Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  Roderick joined me a few minutes after I arrived, graciously giving me time on my own in case I needed to get emotional. I didn’t have tears to shed, though. I’d wrung them all out that first night and then, as so many find on the occasion of another’s death, that initial energetic anguish had been replaced with the viscous silence of sorrow and the fury of clenched fists. I studied every detail of Clyde’s gravestone while I waited for Roderick to arrive because I had a feeling it would be many years before I would want to go back to it.

  Roderick pulled up in that absurdly tiny sports car he’d rented, a soapbox derby racer wrapped in leather and lights. In contrast to my lily he had a bouquet of a dozen roses. If it had been anyone else I would have torn into them - perhaps literally, I realized - but with my cousin it’s different somehow. It’s easier to chalk it up to his being crazy or just not knowing better or maybe even thinking I’d see it as some kind of a welcome joke. He set them at Clyde’s grave, stepped back and stood beside me in silence. We meditated together that way for a long while with nothing more than a glance between us. There was a smile on Roderick’s face when we exchanged that look but it was not of mockery; it was of being glad to be together.

  “So,” he said after a time, that same weird little smile of his returning. “Tell me everything. Tell me about Cliff and what happened at Clyde’s house.”

  So, I did. Almost.

  For reasons I couldn’t quite suss out at the time, I didn’t tell him about the necklace or the bracelet I’d left with H’Diane. I didn’t initially know why, I just left it out. It took a while to tell him about The Transylvanian, to describe the way my Last Gasp works. We did not immediately discuss his. He had never responded to my question at the old film plant and I knew that meant it was off-limits, at least in the state our relationship had been right that moment. I found myself leaving out my inexplicable awareness that Roderick was here at Agatha’s behest, too. Something made me hold back from that, perhaps because there was no way to bring it up without sounding accusatory, perhaps because I wasn’t myself sure how or why I knew. In truth, I felt like I might have done the same in her shoes. When I was done, Roderick looked away and at that blanket of trees for three solid minutes. We could hear all the little creatures of the woods rustling around, ignorant of us, unaware. Finally he turned back to me and lit a cigarette. “So what now?”

  “I don’t know. I need to find the rest of The Transylvanian’s brood but I don’t even know who they are or how many. Sure, we got told a number by that one guy we questioned up in Asheville but he was probably conditioned to lie about it. Plus…” Again I bit down on bringing up Roderick’s Last Gasp and the way it made the numbers iffy at best. Instead, I let it drop. Not yet. Something told me to wait.

  Roderick nodded and sighed. “Does that mean you’re going home to Raleigh? Are you just going to visit more?”

  There was something in the way Roderick asked that question. I shut my mouth again before I could give a simple and mindless answer. We let it sit there for a few seconds and then I spoke. “I guess.”

  “Hmmmm.” He just made a little noise like that and then looked away again.

  “Why? What’s it to you?”

  “I have...” Roderick smiled again, still not looking at me. “I have an idea: a proposal.”

  I knew this was what I was waiting for: why I’d left out the necklace and my knowledge of Roderick’s mission here.

  “I would like you to give Asheville to me,” Roderick said. “I would like to stay here and keep hunting The Transylvanian’s minions. I would respect your authority over the state, but Asheville would be my jurisdiction, like… like a deputy sheriff. I would use it as a base from which to patrol the western mountains and search out more of The Transylvanian’s spawn. I would report to you on a regular basis but I would have a great deal of power to use my own discretion in matters related to The Transylvanian’s brood so that I might decisively act when I encounter one of them.” Roderick turned and looked back at me, smiling weirdly again. His speech was so precise, so unlike him.

  “I...” That was a genuine stunner. I didn’t really see Roderick as being the middle-management type, you know? Were things that bad for him in Seattle? “Why?”

  Roderick thought that one over for another minute or two while he smoked in silence. Finally, he replied. “Agatha, your maker, has offered me a role as one of her lieutenants. I haven’t yet given her my answer. I’ve lived long enough in Seattle. My Last Gasp came and went decades ago. I have no reason to stay there and everything to gain from moving somewhere the talent pool is a little more sparse. I wish to do that under your tutelage, but I’ll take what I can get.” Roderick swiveled his eyes around and stared at me, no smile on his lips any longer. “Do you accept?”

