion of a name. “It is a work in progress. Smiles would be known as ‘Gnasher’ and Dog as ‘El Gato’.”

  I scratched the side of my cheek for a moment before finally saying, “I like it, but ‘gato’ means cat. I think you mean ‘El Perro’.”

  Roderick cut me a sidelong glance of disgusted pity. “Cousin,” he finally sighed, “What on earth do you think is the point of a nom de guerre, anyway?”

  We’d made our way past a small city park, along the back of an apartment complex, between two halves of a high school campus and into one of those long dark stretches of nothing when I sensed a subtle shift in Roderick’s posture and I heard the unmistakable scuffing sound of someone in sneakers trying to creep across asphalt.

  We were on a section where the trail was elevated above the natural topology around it: a deep, sharp valley with a line of raised ground cutting downhill through the middle. The path was narrow and elevated, like an earthen dam holding back a lake that’d gone dry. To keep people from riding their bikes off the steep sides of it, the city had put up a green chain-link safety fence. It kept them from becoming victims o
f gravity but it also created a bounded corridor easily cut off at either end. It had occurred to me, when I saw it from afar on our approach, that its thirty yards of fenced pavement with limited ingress and egress would make an excellent place to ambush the unsuspecting. I was reminded of the tunnel warfare of ancient cultures: long, narrow, underground paths used for offense or defense, easily mined, easily collapsed, easily turned into a deadly bottleneck. The only difference was that this was elevated above ground instead.

  As we approached that bottleneck, Roderick had been saying something about a vampire who’d breezed through Asheville on his way to South Carolina. When we heard that slightly stealthy footfall he paused, smiled and said to me, slightly above the volume of conversation, “So I sent him on his way and continued with my date.”

  “Your date?” I raised both eyebrows. We were very carefully not reacting to the presence of a person on the trail. “Do you really date?”

  “Of course, cousin,” Roderick replied. “Not every meal has to be eaten straight from the box. Sometimes there is real pleasure in its preparation as well as in its enjoyment; and sometimes it might wish to be enjoyed again. Often half the pleasure of an experience is in its cultivation. Ask any gardener.”

  A young man of significantly less than average height stepped out from behind some shrubs ahead of us. He was built like an athlete and wore long basketball shorts, the kind that brightly shine in the light, but he was just barely five and a half feet so they hung too low on him. He cut off that exit from the fenced section of trail. Roderick and I both stopped short. The kid didn’t say anything to us. He just stood there looking sullen.

  Roderick put a hand to the middle of his own chest and said, “Oh, heavens,” in the most sissified voice he could muster. It was easy to forget sometimes that he came straight from Southern stock despite growing up in Seattle. He was doing a crackerjack Scarlett O’Hara.

  I turned and looked behind us. Two other young men – one very tall and one very muscular – stood at the other end of the fenced segment of trail, blocking our avenue of retreat. We were, they must have imagined, utterly trapped. “Cousin,” I said, “We appear to be cut off.”

  The more muscular of the two behind us broke into a swaggering stride and started to approach. The tall guy stayed back. Muscles walked right to us, fearless as an angel in Hell, and reached up to shove my shoulder once. “Come up off the goods,” he said.

  “What?” I hadn’t understood what he’d said. It was just words to me. It didn’t resolve into anything, not even recognizable slang.

  “Come up off the goods,” he repeated.

  “Huh?” In equal proportion to Roderick’s play-acted fear, I offered stony incomprehension. I sounded like a tourist who didn’t speak very good English had asked me for directions. Later, it occurred to me I may have sounded confident instead of checked out.

  “Give me your stuff,” he snapped. He hated me for not sounding afraid. Stepping back once, he looked me up and down, then again, then a third time. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The Bull’s Eye.”

  Dressed in black from head to toe and I was walking at night in the perfect place to be the victim of a crime of convenience: a long stretch of unattended suburban leisure trail with no lights, no emergency call boxes and no one in earshot save those people engaged in the honest sleep of the working class. “Well, hell,” I said. “OK, look, it isn’t – “

  “Yeah,” he said, and he broke into a grin. “Yeah.” He drew it out long, savoring it. “I just wanted a new wallet but now I’m gonna get a new pair of goody two-shoes, too.” That smirk crawled into my brain and started cutting the restraints I try to keep around the monster inside. “Now,” he commanded, “Gimme all your shit.”

  I tried not to smile as I worked on a reply, but it didn’t work. Instead, I pondered to whom else they might have done this. If they were willing to walk up and pick on the two of us with such brazen disregard then they’d done it before, perhaps many times. I wondered what I’d get if I were to kill this kid and then with the special gift of my hindsight draw out all the times he’d robbed someone like this. How many terrified old ladies and defenseless young men out jogging alone and all the other forms of innocence the human race can muster up would I see? I’m no better, I know, but vampires were all once human and humans are very good at justifying their actions. Here this guy was, young and strong as an ox, and the best thing he had to do with his time was pick on people for a few bucks and a laugh? It gnawed at me. The monster inside started to salivate.

