Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  I sank my teeth into pale, papery flesh and Dmitri’s life filled me up like light in a dark room.

  Blood is full of a lot of things. Besides the chemical properties, the things we can taste right away – vegetarian; not a vegetarian; diabetic – we also get a part of who they are. I'm not big on the mystical-istical hoo-hah kind of stuff, in terms of laying it all out and putting together complicated and specific beliefs about the metaphysics of how it works. It’s enough for me to know when we drink someone's blood we get some of what they've experienced: emotions, memories, what they're thinking at that moment. This guy was mostly thinking a variety pack containing different flavors of oh shit this cannot be happening and as his life passed before his eyes it did mine, as well until, like the last dregs of wine from a bottle, the final spark of whatever had been Dmitri passed into me, activating my own Last Gasp power.

  Everything in the little kitchen went dark and the life of Dmitri Chabon Miasnik Miledok, born 1637 in a village on the Ukrainian Steppe, exploded in my vision like a firework of ice.

  In such moments, I have the opportunity to pick one topic from my victim’s life and learn everything there is to know about it: everything known to them and sometimes, unpredictably, things known by others but not to them. It’s a way to crack open a volume of truth on one topic and consume it all at once. I have no control after I pick the topic: I have a moment to choose and then I simply get taken for a ride.

  Floating before me – for lack of a better way to describe it – were the countless topics contained in any life. I could get a sense of any of them if I lingered too long but all this happens in the space between two seconds and I have only the barest ability to comprehend what I see. I had a brief flash of an absurdly beautiful woman, way out of his league, approaching him at something like a bar: a lot of working men in a dark room with a fire and a couple of candles and mugs of booze to keep them warm in some endless winter night. The men all knew who she was – she was the wife of some local warlord – but she went straight to Dmitri to make him an offer.

  She said Dmitri would live forever and be rich, but instead he was lonely and more or less permanently enslaved. She turned him into a vampire so he could be her pet thug, not some equal or lover or even really to pay him a compliment. He was a brute and she wanted a brute so she took him. No less a serf than before, he had killed her two years after she turned him. It had been messy and taken forever and he had hated it so much that he set out to kill a lot to try to get himself used to it and to vent the hatred he felt for everyone who was alive, everyone still able to go out in the sun. Dmitri had never had much in the way of aspiration but now he longed for the thrill of seeing such hopes shudder and fade in the dark eyes of a dying victim.

  That's what's hardest for many of us: the simple eternity of self. There are a lot of vampiric failures, a lot of people who decide to watch just one more extremely warm sunrise at some point in their first decade. They get stuck being who they were when they were turned and they didn't actually like being that person in the first place. I mean, a desire to escape is why they took the Big Flush, right? As I said, people are creatures of habit and we undead, theoretically immortal, are creatures of habit times a million. We turn into anachronisms all too quickly in the twentieth – sorry, the twenty-first – century. The first time prey looks at one of us oddly because of our dated slang or the unfashionable clothes we wear to hunt, whatever gives us away as not being from the now, all too often there's this little internal clock that starts silently counting down to the night when that one of us just can't take it anymore. It’s a make or break moment in the gamble for eternity. We feel it when it happens whether we survive it or not.

  For me, it was the 1960's. At first I just couldn't handle hippies. I figured it was them or me, basically, but my maker told me if I simply let time pass – and who has more time than a vampire, anyway – it would, in fact, be me who won out. She told me they were a fashion that would wane. Hippies aren't gone, of course, and I don’t feel the need to kill them on sight – they can be perfectly nice people taken one at a time – but the whole psychedelia thing did turn out to be a phase, another step in a cycle of fads that come and go. With patience I was able to wait for something new to come along and see if I liked it better.

  I haven't loved any particular era that's come since then but I have loved being here for them. That's the important thing. I feel like I made it over that hurdle into being more or less capable of keeping up. Now I plan to be the vampire who finds out whether immortality is for real. If I have my way, the day the sun finally fries this planet to a crisp I intend to be halfway around the world, in the middle of wherever it's night at the time, drinking the blood of the last human being.

  This guy, though? His unlife hadn't been nearly as interesting as I planned mine to be and he hadn't been nearly as patient. Dmitri was unhappy and he took what small pleasure he could find in turning people into pets and torturing them to death. He thought of it as more than simple feeding: this was cultivation. Rather than the simple pursuit of sustenance, he played feeding like a game of anguish he would always win. The suffering he inflicted had been cold leftovers compared to the warmth of being alive but it had been enough because he could imagine no better alternative. He spent his life as a man in a society that offered no options, no upgrades, and his mind was not up to the task of envisioning something better than that. There was the life he knew or there was death. There was no coloring outside those lines.

  Dmitri settled into that dreary, one-way street of a life, drifting along in a society of vampires who mostly interacted with him to assert their higher station. For his part, he sought and found opportunities to demonstrate his own superiority over the herd of seemingly endless humanity. He spent centuries moving from one place to another, eventually chased away by turmoil or the boredom of triumph. This did not mark him as a failure as a vampire the way it would now. Rather, by the standards of the ones who were alive already when he was turned, he was a complete success. His capacity to stave off boredom through the obsessive, repetitive pursuit of one or another mortal life was not a coping mechanism. It was the point. He may have found himself no more capable of altering his relative social station as a vampire than he was as a man, but at least he was no longer the lowest rung on the total social ladder. He was taught to fear vampires older than he but at least there were people – humans – who in turn would fear him.

