Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  “It's... well, it's hard to explain. I've been mucking around in these kids' heads and something isn't right in there, something beyond the obvious 'no shit, Sherlock' kind of stuff they've got going on.” I drew a breath. “Whenever we fiddle with someone's mind, it's like...” I was grasping at straws. I’d never had to explain this to anyone. Vampires who can do it just know, like a baby knows crying. “It's like trying to mash the buttons on an ATM that's buried a foot deep in oatmeal. No, it's not that simple. It's like trying to work a light switch under a foot of oatmeal. We kind of have to dip into this weird place, stick our hand in, feel around in a hurry, flick the switch the right way and go. There isn't a lot of time to look around and take notice, but that's okay because more immediate memories are the things we're usually trying to block – don't look at me like that, the truth is the truth – and they’re new and firm and fresh. They're right there on top. They're as distinguishable from their surroundings as the metal faceplate of an electrical switch is from oatmeal.”

  The Bull’s Eye didn't say anything for a moment, so I started to take another breath before she cut me off. “If you ever do that to me I'll kill you.”

  “I have no doubt of that. Wouldn't dream of it, scout's honor.”

  “You were not a boy scout.”

  “You're right, but I am absolutely sincere.”

  She considered for a moment then said, “Go on.”

  “So, these kids? The...” I searched around. “The faceplates are falling apart and the oatmeal is going bad.” I worked my jaw and then finally said, “It's not this Dmitri guy fucking with them, either. I know what it feels like when a human mind has been rearranged too many times by one of us. It starts to go sort of blank and smooth. It's hard to describe, but it's not this. These feel like it feels when dementia is setting in. If I were doing this blind, I’d say they were late-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Everything sort of starts to turn into undifferentiated mush.” I shrugged at her. “I'm sorry, I don't have a metaphor. It would be like trying to explain how to hear sounds. Just trust me, we know this stuff – I know this stuff – and there's something bad wrong with these kids’ brains.”

  “Is it going to get worse?”

  “I have no idea. I’m sure as hell no neurosurgeon.” I sighed a little. “I should put that on my door: Withrow, comma, No Neurosurgeon For Nearly One Hundred Years.” I smiled. She didn't.

  “Duly noted,” she said, “And now, for the attack plan?”

  “I figure we’re in the living room, you behind the door, me just inside it? He walks up, smells me and bursts in – or he doesn’t, and he just rings the doorbell – and in either case we attack as soon as he’s inside. Jennifer and Roderick come in with the hounds.”

  She made a snorfle noise, exhaling something that was half laugh and half sigh of pity. “No. I take a position in the trees outside, high up, so he won't notice me. You take a position in a back bedroom. If he can detect you, don’t let him detect you on the other side of the door. The kids are in the kitchen. We leave the door unlocked. He will knock, get no answer, get curious and come inside.”

  “That would make me too wary. I think I'd just leave.”

  “You don't feel a sense of ownership over both the place and its occupants.” She waved a finger, instructive in tone and body language. “He'll be wary, but he'll be lured inside. I begin my approach to the house, blocking his retreat. You attack from the front, I attack from the rear, and Jennifer and Roderick come in from either side. We box him in, flanked on all sides, easy takedown.”

  I said I liked it. She didn't smile in reply, but she did say, in a sharp way that made me think she was pissed at me until I realized it's probably how she said it in the service, “Thanks.”

  “If we do that, it's going to be easier for you to stake him,” I said. She blinked at me, but I went on. “If you're coming at him from behind, he's got fewer ways to stop you. He can't grab it and aim it away or take it in the shoulder or something.”

  “We have to... like, with a wooden stake?”

  “Then we finish him off.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “The rest of us are going to beat the hell out of him to distract him, at first, but as soon as he's got the stake in him it's easy: I drain him of everything he's got.”

  “Cannibalism?”

  “Self-defense.” I left off that it would also be a form of research. “We tend to be our own best auto-immune system,” I said. “Let us kill our own the way we know works.”

  She thought about that for a second before nodding, but her expression said she hated having to accept that. “Will it traumatize the boys?”

