Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  “You do realize that, y’know, people realize you stole that outfit, right? I mean, nobody is going to see you do something terrible and think, 'Oh, sure, Duke did that.' On the news they talked about you stealing that outfit. The school is just desperate to have no association with you. It’s impossible to know you are out there doing your thing without also knowing Duke has nothing to do with it.”

  El Diablo turned his head and looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in town, like he couldn't believe he had been reduced to having to explain this to me. “There are highly complicated causal relationships that happen at a quantum level. It would be impossible to explain it to some outdated hillbilly like yourself but suffice to say, there's more to the idea of sympathetic relationships than you could possibly comprehend. Perhaps like affects like after all. ‘As above, so below’ may be more scientific maxim than mere cult catchphrase: they may influence one another exactly as the ritualists claim.”

  I had taken one of those two final steps while he spoke and I decided when our eyes met – when I realized he also knew what I was doing – that I didn't have time for the last one. There were a few milliseconds in there in which both our eyes narrowed. My heart squeezed like a withered fist, driving blood through my black veins, and time slurred to an abrupt crawl.

  Then I moved at him.

  My teeth came out and I leapt forward with all my weight behind me, hands out, ready to clap one palm over El Diablo’s mouth and plant the other in the middle of his chest to knock him back, neck exposed. As time slowed down for the attack I noticed with tremendous surprise that he was bringing up his right fist in what seemed, to me, to be real-time. He caught me square in the jaw and rolled as I spun into a heap in the spot where he had been. El Diablo was up in a flash and on his feet even as I was just starting to spring back up to mine. He was grinning, now, eyes little slits behind the cowl, perfectly normal human teeth bared just a bit. Smiles leapt from behind but El Diablo ducked smoothly, not even looking, and Smiles sailed overhead to land in a skitter behind me. The chainsaw motor in Smiles’ chest revved once as he turned around.

  “Sometimes, when I come here, I think maybe I should just give it all up,” he said to me before throwing a punch I easily dodged. Any mortal speaking to me now would sound like a single being played at LP speeds. El Diablo, though, sounded almost normal. He was moving almost as fast as I did. I answered with my own punch and saw it land. He still managed to roll with it enough to tumble onto his side and then back up with a swiftness and grace no human being could possess. “Then I run into someone who reminds me what this place is like. Nice fangs! I wouldn't have guessed The Bull’s Eye to be a vampire! That explains a lot!” Then he took off running towards the other end of the bridge and despite my vampiric reflexes and reaction times El Diablo was just ahead of Smiles and me the whole way.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Vampires aren’t even real!” Rule number one: never let the humans find out we exist.

  El Diablo didn't look back, but I could hear him: “Spare me,” he yelled. “I'd love to stay and chat, but I've got some calls to make.” He held up a cell phone, mashed a couple of buttons as he ran – we burst through the trees, onto a street, a car swerving with screeching tires and I just couldn't wait to hear this “witness report” on the news tomorrow night – and as the screen lit up LED-bright, phone dialing, he tossed the little device up into the air in a perfect arc such that it came back down just as I ran under it. I palmed the little device and dropped it into one of my own pockets.

  “Maybe you should call the police,” he cried out, his voice full. He wasn’t out of breath. He was gleeful. “I hear they'd love to talk to you!”

  The phone's light went off in my pocket as the call disconnected or gave up and I heard a massive explosion in the distance, then another, then a third. I stopped short at the sight of that lighted chapel tower, from the cathedral on campus, as a huge stained glass window in its steeple erupted outwards as though it had been punched by a giant fist made of fire.

  That second of me slowing down was all El Diablo needed to make his escape. I stared at the place where the tower had been for just a moment or two, and when I looked around he was gone. Smiles had skidded to a stop ten feet ahead of me, trained to stick to me rather than prey unless I told him otherwise. I could hear footfalls pounding away but they echoed off the trees and the buildings, woven between car alarms going off from the explosions. I could hear people screaming somewhere far away. In all that noise I couldn't have chased that kid if I'd had two hearing aids and a head start.

  Now what exactly had he meant by vampires' existence explaining a lot?

  Cops and fire trucks were headed for the sites of the explosions as fast as you could say 9-1-1, so I took off at a run. Mostly people were running towards the explosions, which was roughly in the same direction as my car, and that was good for me in terms of maintaining something like discretion. Witnesses usually identify bombing perpetrators as the one person running away from the explosions they set off. I had no desire to stick out in anyone's memory for that same reason.

  I ran alongside a few people: scared kids who wanted to see what had happened and a guy who was wearing boxer shorts, flip-flops, no shirt and an over-sized camera of some sort on a strap around his neck. He started taking pictures as soon as we rounded the corner of Perkins Library and the chapel emerged fully into view. We all kept running across a paved driveway onto a narrow street about fifty yards from the front of the chapel, right up almost to the edge of the debris field.

  The stained glass from the steeple was a heap of rubble and saber-sized shards of glass on the lawn in front of the huge wooden doors of the entrance. Pulverized grit wafted in the air like smoke. The explosives up there had been no joke. They had blown the top of the tower off so hard the shockwave had turned to powder some portion of the century-old mortar holding the windows in place. There was a column of smoke coming out of the gaping wounds in the front of the tower where the windows had once been and a few stones and gargoyles teetered dangerously. We all skidded to a stop and the kid brought his camera up.

