Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  I felt such a tremendous sense of satisfaction in that moment that my mind was made for me: satisfaction that Clyde’s murder would be resolved in the eyes of the world; that Cliff would take the blame; that this young mortal wouldn’t carry that case around on her back the way Clyde had always carried his. I turned and walked away, silent as I could be, through the woods. Maybe she would be willing to befriend me over time, maybe not, but I was surprised at how glad I was to see that there in fact was not a new Clyde left to haunt her own first case in Hardisonville.

  I walked back up to my car and my phone buzzed. I had a text message from Roderick. I flipped it open and read:

  We have your cousin. Time to settle this. Be at the plant in the next thirty minutes if you want him to live. I demand satisfaction for the damage you have done to my family.

  Smiles started growling. He’d sensed the shift in my emotions as I raced from something like acquiescent satisfaction to bristling rage in a moment. We both jumped into the Firebird and I threw gravel in every direction as I got out of there.

  I drove thirty minutes, out 280 again, then turned onto 64, then up that long, lonely mountain road. When I roared into the parking lot of Clarke Industries’ Brevard Operations Center I parked it across the handicapped spot in front of the gatehouse doors, got out and strode inside. There was no more need to be formal or stealthy or pretend-nice. As The Transylvanian had said, it was time to settle this.

  4

  I was halfway up the walk towards the old factory’s production plant when I heard The Transylvanian’s voice about five feet to my left. “You’ve killed him,” he said. “I can smell him on you.”

  It took everything dark and terrible every vampire carries inside just to keep from jumping ten feet in the air at that. Smiles barked at it once, like he had spotted a ghost. I stopped walking and looked over where the voice was. There was nothing there but empty space.

  “You killed the others, too, didn’t you?” This time he was ten feet behind me. I turned slowly; nothing but air.

  “What purpose did you think that would serve?” The voice was twenty feet further up the walk, towards the building. The door in, the one I’d used when I’d first come here, was sitting there just like always. I doubted it was any more locked now than it had been then. I felt around with all my senses, still hyper-tuned from drinking down Cliff, and I knew there was nothing there but the voice. So that’s what The Transylvanian could do, I figured; he could speak from afar. Weird, but probably very useful. I wondered how this related to the person he’d killed, what mysterious way this somehow reflected some facet of their personality.

  “They were a disease, a cancer,” I growled. “I am stamping them out. They endanger every last one of us.”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” The sound of The Transylvanian’s voice had moved again, closer to the door into the factory. “I think you liked killing them. I think you’re the monster here.”

  I laughed. There wasn’t much else to do, was there? “You want monster?” I laughed again and the lights in the parking lot flickered. “You’ve kidnapped and converted dozens of people over the years so that you could build a private army. Don’t expect me to give much of a damn what you think.”

  The Transylvanian made a little ‘tsk’ noise that made my blood boil. “You’ve no respect for your elders, young man.” His voice had moved towards the doors again. He was baiting me, I knew this, and I did not care in the least. My cousin was in there, assuming he was still alive, and I was perfectly willing to tear the building down to get him.

  “You should see what I did to my elders,” I muttered and in a flash few mortal eyes could have detected I shot in the door and was running down the hall and taking the stairs upwards three at a time.

  “Do you dare to enter my domain and challenge me?” The voice stayed three yards ahead of me as I ran. I marveled, somewhere in some left over part of my mind, at the control he exhibited over this odd little power. I was practically floating from step to step. I hadn’t escaped the bounds of gravity by any stretch, I was putting one boot down after another as I climbed, but I could feel the tiniest touch, just enough to catch a whiff, of Cliff’s power of flight. Another secret of my kind I’d learned in one night, another to file away for later and wonder how many of us knew this: that we could super-charge our powers by draining one another, that we could take just a little of their own Last Gasp and use it as our own.

  “I’m coming after you, aren’t I?” Normally a big guy like me would have stroked out one flight up, but that’s one of the many advantages of having a purely optional circulatory system. My voice was steady and even. I wouldn’t sweat, wouldn’t pant, wouldn’t get tired for a very long time. Those are all the things we think about when we accept the Big Flush, all those flashy entrances by our makers-to-be, the effortlessness, the inherent grace. We don’t think about the other 360 nights of the year. Now, though, I was perfectly happy to revert to those old tricks of showmanship if it was down to a head-on turf war between me and The Transylvanian. Maybe he’d kept in top form and maybe not. I didn’t see him having a lot of excuses to stand around flexing the mojo in a factory full of mortals all those years; even less opportunity as he passed night after night hanging around an empty one.

  “You are,” the voice said. It sounded... pleased. Almost. That was enough to make me stop cold in my tracks. “Oh, there’s no trap,” he assured me. He’d dropped a lot of the drawl now and sounded more mature, more intelligent; to be frank, more cunning. “It’s just a pleasant surprise. It’s the old way, you know. From before.”

  “Before what?” I was annoyed at all this, suddenly, and leaned against the hand rail on the stairs - four flights up and he was still leading me higher - and let the silence stretch out as he considered an answer.