  I waved that off. “Nah. Once he’s dead his hold over them will break.” In truth I expected it to be rougher than that made it sound, but now was not the time for unkind eventualities.

  The great danger we present to ourselves – vampires, I mean – is that we are creatures of habit. I'm sure Dmitri was wary for a night or two after his first run-in with The Bull’s Eye but he probably got comfortable again as soon as Scott creamed his shorts on command. People fall back into bad habits like they’re getting paid time and a half. The worse the habit, the easier it is to backslide.

  Around one in the morning, Scott and Adam started moaning, low, from the kitchen. Thirty minutes later, they cried out in wordless agony: so much for subtlety. Their master had arrived.

  Dmitri strolled right up the gate – hidden in a back room, I could hear him on the front steps – and even though he stopped at the door and sniffed audibly, he walked inside. He didn't bother with the doorbell, and I had figured he wouldn't. He could smell me, and he knew the jig was up.

  Dmitri was confident enough to stroll inside with his hands in his pockets. “I know you are here,” he called out.

  I decided to match his casual stance, emerging from the bedroom slinging a yo-yo up and down its string, casual as the cat in a canary store.

  Scott and Adam stopped wailing and started grunting like pigs in a field full of truffles.

  “I smelled you a block away,” Dmitri said. His voice was gravelly. He was pissed. He sounded like in life maybe he'd hit the whiskey and the smokes a little too hard, but it was emphasized by his emotional state. I was the intruder, now, and who the fuck was I, anyway? I could read all that, right on the surface, right away. Hell, that was probably half of why the kids up and down the street had noticed him at all: not a lot of sheet-white guys walked down their street acting like they owned the place.

  I am also a creature of habit, which meant there were formalities to observe. I had to give him one chance. I spoke, and as I did I could see The Bull’s Eye drop from a tree in the front yard in utter silence. I didn't hear her at all, so there was a decent chance Dmitri didn't, either. “My name is Withrow Surrett,” I said, voice even and quiet. “I am the boss of these parts, and you've been here for a year without identifying yourself to me. I consider that a crime in my territory. Are you willing to submit to my authority and the behavioral requirements that come with it?”

  He smiled. I could see only a silhouette of his face but from the movement of one cheek muscle I could tell he had, more accurately, sneered. He seemed to be dressed in a collared shirt and jeans and loafers. No jacket, and it was getting cold enough as time hurtled towards Halloween that he was pushing his luck just by being visibly unusual. I hated things like that, the little stuff stupid vampires do when they think what they want is to get noticed so they can blow off some steam killing whoever asks too many questions.

  “I'll take that as a no,” I said. “Go!”

  Time slowed to a crawl, like everything had just dived into a bowl of gelatin, and Jennifer and Roderick burst out of the rooms on either side as Dmitri and I met in the middle. I could see The Bull’s Eye bounding up the front walk with the sharpened tip of a broom handle in her hands like a javelin thrower in an instant replay. I guessed she was four steps away from being broom handle length from Dmitr
i, and at the speed he, Roderick and I were moving it would take me, everything we had to keep Dmitri busy that long.

  Jennifer and Roderick came in swinging, her fists angling in slow motion, as did Roderick’s. Dmitri dodged it effortlessly, but he didn’t realize Roderick was feigning. His other hand came up at proper vampire speed to slam home an upper-cut and shove Dmitri back into the path of Jennifer’s thrown punch. I saw pain on their faces as the blows landed, which is to be expected. Punching someone really does hurt if you don't do it just right. I twisted on one foot, the other coming up to plant a boot heel sharply in Dmitri's stomach. That was supposed to knock his feet out from under him but just like Scott he was too strong for me. Each arm shot straight out by his sides to hammer Jennifer and Roderick in the chest and then he grabbed my foot and twisted so that I was lifted into the air and spun like a tree trunk at a log roll.

