“Whose territory is this?” I hissed it, very softly, an inch from his eyes.
He made a little noise in his throat and his arms twitched like he was going to try to fight me. I could feel bones start to mend between my fingers. I waited a second until there'd be something to break again, then did so. That produced a grunt and a long, high-pitched whine.
“I said,” I whispered, “Whose territory is this?”
Outside, in the parking lot, Smiles produced one quiet growl.
Blaine mimicked it by simply grunting at me again. He could have spoken if he wanted to. He could have assuaged my ego by saying that it was mine and I'd have gotten out and he could have spent a few minutes mending those bones all over again and gone about his merry way, but he didn't.
“I intend,” I said, voice still very soft, mouth – teeth – just an inch from his left eye, “To find that out. I intend to find each and every one of you, and I am going to make certain that everyone – you, Carla, The Transylvanian and his four punks – that each of you understands that this is my territory.” I cleared my throat, drew a long, heavy breath. “I'm going to say that again,” I whispered. “This is my territory. If it's inside North Carolina on the goddamn map, it is mine. Do you understand that?”
He started growling and the bones in his wrists were knitting faster this time, so I broke them yet again with the simple pressure of my thumb and index finger on the little bones where the hand meets the arm. I moved my thumb and forefinger just a little farther up his arm, very slowly, making sure to keep pressure on the breaks, and then snapped the larger bones that run from wrist to elbow in three different places on his left arm. He was pale and shaking and I'd swear that I could smell blood, probably blood-tears pooling in his eyes.
“Good night, Blaine.” I said that in a normal voice and he spasmed in surprise at the sudden volume. “Do feel free to call if you need anything.” I let go of his arms, climbed down to the asphalt and shut the door behind me. When I got into the Firebird, backed it up and drove away, Blaine was still sitting in the truck, still shivering a little, teeth gritted, his hands out of sight.
The way I figured it, one of us would kill the other the next time we met.
7
Roderick licked his lips, dry from the winter breeze that blew continually on his balcony overlooking downtown Asheville. There wasn’t a lot of downtown to be seen. Seattle was so much bigger, so much more. Asheville was a tiny little bowl of light surrounded by dark mountains. He’d seen photographs in the day that explained why they were called the Blue Ridge but at night, those peaks in silhouette were the color of an old bruise. He could walk from one end of downtown to the other in less than an hour. It was all so insignificant, a dot of organized effort on a vast, rolling mass of slanted chaos. Asheville seemed so alone.
It needed a friend who could really appreciate it.
Roderick smiled and licked his lips again, stringy hair blowing over his face and into his eyes so that he reached up with one skeletal, pale hand and pulled it away. “Hello, Asheville,” he said to that bowl of light. “Would you like to play a game?”
The town didn’t say anything in return, of course. A part of him was sad that it didn’t. If he’d been in the right frame of mind, they might have had a whole conversation. It was a happy little thought. He liked those sorts of thoughts.
His phone rang, ruining the moment. He sighed, licked his lips one last time and pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket. It was Agatha. Poor dear. She did worry so.
“Good eeeeeeeeeeeeeevening,” Roderick purred into it when he opened it.
“Hello, Roderick.” She always sounded so officious and slightly offended, like a bank manager about to tell someone the loan application had been rejected.
“What occasions this pleasant surprise?” He turned around and leaned his back against the railing on the balcony so he could stare at his own reflection framed by that of Asheville in the dark glass of the sliding door.
“Just checking in,” Agatha tried to sound friendly and casual but she wasn’t a great actor. “You didn’t return my call.”
“I was having a bit of a rest first,” Roderick said. He liked his reflection. He liked it a great deal. “I apologize if I worried you at all.”
Agatha was quiet for a moment and the cadence of her voice was very precise when she spoke. “Not at all. I do want you to understand, however, that any member of my family simply must return my calls in a timely manner. I don’t call without reason. That goes for adoptions, as well.”
“Does my cousin promptly return your calls?”
Agatha chuckled lightly, as casual as morning dew. “Now, now. No prying.”
Roderick smiled but said nothing. He just let the silence hang there until it made her uncomfortable and finally Agatha got down to business.
“Now,” she eventually said, “What has Withrow uncovered?”
“Well, he might not be telling me everything.” Roderick was unabashedly coy, curling up around the suggestion of half-truths lurking in some shadowy corners. “But, he seems to think The Transylvanian is hiding vampires from him. The guy showed off some babies and Withrow figures that means there are more around. I suspect he’s going to start looking for those hidden vampires very soon.”
“And you haven’t given him any... help? Any little nudges in the right direction? How many did The Transylvanian display for Withrow’s benefit?” Agatha’s voice was a little apprehensive and Roderick had to smile again at his own reflection when he heard it.
“Just three. I’ve given him no help at all. He’s bounced some ideas off me, we’ve brainstormed a little, but I haven’t given him a moment’s assistance. Should I?”
Agatha was quiet, then finally, “If he tasks you with something specific, yes, by all means. Still, I want to see how this plays out without direct intervention.”
“Of course. You’re the boss.”
