Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  She nodded at him and turned to the rest of us. “Let's go.”

  16

  In the Morehead Hill neighborhood of downtown Durham are a million little dead-end residential streets. They all look like great shortcuts to get to Duke University but instead they all end at a sagging old porch, a wall of trees or the carcass of some green grocer storefront from a version of Durham long dead but unburied.

  One of these streets abruptly turns into someone's gravel driveway and disappears around a gentle curve. At least, that's what it seems to be. If you keep going, you drive past the house at the end of it and find there’s more single-track dirt lane beckoning you to follow it into comfortably anonymous darkness: the shadowed cavern of foliage tucked away in an oft-avoided corner of many a neighborhood here and there. Yours probably has one. You may never have even noticed it. In this case, the tree line was clearly where urbanite Durham pressed against the edge of Duke Forest and the Duke campus within, each side of that border huddled under a blanket of kudzu for fear of the other.

  We parked Roderick’s Cadillac and my Firebird – Jennifer complimented its design, earning her a million friend points – and set off on foot down that gravel road into those ill-advised woods. At the end, impossible for most mortals to see in the dark, was a low, long, yellow-beige building. Duke University had stopped using it for some industrial purpose in the distant past and promptly forgotten. All the way around the property’s perimeter there was a chain link fence with rounds of razor wire along the top. Next to the building there were gigantic shelves that held lengths of rusted pipe many feet long. They looked like something one might lay underground, some thin and some big enough for a man to crawl through.

  In front there was the usual royal blue Duke University property sign but it was effectively blank. The name of whatever this was had been almost scrubbed off by time and weather. There were only the ghosts of letters left to make words no one needs to know anymore.

  Much to my surprise, there were lights on. The old bulbs on the outside of the building burned just bright enough to discourage stupid teenagers who might think razor wire looked like fun. The gate across the entrance to the parking lot was a massive steel affair on rollers. It could have slid out of the way if vines hadn't grown all up both sides. I pitied the guy they would have to send out here to patch up the place once I was done with it.

  It turned out this place was pretty close to the technopagan house, also in Morehead Hill. I had wanted to stop in there to ask them about this building but The Bull’s Eye was eager to get things over with and all their lights were out anyway. “Maybe they had an omen,” I said with a dark little smile, but she didn't think that was terribly funny.

  I looked over at her, standing at the gate. “Rip it open?”

  “Be my guest.” She was cracking her knuckles under her gloves – knife Kevlar, she told me – and I started popping the metal wires of the fence between my fingers like bubble wrap. Roderick was filing his nails in the background, Smiles on one side of him and Dog on the other. Jennifer winced when I started popping the fence apart with my hands. It wasn't terribly quiet, but I didn't much care.

  We walked through the hole I made and stuck to the shadows, prowling around the edges of the lot. At the back we saw a door hanging open. There were dim lights coming from inside and I nodded. “We can sneak up that way.”

  “It's too bright,” The Bull’s Eye said, shaking her head, but we didn't have other options. I shrugged, she shrugged, and we all set off across tall grass that had been ignored for at least one growing season. In the perfect silence, its crunch was like gunshots. I still didn't care. I stepped up to the door and inside I could hear the clink and clatter of metal against metal.

  I figured El Diablo must be in there and it sounded like he was working on something. An abandoned building in the most remote possible corner of Duke University's campus; I had to smile at it. He had set up a secret lair and his greatest enemy – the university that made him – was footing the bill. He might be a hopped-up crazy shooting super-steroids into chess champions in violation of scientific ethics but I had to admire his sense of irony.

  Again, the Bull’s Eye made some complicated hand signal and I nodded as though I understood. Roderick was standing on his toes, ready to spring. Jennifer was clenching and unclenching her fists, her wounded arm bandaged up by The Bull’s Eye on our way over here. I held up one finger in the universal sign of “give me just a second here,” then turned the corner of the doorway and walked inside with Smiles trailing happily behind.

  “Evening,” I said aloud.

