Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  I knew exactly how she felt.

  I put up my hands in a gesture of acquiescence and stepped away. If she didn’t want help, I wouldn’t force it on her. She looked to be winning anyway.

  I drifted backwards into the stairwell. Smiles didn’t want to come with me but my hold over him won out, as I knew it would. The two of us withdrew from the fight. In the deep shadows I drew from my pocket the phone El Diablo had used to set off his bombs: the one he’d thrown over his shoulder and I had caught. I dialed a number I’d had the foresight to look up ahead of time in case it ever proved useful or necessary. A young woman’s voice answered brightly, “Duke Chronicle offices.”

  “I’ve got a tip on a story,” I growled. “The Bull’s Eye is about to take out El Diablo downtown and if you run you can watch it happen.”

  “Ha ha, creeper,” the young woman said. I didn’t blame her: middle of the night and she was probably just now pasting together the next days’ edition. I bet she got crank calls from drunks all the time.

  “No joke,” I insisted. I can’t do the hoodoo over the phone, but damned if I don’t wish I could. Instead, I said the only thing I could think to convince her. “Ask your photographer who was at the scene of the Duke Chapel bombing. I was the big guy in black. I’m not The Bull’s Eye, but I’ve been on her trail. He’ll remember me. Tell him the big guy who ran away called it in. He’ll know it was really me if you tell him I remember what he was not wearing.”

  The woman hesitated – of course she had heard about me being there. The kid thought I was The Bull’s Eye, too, probably, just like everyone else on the scene. I hoped that one little detail of him showing up in boxers and flip-flops would be the authentication I needed to put my call over the edge into credibility.

  “Tell him to hurry,” I said. “They’re fighting right now, and it won’t last much longer.”

  I hung up and hit a few other buttons. With only a couple of false starts I managed to find the camera in it and start taking pictures of my own.

  I heard a smack and a crack, and one of The Bull’s Eye’s gloved hands skittered off El Diablo's jaw as a tooth flew in a stark white arc across the room; then another. She had started to get the best of him, finally, with a million billion tiny punches. He had managed to connect with her a time or two, too, and I could tell from the way she moved her left arm that it might be mildly fractured or at least sprained at the shoulder. I didn't know how he had managed that, but she was wounded. One more punch sent him spinning away.

  He smacked against the wall, his back rebounding on the bricks. She leapt towards him to deliver the knockout, and his hand came up with a hunk of rebar. She impaled herself on it before she even knew it was there. Blood shot backwards in the starlight and The Bull’s Eye took two steps back, the wet metal slipping slickly from El Diablo’s grip.

  It was the sort of gut wound a person dies from. Anybody who’s seen one knows it.

  The Bull’s Eye staggered. Smiles and I both ran forward but she wasn't down yet. Even as I stepped up to try to catch her, The Bull’s Eye spun and planted a roundhouse kick right in the side of El Diablo’s neck. I heard bones snap, big ones, and the light went out of his eyes. He collapsed against the cement floor with a sound like meat. He was dead in an instant, whether she meant him to be or not. Perhaps five seconds before, less than mortally wounded, she might have had more precision. Not now, not anymore. Perhaps she knew what that rebar in her gut meant and she decided to take El Diablo with her.

  I wondered what Roderick would see now, if he were here: how much of El Diablo’s life was left, and how much of The Bull’s Eye’s?

  She sagged to her knees as I got there.

  “Let me call 911,” I said. I fumbled with El Diablo’s burner phone, bobbling it as I tried to mash the right buttons. All of a sudden I felt like a clumsy old fool. A moment before, she’d been winning this. She’d had this fight in the bag. Now she was probably dying, and I could have helped her even if she said not to. Between us, we could have finished this the right way.

