Then I dumped the tall guy over the side of the drop-off beside his other two friends.
Roderick strolled up, belched noisily and said, “This is a great spot. I’ve got to remember it. No one is ever going to find them down there.”
“Never say never,” I replied.
“Well, they’ll just blame it on El Diablo, right?” He shrugged with disregard.
That’s when I realized what was perhaps the real reason why El Diablo bothered me so much: he was a convenient excuse. As long as he was around, vampires could act with a lot more impunity than before and that would be bad for everyone.
“Oh, cousin,” I sighed. “Don’t spread bad ideas.”
“C’est la vie,” Roderick said. “C’est la guerre.” That’s life. That’s war.
We turned to walk away together and Ross was standing there with a smile on his face. “Well,” he said, like the cat who caught the canary, “That’s one way to get a boy’s attention.”
7
Roderick stood very still behind me, but to my left, and it occurred to me he was using our relative sizes as camouflage. A photograph would suggest I was protecting my cousin from harm but I had just watched him leap through the air like he was on springs. A year before, we had fought side by side in Asheville and I had outpaced him. After what I’d just seen, I wasn’t so sure anymore. He was probably the more dangerous one of the two of us, all things considered, and he was using to his advantage the probability the average person would think otherwise.
Ross looked as he had before: blue and silver skin reflecting starlight in a hundred subtle ways with sickly amber eyes that left a kind of slime on everything they touched. His expression seemed permanently fixed in the moment he appraised the world and found it lacking but only barely so. He was handsome, I guess. It’s hard for me to think of the right word there. He had many of the compelling features of male beauty: a sharp jaw line, angled cheekbones, a slightly gaunt and hungry cast to his face. He was wearing a plain white tee shirt and blue jeans, just as common as could be. He could have played a bit part in any high school production of Grease. His skin was sleek and shiny and it was easy to find myself fascinated by the rippling colors and patterns as his skin flexed and moved.
Perhaps the word I wanted wasn’t “handsome” so much as “interesting”. He was interesting to watch: alien and beautiful, like a spider or a snake.
“Wait,” I said, “Is that really all it takes? Three kids who push around the wrong guy, and snap, demon delivery service?” I snapped my fingers as I said the word. I tried to sound smirking and cool when I said it but it probably just sounded ungrateful.
Ross chuckled and it sounded like someone gargling butter. “Not exactly.” He nodded in the direction of the ravine where we’d dumped the boys who tried to rob us. “I like your style, though.”
Roderick stepped forward and, after only a moment of hesitation – one somewhere between nervous uncertainty and conscious insult on the scale of social timers – offered his hand to Ross to shake. “Hello,” he purred. “My name is Roderick. Withrow is my cousin.”
The flare of jealousy that lit up inside my chest was as hot and red as a superheated railroad spike. I didn’t even know I liked this guy and I was instantly jealous of my cousin merely speaking to him. I clamped down on saying anything, but I wanted to: I wanted to clobber Roderick into next week right then and there just to get him out of the way. Just seeing Ross, whatever he may have been, made a part of me wake up from long sleep only to find itself in the loneliest, darkest possible pit. One little bit of attention had taken some part of the human me I thought died on the vine over half a century ago and made it sit up and pant.
Ross flicked those fool’s-gold eyes at me for one electric nanosecond then took Roderick’s hand, returning that precisely timed hesitation with equal ambiguity. “I’m Ross.”
“No, you are not.” Roderick smiled. I could see his ears lift. I had seen that smile before. It isn’t a smile, it’s just his features rearranging so it’s easier to open his mouth wide before he bites. “Your name is not Ross. It’s something complicated and dangerous and you keep it concealed from others because its knowledge would be a form of power over you.”
Ross arched one eyebrow, then the other. “Withrow,” he said to me, still shaking Roderick’s hand, “Your cousin has seen some interesting movies.” Ross paused for a moment, looking briefly puzzled, then stopped shaking Roderick’s hand. He did not, however, let go of it. “Tell me,” he murmured, “If names have power, why did you just tell me yours?”