  El Diablo looked up at me and smiled.

  El Diablo’s outfit was in worse shape than ever: some of the stitching had started to give way, exposing one leg and a curved shoulder. The smell of him washed over me, a hundred times stronger than before. My fangs dropped right away. Between that physique and the blood inside it, I had a month’s worth of wank fantasies at once.

  I hated to think what Roderick would do when he smelled this guy.

  El Diablo was busy bolting something to something else, what kind of looked like a big metal box, in a way that seemed a little clumsy but done with tremendous strength. When he would tighten a bolt I would hear metal squeal and I realized the wrench in his hand had been slightly bent out of shape. He was capable of bending steel with his bare hands.

  I recognized what he was building: it's a kind of improvised bomb that has an armored back and sides to direct the blast. The Olympic bomber, that motherfucker in Atlanta, used one like it in ‘96. It's worse than a simple explosive. It's a device you'd only use on someone you really hated, someone you really wanted to hurt. I didn't know where or when he planned to deploy it but it would do a hell of a lot of damage when he did. I couldn’t believe he had superhuman strength and still relied on bombs. It seemed so complicated compared to what he could do with his fists.

  The wrench took another twist as he spun it around. He was really strong: stronger than Adam and Scott, perhaps stronger than both of them combined. I already knew he had been sampling the product but I hadn't expected this.

  “Ah,” he said, voice flat in a way that clashed with the sick sneer he was wearing. “The Bull’s Eye comes to my lair at long last.”

  “Yeah.” She was behind me, looking annoyed and speaking around my right side. “She does.”

  El Diablo shifted his gaze, very slowly, and his eyes were completely mad: bugged, not totally focused. He was still beautiful. I couldn't help thinking that. He smelled delicious, too. I had to shut this down immediately. “So, if you don't mind my asking, who the hell is he?” He waved the wrench vaguely in my direction. “Your sidekick?” He smirked as Jennifer and Roderick stepped in behind us. “Oh, brought the whole Scooby Doo crew?”

  I cracked my knuckles.

  “This one’s the guy who wants to kill you to put you out of business.” The Bull’s Eye shrugged a little, as if to say: you know, like y'do.

  Roderick cleared his throat delicately. “As do I.”

  El Diablo smirked at The Bull’s Eye. “And what do you want?”

  “I want to turn you over to the authorities so you can repay society for your crimes.” She spread her hands. “Nice, clean and easy, and nobody has to die.”

  He pursed his lips in an expression of mild surprise, perhaps even scandal. “Really? That's terribly quaint, isn't it?”

  Ugh. Privileged son of a bitch. The dripping sarcasm coming off a hottie like that said I get what I want in tall neon signage. Some of the letters blinked to get your attention.

  “No, it's how things work in the real world,” she said. “I suspect you're going to cause enough trouble for them that the cops end up shooting you during an escape attempt, to be honest, but I don't get to decide that. You do. Now put down the wrench, step away from the improvised explosive device and get down on the ground with your hands on your head.”

  El Diablo smiled and in a flash the wrench was flying through the ai
r. I dropped into slow-mo and saw that The Bull’s Eye had started dodging before he had started throwing. She knew the whole time how this was going to go but she had to do her thing. She had to let him make his choice for himself. Some things we do because we have to, even when we know they won't work.

  El Diablo had started moving as he threw the wrench – it was just a distraction – and he was going about as fast as I could. The last time we’d met, he’d only been almost as fast as I am. Very bad, but between Roderick and me I was sure we could take him out. The Bull’s Eye and Jennifer would barely get a moment to realize what was happening, again. It wasn’t sporting, but I figured it was probably better that way.

  As I thought that, at least a dozen college kids in elaborately defaced Duke University paraphernalia surged forward out of the shadows. Athletic gear in hand – basketballs, baseball bats, oars and whatnot – they looked like a sporting goods store under evacuation orders.

  They were all moving at super-speed, too.

