Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  Two seconds.

  That was about as long as I should spend on any one target at any one time so I bounced off him and up into the air - more splintering noises from his chest cavity - and twirled with all the grace of a ballerina.

  That’s what told me they were all young, no more than twenty years a vampire, if that. They were slow and graceless and they moved like mortals. A vampire is outside the laws of physics in a lot of little ways. If we’re given enough time to test our abilities, we find out we can move like the secret and anatomically impossible offspring of Baryshnikov and Jackie Chan with the strength of, oh, rough estimate? A lot of people. That’s the best I can do on that score.

  The woman - blonde hair, athletic, small like a gymnast - was coming at me with one of the pool cues in her hand like a javelin, and I respected her for at least trying to wield a weapon in her own defense. She moved like molasses, though, and I swept the cue aside and put the flat of my left hand against her nose so hard her whole face caved in. The small bones of her nose carved her own brain to pieces. She never even landed on the bubba at my feet. She simply turned to ash in mid-air. I wasn’t breathing, of course, and I was very glad that I didn’t have to. I bet it tasted just awful, all that greasy dust.

  One second and a half. I was getting better.

  Roderick had driven the legs of a stool through the chest of one of the two guys who’d come after him then used it to pin the second one against the wall behind the first one. They were both tiny, angry sorts, skinheads from the look of it. They both had that Small Dog Complex quality to them. I figured they were buddies. One of them probably turned the other after getting turned, himself. Roderick’s scrawny little arms had no difficulty holding the two of them in place and so I took the time to look around for a convenient weapon to behead the bubba from before. He was gurgling and struggling on the floor, trying to heal his own wounds but doing it painfully slowly.

  “You got a knife? Machete? Anything?” I was glancing back and forth around the room. Roderick didn’t look at me; he was studying the faces of the vampires he held pinned. The one in front, with the stool through his chest, was grunting and straining and his eyes were bulging out. The one behind was - well, I was surprised again, as he was crying and pleading. His arms were pinned to his sides by the legs of the stool and whatever he was saying came out in a liquid burble, confused and incomprehensible.

  Roderick kept staring at them, fangs descended. He leaned forward with his neck craned impossibly so that he could strike with his teeth. He finally said, very evenly, “No, Cousin. I didn’t think to bring anything of the sort.”

  “Oh well,” I sighed, “Nothing for it.” I heard one of Roderick’s guys scream after I turned my back again. I lifted one boot and brought it down square on the bubba’s forehead. He tried to raise his arms to stop me, but his wrecked chest wouldn’t let him: his muscles pulled his chest cavity even farther apart. I imagine it hurt like hell. He started to shout but he didn’t get the chance. His skull cracked like a walnut and he was a pile of dust before I’d even lifted the boot again for a second blow.

  I turned around and dusted my hands off. That made twice in as many minutes. Not good if I wanted to avoid a reputation as a showboating prima donna. “Right,” I said. I sniffed once and looked over the one Neo-Nazi still pinned to the wall by that bar stool Roderick was holding. There was a cloud of ash in the air but I didn’t have time to wonder why. Instead I felt a little sorry for my cousin, that he had scored so many fewer kills than I had. On the other hand it was my state to defend, not his.

  The vampire being held in place by Roderick was wide-eyed and babbling something about his friends. He seemed terribly weak, like there was hardly any fight in him at all. I wondered if he’d even been a vampire for a year. “Alright,” I said, “Now let’s do some talking.”

  The skinhead didn’t want to say anything coherent at first, so I decided to test Roderick’s abilities in another way. “Just Jedi Mind Trick him,” I said, shrugging it off. It was an easy thing for me to do. I wondered if he would be the same way. He looked at me for a second with the guy squirming ineffectually as two of the four legs of the stool poked through his chest at odd angles. Roderick had missed the guy’s heart by a mile and I suspected he had meant to do so, that if we were really going to keep one of these jerks alive to talk to that he had intended to score the honor of having bagged our interview.

  Roderick blinked at me twice and said, “Did you just say ‘Jedi Mind Trick?’”

  I frowned and crossed my arms. “Yes.”

