I went back to fiddling with my fingernails and a file. A corpse’s nails don’t really grow, but a vampire’s do. I’ve always wondered why. “Okay,” I said. “You’re not ready to talk about it. Let’s go back to El Diablo. It's my understanding a big school pisses people off all the time.”
“So do medium-sized schools, and little ones.” Jennifer tried not to sound bitter as she said it, stepping onto the balcony to join us with Roderick right behind her. I felt a pang of sympathy: I liked Jennifer. I hadn’t seen her in a long while but had thought about her plenty of times. She was the friend I hadn’t allowed to happen. Now that Roderick had me pointed in the direction of being more sociable I wished I had. On the other hand, smart humans who like to solve puzzles are just about the worst possible choice to be a vampire’s pal.
Roderick dug around in the pockets of his white pleather jacket for a stick of gum. I was trying to teach him to be a little more normal and an obsession with a particular flavor of gum seemed harmless enough. “There can’t be many young, athletic, good-looking physicists with a chip on their superhuman shoulder,” he said.
I nodded. “He thinks Duke ruined him. If they cut his funding or something he could take his work elsewhere and keep going but he isn’t trying to do that. Either he lost everything or he thinks he did.”
“Something big enough to destroy him would wind up in the paper,” Jennifer said. “Or it would be completely covered up and forgotten.” She cleared her throat. “Or both: a cover story in the paper while the real deal is buried.”
I thought again of Jennifer’s experience with the Steeplechasers: saving her school from the walking dead only to be fired for it. Everything had been swept under the rug. The world knew the dead had walked – for one night, in just a few places – but it had been denied the stories of at least one real hero.
I tried to keep us on-task. “Since then, he’s turned into something smarter, faster and stronger than humans and he thinks he has nothing left to lose.”
The Bull’s Eye pursed her lips just a little. “You don’t think of yourself as human.” It was an observation, not a question.
“No. I don't,” I admitted. It bothered me to hear Roderick say ‘them’ but the truth was I hadn’t thought of myself as one of them in a very long time. “I think of myself as being among humans, and I try to live that way, to stay connected. Retreating into a walled off existence is a recipe for winding up an insane anachronism who sees people as nothing more than cattle.” I favored Roderick with a quick glance and he gave me the most fleeting of encouraging smiles. Gods, but the irony was almost too much to bear, being schooled by Roderick on how to make friends. I looked back at The Bull’s Eye. “But I am not one of you and I never will be.”
The Bull’s Eye coiled up the corners of her mouth for a second but didn’t say anything. It felt dismissive, but I didn’t have time to say anything.
Jennifer cocked one eyebrow at me. “You don’t believe in walling yourself off?”
I sighed a little. “I…” I wasn’t sure how to apologize.
She saw it coming and shook her head. “C’est la guerre.”
Both The Bull’s Eye and I looked intrigued by that remark, and Roderick looked as passive as a clock’s face. I narrowed my eyes. I wanted very badly to know what they had been discussing while they were inside.
Jennifer went on. “We all lose people, one way or another. No hard feelings.”
I thought of the boyfriend she told me about, the guy who’d drifted off as she became more and more obsessed with the zombies she’d had to fight in a tiny town. I nodded and turned back to The Bull’s Eye. “I think you know what it feels like to be outside looking in,” I said. “And you know what Jennifer’s talking about, too. You were in the military. Bad stuff happened. You saw too much, or knew too much, or something along those lines. Now you're back home and you do this. Why? Because you don't feel like you're one of them, either.” I gestured out at the night, at the trees, at the unseen suburban houses full of hidden sleeping souls. “It explains how you were able to get into a tussle with a vampire and survive. You’re good at this stuff, so it’s what you do.” I pointed up and down, at the costume, at the stance, at everything, “Maybe it's your job, maybe you're bored, maybe you want revenge for something. I don’t know, but my money says a little of all three.”
“I'm here and I have skills. I choose to use them. That's what matters.” The Bull’s Eye didn’t quite look at me.
“You don't like long conversation. Me, I can talk all night long. I've got nothing but time. You’re not so big on frittering it away like that. The only time you get so distracted you start forming complex sentences is when you're thinking about a problem that needs to be solved.”