  The Bull’s Eye drew a panting breath and shook her head. “Let... me... assess...” She was very lightly touching her own abdomen, feeling around, wincing, eyes fluttering as she did so, then she shook her head. Clouds swept across the sky and moonlight shone in. Blood was flowing out all over, smelling like you wouldn't believe. I knew for sure she was dying when I saw all that life everywhere. El Diablo had torn a gaping wound all the way through the core of her body and the Bull’s Eye was fading fast.

  She took as deep a breath as she could manage, which wasn’t very deep, and tried to focus her eyes on me. “Could you save me now?” Blood swelled again from The Bull’s Eye’s gut. “If you turned me, would I live?”

  I told you once I’ve never asked to learn the ritual used to make one of us, and that was true, but a part of me wanted to try. A part of me wondered how much of that ritual was playacting and how much was the pseudo-science of our semi-mystical state. I could try to turn her right there. I knew the motions if not the words or the why’s. If it worked, she could pull out the rebar and the wound would close right up. She'd probably have to drain every homeless guy in here, but it would work. She’d come out of it just like Old Shoe: waking up every night with half her torso missing. She’d be a wreck, but she’d be alive.

  The Bull’s Eye repeated the question. “Would it work?” Her voice was a thin reed.

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe.” I hesitated to say more. I didn't know what to say. We see death all the time, all around us, but we rarely give a damn. This time, I gave a damn and I didn’t know for sure I could stop it: stop the death or stop giving a damn. Roderick had done a number on me all right. He’d made me care about people again.

  “Imagine what I could do.” The Bull’s Eye blinked. Her eyes were going dim: only seconds now. She turned her face towards me, but not her eyes. Her eyes were elsewhere, looking out the gaping bay door with rain-soaked particleboard half over it. She was looking at the night and the moon and the stars and the pretty little skyline of her pretty little city. “Will you live forever?”

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  Smiles had stood silent guard over both of us, but he leaned in and sniffed her face, then whined loudly.

  “Imagine what I would be capable of.” She could only whisper.

  I cleared my throat. “I already have,” I said. “That's why I won’t try to turn you. I know exactly how formidable you would become.”

  She smiled one last time. “I didn't want you to,” she exhaled. “I just wanted to know if you would.”

  Then the Bull’s Eye shuddered, a convulsion that traveled all up and down her body, and her eyes stayed open only because she wasn’t there anymore to close them. Her body started to fall over but I reached out and caught it so that I could ease her onto the floor. El Diablo might have deserved to die with a hard thud against cold concrete, but she didn't.

  Smiles, tied for eternity to my own emotional state, threw his head back and howled.

  I could have still tried to turn her, even then, but like she said: imagine what she could do. The Bull’s Eye was a noble and brave soul who fought for what she believed in and took seriously this obsession she’d turned into a second job. She had a city full of defenseless persons to protect and she had done so one bungled burglary, weird suburban house and self-made super villain at a time. She was a hero, a real and true one. I could respect her for it; I could even like her for it; but I didn't have any room for that kind of thing in my operation, especially now I knew there was something even bigger going on: a war unfinished but largely forgotten. When animals fight, people are better off getting out of the way. She was people. We were animals. It was that simple.

  I maybe could have bitten her at the last second and taken in that final spark out of greed for some aspect of her life story, but her death had been her own and I had too much respect for the life she’d lived to impose myself on how she left it.

  I c
losed her eyes and reached gingerly into her pockets until I found her phone. Then I twisted her neck all the way around, fast as I could, to make sure she wouldn’t be the one in a million who rose again as a Steeplechase zombie the next time an elder vampire decided to call back some ancient from the dead. That whole topic was a huge, vast silhouette on the horizon of my mind: the problem I knew I would deal with next, but not the problem in the room with me right that second.

  That done, I turned around. The bums were still watching. “She was The Bull’s Eye,” I said aloud. Then, faster than they could see me move, I stepped up to each of them in turn. “You will forget that I was here.” I drove into each of their minds with all the force I could muster in silent fury, “But you will remember her.”