  Roderick laughed suddenly, three quick chuckles - huh huh huh - and then looked back at the guy. He screwed up his face, closed his eyes, then opened them and said, “You want to tell me your name.”

  The guy just kept wiggling around. Roderick tried it again with no change. Very rapidly he descended into saying, “Tell me your name tell me your name tellmeyourname,” faster and faster, so that I put up a hand and stopped him by touching him on the shoulder.

  “Here,” I said, “Watch and learn.” I reached over and took the guy’s chin in my hand to turn his face towards me. He tried to get away but it was futile. I looked deep into his eyes, reached down inside myself for the hoodoo, and spoke. “Tell me your name.”

  “James.” He growled it between gritted teeth, pushed out like pasta from a machine in one of those late night infomercials. I nodded, smiled a little, and considered what to ask next.

  “How many of you are there?”

  He paused for what was an unusual length of time. “Seventeen.” It physically pained him to speak, not just from the wooden beams shoved through his lung, but, I guessed, also because the information was being dragged out of him against some sort of inner defense mechanism. I thought briefly of Marty Macintosh, of the way he’d not said anything to me about the map of disappearances in Transylvania County, how he’d simply said I should see it and then shown it to me and had been as nervous as a cat in a rocking chair factory the whole time. Ah, yes. So their maker wanted to stay hidden.

  Gee, I wondered who that could be.

  “Why only seven of you here tonight?” He didn’t want to speak, but I was drilling down deep into his psyche and everywhere I could feel something push back I simply split it in two and kept going. We don’t usually have to be like this - people, like the bartender, are easy to work the mojo on as a rule - so I had no idea what I was doing to his mind by being this rough with it. It didn’t matter, though. I had already decided I couldn’t let him live. I’d decided that before I’d known who he was, decided it when I’d said that kill him too, of course line to Roderick in the elevator. At the time it had felt like cheap but effective machismo and now, standing here, I knew I’d meant it deep down in a way I’d not even been conscious of when the words came out my mouth like so many how are you’s.

  “Emergency meeting,” he grunted. “Only ones who made it.”

  “About what,” I said with a hint of a smile, “Was the emergency meeting?”

  He didn’t get proper grammar like that for a long moment, or maybe he was still fighting me in some way I couldn’t detect, but finally his eyes closed and he tried again to twist away from the wall. Roderick mashed harder on the seat of the stool so that the guy groaned long and low, like a wounded bear. “You,” he whispered.

  I leaned in close enough to smell the terror on his skin and whispered, “And who am I?” He tried not to answer, tried to snap at me with his fangs but I was two feet away before he could blink. I laughed. I laughed right in his face and then leaned in again. “Who am I?”

  “Withrow,” he finally managed.

  “No,” I said. “I’m the boss. Who made you?”

  He fought so hard against telling me that I started to lose my grip on his will. I had to put both hands against his face and hold his head steady against the wall so that he looked me in the eye. His own were wide, mad, yellowed with fury and terror. He was like a rabid animal being shocked into exhaustion s
o it can have a collar squeezed on and a shot administered. What I was doing was an act of cruelty and I relished that about it. James closed his eyes in defiance so I reached up and pulled them open with my finger tips on his eyelids. He groaned again and I heard one of the legs on the stool start to splinter.

  “Cousin Withrow,” Roderick said very casually, “I think we might need another chair in a few moments.”

  “Tell me,” I growled at him and I felt his will snap a moment before the chair did so that he gasped, strangled, then blurted out the name: The Transylvanian. It wasn’t much of a surprise, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

  When the chair finally split down the middle, Roderick didn’t spare a half of a second driving his fingers through the guy’s neck and grabbing him by the spinal column from the wrong side. There was a snap and then a cloud of dust and we both stood there blinking for a moment.

  “Cousin,” Roderick started to say, voice oddly light, but I squeezed his shoulder with one hand and shook my head.

  “Not now, Roderick,” I sighed. “I need a drink.”