“Please, just call me Agatha.”
“What does Cousin Withrow call you?”
Agatha was quiet again, then hung up. Roderick held the phone open until it went to sleep and he was in the dark again with his own reflection. The city’s lights shimmered around his shoulders like a mantle, like a great cloak of stars. He hoped very much that Withrow would call him again soon; otherwise, this was going to get tiresome. Roderick would have to start getting creative if he was left to his own devices.
H’Diane and LaVonde were sitting on the couch of their living room. Music was playing on the stereo, piped in from LaVonde’s computer in the bedroom. They each had a pile of papers around them and on them and in their hands. H’Diane was doing some reading on old cases, ones that had never been closed. She’d been desperate to get her head out of the Clyde Wilfred killing for five minutes. They’d watched the house, they’d put out bulletins, they’d run his picture on the news, they’d gone up there to that damned factory a million times, watched the road in and out, everything, and they hadn’t turned up a thing. Cliff was nowhere to be found. That first forty eight hours of the investigation were long gone. The trail was cold. Hell, there wasn’t a trail to have go cold in the first place. There was nothing. They didn’t have a murder weapon, a motive, a suspect. Of course they were listing Cliff as a “person of interest,” which translated roughly as “the closest thing to a suspect we have at this time,” but they didn’t have anything like enough to press charges.
H’Diane had heard a couple of the deputies talking it over in the break room the other day and one of them had said what she’d already caught herself thinking: that kid is dead in the woods somewhere, just like the rest of them, and we’ll never know. It wasn’t going to look good for H’Diane if her first case as a detective went unsolved. Nobody had hated Clyde Wilfred for letting his own biggest case go unsolved, but that’s because he’d already closed a few by the time that happened. H’Diane shook her head and tried to focus her thoughts on the old case files she’d brought home to get all this out of her head i
n the first place. She sipped her coffee, set one folder aside, opened a fresh one and started to read.
LaVonde, very casually, piped up from her side of the couch. “You know, I talked to the cousin of the woman in that old murder the other day.”
H’Diane didn’t really hear her, or at least didn’t process it, at first. “Who’s that?” Then she blinked and looked away from the papers in her hand and looked over. “Wait, what?”
“Virginia Ramsey. The old woman who was found out there off Green River Road back in the ’50s.” LaVonde barely even looked up, so thoroughly engrossed was she in the old clippings and printed microfiche articles she was reading.
H’Diane blinked again, then set the papers in her hand off to the side in a haphazard pile on the coffee table. “Why?”
LaVonde shrugged. “I just got curious. Looked her up.”
H’Diane looked incredulous. “Curious? With your copious free time at the paper?”
LaVonde blushed slightly. “She says her aunt - they’re cousins, but they called her an aunt - anyway, she says her Aunt Ginny was...” LaVonde suddenly stopped and looked around for her own coffee cup.
“Was a...” LaVonde made a little forward-motion gesture with her hand.
LaVonde grimaced a little and looked away, then took a sip of coffee. “A witch-woman. She solved, um, problems. For people. When they couldn’t go to the doctor, for instance.”
H’Diane sat with an even expression for two seconds and then said, “She was an abortionist?”
LaVonde kind of waddled her head back and forth on her neck and then sighed. “Among other things. She cured sicknesses, sat with people, did births, sometimes arranged quiet adoptions. I get the impression it was a little of everything.”
H’Diane sat and drummed her fingers on her knees for a moment, watching LaVonde very studiously not look back at her and finally said, “Why?”
“I said,” LaVonde tried to smile, “I got curious.”
“No, no, fine.” H’Diane waved a hand around and dismissed that whole line of inquiry. “Not that. Why tell me?”
“Well...” LaVonde laughed finally, and shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. It’s ridiculous.”
“No, no, no: you don’t get away that easy.” H’Diane smiled. She couldn’t help it when LaVonde was acting uncharacteristically shy. “Out with it.”
LaVonde looked away again, rubbing her thumb against the eraser tip of a pencil, concentrating hard, and finally she set her jaw and turned back. “Her cousin told me she thought Ramsey and English - the kid - that they were in danger from something...” H’Diane started to interrupt and her expression suggested it might be with something of the no shit variety so LaVonde kept pressing and cut her off. “Something old and dark. She made it sound... ancient.” LaVonde actually shuddered a little. Jesse Beth’s words had stuck in her brain for two days now: Something no one saw anymore, or talked about, anyway. Something dangerous. Something that scared him so bad he couldn't tell anyone else but an old woman no one would ever believe. “She made it sound really scary and bad. Like, horror movie scary.”
H’Diane arched both eyebrows and set her coffee mug down, leaning forward a little, sitting cross-legged with her back against the arm of the couch. “What do you mean?”
LaVonde shrugged it off and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “Just... Jesse Beth, the cousin, the way she said it. It gave me the creeps. Like something awful could be out there, lurking out of sight, something old that nobody remembers anymore or talks about.”
“What, the old man with the hook for a hand? The phantom hitchhiker? What kind of campfire story did she tell you?”
LaVonde snorted.
