Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  He’d taken notice of Clyde when he refused to give up the case of a minor murder – there was more there I couldn’t get this way, and I didn’t know why – and then quickly realized that the Others, the vampire power structures he’d escaped in coming here, the ones to which my maker and I belong, had taken notice as well. He was insulted to find one of them nosing around up here again after so long. He’d decided the time had come to take care of things once and for all: murder the last human who mattered to the sentimental idiot – that’d be me – and make his move once that put me off my breakfast. If I shut down and went into some sort of self-pitying regression, great. If not, I would probably start kicking in doors and demanding to know what happened and he’d have his excuse and his opportunity that way. All he wanted was to upset me so he could put me down and make it look like a reaction to what I was doing rather than an overt maneuver for power of his own. Real vampires, The Transylvanian felt, shouldn’t act like big babies when mere mortal meat died. He counted on me being less than his idea of a real vampire. He’d told Cliff all this in his endless gloating, his ceaseless self-satisfaction with the plans he’d set in motion, and Cliff hadn’t paid much attention to anything but the lies he’d wanted to hear.

  And here I was, playing along nicely with The Transylvanian’s aims.

  I slammed face-first into the ground when the flood of information ended and I came back to normal time. My feet had flown out from under me in a great big tangle and Smiles bounded over. He was snuffling my face and neck. I tried to tell him it was okay, but I felt like I’d just gone on a three-week bender in the space between two seconds and now I had the hangover to deal with. Smiles grabbed my collar in his teeth and pulled so hard my shirt tore. I managed to get a couple of fingers around his collar and he backed away with all his strength, dragging me, half lifting me from the muck. I made some sort of moaning sound, then staggered to one knee and let go of Smiles. He skittered backwards for a moment, then came back and grabbed the hem of my coat to keep dragging. I ordered him off with something that was almost language, stood and blinked my eyes at the corpse on the ground back there. A vampire usually dusts pretty fast but Cliff was only a few hours old and it can take a long time – maybe minutes – for us to turn to ash when we’re that new. Hell, parts of him were probably still technically alive, dying flesh being carried around in a vampiric sack. The transition is not instant like they show you in the movies. It can take hours or even several nights and it hurts like all hell in terrible spurts.

  I fumbled around on the ground in his direction, got there and tried to grab the bracelet but my hand felt like I’d put it on a hot stove when I touched it. I’d soaked it in a vampire’s blood and if that little poem Clyde had stowed away in his office meant what it obviously had to mean, I wouldn’t be able to touch that thing ever again. I yelped and drew my hand back and heard the boots on gravel stop for a moment, then start running. Gods, I was blowing everything. The Transylvanian had to know what had happened, I’d activated some screwy anti-vampire magic thing and the cops were probably running this way. I finally just left it and took off at a ridiculously slow, drunken stagger back into the trees. Smiles and I made our way a few feet back into the shadows where things were darker and my eyes wouldn’t hurt so much from how bright everything was.

  The boots left the gravel road and tore through the trees alongside the house like a thousand drums beating in time to one another before they erupted into the yard. It was a stout little Asian woman. I figured she had to be that detective with the sheriff’s department, Detective Bing, the cop I’d seen quoted in the paper. She had a gun out and she spun in a circle with it held out in what I regarded as a very professional but maybe not practiced stance, more like a cop on TV than I imagine cops are in real life, before running over to Cliff’s very cold body and leaning down to feel his throat. I was too disoriented to think of licking closed the wound in Cliff’s neck so her fingers stayed there for a moment and she studied him. She put her hands to his forehead, the sides of his face. She had to be thinking he’d been dead for hours, surely, as cold as he was. We’re all basically room temperature.

  She stood up and pulled a radio out of her belt and spoke into it, voice terse. “I need two units and an ambulance at the Wilfred residence in Kills River, immediately.” There was some garbled, staticky response and then she said it again, louder. “There’s been a murder,” she said, and she said it that way, in total surprise, there’s been a murder, two or three more times before slapping the radio back into its holster. Then she pulled it back out and shouted, “And I hit a deer on my way up here so watch out for my car, it’s in the middle of the goddamn road.”