  “Or what?” My voice was a low growl but it carried far in the clammy silence of a dark autumn night.

  Muscles stared at me, eyes gleaming in the starlight.

  His buddy behind him, the tall one who had held position when this guy approached, looked nervous. “Just give up the goods, fatty, and we’ll leave you and your boyfriend alone.” He tried to sound tough but he sounded frightened.

  “Yeah,” Muscles said. “Just turn it over and you and the Fag Wonder here can go find a kitten in a tree to get in the papers tomorrow.”

  I didn’t look at him. I glanced at Roderick, who winked at me before turning towards the one kid who’d stepped out first and blocked our way forward. I told myself they had sealed their fates when they insulted me. In truth, maybe the jab about my weight could have been allowed to stand, or the homophobia, but I think it was mistaking me for The Bull’s Eye that did them in. Something about being taken for a hero was worse to me than being taken for a victim. I was tired of shit like this. I was tired of a “demon” and El Diablo and having to save the world from itself every now and again and I was tired of that world thanking me by assuming I was just another schlub. I stopped bothering with seeking to justify what I wanted to do.

  Smiles and Dog emerged from the shadows fifty yards back from the tall guy at the rear. They made no noise because hellhounds are every bit as much the predators as the vampires who make them. We had walked without them in order to look unprotected but Smiles and Dog had followed behind, well out of sight, for a moment such as this. They knew we wanted them to approach now, so they did.

  I snapped my finger by my side and Smiles growled, deep down, like the stones of the earth had begun to grind together.

  I locked eyes with the would-be mugger in front of me and drilled into his mind with the force of my own power. His free will instantly buckled. Muscles was just a bully: a nobody with nothing going on upstairs. “Stay here,” I ordered him, “And watch what we do to your friends.”

  Roderick made a noise a little like a giggle and smacked his lips before he and I broke in opposite directions. Dog and Smiles darted in as soon as we moved. Dog blew by me, running the other direction many times faster than a St. Bernard his size should be able to go. He bounded down to catch up with Roderick and the two of them sprinted and then leapt together at the short guy at the front. They were far too quick for him to comprehend or react. Dog hit the guy like a tanker truck and Roderick descended like a spider, all angles and limbs and miniscule agility.

  Smiles met me halfway, with the tall guy between us. He leapt to clamp his jaws around the back of the guy’s neck. Smiles planted his paws on the guy’s spine and shook his head once with a thick, viscous snap of bone and spinal cord. I latched a hand over the guy’s mouth to muffle the scream we both knew wouldn’t have done him any good anyway as he collapsed, paralyzed and probably dying. Dropping him on his back, I wrenched his wild eyes towards me, bared my fangs and used them to tear out his throat in one go. Blood sprayed in all directions. It was like bursting a ketchup balloon.

  Roderick didn’t bother to cover the mouth of his victim, letting Shorty get out one long, loud shriek. It echoed across the little valley, bouncing off curtains of kudzu and pillars of old trees, and by the time it came back the guy was dying in Roderick’s tiny arms. I realized abruptly I might not remember the kid in a few minutes, but Roderick dropped the guy face-first on the ground and let him bleed out onto asphalt instead.
He didn’t even offer this guy the mercy of being forgotten. His obituary, if he rated one, would immortalize him at best as a murdered miscreant in a nameless corner of an anonymous suburb.

  I swiped my hand across my mouth with all the effect of one of those thin paper napkins you get in a sleeve of plastic silverware with your to-go box of pork barbecue. The last remaining kid, the one I’d called Muscles, the one who’d put his hand on my shoulder and pushed it once to assert his dominance over me, was trembling from head to toe in the very center of it all. True to my command, he had not looked away from me. I walked slowly towards him. He shook like a leaf, more and more violently, as I approached.

  I locked eyes with him again and whispered, “Run.”

  He turned and started to sprint but Roderick was standing there, arms open like a bear trap waiting to be sprung, and twenty seconds later I dumped Muscles – still alive, but bleeding out and awake enough to experience the terrible certainty of his own death – over the fence and into the ravine below. Down there, among the kudzu at the bottom of a gulley where no person would likely go and no loved one would look for him, he could live out his last few seconds. I hoped he spent them staring up between vines at a dark sky and wondering why God had abandoned him.

  Roderick hefted the little guy he’d taken out and dumped the corpse down into the same spot. I walked back to mine and found Smiles lapping at the cooling blood. “Stop that,” I said to him. He did, but like any dog who sees a crumb swept from the floor, he mourned it. “We do not eat off the ground.” I tried not to scold him too hard, though. We’ve all been there at one time or another, and for all the smarts and strength my blood gives him, he’s ultimately still a dog.