  “Before vampires started laying claim to territories that weren’t theirs. Before the Bobs started showing up in North Carolina, before you. You want rules, order, good behavior. You want safety and certainty. You eradicate my children because you can’t control or cow them, because they don’t recognize your...” He chewed the word unpleasantly. “Your authority. You don’t even consider that there might be another way, a way just as safe if not safer for all of us, a way older than you or your maker.”

  I took a long breath and tried to look bored. “What way is that?”

  “The way we lived for millennia before this modern era of cell phones and false identities and computer records and fixers.” He said ‘fixers’ like it smelled bad. “To live quietly, to accrete power and wealth to sustain us, to create communities around ourselves that would rely on us as much as we relied on them, to make being chattel so rewarding to them that the mortals eventually can’t imagine denying us our due.” He tsk’ed again and it made me even angrier this time.

  The voice had started drifting upstairs again and I followed it at an easier pace, watching warily the spot from which it seemed to emanate. I wasn’t going to be caught off guard by him appearing out of nowhere. If he could throw his voice that was one thing; if he could turn invisible that was quite another. “I’m not sure I understand,” I said, though I understood well enough: the village at the foot of Dracula’s castle, perhaps? The peasants who refuse to look at Harker when he’s leaving, the villagers who cross themselves at the sight of the Count’s obsidian coach. The Transylvanian was training up vampires to be monsters like him who cowed and herded the humans around them - Carla healing up that old man so he’d leave her more of his wealth when he died, Blaine draining the Latinos dry because he didn’t like them on his turf and hiring a cadre of mortals to staff his business and become addicted to his blood, both of them taking big actions that would start tiny rumors they could nurture and tend and groom as they grew into superstitions. They were creating a world in which locals got used to living in a town where the wealthy people clung to life just a little longer than they should and the undesired outsiders wound up dead in a ditch with a little booze splas
hed in their face and nobody got too stirred up about it.

  “Of course you do,” The Transylvanian said. He was practically purring by now. “Do you know anything about the history of this plant?”

  I wrinkled my brow and then quietly but casually told him no.

  “Most floors ran in darkness all the time as unpackaged, unprotected film would spool from one machine to another as it was made. There was a spoken code for going around on those floors: ‘Watch watch!’ The workers would all say that when they were about to turn a corner in the darkness. It was how they signaled one another so they wouldn’t run into one another all the time. Walking down the halls, then, I’d hear that at every corner, say it at every corner, could hear it coming from other corners down other halls, a beehive of warnings flashing from one person to the next.”

  I sighed and kept walking. “Go ahead and spit out your tortured metaphor so we can get this over with,” I said.

  The Transylvanian allowed a small chuckle. “They - mortals - are like that. When there are unknown dangers, when something unknown and unknowable looms in the darkness, they shout warnings to one another. As you and your little friends in modern vampire society run around hiding behind he facades of legal identities and feeding in shadowed corners, they sense your presence. They sense that danger. They rush to investigate and then to warn one another. No, the better way is my way, where we build ourselves into the environment so that they have nothing special to fear from us. When you hide from them you still leave traces - a case of anemia that goes unexplained, a mysterious death, a scream heard drifting over the hills. You leave a blank spot in their view of the universe which the mortal mind yearns to fill. Look at how they live today, obsessed by fears known or otherwise. They create television channels that do nothing but tell them of new reasons to be afraid. They live in terror of terrorism. They live in angry fear of whole religions. On the rare occasion their leaders assert their cultural identity the mortal hordes quail and shudder and urge those leaders to back down after it’s too late.”

  “And you and all your minions have fixed that?”

  The voice was still leading me. We had walked up to the seventh floor and then down a darkened hallway only very dimly lit by an occasional red light fixture in a high corner. I could see perfectly well by that, but I could only imagine what it was like for human eyes, when the plant ran all the time, trying to navigate these halls by feel and, after enough years, memory. I could imagine them calling out this “watch, watch!” at every corner, warning others who might or might not be there that they were there, too. We had turned one of those corners and gone to a set of double doors that had CUTTER #9 on a large plaque on either door.

  I pulled open the one on the right and stepped inside as The Transylvanian spoke again.

  “We give them the solace of knowing what to fear.” His voice was soft, almost wistful. “They know to fear the night, the darkness, and they have some idea of why they fear it - not a full conscious knowledge, nothing that would ever get printed, but enough subjective experience to come up with an explanation they can live with. We are the heart of their superstitions, their nightmares, but we are an old and careful race and they know, deep down, that their ancestors grew and thrived alongside us, and if they behave themselves, they can do the same. They stop searching for what plagues their sleep and makes those screams across the hills. They huddle together, yes, they find it unpleasant, yes, but they stop searching for more to fear.”