  Little changed for him until the nineteenth century drew to a close.

  That was what caught the attention of my soul’s eye. I realized inherently, in some silent and unknowable way afforded by the Last Gasp, the specific topic of what had happened to him a dozen decades ago was also intricately tied to whatever was going on now. In a strange, innate sense I knew whatever had brought him here was directly connected to Jennifer and to Roderick and to me. I had to know that, and as I observed the dissolution of the rest of the pathetic diagram of pain and pleasure he had called a life, I fell forward into that bright, shining star in the galaxy of his life.

  15

  In 1893, vampires rebelled against their masters.

  Dmitri didn’t have particulars as to why, but he knew the elders whom he served for centuries, patiently sycophantic in hopes they would one night allow him to sit at the grownups’ table, were almost entirely wiped out in a matter of months by their youngest, weakest spawn. That year was a big year: the Colombian Exposition, rebellions, assassinations and popular uprisings all over the world. Dmitri loathed the weakness of humankind and he equally abhorred the ingratitude – the uppitiness, I’d call it – of unworthy young vampires choosing to eliminate their betters so they could steal the night for themselves.

  Of course, he was also a bully and all bullies are cowards. Dmitri sucked up to his bosses by killing a few young vampires to show some team spirit but by the standards of time as perceived by most of the really old bastards, the war was over before it started. Elders had been reduced to a hidden r
emnant in the blink of an eye. Accustomed to isolation and unchallenged authority over their own precious little fiefdoms, they were driven to unite in the end. None of them could win the war on their own and by the time they were talking to one another they couldn’t manage to win it together, either. Desperate for an exit plan other than death, the elders huddled up and started brainstorming. In the end, they went with the one idea they liked least: a deal with an actual self-described devil. He told them he couldn’t win them the war but he could give them the power to survive it.

  It beat nothing, so in 1909 they signed the dotted line.

  The demon didn’t want much: just an agreement. The agreement didn’t even specify they had to do it favors. It just wanted them to agree. Dmitri didn’t understand why it would want so little, but Dmitri was not an imaginative man. I wondered if the entity with whom they cut these deals had simply gotten its kicks on making a bunch of ancient horrors kiss its proverbial pinky ring or if things were more complicated: maybe it was offering them survival in hopes they would try to bargain up to victory, for instance? I couldn’t find that out because Dmitri didn’t know it and it wasn’t one of those flashes of insight my Last Gasp delivers from beyond the ken of my actual victim.

  Uncertain and concealing their nervousness behind a curtain of overt cruelty towards those sad little lapdogs still left to them – such as Dmitri – the elders convened an overwrought, fright-fest ritual straight out of the imaginations of every Satanic Panic picture of the 1980’s: human sacrifice, intoned Latin-ish, the works. Everything the devil they knew suggested to them, they did. When they were done, he appeared in a puff of angry yellow smoke and made them a smiling deal: they could be forgotten, raise new minions and escape their certain defeat. He would introduce on those ancient vampires’ behalf just enough circumstantial evidence and whispered rumors to get the kids to settle into a complacent sense of victory. This particular devil would cover their tracks, throw still-hunting rebels off the scent and anything else necessary to let his clients retreat into the mists of memory and terrible lore. He assured them the world, changing more rapidly than they could comprehend into one you or I might recognize as modern, was not devoid of places for them.

  Even electric light casts a shadow, the demon said to them.

  Dmitri loved a cheesy line like that. He loved the way the demon appealed to the worst parts of him. Dmitri loved the play-acted cruelty, the parade of suffering dished out to screaming mortals. The ancients and the spawn still loyal to them gathered one more round of victims and props in some abandoned country church bereft of mortal attention, dressed it up like an after-Halloween clearance sale and let ‘er rip. Dmitri joined in with abandon. At the climax of it all, the demon told them his services required only one more tiny thing he’d failed to mention: they had to drink his blood.

  Vampires had been using blood to lord themselves over victims as far back as anyone could remember. Some loved this idea of upgrading to demon blood for a night. Others feared it would enthrall them the way they – and I – could make dogs into hellhounds by feeding them a little blood at a time until they had been changed into something else, something perceptibly obedient and vicious but more or less still the same in appearance. The demon won over those who hesitated by offering a bonus to sweeten the deal: new powers beyond what their state or the Last Gasp already gave them. Always calculating, always playing the margins, the doubters were convinced they could eventually wrest some victory over the young in future nights. A couple of new tricks, a little breathing room and enough time for the victors to grow confident, they figured, and they could come roaring back when the kids least expected it.