  I walked out as they glazed over, their brains working to process the orders they'd been given. At the top of the staircase I dug out El Diablo’s phone. It was still recording video of nothing. I couldn’t have that laying around, not now I’d sat there and chit-chatted with her while she died. I picked it up, crushed it into pieces with one flex of my thick fingers, and poured it out in a pile in the corner. At least I’d called the Chronicle. At least someone might find her. At least they might remember her as one of the good guys.

  No, I had to make sure. Flipping open The Bull’s Eye’s phone, I put it in the hands of one of the winos, a scraggly old guy who looked like a pad of steel wool. “Call 911,” I said to him, “Then set the phone next to her head.” She deserved certainty. The kid from the Chronicle might not come here and I couldn’t bear the thought of her laying there until the building fell down.

  Then I left, simple as that: back down the stairs at a run with Smiles by my side.

  The papers got everything wrong in the end, but that’s the way things go. C’est la guerre.

  18

  Jennifer, Roderick and Dog were just coming up the street when Smiles and I emerged from the factory building and slipped through shadows onto the sidewalk in a dark, forgotten stretch of Main Street. Roderick was walking with his hands in his pocket. Jennifer held her bandaged arm in her opposite hand. She looked slowed but nowhere near beaten. Dog, nose down, was leading them towards us one sniff and snuffle at a time.

  Jennifer jumped right to the obvious question when she saw Smiles and me were alone. “Is she dead?” Her voice was almost totally flat, but there was a flicker of hope in there.

  “They killed each other,” I said. I didn’t hesitate or hem and haw over wording. I wanted her to know it was true so I just said it straight.

  That made her stop for just a second, but then she nodded. She was no stranger to death in circumstances such as these, either.

  “You said you had learned something,” Roderick murmured. “That we are in a war.” He said it so quietly only Jennifer and I could hear it. I figured that meant he knew and he had talked to her about it. He would never have brought it up in front of her if he didn’t know already what he might hear in response and if he hadn’t discussed it with her. Of course, at the time it never even occurred to me she might have heard me say it back at the House.

  “Dmitri thought so, anyway.” I shrugged one shoulder at him. “He’d been around a long time and he was still just a flunky for the really old bastards. There was a rebellion in the 1890’s. The old guys were nearly wiped out. A demon came along and offered to help. Sound familiar?”

  Roderick nodded. “Yes. In Seattle it was much the same: a vampire from the city’s founding days. Emily told me he was a relic of another time. She wanted us to forget about it: sweep it under the rug and pretend it had ever happened. I could get no further information from her, so I set out on my own.” He shrugged.

  I nodded. That explained his willingness to pull up stakes and move across the country to take over Asheville for me – and to entertain Agatha’s offer of employment. “It makes me wonder about Agatha,” I said. “She’s never said how old she is. I’ve always assumed she was around a buck-fifty, maybe two. That puts her just the right age to be on either side.”

  “You and she have always been close.” Roderick’s voice was lilting: other emotions ran under those words, ones I did not and would not understand. He was an orphan, after all. No one knew who had made him or why and he had suffered for it ever since. Agatha had offered to adopt him and he had turned her down to work for me; at least, that’s what he said. “I wonder why she never told you?”

  “None of them did,” I replied. “I got the sense of there having been a kind of vow of silence after the rebellion was over.” I paused. “Of course, there’s still the question of why you didn’t tell me.”

  Roderick smirked just a little. “Cousin,” he purred, “Would you have believed me?”

  Well, he had me there. I would have written it off as the beginning of some crazy spiral.

  Jennifer looked to one side, cocking her ear, and cleared her throat. “I hear sirens. We need to go.”

  I nodded, and the three of us made our wending way back to our cars in total silence. Roderick said a solemn good night and got behind the wheel of his Cadillac. Jennifer paused before climbing into the passenger-side door of his car. She nodded at me. “Roderick has my number,” she said. “I want to talk.”