Jennifer cleared her throat softly. She thought it was time for me to leave it be, but I’ve always been terrible at that. I kept addressing The Bull’s Eye. “You retreat into terse fragments when you're confronted with yourself, your history. My kind are good at finding weak spots in the armor. If you find yourself facing off again with the vampire you met before, keep that in mind. Don't let him talk. Don't look him in the eye. Just hurt him. Don’t let him draw you into anything more complicated than that. Don’t let him position you, physically or psychologically. We are like spiders with elaborate webs.” I drew a breath. “We capture people so we can drain them; and we love it when our designs are so clever the prey gets hurt. You’ve earned better than that.”
There was a long moment of silence. I glanced at Roderick and his eyes shined over a strange smile.
The Bull’s Eye looked down as she spoke. “He wasn't interested in talking.” She bit down on the memory and found it bitter. I knew the look of someone who'd stared death in the eye: I’d seen it on Jennifer’s face one Thanksgiving night some number of years ago. To my surprise, The Bull’s Eye told us the story at last. I thought I’d probably pushed too hard, but I hadn’t been able to stop.
When The Bull’s Eye finished, I fluttered my lips. “He might be chattier next time. You got lucky.”
“Yeah.”
Jennifer hadn’t reacted at all: she’d heard it before. Somewhat to my surprise, Roderick was absolutely still. His eyes were on The Bull’s Eye and he was listening like his life depended on it.
“It sounds to me,” I said, trying to move away from the attack on her, “Like he's farming these twins. The rare human who's really turned on by being fed on is also usually pretty ashamed. I mean, they're basically being molested, right? There's a serious power differential going on and that, plus intimacy of some sort, usually means someone is being used.” My own voice caught as I thought of that guy from Power Company, the one I’d left passed out in the bathroom. I was sure he had a name, but damned if I could remember it now. At least I hadn’t taken over his life. He would remember me as nothing more than some guy who made out with him at the club. I wasn’t going to show up night after night until his mind cracked like a raw egg from the pressure of all the hoodoo and abuse. That had to mean something, right? And anyway, a guy’s got to eat. “It certainly sounds like one of them enjoys some aspects of it.”
The Bull’s Eye looked surprised and a little revolted and a little not-so-surprised-after-all. “Humans – we – get off on it sometimes?”
I hesitated. “Not commonly, but there are definitely humans who get into it. They like being so thoroughly dominated and, I don’t know, owned by someone else. It's a form of retreat, a way of giving up and letting someone else do all the thinking for a while. It's what they have in common with drunks and religious fundamentalists and people with multiple personalities: with anybody else who finds a hole to climb inside and pull shut after them.” I waved a hand around. “Some vampires have a few regulars, sure, but nobody in his right mind would feed off of the same person or two all the time. I mean, eventually someone notices that kind of thing. The kids in your neighborhood, for instance.”
“It's not really my neighborhood, it's just one I pat
rol.”
“Then it's yours,” I said. “Ownership is more than paperwork.”
The Bull’s Eye dismissed that with a gesture. She was not interested in entertaining the notion she asserted stewardship over anyone. It too easily resembled the sort of uninvited dominion the interloper had claimed over the twins. “So what do I do about them?”
I shook my head. “You don't do squat. It’s my job. If I can’t do it, someone else should be the boss anyway.”
The Bull’s Eye smirked a little. “How old are you?”
“Ninety, give or take.” I chuckled. I wondered why I’d answered so honestly.
“Crosses? Holy water?”
It was my turn to twist up the corners of my mouth. “I brush my teeth in it every night.”
She laughed once, high and sharp and honest.
“So we’re a team now.” Jennifer stood a little straighter as she spoke, dragging us back on-task. “There’s a lot going on: stuff you don’t know about. Stuff is happening out in the countryside, out on the coast, all over the place. Vampires are popping up in places they aren’t supposed to be. They’re in places the Bobs thought were clean and so you think are clean.”
I turned my head slowly and blinked. “How do you know about the Bobs?” I didn’t even consider asking about all the other things she had just said. I have spent years, ever since, wondering why I did not.