Roderick’s ears lifted farther. “Because it didn’t matter the last time I killed one of you. I don’t expect it will matter now.”
This time the surprise on Ross’ face was genuine, or appeared to be. I couldn’t believe the things Roderick was saying to him but I felt paralyzed. If I allowed myself to move one millimeter I wasn’t sure what it would be to do: to hit Ross, to hit Roderick, to throw them both over the edge of that ravine and let them catfight over the steaming corpses of our cooling kills. Ross let go of Roderick’s hand and backed up a couple of steps, hands raised to show he had no aggressive intent.
“Easy, boy,” he said to Roderick. Dog abruptly growled and I knew that meant Roderick was containing some equally feral response. Ross then looked at me again. “Your cousin’s idea about finding the most desperate person around wouldn’t work on me in a technical sense but I do notice things. I wasn’t quite ready to strike things back up with you – I have a lot on my plate, it’s just been that kind of month – but how about we make a deal? If you can find the most desperate person in all of Durham I will absolutely show up for another chat. I want to get to know you, I will happily admit, but right now I’m working on a big project. I’m willing to set it aside for a night or two, though, if you can in fact do that one thing.”
I finally found my voice amidst confusion and conflicting reactions. “So, sacrificing the most desperate person in town wouldn’t force you to show up but you want me to do it anyway? Why, for fun?”
“To a degree,” Ross said. He rolled his shoulders in a shrug I found almost intoxicating to watch: every muscle and bone and tendon was visible against that magical skin. “Mostly just to see how you go about it. You learn a lot about a man by watching him solve a problem. I’ve never had much to do with your kind. I want to see how you think.”
“You want something.” Roderick spoke, but his voice was as flat and as dead as week-old road-kill. He sounded absolutely deathly cold.
“Yes,” Ross said with a smile. His teeth were like a megalodon: too many and pointed in all the wrong angles. The part of me that was once a teenager thought they looked just as cool as all hell. “I want to get to know your cousin better.”
“Tell me why.” Roderick was trying hard to keep something in. Smiles had sat in silence by my side the whole time but Dog’s growl rose up again and Roderick’s fists were clenched.
Ross’ tone was one of ultimate exasperation when he replied. “Because I like great big guys! OK? I’m into bears! Christ!” He turned to me and said, somewhat apologetically, “Look, mostly I came here to say nice work on those kids – they deserved it, trust me – and to chat you up. Looks like maybe that has to wait until some other time.”
With that, he disappeared. There was a sound like a miniature clap like thunder and a puff of angry yellow smoke where Ross had been. Roderick stood, fists balled up, en garde, waiting for an attack that didn’t seem to be coming. I waited long moments for him to relax. When he finally did, he ran his fingers through his hair, shook his head and proceeded to ask me about something inane and neutral as though the whole exchange had never occurred. I honored his agitation and concern by letting him do so without a word of argument.
By the time Roderick and I and our respective canines had walked all the way downtown it was nearly one in the morning. I offered to see him to his hotel but he declined.
“Oh heavens no, Cousin,” he said. “I must go dancing fir
st. Nothing like a little body heat when I’m all warm and tingly inside after a meal.” He wanted to go to a massive gay club in the middle of downtown. It’s called Power Company and by reputation it’s the best bar in the Triangle – maybe one of the best in the southeast. I’ve been a couple of times but I don’t much dance and I don’t much like small talk with mortals so it just never really drew me as a place to go kill time on my own. I could see it fitting Roderick to a tee.
