Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  “The noise,” I said. “The weird metallic sound when you blipped for a second.”

  Seth twisted up the corners of his mouth. “Exactly. I don’t know how or why it does that, but it does.”

  I asked the obvious question before I could talk myself out of it. “Why haven’t you used this to murder all your old compatriots?” I let my mouth hang open for a second as my brain churned. “It just seems like the easiest way to make sure no one would come after you: step out of time, kill your old peers and then step back in.”

  “That was the price of being forgotten,” Seth said with a small, sad smile. “Ross said I had to give up certainty in order to be forgotten. It had to be a gamble, he told me, or what was the point? So, I swore not to go after my old colleagues and he promised to make them forget me. I thought I was getting the good end of the bargain, right? Who’s going to hunt down a vampire they can’t remember? But now I shake my head and appreciate how wrong I was. Everyone else may have forgotten me, forgotten who I was or why I may have mattered to them, but I haven’t.” He chewed a fingernail for a moment. “I still remember it all. I still have to be afraid of who I was.”

  Roderick set up a meeting with Jennifer for me. I asked him to give her my number and let her know the old prohibition on being found or followed was over. Any concerns I’d once had about discretion were now well and truly water under the bridge. Jennifer called me a few days later and we met for coffee at a little place in Durham not too far from my “abandoned” cabin crash pad: a quiet little shop in a strip mall, with friendly staff and good candy. We sat and split a piece of cake in silence for a while.

  “Do you still work at ÜberBargains?” I asked it casually, trying to ease my way into the conversation.

  “No.” Jennifer shook her head at me. “I quit a few months after, well, that night. You know.”

  I nodded. “Our own private zombie apocalypse, part two.”

  She smiled a little. “I couldn’t just go to work and pretend nothing had happened. Not again. Not twice. That time was too much. The world was too unlike what I thought I understood about it. I couldn’t just put on the blinders and punch the clock.”

  I wiped my mouth on a napkin and pushed back from the table. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  She looked at me with piercing eyes. “Don’t apologize. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Technically, it sort of had been, but that wasn’t the point. I waved it off. “I’m sorry because mortals shouldn’t have to deal with crap like that.”

  Jennifer arched one eyebrow at me, a little insulted.

  “It sounded a lot less condescending in my head,” I murmured. “I’m sorry. You are not an ordinary mortal. I knew that the first time we met.”

  Jennifer pondered that for a few seconds. “Thanks. I think.”

  I nodded. “It is intended as a compliment.”

  “I’m not part of the herd but I’m not a vampire. So what now?” She put her fork down.

  I blinked. “Are you asking to be made a vampire?”

  She chuckled, low and rueful. “No,” she said. “I most certainly am not.”

  I breathed an obvious sigh of relief. “Good.”

  “But I don’t know what I am,” she went on. “I know too much, but you let me live. This time around I was on the team. Sort of.” She produced a bitter smirk. “I get the impression from talking to Roderick that you guys don’t often make friends.”

  I blinked. “You talk to Roderick?”

  She shrugged. “I have talked to him a couple of times, sure.”

  “Look,” I said, “Just for your information, my cousin Roderick is…”

  “Crazy as a soup sandwich.” Jennifer smiled for a split second: just a hint of humor at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes softened a little. She was starting to relax.

  I relaxed a little. “As you say.”

  Jennifer nodded. “I know, but I feel like he treats me as a peer. I have trouble finding those with my own kind.” She said the last three words as though they tasted bad, and I guessed they did. I hated saying them, too, sometimes.

  “Listen,” I finally said, my hands falling into my lap. “I cut you off after the ÜberBargains debacle because…” I started to say it was because mortals who get wrapped up in vampire affairs tend not to live very long. That was true, but it wasn’t the truth of why I’d mandated she stay away from me and from vampires in general. “Because you’re dangerous.”

  She arched both eyebrows at me over the rim of her cup of coffee.

  “You’re curious, Jennifer. Curiosity is bad. It’s bad for my kind because by necessity we hide from the world. We mostly just want to be left alone. You weren’t someone who would just leave things alone. If you were, you never would have been fighting the hive mind alongside me in the first place. I couldn’t run the risk of knowing you.”

  “So what’s changed?”

  I shrugged. “Roderick got to me. Roderick made me start thinking friends might be more of an asset than a liability.”

  “That’s not true,” Jennifer said. She ran a hand through her frizzy hair. “Well, maybe it is, but the truth is you’re scared. You need allies but you can’t admit it to yourself. There’s something big going on and you don’t know exactly what but you think you need friends to get through it.” She looked me in the eye. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  I looked away.

  “I was up in the mountains, you know.” She said it as casually as she could.

  I looked back and blinked at her.

  “The murder of that old cop? I don’t know what went down, but I suspect he was a friend of yours. I talked to the locals. I investigated it to the best of my ability.”

  “All that business with Clyde and with the Transyl – “ I cut myself off.