  The urge to drive straight to Brevard in the middle of the night, kick in every door and challenge The Transylvanian right then and there was pretty strong. Roderick and I slipped out the back door just in time to see the bartender and the DJ coming back looking confused. The hoodoo I put on them to get them and everyone else out of the club would wear off sooner or later, I knew, because I hadn’t had the time to do something that would really stick. I guessed from their return that it was sooner. The bartender looked at me for a moment like he might recognize me then shook his head and kept walking. At least I’d gotten that part right.

  The guy checking IDs, the one I’d punched, had been slapped awake by Roderick and I hoodoo’ed him, too. I figured we were pretty safe. He didn’t get much chance to look at us, but still: better safe than sorry, as they say.

  That is, actually, why I refrained from going after The Transylvanian right then. If that vampire back there was telling the truth - and from what I’d seen of breaking down the barriers in his head, he was - then there were at least ten more vampires somewhere in Western North Carolina, plus The Transylvanian, plus Cliff if he’d already been turned. I had, at this point, to assume that Marty Macintosh and Carla Van Buren were among those ten, so really there were eight that we needed to find. Marty had told me once that his maker was a vampire who lived in Philly now, but I’d never bothered to check; I had to assume he’d lied. Thing was, all those other vampires could be anywhere, and if there had been an emergency meeting called then they were all aware that I was out and probably looking for them. They were going to lay very low for a while was my guess. Either that, or The Transylvanian’s hold on them was strong enough that they’d go there to protect him. Somehow I doubted that, though. If he’d been spending years populating this third of the state with his own personal brood just to have muscle around then he would have shown it all off when I got there instead of the one I’d seen. No, he probably wanted to keep them out in the field to keep their eyes on me and maybe for the same reason I’d turned down Roderick’s initial offers of assistance: he didn’t want to look like he needed the help.

  Another good reason to wait was this: if there’d been a meeting, The Transylvanian knew about it. He’d be waiting to hear from them. If he didn’t hear from them, he’d get nervous. I wanted him nervous, maybe a little frightened. I wanted him to know that death was coming for him.

  None of this, however, explained away the old murder from back in the day. Sure, The Transylvanian was going to turn Cliff so he’d killed off his family. Very traditional, like I’ve said. Maybe a little overboard. Maybe too traditional in the end: after all, I’d never have gotten involved first if he hadn’t done that. Still, there was some connection to the old murder, I felt certain. It was too much to claim that it was coincidence The Transylvanian would go after the kid of my last living friend when he was also somehow wrapped up in the guy’s first case. With enough leg work, maybe - maybe - someone could independently figure out that Clyde and I knew one another but no, it would be a lot easier for The Transylvanian to have found out by virtue of being interested the whole time, ever since the murders happened, keeping an eye on Clyde and thus finding out that he and I knew one another by witnessing the times we met out there in that old field.

  Well, whatever. These were questions I could ask him when I saw him. I wanted to wait just a night or two for that, but no more. I wanted to talk to him real, real soon. Roderick and I split up again after we walked back to his hotel. I went on home and sat out on the back porch with Smiles curled up on the back porch beside me. It was cold, but I didn’t much mind. I didn’t turn on any lights, didn’t even try to do a crossword or play with the little sudoku gadget I’d gotten. I didn’t check my email. Nothing. I just sat and listened to myself listening to the woods.

  Around five in the morning, I went to bed and lay there while the sky turned from black to purple and then purple to blue. At that point I closed all the blinds, climbed into bed and read a book for a few minutes. The next thing I knew, the clock read 5:33pm and another day had passed in the land of the living.

  2

  “He’ll probably turn Cliff tonight,” I said to Roderick on the phone. Yeah, yeah, electronic bugs, whatever. They listen for other stupid stuff these days. The way I reckon, the only vampires that ought to worry about telephones anymore are the ones speaking Arabic. That’s people for you: always worried about the wrong damn thing.

  “Why tonight?” Roderick’s voice was wispy and wistful. It was easy to imagine him staring at nothing in his hotel room, talking on the phone, legs crossed, sitting hunched forward on the bed as though there were a spiritual TV only he could see, hovering in space three feet to the left of the physical one.