  I went up, bounced off the ceiling and came back down on my face. I didn't let myself take a moment to hesitate, though, rolling against the momentum so that I spun backwards across the floor. Dmitri's boot came down where I would have been if I'd just let physics splay me out on the ground. I bounced up and dove, hands out, but he slapped my hands away much more easily than I would have expected. Jennifer was flying back against the end of the couch and Roderick was trying to recover from the punch to the sternum he’d taken. I stepped around to where Jennifer had been and drove my elbow hard into Dmitri’s shoulder as Roderick, bounded forward, dropped to one knee and planted a fist in Dmitri’s opposite hip. That was enough to knock the bastard sideways and tip him so I swung around to bring up a knee under the side of his head. He rebounded and Roderick gave everything he had to stand again in time to bring a knee of his own under the other side of Dmitri’s head.

  Ultimately, that's what vampire fights come down to: trying to addle the other one so hard you get time to debilitate him in some more permanent fashion.

  The Bull’s Eye had made it one and a half running steps closer to us by that point, so I raised my fist and brought it down on Dmitri's nose, as hard as I could, before he had a chance to get his balance back. It hurt me like hell but blood shot out from the middle of Dmitri's face and my fangs dropped as a reflex action. I raised my first again and brought it down again to the sound of a sick wet crunch. More blood, but all over my hand this time. Roderick joined in, kicking Dmitri in the gut over and over as I punched him five more times.

  Jennifer had bounced off the end of the couch in slow motion and with human gracelessness rebounded towards us, hands out. She wasn’t moving fast and she wasn’t accustomed to precision work when it came to fist fights but she was able to get her hands in Dmitri’s face, jabbing at his eyes and clawing at his skin. I tried to say something, to warn her, but I couldn’t get the words out slowly enough for a human to understand. Dmitri’s fangs tore into her flesh and blood arced out in bright crimson: across his face, across the floor, but luckily also into his eyes.

  Jennifer, moving at a molasses pace, bore a look of determination I had never seen on a human’s face. The Bull’s Eye did this because she was protecting people but Jennifer, I suddenly realized, did this to kill a vampire. The two are very different and I knew in my heart of hearts this meant trouble down the road. No time to speak or think or deal with such things, though. Instead, taking inspiration from Jennifer, I reared back and jabbed Dmitri in the eyes just like an old Marx Brothers routine.

  The Bull’s Eye had taken that last couple of steps at long last. She kicked the door shut behind her, spun for momentum, aimed and drove the broom handle into the left side of Dmitri's back. He was already trying to stand and somehow had a knife. One of them shot out to stick in my left thigh and it hurt like hell. The other blade missed Roderick, who saw it in time and practically floated backwards out of its path. In the dim light I saw something light up for a moment around Roderick’s neck: a cross on a chain, of all the things in the world to see at a time like this on a neck as sinful as his.

  The attempted staking seemed to be taking for damn ever and I was worried Dmitri would move before The Bull’s Eye could finish planting it. She grimaced with crawling effort before the broom broke the skin, then snagged again, but she had her full weight behind it, her face twisted with furious effort. It occurred to me this might not be the first time she had impaled someone on a broom handle because she certainly seemed to know how much the body tends to push back against that sort of thing. I heard a snap as a rib gave way and then, like a light going off, Dmitri's frantic scrabble to find a way to resist stopped and he dropped into the same molasses speed as The Bull’s Eye.

  One hilariously slowed-down thump later, The Bull’s Eye stood over Dmitri’s body with a broom handle connecting her hands with the region right under his left shoulder blade.

  Scott and Adam fell into total silence. Everything was suddenly quiet.

  I dropped into normal speed, mouth open to ask Roderick what exactly he was doing with a magic necklace – especially given I had gone out of my way not to tell him about that particular aspect of our time in Asheville together the year before – but instead I fell to one knee, myself. The knife blade in my other leg burned like fire. I yanked it out and threw it across the room.

  “Alright,” The Bull’s Eye said to me. “Do your thing. Do it now. The three of you were a blur when I ran up here but you're panting and you got stabbed? I guess? So let’s finish this and patch you up.”