  Wheels turned in Jennifer’s head, capturing and recording every atom of meaning I might give away. After a moment of awkward silence she went on. “Clyde, yes, and whoever else. I was there with my team.” She produced a business card for NORTH CAROLINA PARA-SCIENCE. “I was looking for signs of vampire attacks and there was a bloodless corpse. I checked it out. We couldn’t find out much. It turned out dousing and ‘sensitives’ and my own moxie didn’t get me very far.” She shrugged. “I disbanded the group eventually. Groups like that never last very long anyway. They’re drama magnets. The point is, I’ve been doing what I could and I’m going to keep doing whatever I can to learn the way the world really works. Maybe you don’t want to be bothered with a human. Maybe you think I want to be your sidekick or something. Maybe you think I’m a security risk. You’re wrong, but that’s your problem. I’m already involved in this world of yours, Withrow, and I’m not going to be told to go home and act like a good girl. Neither am I going to be an on-demand social acquaintance.” She gave me a look that was not entirely unkind. “But I am open to being friends if you are.” She paused. “The truth is, you’re not the only one who needs a friend who gets this shit. I need one, too.”

  I let a long-held breath go at last. “Maybe this was a mistake,” I said. “I need friends, yes. I need…” I waved my hands around. How could I describe to her the way it felt to be so connected to the world for just a few seconds after I drained Dmitri? How could I describe what it was like to spend the better part of seven decades cut off from the world and to realize, all at once, how terrible that was? “I need a connection to the world of the living. I do not need to get that connection killed, though. I don’t need to screw up in my responsibilities to the rest of my kind by bringing smart mortals into things when we’re all trying to be as…” I searched my vocabulary. “As discreet as possible.”

  “Okay,” Jennifer was all business. “Turn down an offer to become allies if you like. It’s your funeral.”

  She stood up, and so did I. After a moment, we shook hands, our eyes locked, and she stepped backwards after holding the shake for a moment at the end.

  “Jennifer,” I said, fishing for some way to express the
truth of how vampires see humans, “I have a lot of respect for you. You are a formidable mortal. You’re going to do something amazing. I can feel that. I knew that right away, the first time we met.”

  “I know I am,” she said. Jennifer smiled, really smiled, at long last. We weren’t going to walk away best buddies, but we were going to walk away liking each other even if we didn’t see eye to eye. For me, that was a big deal. It was more than I got the vast majority of the time. “I just hope you’re there for it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

  Jennifer turned, but stopped and turned back. “You could have saved her.”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted to be one of us.” I shrugged.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean you could have joined the fight she was having.” Jennifer held my gaze. She hadn’t been there and I had crushed the phone to pieces so she couldn’t have watched the video footage I was filming at the time. Jennifer didn’t have any facts to go on, but she knew it, deep down, and I knew she was right. “The two of you were alone with El Diablo. The two of you could have taken him. I’ll never know why you let her die but I know you must have allowed it to happen, to one degree or another. I’m willing to forgive that because I wasn’t there and because this is, apparently, a war. Maybe you weren’t able to help her; maybe one or another person dying stops meaning very much after you’ve seen it happen enough times over decades or centuries. I’m not saying all this to make you feel guilty. I’m saying all this so you’ll know the quality of friendship you’re passing over. Maybe next time you’ll choose to save someone or you’ll choose to make a friend.” She looked away for a moment. “Not everyone gets to live forever, Withrow. We don’t all get to be choosy. We don’t have the luxury of turning friendship away. We never know when or how or why those friends will be taken from us. We only know they will.” She looked back at me. “Goodbye.” With that, she walked out of the coffee shop.

  I finished off the cake and wiped the staff of any memory of our having been there.

  I do hate leaving loose ends.

  At the end of that week, Roderick and I paid another visit to the technopagans. We coaxed them over to El Diablo's lair, where we found notebooks full of hand-written figures and a laptop running software neither of us could have understood or used. We paid the technopagans to tell us what everything was. Roderick and one of the technopagans went out into the woods and took care of the bombs El Diablo had been building while the others worked. It took several nights but eventually they made sense of El Diablo’s research.

  El Diablo had come up with a cocktail of steroids, stem cells and chemicals of his own making designed to send a human’s metabolism through the roof. It had crystal meth in it, too. That was part of what made its users so strong and so addicted. Meth turns off the part of the brain responsible for telling you to stop straining a muscle before you damage it. That's where meth strength comes from. The kids taking it were destroying a little more of their bodies every time they performed some feat of might.

  The technopagans were able to turn up one more important thing about El Diablo’s work: the stuff destroyed brains. I don’t mean it merely made its users crazy: it did something to the actual gray matter. The twins' minds were mushy when I used the hoodoo because of severe brain damage they had suffered. It would never correct itself. The technopagans were pretty sure it would keep getting worse. On the plus side, the physical enhancements would fade in time. I made a point of stopping in to check on Scott and Adam and, sure enough, within a month the twins were borderline mental vegetables and had reverted back to their normal physical capabilities. They didn't really recognize me. Their memories were completely shot. I wondered what their mother would think now. I didn't call anyone, though. It was an act of cruelty, but one I felt necessary. I’d called enough cops for one lifetime and their situation was not, ultimately, my problem.