  “Just a hunch,” I finally replied. “He didn’t hear from anybody after the little tea party they were having about me last night. He would have tried to get hold of them somehow. When that failed, he’d have to decide they’re dead or flipped, sooner or later, no matter how he went about looking into it. He’ll be wanting all the loyal allies he can get. My guess is he’s putting out calls to the others right now. If they’re all in Asheville already, which is a little unlikely what with there not being enough people for them all to stay hidden all the time, some of them will take a while to make it to Brevard. I figure he’ll plan a big headcount affair tomorrow night, giving him tonight to turn Clyde and get him somewhat ready for his coming-out tomorrow.” I shrugged, sitting on the porch again, talking quietly. Smiles was prowling around the back yard, sniffing at leaves and then taking a leak on them.

  “Okay,” Roderick said, “So what do we do?”

  “Well, let’s play a little what-if. If he tells Cliff tonight’s the big night, what’s the first thing he’s going to want to go do?”

  There was silence on the line and then Roderick chuckled. “Look at the world. Look at what he just lost?”

  “Exactly. I figure Cliff gets one last visit to mom and dad’s, either before or right after. Right?”

  Roderick had always lived in the home where he grew up so to him it was all hypothetical, but I knew exactly where I’d gone the night I was turned. I went to my parents home and just watched it from the trees. My family had been there at the time, but of course I didn’t show myself to them. I’d chosen to say goodbye to all of that already. To be honest, the temptation to speak to them wasn’t even there. I wasn’t going to miss them very much. I hadn’t known at the time what their fates would be, and I wouldn’t have wished it on them had I known, but I wasn’t exactly stewing over how to keep them in the dark, either. Roderick had been born by then, but just barely. I knew him as nothing more than a proxied signature in a Christmas card. It’s funny how life works out, isn’t it?

  “Hmmmm,” Roderick finally said. “Perhaps so. Shall I meet you there?”

  “Nah, it’s a pain in the ass to find,” I said. “I’ll be OK.”


  “But what if The Transylvanian decides to go with him? I wouldn’t want you to face him alone.”

  I chuckled a little. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll worry enough for both of us.”

  As soon as Roderick clicked his phone shut, the door to his room opened. It wasn’t kicked in, the lock wasn’t shot out. The person at the desk had happily given a key card to the man who asked for one because that man was a vampire who had made the clerk do so by looking deep into his mind and telling him to do it. Now the man – a generic redneck thug, just short enough to carry a chip on his shoulder and just dumb enough to think he was clever – was holding a set of chains as thick as a tree limb and a tiny little revolver. They both knew its bullets wouldn’t hurt Roderick in the least, but gunshots would sure as hell lead to some uncomfortable questions when the cops got called.

  Roderick sighed a little impatiently and said, “Well, finally. I thought you would never get here. Are you going to tell me your name or do we skip straight to the kidnapping?”

  I pulled into that little nook in the woods again and hid my car in the darkness between the trees. It had been a few nights since I’d been back to Clyde and Edith’s place and I wondered if the cops would even still be watching it, looking for Cliff. Probably not. From what I’ve read and what Clyde told me, most of the motion on a case like this happens in the first few days and then drops off real fast. Leads either turn into an arrest or they dry up completely. Media saturation only buys them so much in the way of information from the public at large. It was probably safe, but I wanted to be stealthy anyway. I didn’t want to alert Cliff to my arrival, if he were already there, any more than I wanted to alert the cops if they were there.

  With Smiles silently padding along between the underbrush and the trees, me in my boots and doing my best Injun Tracker walk, we progressed up the hill and over it to stop about five feet back from the tree line. I was dressed more consciously ninja-fied tonight: black parachute pants, brand new black t-shirt without any letters or markings or anything, black trench coat, black gloves, black boots. I stopped and listened for a long time, able to see nothing moving in the house and nothing in the yard. No sign of Cliff yet. It was just barely past eight o’clock, and I doubted The Transylvanian could have turned Cliff so fast that he’d be up and about and here already. I hunkered down on my heels, gestured Smiles over and wrapped my coat around him so he’d stay a little warmer and keep me a little warmer while he was at it. The cold didn’t usually bother me, but something about that night made me want to be warm.