  Roderick pulled into my driveway – my real driveway, at my house in Raleigh – an hour later. He had taken Jennifer back to her apartment complex, or one she said was hers. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d lied. If I were human again, and as aware as she was of all the things that go bump in the night, I’d have lied to us, too.

  Roderick put out Dog’s food, filled his water dish and left him and Smiles curled up in the living room to join me on the back deck. We were deep into the small hours before sunrise. Those are often my favorite time of night. The world is still asleep but it’s started to stir in its slumber. For the last few minutes before dawn I can almost feel like I’m in the world of the living.

  “So,” Roderick said as he scooted his chair forward and put his go-go boots up on the deck rail. “Demons.”

  “Demons,” I said. I told him everything I had seen in Dmitri’s head. He sat in patient silence while I talked. When I was done, I added, “Where from?”

  Roderick smirked. “You are really asking if there is a Hell,” he said. “And, by extension, a Heaven.”

  I opened my mouth and worked my jaw for a little bit. “I suppose so,” I said, “But not because I’m in some all-fired hurry to get there.”

  Roderick laughed once, a single noise of something that wasn’t quite amusement. “Good.”

  “But still,” I said, “Doesn’t the existence of one – no, two, counting the one in Seattle – doesn’t that raise a lot of questions?”

  “Only if you insist they must have a source other than this world,” Roderick replied.

  I frowned at him and his coy mannerisms. “Okay, cousin,” I said. “Out with it. Impress me with your very best theory.”

  Roderick allowed himself a prideful smile for a moment. “Have you heard of the Buddhist concept of the tulpa?” He folded his delicate little hands together against the back of his head. I shook a no with my own and he went on. “It is a spiritual practice by which a practitioner or, better, a group of practitioners focus their thoughts and energies on the manifestation of a thoughtform: an independent entity of purely psychic qualities.”

  I scratched the little diamond of facial hair under my lower lip and said, simply, “Huh?”

  “They will a helpful spirit into being,” Roderick said.

  “Sounds damned useful around the house.”

  Roderick nodded. “Indeed it is, or at least until such time as it has been invested with enough power to become independent. At that point it ceases to be a helpful entity and becomes something between a trickster and a poltergeist. It escapes the control of its maker or makers and must be put down. It is not unlike stories of the golem or of Frankenstein’s monster or even of Rumplestiltskin: that which solves our problems for us requires a price hi
gher than we might wish to pay. Therefore, it’s best to solve your own problems.”

  “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?”

  Roderick nodded professorially. “Exactly. According to the Tibetans, a tulpa requires study and effort. But let us say it does not, or perhaps that one or more of the elder vampires was aware of the practice and capable of completing it. A tulpa is, we are told, akin in nature to the motivations of those who bring it forth. Who is to say a gang of ancient vampires, terrified for their lives and eager for an easy ‘out’ may not have summoned up, consciously or unconsciously, a tulpa resembling a demon because that’s what they actually wanted?” Roderick spread his hands like a lawyer making a point in a courtroom drama. “They may have created something eager to help them but unable to win the war on their behalf because ultimately they wanted to believe they could win it themselves. Perhaps they think themselves damned in a moralistic religious sense. Perhaps they liked the idea of ‘binding’ it after having watched their own offspring use their free will to stage a revolt. Perhaps they simply like the aesthetic. You observed them adopting the garb and ambience with abandon, did you not?”

  I considered it, then considered him, then shook my head. “So, what, it happened more than once? Two bunches of ancients summoned up some manufactured entity to help them in their time of need and they just happened to get the same thing? It happened here and it happened in Seattle, just by coincidence?”

  “Perhaps it happened many times,” Roderick said. “Perhaps it happens even now. Clearly the elders who survive are working in concert. What is successful for one may be shared with others. I would consider it too great a coincidence that it happen by chance; and we have no special reason to believe coincidence is required.”