  I was feeling a little giddy from the blood, from drinking down another vampire like that, and I giggled a little then slapped my hand over my mouth. I don’t know whether she saw me or heard me or what, but all of a sudden she jerked her flashlight in my direction and before I’d even thought about it, at the speed of my recovering instincts and not my still-reeling conscious mind, I’d slipped behind a tree. Smiles started growling, loud, and he sounded like a chain being dragged across the gravel road.

  “I know you’re there,” she said. “I could see something move a second ago.”

  I could smell fear. I could smell it as rich and as sweet as an apple pie fresh out of the oven. It was pouring off of her the way it only does in our most secret fantasies. I closed my eyes for a moment and just let the smell fill me, then breathed out. I opened my eyes to find she was still standing there, still waving the flashlight around so that I could see it flicker madly between the trees.

  “I know you’re there!” she said again. “I know it!” That time, though, her voice sounded less sure, less certain. If I just kept my cool, she’d turn around and go back down to her car and forget all about how I was ever here. I could hoodoo her, sure, but in this state I didn’t really know if it would work or maybe it would work too well. Maybe I’d squeeze her mind too hard and erase every memory she’d ever had her whole life. I stayed very still, Smiles beside me, and let the night just hang out there in the air between us in perfect silence.

  She lowered the flashlight a little, took a step forward, paused and raised the flashlight. Smiles barked once, a sharp and instinctive warning to stay the hell back. I heard her gasp, saw the light hit him full in the face. He looked like he could murder an entire army on his own.

  In that moment, I had a terrible decision to make.

  3

  The thing was, I should have killed H’Diane Bing right then and there. I should have just swept forward too fast for her to see, broken her neck and left. That would have been the smart thing to do; the vampire thing to do. But here was a smart, young detective on a case she would very likely find impossible to crack all the way. All her leads had dried up days ago. She’d come out here tonight to watch the house, most likely, the way I imagined it was her who’d been here a few nights before. She probably came out here every night, after her shift, sitting and watching and waiting, hoping something would happen. Well, something had happened, alright: Cliff, The Transylvanian, me, we’d all happened. She was up to her neck in it and she had no idea. She didn’t necessarily need to ever have an idea, either.

  She reminded me of Clyde, standing out there in that field, going back every so often to talk to his vampire friend, wondering if he’d ever know the truth. He never would. She never would either, I knew that, but maybe it would be okay if I just... helped her along. I could step out and gamble that I could handle the hoodoo after all, try to make her forget we were here, and Smiles and I could disappear back down the hill while she wondered where the time had gone.

  On the other hand, I could step out and introduce myself. If she reminded me that much of Clyde, maybe I should go all the way. Wouldn’t hurt to have a cop acquaintance up here again, would it? I was drunk on the blood and the Last Gasp or I never would have even considered this idea. Look at how I’d walked away from Jennifer McCord
y that night in the ÜberBargains. That had been stupid and sentimental of me but I’d done it because it felt right and I’d known, somehow, that I could trust her to live up to that promise to try to stay away from me. I had no such feeling about this cop. It was her job – her calling – to run towards trouble.

  Still, the idea was there and part of me was enamored of it. I’d told myself after meeting Jennifer that I wouldn’t have known what to do with a friend if I’d made one, but Clyde was all the proof I needed of how untrue that was. I had a friend and now he was gone and part of me wanted, deep in my mourning him, to reach out and make another. I didn’t know whether it was a side effect of the Last Gasp or something deeper and more intrinsically me, but for a moment I felt a deep and aching loneliness that resonated with that of my mortal days. Across all those decades I could hear the same morose tolling of the bell of sadness I had tried to leave behind by becoming the thing I now am.