I had hours before sunrise so I decided to strike out on another walk downtown with Smiles by my side to think for a bit. My thoughts were on Ross and what he’d said; on the challenge he’d given me; and on El Diablo. It seemed obvious to do the math: one devil and one devil-themed villain make two, right? A part of me was worried my biggest current problem – a self-declared super-villain making life more dangerous and more tempting for my people – might be the huge project Ross had mentioned. It seemed only natural, didn’t it? I didn’t want to leap to conclusions, though, and I didn’t want the idiocy of carnal attraction to keep me from doing my job. Maybe it would help to revisit the place where I’d first seen both of them. Maybe it would help to be alone with my dog for a while. Maybe I could just wander between the remaining signs of life in the middle of the night and hear myself think.
Duke’s campus was not busy at half-past one on a weeknight. Still, a college is a college and kids are kids. I could hear people walking the stone paths; television sets in dorms here and there; NPR's overnight broadcast of the BBC; car doors opening and closing; cigarette lighters flicking on and off. They were all the sounds of life on a university campus. Smiles and I set off walking towards the Chapel, its tower lighted like a beacon in the night.
I didn't know exactly what I was there to find, but I knew I had to be there to find it. I figured if nothing else I might could catch a whiff of either my intruder or El Diablo. I’d first followed or found them there, hadn’t I? Doing so again didn’t seem so impossible. The crisp air of autumn is perfect for hunting: the scents that compete with prey are fewer and more easily distinguishable. Nobody ever mistook blood for decaying leaves or the warmth of life for the olfactory blade of a cold front somewhere high on the wind.
Smiles and I spent probably twenty or thirty minutes just meandering around between old stone buildings covered in carefully manicured ivy. Here and there we sidled past kids standing outside in old sweatshirts and jeans trying to smoke cigarettes and text at the same time. None of them spoke to me or even especially noticed me. Kids at that age are tremendously self-absorbed and to some degree I was relying on that. Eventually, the places with people in them – the dorms where fraternities with whole floors to themselves were throwing poorly-concealed keggers; the paved courts were a few kids were playing basketball in the middle of the night; the thin slices of asphalt perched over stretches of carelessly perfect forest – became the exceptions rather than the rule of my experience of campus.
I went to college, yes, but it was a different time and not a particularly happy one. I didn't like myself then and I liked everyone else even less. I had a few friends back home and fewer at school so I threw myself into my study of painting. I developed a little talent, enough that my maker noticed me, and that was that. I graduated and died almost immediately thereafter, and there I was.
The mortal life I’d had in that kind of place was jettisoned like a booster rocket: spent, useless. It was just so much dead weight holding me back from eternal night. These kids were just like the ones I had known in those days – my last days, in point of fact – in that they didn't pay me any mind and I didn’t want them to. I was just another pedestrian they probably couldn't even see in the darkness.
I loved it more than I can possibly tell you.
Soon enough our meanderings led Smiles and me to the edge of those Duke Gardens again – the ones through which I’d originally tracked the scent of the intruder – and in moonlight they were breathtakingly beautiful. There was a large pond and a bunch of graveled paths and trees from all over the world and all of it was just stunning when barely lighted. Everywhere the eye fell there was a huge flower that had closed for the night or another that had, in turn, opened. The whole place was lush and alive. Even as autumn approached and parts of it shed their leaves, confetti at the end of a riotous party, the place breathed vitality. I stopped short at the tree line because it would have felt almost... I don't know, I hate to say sacrilegious but that's the word that comes to mind, so I'll just say wrong; it would have felt wrong to go stomping out into the middle of it in my big black boots and leave prints all over everything.
I had a meditative few moments there, watching the gardens open up under the night sky, Smiles sniffing the ground around me, when I saw him: El Diablo was there, too, standing on the bright red Japanese-style arched bridge that spanned the pond in a back corner. It was a shielded little spot, shielded from view and perfect for reflection. I was probably two hundred yards away but I was sure it was El Diablo: that getup he had on was utterly unmistakable in any light.