  The room was almost pitch dark. I had my eyes as open as they could be but there simply wasn’t much light here by which to see. I was almost as blind as a human in a tomb: I could see shapes in the darkness. Feeling around, I found a switch that turned on a light in a closet. The sliver that came out from under the door was enough for me to see again. The machinery of the cutter, whatever that is, was dusty but intact. I doubted any part of it could move anymore, sitting without maintenance for years by this point, but it was an interesting arrangement of interlocking contraptions nonetheless. I looked around a bit in the room, taking a few steps this way and then that to peer around various mechanisms and into corners. I pulled the door open on the lighted closet. I could smell dead flesh on the other side as I did so and found two recent corpses, one male, one female, neither of them anyone I knew or especially cared about. They, I imagined, had served to slake the thirst of Cliff after he was turned. The hunger in that moment is unbearable, the body’s new need to feed at any cost overwhelming any other thought or desire.

  There was also a much older corpse, desiccated, like the natural mummy of that guy they dug up in the Alps a few years ago. He was wearing a fairly modern outfit, though: chinos and galoshes and a heavy sweater and oxford shirt. He’d had gloves on his hands, but all I could see between the gloves and the sleeve of his sweater were exposed bones.

  “The songchaser?” I said it aloud, though I hadn’t heard much from the voice lately and so for all I knew The Transylvanian had gone away or his power had faded or something like that.

  The simple “yes” came from a few yards behind me and was delivered, I could tell, by The Transylvanian himself. He was in the room. I was stunned I hadn’t smelled him come in but maybe that was another part of this Last Breath ventriloquism he had going. I turned slowly.

  “He was mortal.”

  “He was a hunter.”

  “A what?”

  The Transylvanian smiled a little, hands in the pocket of his overalls. “A vampire hunter. We used to get them more than we do now. He was a vampire hunter. I could tell from the way he asked questions around town. Some of the people he talked to were loyal to me for one thing or another - a favor I’d done their family, a big buck I’d killed and brought and skinned and cleaned so their dear old grandmother would have something to eat in the winter, that sort of thing. He wasn’t asking about songs, he was asking about disappearances, deaths, strange occurrences. I hunted him and his helpers, his local guides, and slew them to protect us all. You cannot possibly believe that’s a bad thing.”

  I wrinkled up my brow at him. “So why all the charades about not being involved? Why keep his body here when someone from the plant might find it? That doesn’t seem too smart, and being all smart about this vampire shit seems to be your biggest claim to fame.”

  The Transylvanian favored me with a luxuriously slow shrug that happened entirely in his shoulders and neck; his hands never left his pockets. He didn’t otherwise move, except to speak. “He was a trophy. I’d hunted the hunter and won. That victory was mine and no one else’s. I saw no reason to share it with anyone else. This was my territory and I acted within my prerogative within my territory. No one else needed to know and no one else needed to share that victory with me.”

  “A trophy?”

  The Transylvanian smiled a little in reply.

  “Christ,” I said, holding up my middle finger. “Keeping a mortal corpse around to look at as a reminder of your skill as a hunter? That’s what sport hunters do, not food hunters. That’s the most human thing ever. Also, your metaphor - simile, whatever - about the dark hallway and the mortals saying ‘watch, watch?’ That doesn’t make any sense. You, my friend are just super-attached to this idea of being the big, scary monster in the woods. That’s what you get off on. I don’t think it’s really enough to call a philosophy or an ethos or anything, it’s a pose. It is overt posturing. It doesn’t hold up under the most cursory examination. You know why those mortals walked around saying ‘watch, watch?’ Because they worked in a building with rooms named things like ‘Cutter Number Fucking Four,’ that’s why. They were on high alert all the time and adopted systems of warning one another because they knew they were in danger. Sure, maybe you and your brood have conditioned a few specific people to be accustomed to being in your presence. Do you think none of them will ever reject that? Do you think none of them will ever decide it’s time to get that yoke from around their necks? You ought to meet a lady who lives in my neighborhood. She’d set y
ou straight in about two seconds flat.

  “You think all us modern vampires endanger the rest of us by living among humans in secret? You’ve created an even greater chance that some individual human being will take it upon herself or himself to hunt us all down, you moron. You said yourself that back then there were more people who hunted us. I think that, really, is why you hide this ‘trophy’ away and try to make people think you didn’t have anything to do with that murder. You got up on your high horse and went out and murdered three people and left two of their bodies to be discovered and what did it get you? A couple of cops up your tail pipe for fifty years! Shit, man, you’re clueless. You are beyond stupid.”

  That got to him. I could tell that The Transylvanian was starting to get pissed at me. He’d taken his hands out of that front pocket on his ridiculous overalls and cracked his knuckles one by one at his sides. I figured he was going to jump me while I was still talking so I drew another breath and kept going. “You’ve been out of the game, out of human society, for way too long, man. You think they don’t all carry cameras and telephones and video cameras in their pockets - and all of those are one device! Do you even know what a video camera is?”

  But I stopped talking then, because I heard two shouts from another room and one of them was Roderick. Smiles started barking like crazy and I leapt at The Transylvanian with my fangs out.

  5