  Detective Bing from the newspapers, this young cop, she could be seen to fit the bill some part of me had dreamt up. It would be good to have some eyes up here. Yes. That argument kept suggesting itself to me as a justification. I dug a lot of information out of Clyde in tiny flakes over the decades. Only seeing him every once in a while didn’t put much of a damper on his usefulness for that, really. Most stuff with vampires moves real, real slow. So, if option A was to leave her ignorant or dead right that moment the way ninety nine out of a hundred other vampires would have done, this was option B: offer a hand and try to make nice.

  She stood there, gun out, flashlight out, Smiles staring at her, but to her massive credit she didn’t shoot. It would have pissed him off something terrible. I heard her draw a shaky breath and say, with tremendous fear, “Good dog.” There was a rustling somewhere off in the woods to the side, yards away. She turned for just a moment, just long enough, and I swept Smiles up in my arms, holding all hundred fifty pounds of him in both arms, out of sight behind a tree.

  Detective Bing turned back around, gasped at the sudden absence of a dog, and then took two steps back. I waited long seconds. She took another step, this time closer to the woods. Gods no, I thought, Just give up, go back, get scared or think you were crazy or anything other than come stomping into the woods to find the dog that just disappeared. The rustling off to the side reoccurred and a deer shot away into the night. It must have been standing, frozen, the whole time. I heard H’Diane gasp again, then produce an involuntary chuckle of nervousness: she thought Smiles was some neighborhood dog making a hasty retreat or something like that. “Stupid fucking dogs,” she said to herself, and she turned and walked back to Cliff’s twice-dead corpse. I eased Smiles back onto the ground, put a hand over his mouth and peeked out in practiced silence. If I breathed anymore I would have been letting out the one I’d been holding.

  She started patting Cliff down, checked that he had a wallet but didn’t pull it out, checked his pulse again, and then surprised me by picking up the bracelet with obvious interest, looking at it for long seconds, then fishing around inside her shirt to produce a little leather loop on a long string around her neck. The leather had a kind of new smell about it, like it’d just come from a store, and the leather - my eyes were this powerful after draining Cliff - had fresh tears and seams in it where it had been cut up, then sewn back together. There were tiny little teeth around the edge and two iron nails driven through it and sewn in so that they formed a cross. H’Diane compared it and the bracelet and though they weren’t the same, they clearly had the same general design sense.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  She knelt there for a moment and then produced a scrap of paper from a pocket. She unfolded it. I could tell it was a small and hastily folded piece of lined paper from a little flip-pad. She mouthed the words on it to herself and I could hear so clearly that the half-whisper of sound carried to me like a shout:

  If danger’s high and hurtful nigh

  This necklace will give out a cry

  No one shall hear it but you my dear

  You’ll know the reason for your fear

  It warns you if there’s bad around

  Do not ignore this silent hound

  Christ, but I hadn’t counted on there being that much folk magic around. What was this, Pagan Pride Day at the state fairgrounds? I sighed a little to myself. I don’t know what it is about us, but we draw out all the old ways in a hurry whenever we’re active. H’Diane went on comparing the two and then looked like she might slip the bracelet on. If she did, if I didn’t stop her, she’d be protected from vampires as long as she wore it. I was certain of that. She reminded me of Clyde, yes, but did she remind me of him that much? Did I see so much of my friend in her that I could let her not just escape but give her an unknown, unquantifiable defense against us?

  That made the decision for me. I couldn’t just be passive and hope for the best. I stepped forward, through the trees, and I didn’t bother to be quiet about it. I’d expected H’Diane to turn and use her gun: point it at me, maybe even shoot at me, something along those lines. I would have been fine with those but instead she slipped the bracelet on without even thinking about it.

  Hell and damnation.