  “I'm with the Chronicle,” he panted as he started grabbing photos. I recognized it as the school newspaper. “Did anybody see what happened?”

  The couple of dozen college kids standing around me all started doing one or both of two things: talking and taking video of the scene with their phones. They spread out in a wide arc around the shattered debris, taking photo upon photo even as the structure above us groaned audibly as though it might not quite have made up its mind on the question of falling down altogether. Then one of them, looking right at me, said aloud, “Are you The Bull’s Eye?”

  I looked down: still with the black coat and the dark colors head to toe. It’s what I get for having wanted so badly to be a beatnik back in the day. Then I looked back up. The longer I stayed, the more chance they had to take my photo. I couldn’t start killing them, obviously. Taking out two dozen sleep-deprived coeds wouldn’t be a problem but then I’d have to deal with their phones and the camera of the Journalism major and one of them might, I dunno, tweet something while I did for the one next to them: “ACK VAMPIRE KILLING ME”. There wasn’t even any point to sticking around denying it. That would just be more face-time someone could post to YouTube to screw me over good and hard.

  “I…” I drawled it out, long and low, then simply turned and took off running.

  Smiles and I ran back through woods to emerge downtown on the other side of campus. We stepped into a bar that should only have been open another hour but had a bunch of television sets tuned to soccer games in the UK. There were a few guys sitting around watching the matches, wearing actual English football jerseys.

  “Mind turning on the news?” I was addressing the bartender, who watched himself polish a glass instead of one of the games. “Something just happened over at the school.”

  He nodded towards a back room. “There's another TV in there. Go for i
t.” It was a tiny space with some tables crammed into it, no one at any of them. I could smell that once upon a time the outer room had been for smoking and this had been for non. There was a TV mounted in a corner, tuned to some classic sports channel that was showing a bowling tournament from the 1970's. I reached up and mashed the buttons on the front until I got it over to a real channel, one of the local ones that had interrupted the late night talk shows with a news bulletin. Two bombs had gone off in the tower of the chapel but a third had also been set in the basement of the Divinity School next door. The lowest floor of the building had basically been blown out from underneath itself, causing the whole thing to collapse. To do that with just three bombs – to cleanly eject massive windows framed in stone and mortar and then collapse a building next door – took real skill. It took somebody with brains and, usually, a lot of experience. Duke had managed to piss someone off real bad and that person was really, really smart. El Diablo had also said the words, “as above, so below,” a phrase I had heard before.

  “Students on the scene are also reporting the event may have involved Durham’s homegrown vigilante, the so-called ‘Bull’s Eye’. We’re receiving reporting he was an overweight Caucasian male, a description which does not match some earlier reports. Copyrights or fashion trend? More analysis when we come back.”

  That was that: I had to find The Bull’s Eye and I had to find El Diablo and I had to put them on each other’s trail. The things El Diablo had said to me tonight at least gave me somewhere to start.

  8

  The Bull’s Eye had not seen the pleas by the police or the district attorney’s office that she turn herself in and testify. Neither had she seen the station’s discussion of whether The Bull’s Eye had been misidentified in earlier reports; if she was merely one of many; or if she had simply inspired incompetent copycats. She didn't watch the news much anymore. She had patrols to do.

  After the bombs went off she wondered if she had to be drastically more careful on the streets. Stopping a few muggings wasn’t so bad in comparison, she knew, and her appearance was sufficiently low-profile and forgettable she didn’t much need to worry about being spotted from a distance, but police patrols were up all over the part of town where Duke and those affiliated with it tended to congregate. It had not taken very many nights to realize the parts of town she favored – the dilapidated former middle class enclaves populated by less-well-off children and grandchildren of people who’d worked to make things by their own hands – were not important enough in the eyes of the law to warrant a lot of extra attention. If anything, she saw fewer cops now than she had before. They were all too busy staring at Duke’s campus waiting for shrapnel to fly out of something.

  This simply made her life easier. She wasn’t exactly grateful for it, but she took both notice and advantage of the change in temperature on the streets. So did everyone else.

  The Bull’s Eye was on patrol again, as she was almost every night, but this night she had made sure to head back by The House to see if there was anything going on. Over several days she had approached more kids in that neighborhood and been able to track down confirmation that the strange visitor, on nights he visited, arrived around one in the morning. Now The Bull’s Eye dressed warmly and went out on patrol and when she got to that house she kept going for a block before cutting across the street and up a string of old oaks to take up a position behind the largest one.

  The strange visitor came from the same direction every night, she had been told, so she put the house between her and that end of the block. People were usually a lot more afraid of being followed than they were of being anticipated. Many times in her career, and in many places, The Bull’s Eye had used that to her advantage when choosing an observation post.

  She settled in, arms around herself, and waited for one o'clock to arrive. She decided if no one showed up by two o’clock she would leave. Sixty minutes was a long time to stand behind a tree and wait for something to happen, but she’d waited longer in less pleasant places. Last call was a pretty popular time for petty crime, too, but she could give up the hour before it to see what was going on in that house.