  I checked myself. I was in fact panting. I don't have to breathe, but the muscle memory is strong. I bent over my own traumatized thigh. “Fuck but this hurts,” I groaned.

  Roderick pulled his sleeves down and straightened his shirt. “It is enchanted,” he said. “Anti-vampire magic.”

  I growled at him, “How do you know about magic shit?”

  He smiled a little. “There is plenty of it up in the mountains if you know where to look.” His words were as coy as his expression. I didn’t like this at all, and I wasn’t even sure why and I couldn’t think properly because my leg hurt so much. Roderick nodded at Dmitri’s form. “You are going to need blood to heal that, Cousin.” He nodded at Jennifer, “And you need first aid.”

  I looked down at Dmitri, then back up at everyone else. “Anybody who doesn't want to watch had better turn around,” I said, then I snapped the broom handle in two with one hand and hoisted Dmitri into the air by hooking the other under one armpit. Old or new, we all only weigh as much as our collected flesh.

  There was a knock at the door –three small raps – and we all fell silent.

  The Bull’s Eye, without making a sound, leaned against the peephole. Her jaw clenched as there was another knock at the door: three more small, almost apologetic raps of knuckles against wood with a pause between each just about the length of the average human heartbeat.

  I looked at Roderick, whose eyes were closed and his hands out and open by his sides: he was pushing his senses out across the yard to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Jennifer was clutching her ripped-up hand to her chest, keeping it elevated, but she didn’t give away anything like pain or discomfort.

  The Bull’s Eye turned and mouthed in silence, her index finger twirling in a circle to indicate a perimeter, “Surrounded.”

  I heard something heavy smash a window in the front as a foot – no bigger than a child’s, and wearing the kind of shoes kids liked last year – kicked out the section of door we’d damaged when The Bull’s Eye and I first arrived. Every window exploded inward, almost in unison, and I saw all manner of children in anonymous gray hooded sweatshirts reaching up, gripping jagged glass in bare hands. Their enormous eyes were as black as the new moon and they seemed impervious to pain as they sliced themselves to pieces, hauling their tiny bodies through the windows in a mass of rage.

  Roderick and I both flipped on the super-speed and all those angry young bodies, their grasping, blood-smeared, tattered fingers, seemed to freeze in mid-air.

  As they poured into the house in ultra
-slow-motion I dragged Dmitri into the kitchen and leaning him against the counter in front of the kitchen sink. Adam and Scott strained at their chains in near-frozen tableau. Their eyes rolled with incomprehension and their voices were like bellowing low brass. The parts of them screaming and sobbing were not the thinking, talking parts: they were the blood and the veins and the bodies from which Dmitri had stolen so many times they’d gotten used to it.

  A black-eyed kid was pushing her own pale forehead through the window over the sink, one millimeter at a time. In the percentage of a fraction of a second I considered her, one word sprang to mind: Steeplechasers. Zombies. These were not the zombies I had put down by the dozen in my neighborhood all those years ago and they were not the all-consuming hive mind constructed from collective id Jennifer and I had faced after that, but neither was this girl a human being. Her teeth, bared in rage, were those of a mortal but her eyes were sharp shards of obsidian staring out at a world that did not interest her. If the first zombies embodied chaos and the second type were hunger, these were calculated, calibrated rage. They might not all be the exact same kind of thing in a textbook sense but the way she pursued some violent and alien agenda encrypted against normal comprehension was exactly the same.

  I guessed I had less than a second of “normal” time to spare.

  I bared my fangs, did the classic vampire hiss – some things we do because we just have to do them when there's an audience present – and said, “Dmitri, I do not know your origin but I do know your end. May you be a lesson to the rest of my domain.” The security light in the back yard crackled and went out. I wasn't just saying it to sound good; I was saying it because I think saying that sort of thing aloud really might do something: something mystical, I guess. I don't know what, or how to explain why I think that. There was also a more practical reason. It might sound melodramatic in the moment, yes, but there are some things we must say to remind ourselves of why we do things and why we don't. Protocols have to be observed in our greetings and in our final partings, too.