H’Diane reached over and put her hand on LaVonde’s knee. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made fun of you. You... well, it seems to have really scared you. But I doubt I’d get very far if I walked into the station tomorrow and told the sheriff I was going to charge an ancient and horrifying presence in the forests of Western North Carolina with two murders. It would be awfully convenient, though, to wrap up both at once.”
“Still,” LaVonde said with a smile, “Promise me you’ll be careful. OK?”
H’Diane met her eyes and smiled. “I promise.”
They sat back and both started to go back to their reading when, finally, H’Diane set her papers down again. “OK, I have something to tell you.”
LaVonde set her own aside rather quickly and this time she was the one who leaned forward. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” H’Diane smiled, “But it’s weird that you would tell me that. See...” She cleared her throat. “I went through the case files at the station from that murder, the Ramsey/English murder. Clyde Wilfred kept something from the crime scene. It was this little leather bracelet that he found on English. He told one of the deputies at the time that it was a talisman. He didn’t know what it was supposed to protect against, but he was very clear that it was supposed to be a... charm.”
“Do you think Ginny Ramsey made it for him?”
H’Diane shrugged. “I wouldn’t have said that ten minutes ago, but now? Maybe so.”
The next morning, LaVonde called Jesse Beth. She answered on the third ring with a heavy, already-tired sort of hello.
“Jesse Beth,” she began, “This is LaVonde? We met the other day?”
“I knew you’d call again,” the woman said. “I could see it on you when you left.”
LaVonde just let that go. She had something to ask for. “Do you ever do... talismans?”
Jesse Beth didn’t answer for a moment and then said, “No love magic and no divorce magic.”
So it was that easy: like an ad in the yellow pages or calling up to order a pizza. “It’s not that,” LaVonde said. “I was wondering: you said you thought your aunt was trying to help him with something evil and frightening from the past. Something old that people wouldn’t talk or think about anymore at the time.”
“I don’t know whether she made any talismans for him, Ms. Burke. I wouldn’t know how to make the exact same thing.”
“No, I understand,” LaVonde said, “But could you make something that would... warn someone? Or something? Something that would protect against that sort of thing if it tried to show up, or if you got too close to it or something?”
After a long few seconds of thought in which LaVonde was certain that Jesse Beth had hung up every time the line popped, she spoke. “I could do something sort of like that. Maybe. By when?”
“As soon as possible,” LaVonde said, too quickly.
“A hundred bucks,” Jesse Beth said, “And you can pick it up tomorrow.”
Janine was walking in a circle around the field, ten feet from the yellow police tape, with one hand on her own forehead and the other held out in front of her. She’d been doing so for five minutes. Jennifer was pretty sure that was bullshit but everything was reopened for consideration after she’d killed a dozen zombies and met a vampire.
Marilyn had been dowsing up and down the field for a bit but now she was helping Jennifer. The property owner had told them they could fiddle around out there as long as they liked in return for five hundred bucks of Christmas money Sue had slipped them in an envelope. It helped to know a rich lady once in a while. Jennifer knew the sheriff’s department wouldn’t bust any chops as long as they stayed out of the actual crime tape. More of Sue’s monetary magic at work and Jennifer was grateful for it.
“So what are these we’re hanging up?” Marilyn was smart, efficient, and took orders well. Jennifer liked her for it. Marilyn could also give orders, an even more rare talent. Without her around, Jennifer was pretty sure this paranormal investigator bullshit would have worn her out a long time ago. It was yet another of the ironies of her life as she saw it: she hated all the junk science that got bandied around on those television shows about people looking for ghosts in old tourist traps, but those same shows had made it somewhat slightly more socially
acceptable to go knocking around someone else’s property looking for bogeymen than it had been before. Jennifer had seen the world crack open for just a couple of nights in her life and she was determined to find the truths that were out there. She had promised a vampire named Withrow that she would never go looking for him, never try to seek him out, and she had meant that, but she had made no promises about any others. It hadn’t taken long to sit down and come up with a set of circumstances she could consider possible markers of a vampire attack. Bloodless corpses were the most obvious. Newspapers didn’t often play that angle up because it was just over the border of being too freaky for the people who subscribe to get sale papers and advice columns. Jennifer had learned in time that cryptozoology message boards always caught those cases, though: to them, they were evidence of chupacabra.
Jennifer smiled. How many times had ignorance and blind faith enabled real learning? How many monks had believed bloodletting cured the common cold? All that wrongness, but maybe without them we wouldn’t have blood donations. Ah well. In the end, it all came back to blood after all. Maybe zombies and vampires were the only things out there. They were the only things she had seen herself, directly, so they were all she would allow herself to believe possible. She remembered abruptly that Marilyn had asked a question. “Oh, these? They’re game cameras. If anything comes back here and trips the motion sensor it takes a picture with a low-light lens. Grainy, but better than nothing.”
Marilyn nodded. “Something like a bear or a catamount?”
“Yes,” Jennifer lied. “Something like that.”
Part III
1
“The way I figure it,” I said to Roderick as we rode down the elevator from his room, two nights later, “They’ve probably called a powwow by this point.”
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 16