  Of course, on later reflection, I figured it all stood to reason. El Diablo wasn’t only experimenting on Adam and Scott. He had lots of clients on campus. Once the athletics program got tipped to one kid on a new performance-enhancing drug they tested everybody and found the others. They’d all been kicked off their teams, just the way Dmitri’s pet had been, but they were still addicted to El Diablo’s happy juice. They could be turned to his purposes if they wanted more.

  Now his personal revenge corps, they wore their old gear still but they’d painted over the face of the school mascot or they’d added a leg to the “D” such that their backs now read PUKE UNIVERSITY. It was all adolescent nonsense like that. I thought of how Adam and Scott, top performers in their areas of expertise throughout their lives, had basically run and hidden as soon as there was trouble. They were like little kids caught breaking the rules. I thought of El Diablo’s furious lashing out at the university by blowing up part of one of its most prized possessions, like a child throwing a tantrum. If regular old steroids make people rage out, what did El Diablo’s super-serum make them do? All indications were it turned them into children in superhuman bodies.

  I realized now the hammering on the bomb casing had been another feint on El Diablo’s part: something loud enough to mask the heartbeats and quiet breathing of all those human metabolisms so Roderick and I wouldn’t hear. El Diablo had been warned – by Ross, I guessed, because there was no way he wasn’t a part of this – and had called in his posse of loyal addicts to defend the castle.

  Now they came at us, a dozen different representations of the school’s entire sports program wielding the implements of their pastimes like weapons of war.

  There was a young woman with wild eyes and a track and field javelin who threw it so hard the handle cracked in her hand before she let go. I ducked and rolled out of the way so it sailed on, aimed at The Bull’s Eye. Roderick leapt toward it, hands outstretched to catch it. His hands clamped down and pulled it in as he somersaulted, came to a standing stop and threw it back in one smooth motion. The woman who’d thrown it caught it, but not with her hands.

  One down.

  Blood shot from the wound and Roderick’s fangs jutted out. He made some kind of low moan, something seventy years ago I would have considered distinctly sexual. Without hesitation, he launched himself teeth-first at the woman, bringing her down before she could finish falling. Dead blood doesn’t normally interest us but the line between dead and fresh gets fuzzy when they haven’t quite hit the ground in slow-motion.

  I twisted to face our other attackers, grabbed the nearest one by the thigh (lacrosse player or something like it: fancy net on a stick) and used his knee to shatter the jaw of a basketball player coming in from the other side. I grabbed the basketball player by the neck and used his forehead to break the nose of the lacrosse player, in turn. All that fancy stuff left me open to the basketball the player had thrown: it hit me square in the face, popping one of my eyes clean out of its socket and shattering the bone of my skull on that side of my face. It hurt like hell. The basketball exploded like a burst balloon from the force with which he’d thrown it.

  I planted one fat hand in the middle of each of their chests, braced myself and pushed hard so they took off through the air across the room. I turned to face Roderick and watched him drain the last of the blood from the woman with the javelin. He stood, wiping delicately at the corners of his mouth with his fingertips. My vision was all crazy: two angles, one straight ahead and one the floor in front of me. Roderick pointed at my dangling eye and laughed.

  Vampires are static creatures, bodies locked into the same shape for as long as they can stand, and my form was already trying to assert itself: the bones drew together and my eye retracted on the optic nerve like the winch on my Firebird’s front bumper. All the little shattered pieces settled back into the state they held on the night Agatha turned me into what I am now.

  It didn’t even hurt.

  I mimicked Roderick’s taunting jab with my own finger and smirked. “Two to one, Cousin. Try to keep up We’ve got nine more to deal with here.” It was something to distract me from the terrifying realization I could already feel myself forgetting the woman who’d been his first victim of the fight. Whereas the Last Gasp lets me learn everything there is to know about one aspect of a victim’s life, Roderick erases his prey from collective memory when he drains the life completely from them. It’s a horrifying thing to know exists and we’ve only spoken of it briefly. I mean, for real, I’m not even sure I remember how I found out he can do it in the first place.