  The elders all lined up, drank deep and plunged backwards into the still, dark waters of forgotten threats. Dmitri found the new powers he received were something less than he had hoped for, but useful all the same. His Last Gasp had always allowed him to command for one night the corpus of a victim he killed. After signing and taking a sip of a devil’s blood, those bodies would stay active for months at a time and he could have several of them. They weren’t enough to form an army but they were plenty to make a gang and he liked that idea. They were just like Steeplechase zombies with one important exception: he could tell them what to do and they only looked a little bit dead instead of all the way.

  The demon arranging all this was, of course, the one who introduced himself to me as Ross.

  Over time, most of the elders who survived were hunted down despite the demon’s assurances and all those papier-mâché atrocities. Several members of the youthful rebellion stayed active, obsessed with eliminating all the ones they remembered. Some elders survived, however, so they ultimately saw the reduction of their own competition as a net gain. Vampires make the best selfish bastards. If you think some entirely mortal and mundane adherent of Ayn Rand decked out in driving moccasins and a club tie is good at ginning up justifications for their own privilege, let me assure you: you ain’t seen nothin’.

  The survivors worried, though. The world changed ever faster. They became worse and worse at adapting to it. The youthful vampires who rebelled against them were not themselves so young anymore but they still had much greater capacity to cope with modernity. Even if all the elders were forever forgotten, how could they be sure they would also persist in that obscurity? For that matter, why should persistence be enough? Those with wide vicious streaks and short memories – such as Dmitri – eventually found themselves wondering if the demon could help them restart the war at some future date.

  To really put up a fight, they knew, they would need to balance the numbers: make more of themselves or eliminate some of the kids. New vampires they made themselves tended to pull on the leash too hard, too early. Human society had lost its penchant for obsequiousness. Recent mortals were unsuited to service. The elders were hesitant to take on the young: they predated the notion of surgical strikes and they lacked the skills to perform their own assassinations. They were accustomed to command, not to having to do the heavy lifting on their own. Some elders wanted to recruit young vampires to their cause, but that never went anywhere, either. They picked up a few promising prospects in the 1950’s and 1980’s, but they were babies compared to the vampires they would have to face.

  Then someone asked Ross what seemed impossible: could they ever bring back any of the vampires the rebellion had destroyed?

  Ross was only too happy to answer in the semi-affirmative. Gathered together again and dressed for a performance of the Satanic Tabernacle Choir, Ross led them through the magical “logic” such as it was: vampires were already familiar with the basic magic of blood, the act of stealing it to sustain themselves. In that scenario, the life of mortals sustained and preserved the life of the vampire. When vampires were made, the ritual called for the death of the candidate and their restoration to life through a vampire’s own blood.

  If the goal were to sustain the dead, to reach into the mechanism of time and mortality and bring back something not alive, they would need to think along the same lines. If a sacrificed life could be transmuted into endless life, they might achieve endless death by sacrificing the dead. It hadn’t made sense to the vampires who asked, but the demon refused to explain more. He simply insisted that with the right rituals and sacrifices – oh, so very many sacrifices – they could bring back one of their own. It wouldn’t matter that one or another of their ungrateful spawn had shoved that dead elder out the airlock of this immortal coil.

  Life, Ross had said to them, Has a kind of power. You feel it when you drink their blood. It sustains you now. Trust me when I say death generates a reflection of that. Life and death are simply perpendicular threads in the tapestry of energies. All the vampires had to do to get access to that kind of magic was promise to do Ross a few favors at some later date. He didn’t specify what those might be.

  The elders were too desperate to ask. Instead, they did what he said. The ancients, silly though they felt, gathered in some Southern countryside near the
place where one of their own had been destroyed some years before. There they made the right noises to go with the prescribed desecrations and debased acts. They wanted one of their biggest, baddest guns: a vampire who had been one of the most terrifying and the most powerful. They had already mortgaged their fates to a demon, made one promise after another, and gotten what seemed like jack squat for it. They might as well get back an ancient vampire likely to assert her authority over them. In the best-case scenario that would get them a powerhouse combatant and commander stuck holding the check on all this diabolical jazz.

  Oh, Ross asked later, Did I mention there might be side effects? Hard to predict in advance what those might be. There’s really only one way to find out. The vampires all thought the other shoe had finally dropped when Ross asked them for “favors” but they were wrong. The dark threat of owing favors to an unpredictable, deceitful and alien entity couldn’t just be enough for them, could it? Even the strings came with strings attached.

  The vampires distracted themselves from this new reason to worry by focusing on the fact the ritual worked. Well, it technically worked and I suspect that’s how it is with most things involving deals with the devil. The vampire they wanted brought back was returned to physical form but mindless. It was all appetite, no smarts. I told you once that vampires are the ultimate preservation of self: the concentrated experience of an individual preserved in a shell they hope is permanent. It appeared all that comprehension and perspective and the shell containing them were not necessarily inherently linked because the elders seemed to have gotten one without the other: an enormously powerful and ravenous vampire who couldn’t so much as count its own toes. On the plus side, she was strong as all hell and could take down just about anything they threw in front of her. Like trying to buy a pistol and being handed a Davy Crockett M-28 tactical nuke gun instead, the elders knew they had something they could use to eliminate plenty of their hated enemies if they could just figure out how to aim the damned thing.