He was sitting in the way we used to call “Indian style”: legs crossed in front of him, ankles tucked under, elbows resting on the blue sateen flames that climbed his legs. He was in the full uniform, just sitting there, looking at what I assumed was his own reflection in the surface of the pond. The uniform had seen better days. Far from the pristine state it was in when I watched him steal it, it now bore stains: dark brown on the knees, the shins, the elbows, the chest. Most were probably mud but the ones across the chest bore fingerprints and I was pretty sure I smelled blood. I wondered whose.
I slipped around the edge of the tree line, up onto a dark street, around a curve and back into the trees with Smiles gliding behind me in total silence. Three minutes of slow, purposeful creeping later I was back in the trees of the gardens but I was behind El Diablo and maybe twenty yards away. I moved down, balanced preternaturally on some small, smooth stones and tiptoed up to the end of the bridge. Then I stepped onto the first footstep at the end of it – he was in its dead center – and waited to see if he would notice me. Smiles, sensing my intention, moved through darkness to cut off the other end.
It did not escape me that we were trying a close variation on the tactic of the would-be muggers from earlier that night.
“I love this place,” El Diablo said. His voice was low and a little slurred: weirdly lazy, like he'd just awakened from a deep sleep. “Loved, I guess I should say.”
So: his hearing or his vision or both were way ahead of the average human being. Not good, but in some ways it made things easier. Sometimes we think of humans as just another kind of cattle, yes, but sometimes we remember the humans we used to be and we feel something like guilt. When we're dealing with something else in the world that qualifies as “weird,” the moral and ethical playing field is a lot more level. I had enough to think about from tonight already.
“It's a beautiful garden,” I said. Our voices were very quiet. An unlikely pedestrian on one of the streets nearby would never have heard us. “I'd never been here until the other night but I think I'll be back. It's a really special place.”
He was still staring at himself – cowl and all – in the lake surface. “I don't mean the garden,” he said. “I mean the school.”
“You phrased it in the past tense,” I said. I took another step onto the bridge, just easing up and then leaning my weight against the railing. “But here you are.”
“I'm only here in the immediate, physical sense. I'm just here to finish something. I used to be here...” He paused, and lifted his head to stare at the stars instead. “I used to come here to make things.”
“And now you come here to do what?” Another step. I wanted to get closer. I wanted to get close enough to close the gap between us before he could cry out. I was telling myself I didn’t know what I would do, but I knew: I would remove one of my concerns from the world. Sometimes we can’t help but think destroying a thing is the easiest way to cope with it. “Did you c
ome here to destroy things?”
He smiled, sort of: the corners of his mouth jumped around for a second, anyway, before he grew serious again. He started to turn his head towards me but then stopped for some reason. “Not things; people. Buildings. The school itself. You have no idea how I loved this place, and to think they did this to me?” His voice dropped. In a vampire that statement would have turned into a snarl. The monster inside is never very far away from us, never too distant to be heard. Something about him, about the way his social skills skittered and shuffled atop his interactions like a loose piece of paper with a roach underneath, told me he was much the same way.
“What did they do?” I took another step, then another, using the syllables of what I said to train his mind away from noticing by giving him a different sound pattern to focus on and identify. I still remember the time my maker said to me, when teaching me to hunt, that the tongue, like the pen, is also mightier than the sword: a well-said word with the former can hide the latter's unsheathing. “Did they hurt you? Did they do something to make you mad?”
“No, they said I was mad already.” He smiled again.
I took one more very casual step. I was fifteen feet away and I knew that with another two steps I could be on him so fast he wouldn't realize it himself before my teeth were in.
“They took everything away from me after that. So I'm going to take away everything of theirs. But do you know how hard that is?” He all of a sudden had the aspect of talking to just another one of the guys, griping over a beer about the boss and his girlfriend and the crazy neighbor downstairs. “I try and I try to think of something really bad I can do to them and it’s not that hard, but all those things? All those things make them into the victim and I can't have that. I'm just letting them win, then. No, I need to do something that will really tarnish them, something that will associate their icon with some great tragedy. I need to make people feel... uncomfortable when they think of this place. That would be... that would be nice.” He smiled again.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 10