  “What is going on with these people?” Roderick looked around at the tableau in which we stood as he spoke. All around us the remaining nine or ten college athletes were still roaring towards us but we were moving even faster than they – so insanely fast, faster than ever, I figured it had to be the blood I’d taken from Dmitri and Roderick had consumed just now. Smiles and Dog hadn’t even had time to get involved: they were just now starting to approach where we were. They could move faster than people but not as fast as we did on the super-blood.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “Just fight. We can figure it out later. Stopping it is a higher priority than comprehending the science.”

  “Gosh,” Roderick sneered. “A license for ultraviolence? It’s a bit early for Christmas, Cousin.”

  We launched ourselves in opposite directions, wading in with fists and fangs, and didn’t say another word until we were done.

  Two dumbbells came flying at me, but I kicked them back into the face of the weightlifting monster who threw them at me from across the room.

  Three.

  Some country club recruit with a golf club in each hand tried to come after me but I took one away from him and used the other to choke him half to death. My teeth did the rest.

  That put me at four of eleven.

  A baseball player and a softball player took me by surprise as soon as the golf kid was unconscious: each of them swung for the fences at the same time, clocking me on both sides of my head at once. That almost knocked me out for a second but Dmitri’s blood was like electricity in my veins. No, it was like sparks: occasional and unpredictable. I could feel the effects fading but every time I got that burst of something special – something extra, as Adam and Scott had called it – I used it to full effect. I didn’t know if it was time or the fact it had been filtered through Dmitri first, but no wonder he’d been drawing from that well every night. I probably would have, too.

  The baseball and softball players put me at six out of nine so far.

  My last two opponents were a guy in a martial arts outfit kind of thing and a wrestler. I liked the wrestler’s body but I didn’t like his odds: he was a brute and he didn’t know how to fight somebody who wasn’t waiting for a referee to tell them to engage. He got his arms around me and squeezed real hard but that just put his neck all the closer. I bit down, white hot fire flooding into my mouth, and when the new karate kid came at me I spun to us
e my victim as a shield while I drank.

  That knocked the wrestler loose, though, so the martial artist and I squared off: pacing around each other in a circle to size each other up.

  “I am the only one here,” he calmly stated, “Who is trained to fight rather than to play a game.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m kind of flattered you’re fighting me rather than him.” I hitched a thumb in a random direction, indicating Roderick. I had no idea where my cousin had gone or what he was doing.

  El Diablo and The Bull’s Eye and Jennifer were fighting on their own in the middle of the room but it was going at a snail’s pace compared to us and neither side seemed especially about to win. El Diablo was much faster and stronger than a human being but The Bull’s Eye was a professional soldier and Jennifer had that mad look in her eye, wounded arm and everything. They came to fight and they were not going to be easy to beat.

  “You look easier to take,” the kid said with a smirk. “Big fat guy like you?”

  “I prefer to think of it as marshmallow armor,” I said, and took a swing. Banter makes a great thing you can use to conceal a sucker punch.

  The guy stepped aside and grabbed my wrist, pulling me closer so he could plant an elbow in my face and knock me back again. It stung like crazy and I staggered a little, completely surprised by the move. As soon as I had my balance back, I lunged at him with a growl. I was annoyed and a little embarrassed and planned to take it out on him. Much to my surprise, he dropped and rolled me right over top of himself, down the back of one of his shoulders, and was standing, facing me, before I’d even had time to clamber back to my feet.

  “Try to hit me again,” the martial artist said to me. He was smiling beatifically, always moving, all his limbs in motion as he did.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Roderick said from behind him before punching the kid in the back of the skull. I heard something like a cracker snapping in two: vertebrae, maybe, or the thick bones of the skull. The guy staggered forward just in time for Dog and Smiles to arc slowly through the air and land against his torso. With the burst of energy from the wrestler’s super-blood I spun to plant the toe of one boot in the guy’s cheek, sending him flying. He clattered into a pile of unidentifiable old equipment.