  At five minutes past one, The Bull’s Eye felt a cold tingle slither up her spine. She had learned to trust her intuition in dangerous situations. She knew that he – the neighborhood’s bogeyman – had arrived and the local kids had not lied to her.

  The Bull’s Eye eased out from the very center of the tree she'd used as cover just a quarter of an inch at a time. Very slowly, with her cap on backwards to keep her hair from falling over her face and to keep her hat's brim from being the first thing anyone saw, she moved enough to let one eye see around the edge of the tree's trunk. A block and a half or two away, walking down the middle of the street – just as the kids had said – she saw a middle-aged man in a shirt and tie and dark pants. He was wearing a coat or a parka of some sort, but she couldn't make out more than that in the dim light and at that distance.

  The guy didn't seem to notice her. He didn't seem to notice anything. He was just walking along, hands in the pockets of his trousers, though he did once – just once – stop in his tracks and turn his head. He shifted his gaze up and to the side towards a house with no lights in any windows.

  The Bull’s Eye saw a curtain jerk shut in a hurry. Good God, she thought to herself, It's like he really can tell when they look at him.

  That was enough to make The Bull’s Eye pull back so she wasn't looking directly at him anymore. She figured if his peripheral vision were that good she wasn't going to risk it. Instead she leaned around the other edge of the tree so that she could see the front door and porch of The House.

  The Bull’s Eye heard footsteps in the street turn into footsteps on a different surface: the sidewalk in front of their house. A few seconds later the man took two jaunting steps up onto the porch. He walked with absolute confidence and certainty. Like he owns the place, The Bull’s Eye thought to herself, and then she made a mental note to spend some time looking into that later. From here she could see him better: nominally Caucasian but of the same statistical-average muddled features as every other Southern “white” guy who probably had a little of everything in his background. His shoes were dress shoes but in the comfortable, versatile style of all-purpose black shoes from the same sorts of chain stores where she had bought her own patrol uniform. A person working in an office could easily get away with them; a person working retail on their feet would need them to survive. No rings, no obvious signs of privilege other than the jacket... and dark sunglasses, even here, even at night.

  He paused for a moment as though he might have seen something. The Bull’s Eye stayed where she was, knowing if he had noticed her in his peripheral vision that her movement to hide would give her away more quickly than staying stock still and blending into the landscape. He never moved to turn towards her but in an odd way she felt him almost notice her, like the sweep of a radar arm on an animated display in a movie. The Bull’s Eye wondered if she were simply jumpy from the stories the kids had told her. They had all been convinced he did terrible and impossible things. They told her stories straight out of science fiction, tales recognizable as variations on the sorts of urban legends the Internet ginned up out of nowhere.

  Some of the kids had told The Bull’s Eye they knew what really happened. Like the passwords and handshakes of their grandfathers’ fraternal orders, they swore her to secrecy before hesitantly spilling the impossible beans: overnight disappearances, kids replaced by robots, that sort of stuff. She didn’t doubt terrible things happened to the occasional kid. It was a neighborhood where as many families were on their way down as on their way up; where unknown numbers of families might be $20 from disaster at any given time. The lore a group of children weave together, whether here in suburbia or in a village in Afghanistan, becomes the mythology they use to encode the adult world around them.

  A few seconds passed, then a few more, but the guy on the porch didn’t do anything to acknowl
edge or act on that wave of awareness The Bull’s Eye had felt – no, imagined – passing over her. The door to the house opened. The man stepped inside with the relaxed posture of familiarity; the door closed behind him; and the street was again exactly as it had been two minutes before.

  The Bull’s Eye realized she had been holding her breath.

  She gave the guys inside thirty seconds to do any peeking out the blinds they might want to do before they all got settled in to complete whatever illicit deal he was there to make. After counting that half-minute off under her breath she slipped out from behind the tree and around a house three doors down from them, then into that house's back yard. From there she could close on The House from the rear, at an angle, unlikely to be detected by the occupants. If they watched a lot of TV, they would keep peeking out the front. If they were clever they’d look out the sides, too. Either way, they wouldn’t see her approach.

  A minute and a half later, The Bull’s Eye had crept forward on rolled steps and gentle balance and was molded against the corner of The House. There was dim light coming from the front and she crouched to slide past some dark windows to get there. She’d noticed a tiny gap at the bottom when she’d been here before and they probably didn’t expect anyone ever to walk up and simply look in.

  The thing she kept realizing, at every turn, was how unaccustomed people in this country were to thinking about risk. Sometimes they made it too easy.

  The Bull’s Eye drew two deep breaths, counted to five and then raised herself to a crouch in one smooth movement, peeking in that tiny gap. In the living room she saw one of the twins – the more sallow one – sitting in front of the television. A white guy in a suit was cracking jokes on the screen, smiling real big, and she imagined the audience was eating it up as noisily as they possibly could. The kid wasn't watching. He had his hands in his face and the knuckles were wet with tears. He was sobbing, trying to stay silent, his whole body clenched like a fist as he was wracked with ragged breaths he was trying to smother.