“I do my research.” Jennifer shrugged a little. “That’s all I can say.”
I turned my gaze to Roderick.
“Oh, Cousin,” he sighed. “They’re dead. It doesn’t hurt to tell her just the teensy-tiniest bit, does it? We have to work together. Trust me on this. She had just about everything figured out already anyway.”
I narrowed my eyes. “No. This team thing is not happening. I’ll go to the ballet with my…” I waved both hands around for a second. “Friends? Sure, why not? I’ll go to the ballet with my friends, but we are not a team. I am not on any team. This is my problem and I am fixing it. El Diablo is your problem and you are fixing it.” Suddenly the whole notion of having worked with anyone else on this seemed stupid: stupidly idealistic, stupidly shortsighted, stupidly useless. It seemed a hindrance more than a help.
“Delta Force.” The Bull’s Eye blurted it out. “So was my husband. That's how Delta Force works a lot of the time.”
I paused and looked at her. We all waited for her to go on.
“When your spouse dies, in Delta Force, they let you go. They cut me loose: pension, honorable discharge, cover story, the usual, but all the handshakes and memorial flags in the world can’t make that life come back.”
I wondered if she meant her husband’s life or her own.
She finished simply: “I couldn't find much of a job so I made one.”
“This economy can't be easy to come home to,” Jennifer said.
The Bull’s Eye shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Less than the span of memory.” Jennifer met her eyes and nodded. Some kinship of common experience – as women, as victims, as those burdened with survivor’s guilt – passed between them and I knew I would never understand it.
The Bull’s Eye considered things for a moment. “Life's a bitch.” She turned to me again. “You don’t have a choice, Withrow.”
“I always have a choice.”
“Okay,” she said, shrugging at me with a little exasperation. “You have a choice: we do this together or you’re not involved.”
I glanced at Roderick and he offered no help. I twisted up my mouth in obvious bitterness, but as I did so I ran through all the scenarios in my head and they all boiled down to my cousin working with a bunch of people – to whom he referred as them, for gods’ sakes – while I ran around duplicating some small portion of their efforts and getting nowhere. I hated this, hated having my hands tied, hated feeling like I was again being told what to do in my own town by someone who hadn’t earned the right, but I didn’t immediately see a way out of it. I finally nodded. “Fine. We’re a team.” I held up a finger. “For this one thing, this one time.”
“Good.” The Bull’s Eye stood away from the balcony railing. “Let’s go find out if these magic computer guys can help us or not.”
We all walked downstairs to the main floor and came around into the living room. Sheila, Ramon, Chang, Xi and Dan were sitting with laptops open; Bob was watching Craig Ferguson do his opening routine. “Hey, guys,” he said, like we were the other four housemates who were there all the time. I blinked, looked at The Bull’s Eye, shrugged.
“Bob,” Jennifer said, “Can you tell us about any physicists Duke might have pissed off recently?”
Bob paused the playback and looked at us. He rubbed his eyes. “Lots of them,” he said. We waited for him to elaborate, and eventually he made a little “o” with his mouth and realized we were all ears. “They had some major cuts in their Physics department at the beginning of the semester. Something about misappropriated funds or something.”
“It was a cover for a scandal,” Dan drawled. He didn't bother to look up from his laptop. “They caught a physics student working on a project involving human subjects but it wasn't approved and blah blah blah.” Dan waved a hand around. “So he got booted.”
“Can you tell us his name?”
Dan thought for a second, then went back to typing. “Sure. They said his name in the papers, but that's boring. Let me crack the Duke HR file server. It should just take a second.”
“Wait,” Xi said, holding up a hand. “We should take this as an opportunity to say our invocations.”
Bob paused the TV, Chang looked up, Ramon continued to stare intently at the screen. Sheila tossed something at him – a hacky sack, it looked like – and he started and looked around.
“Invocations!” Ramon sounded like someone had caught him sleeping in church. “Right! I'll go get the glow sticks.”