  I held up both hands to show I had no weapons and then spoke aloud, from memory, Clyde’s poem:

  When Sun is low and Moon is high

  Cold on you and danger nigh

  Drench in blood of what you fear

  Wear on wrist or keep it near

  It stops the danger keeps you whole

  It helps dear Jesus save your soul

  H’Diane blinked as she listened. “Where is that from? What is that?”

  “It’s old. It was written for the bracelet you’re wearing.”

  “You...” She swallowed. “You made the 911 call.”

  I watched her and then slowly nodded. “I did.” She didn’t raise her gun so I kept talking. Getting a human talking is always the key to moving things along. Most of them can’t shoot someone who’s responding to them; even the ones who are trained to shoot people are trained not to shoot someone who’s still talking. “Tell no one that you have the bracelet. It will keep you safe from... us.”

  “What ‘us?’ What the hell are ‘us?’ What are you? This thing my girlfriend bought me is itching like crazy whenever I look at you.”

  “I’m no one of consequence,” I said softly. Smiles stood stock still beside me, ears up, eyes like two dark gems in the night.

  “My...” H’Diane closed her mouth and reached up to wipe her mouth on her sleeve. She looked like she was about to puke. The charms she was wearing must have actually worked. “My girlfriend had this necklace made for me. She said that a witch-woman told her that whatever this was wrapped up in was old and dark and hidden in the hills so that people didn’t talk about it anymore.”

  “She was right.” I cleared my throat a little; I didn’t need to stick around, I needed to go! Precious seconds, a whole minute, had gone by while I dithered and hemmed and hawed and put on this little show. “Be careful of us.” I paused and added, “But know that I might come to you again in the future. I might have a favor to ask. I’ll offer whatever I can in return.”

  H’Diane gave me a look of incredulity and I laughed suddenly.

  “I don’t mean a bribe. I don’t know exactly what I mean, but I don’t mean that. I just want you to get that I’m not your enemy. I was a friend of Clyde’s. I could be a friend of yours, too. Maybe. If you’re willing to overlook what the charms tell you when I’m around. We’re not all bad.” I reconsidered. “Not all the time, anyway. Now I’m leaving. I’m going to walk off with my dog and you’re going to let us go. Think about what I said. I could have hidden Clyde from you or hidden Cliff from you, but I didn’t. Let that settle before you decide anything in particular about me. Don’t try to fight me. You’ll lose. Please, get that: I could hurt you but I don’t want to hurt you. I want something better for both of us.”

  H’Diane started to go for her gun again but
I didn’t care about that. I’d already let her have the bracelet. It wouldn’t be any use to try fighting her, but she didn’t know that. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried so I simply wasn’t going to try. I turned around and started walking back into the trees, Smiles plodding along beside me.

  “I could arrest you,” H’Diane called after me, somewhat weakly.

  I called over my shoulder, “Maybe next time.”

  I stopped once I was well up the hill and out of sight and hearing range so that I could watch H’Diane. I wanted to see whether she came after me. I could get away, I was sure, but I wanted to know what choice she made. To my surprise, she gave up on me. She knelt again by Cliff, patted him down on the other side and came out with a little leather holster for a little steel knife. It was technically within the limits of what state law would allow Cliff to carry but the blade was wicked sharp, way sharper than it was when he picked it up at whatever gun and knife show he’d been haunting, waiting for the perfect weapon. I could see the blade’s edge from there.

  I could smell his father’s blood on it, too, even though it had been wiped down. Cliff had carried it since the murder as a souvenir. I’d seen him use it, in my mind’s eye, when I drank down the unraveling of that particular topic along with the last spark of his life: he’d walked up behind him in the back yard and drawn it across my friend’s throat with one quick movement and almost no struggle. Clyde hadn’t tried to fight. The boy I’d befriended in high school would have fought, but he’d been replaced a long time ago by a weak old man who simply died when a knife was dragged through his neck. H’Diane handled the blade very delicately, realizing that it was probably a clue. She’d have enough DNA samples from it by next week to know it was the murder weapon she obviously suspected it must be.