  The technopagans also tracked down The Bull’s Eye's mundane identity faster than the cops could. I went to her house and spent hours boxing up everything I found that was hand-written. I left her medals alone out of respect but I took her journals, years' worth, and studied them in detail. She was a meticulous diarist. It made piecing together how she got in this situation possible, and I was intensely grateful. I thought about burning them, but I ended up putting them in the attic of my house in Raleigh. Vampires do that a lot: we’re big on mementos.

  Real estate records turned up three other houses owned by Dmitri, all of them with high turnover rates. Rent checks started going uncashed and tenants never seemed to complain. I didn't blame them. It would be a while before the county noticed anything.

  My state was mine again: yet another intruder was gone and so was a hero I didn't want to ever have to put down myself. A part of me was jealous of The Bull’s Eye, to be honest. A vampire is a survivor, ultimately defined by self-interest. That tends to make us the villain of the story rather than the hero no matter what wacky fantasies Roderick might have. I was okay with that. He could continue to struggle with it in his own way all he damn well wanted.

  I thought a lot about what Jennifer had said: her determination to understand the world vampires occupied. I had no intention of trying to stop her. The truth was, I was finding out I didn’t really understand it, either. I kind of hoped she got what she wanted and kind of hoped she hit nothing but dead ends. If Jennifer were successful in her quest it might be useful to know whatever she discovered and I had plenty of ways to find that out. As for what could have been the friendship between us, she had been right about me allowing The Bull’s Eye to die but she wasn’t there. She didn’t understand the circumstances. She would have to make her own peace with that. I couldn’t talk her around to my way of thinking. She was too smart to be persuaded like that anyway.

  For now, I chose to go back home, scratch my dog behind the ears and wait to see if anyone else reacted to Dmitri’s death. That’s one of the advantages of trying to live forever: we just need to have a little more patience than our enemies. The demon Ross, the elder vampires, the whole kit and kaboodle could wait until they got tired of hiding and presented themselves in some helpful fashion. I had some ideas of things to do to investigate, but I needed to let them stew a while. In the meantime, I’d acted to defend my turf from whatever bizarre machinations they’d cooked up. I hoped it would provoke some sort of revealing response. I could think things over until they broke cover.

  I had all the time in the world.

  Epilogue

  The most desperate person in Durham, it turned out, was a cashier at Jennifer’s old ÜberBargains. Roderick found him via the technopagans: he paid them handsomely and they had asked few questions. When they gave him an address, he went to it and studied it over the course of several nights.

  The man who lived there was middle-aged and had a nice house in the suburbs. It was big and expensive and Roderick wondered how he could possibly afford it on a few dollars an hour for thirty five hours per week. Observation filled in the details: a divorce, a layoff, depleted savings. Now the man worked as hard as he could at two part-time jobs. He just barely failed to make ends meet for as long as he possibly could cover the gap between his expenses and his income. He was at the end of his rope and he didn’t know what to do. The man had pondered turning to crime, of course, as many before him had done, but he lacked the temperament for it. He was essentially an honest man and Roderick knew the world would eat him sooner rather than later. There were lots of these people: the suburban poor, subsisting in homes too big for their reduced incomes. They were a phenomenon about which Roderick had read on the Internet. Roderick decided to spare everyone the trouble of hoping for the best. He would end the man’s life himself. Roderick very carefully set his intention, visualizing himself doing the man in for a specific ritual purpose: a summoning.

  Ross appeared when Roderick put his gloved hand on the latch of the man’s garage door.

  “I didn’t expect you to be the one
who summoned me in this way,” he said. The devil had a glint in his yellow eyes and a wicked smile. He looked like he very much wanted to have sex with something virtuous.

  Roderick took his hand from the door. “Just confirming a theory,” he said. “I do not wish anything from you.”

  Ross arched an eyebrow. “That’s not true.”

  Roderick smirked. “Then allow me a small correction. I do not wish you to give me anything or do me any favors. What I want is for you to understand that I will destroy you.” Roderick leaned closer to speak. It was an intimate whisper, like suggestions being passed between lovers. “I want you to know that you will suffer and be destroyed. The mechanism driving your continued existence will be disrupted and I will remain after you are banished.”

  Ross chuckled low in his chest and returned the gesture, leaning close enough to tickle Roderick’s ear. “Roderick,” he sneered, “I had no idea you cared so deeply about me.”

  Roderick leaned even closer, his breath cold against Ross’ neck. “It is not that I care so strongly as to find you contemptible,” he murmured. “You have a desire to survive and appetites to sate. I understand that. I am much the same way. I simply cannot stand the competition. The world can only bear so much anguish and I want it all for myself.”

  “How do you plan to destroy me? I’m a creature of thought, aren’t I? That’s your theory, anyway.” His tone was teasing, on the taunting end of flirtatious.

  Roderick let a little breath of laughter escape before he pulled back and looked Ross in the eye. “This is not, as they say, my first rodeo. I destroy. I remove things from the world. It is my calling. It is my art. Where others create, I create absence. I have done it many times and once – just once – it was to a creature such as you are. I intend to do so again.”

  Ross tried not to look concerned as he replied but Roderick could sense just a little fear behind his words. “So why aren’t you doing it right now? Why all the big talk?”