They ringed up in a circle around Dan as he typed, chanting what at first didn't really resolve as language for me but I eventually realized was mystical verse in computer speak:
10 WE CALL ON THE GUARDIANS OF THE WATCHTOWERS
20 WE CALL ON THE EAST, INTELLECT
30 WE CALL ON THE SOUTH, PASSION
40 WE CALL ON THE WEST, NURTURING CARE
50 WE CALL ON THE NORTH, GOOD JUDGEMENT
60 WE CALL ON THE GODS AND GODDESSES OF MIND AND OF WILL
70 WE CALL MERCURY, WHO ESTABLISHES THE SESSION
80 WE CALL KOIOS, THE QUERANT, THE INQUISITIVE MIND
90 WE CALL ATHENA, GREATEST OF INTELLECTS
100 WE CALL THOTH, WISE MEDIATOR
110 WE CALL SET, PROTECTOR OF MYSTERIES
120 GOTO 10, THE CIRCLE IS CAST
They chanted this in unison, three times, each of them calling one of the gods and snapping his glow stick so that it gave off a weird, neon light then passing the sticks to the left, clockwise, as they did second and third iterations. Then the four who formed the circle around Dan closed their eyes and started producing a low, continuous hum as he hunched over the laptop and typed.
“That's not even valid BASIC.” Jennifer looked a little offended.
“Maybe not for computers,” I whispered, “But for the universe?”
Five minutes later, paper came gliding out of one of the printers in the dining room. I walked over and took it out, looked at the driver’s-license-esque photo and then nodded. “Yep, that's him. Joffrey Hammerton IV. Joffrey.” I slowly sounded it out. “Christ. He might as well be named Cracker McFoxHunt. No wonder he’s an asshole.”
The Bull’s Eye cocked one eyebrow at me. “This from a white guy named ‘Withrow’?”
I frowned. “Which one first? El Diablo or the vampire?”
“The vampire?” Dan squeaked in surprise.
“The vampire.” The Bull’s Eye said it, nodding at me. “I owe him one.”
Jennifer agreed.
Roderick nodded. “He is my primary concern. Anything else is a bonus.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “The vampire.”
12
Fight shopping is the best kind of shopping in the whole wide world.
The night after we had met with the technopagans I found myself wandering the aisles of an ÜberBargains out on the edge of town. It was part of a solid three miles of strip malls and cheap apartments running between downtown and suburbia like a defensive trench. Smiles was with me, his Service Animal In Training vest around his mid-section. A kid at the front of the store tried to pet him but I shooed it off with a growl. Hellhounds are not play-toys for curious tweens.
When I told the others I would pick up a few things useful against vampires, Jennifer offered to come with me to use her employee discount. I forbade it. I wasn’t ready to manufacture chitchat like nothing ever happened and I wasn’t ready to talk about the things that had. I wondered if that’s what it’s like in families or between friends after they’re driven apart by one thing or another only to meet again after the fact: uncomfortable silences crowding in with all the other elephants in the room.
I was dressed in anonymous blacks and grays, my trusty trench coat on despite the stifling heat of the store. The high ceilings and open floor plans make them impossible to climate-control evenly. The store always cranks up the thermostat and hopes for the best. One will be a meat locker and the next a barbecue. That night the ÜberBargains down from Southland Mall & Multiplex was turned precisely to Self-Basting Slow-Roasted. I kept the coat on anyway because I don’t see much point in living forever if I can’t do it in the wardrobe of my choice. If Roderick could spend eternity balanced on the knife’s edge between plastic-clad go-go boy and off-hours drag queen I could sure as hell spend it looking like a goth beatnik.
Times like that – prepping to deal with gods-knew-what from a vampire and a self-declared supervillain – always make me wish I knew a more reliable arms dealer. The Internet can get you anything, sure, but it can’t beat browsing a store with real shelves and letting inspiration strike. I bought all kinds of things when I went up against Bob in the ‘90s but I spent the better part of two years prepping and I got it all face-to-face or through a handful of trusted middlemen. I have yet to find the weapon equivalent of Amazon. Roderick has gotten me as far as using email and a few websites but I know a lot more happens in the Internet’s darkest corners than I can imagine or usefully find.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 17