  I had to think about it. I knew the smart thing would be to sleep on it and see how I felt the next night but there was no time, I could tell. “Give me five minutes,” I said and walked away from him, away from Clyde’s grave, and took a quiet stroll between the dead to think about it.

  Three minutes later I walked back up and took exactly the same position, but facing him instead of the remains of Clyde. He looked at me without distraction or movement.

  “You would be loyal to me?” It was an honest question and my voice was low but my arms were crossed. I realized the defensive body language and tried to drop my hands to my side but instead just sort of fiddled around with my elbows.

  “I would submit to you as a knight to his liege. You would be the ruler of this state but I would be your agent in Asheville and its surroundings. I would act to enforce and represent your rule.”

  “Once we find all of The Transylvanian’s brood I doubt there will be any vampires to whom you could represent it.” As I spoke, Smiles wandered back up the row in which we were standing and bumped his nose affectionately against Roderick’s left leg.

  “Perhaps, but perhaps not.”

  I squinted at him but I couldn’t read his mind any more than he could mine. Finally I sighed. “And if I don’t accept?”

  “I go to work for Agatha, yes, but not against you if trouble ever broke out. You, meanwhile, are left without a helper in Asheville and The Transylvanian’s minions retire to lick their wounds and plan for revenge. You’d be dead before you knew it.” Roderick was so matter-of-fact, so sane, it made me shiver a little. “There’s also the matter of your own soul and future to consider.”

  I blinked at that. “What?”

  “You, your future, who you are.” Roderick licked his lips, perhaps unaccustomed to speaking this much all at once and with so much presence in a conversation. “If you just act like none of this ever happened, what will you turn into? You’ll turn into The Transylvanian. Not literally or anything, not at first, not for a long time, not in every single way. However, I know you. You would recede from the world. You must choose, cousin, right here and now, to accept that you are giving up a little control over your surroundings to someone you are choosing to trust. You must be a little vulnerable in some way so that you can still be a little human. Cousin Withrow, that is what makes vampires become The Transylvanian: an unwillingness to let life happen around them, a desire for predictability, the urge to leave nothing to chance. We are strong and fast and we get fun little powers and we turn all of them, in time, to our attempts at control over the world around us. We try to stop the passage of time because it’s so meaningless and terrible from our perspectives and that’s when we become the monsters. You must give up some of your power, give up some of your surety, so that you can live like a human does in some way. I am offering you that, right now. I offer you a chance at uncertainty so that you can still be alive inside. Don’t try to turn the whole state into your personal Transylvania County. Relinquish something now so that you can stay connected to someone and something by caring what they do with it.”

  I stood in dumbfounded silence and turned that over in my mind. Roderick watched me very closely as I swiveled to gaze out
at the woods myself, reflecting, considering. Finally, I spoke. “Where would you live?”

  “I would buy a place, or rent a nice condo. I have money, that’s not an issue. You saw my home in Seattle.”

  “When would it go into effect?”

  “As soon as I could have the movers take everything from Seattle and bring it here; about four days.”

  “You’ve already been calling around, haven’t you?”

  Roderick smiled thinly and shrugged. “Covering my bases.”

  “Okay,” I finally said. “You’ve got a deal.” I held out my fat, sausage hand to shake and Roderick took it in his tiny little paw and that was that. I ceded to him all the control I had just fought hand-to-hand, fang and fur, to assert.

  Roderick spoke again, only a little tentatively. “Now, the first request of your new lackey? Visit more often. Once a year is not enough. You cannot keep up with what’s going on. Shoot for once a season, if not every month.”

  “Why? Aren’t you going to be my eyes and ears here?”

  “Because,” Roderick said, shaking his head a little at me, “I would like to see you more.”

  I let out a long, ragged sigh. “Roderick,” I said. “When I came out of the Last Gasp from The Transylvanian, I knew a lot. I knew that you were here on Agatha’s orders. I figured you were here to clean up behind me and around the edges, to help without being seen to help. I’m glad you told me yourself about Agatha sending you here. That you brought it up is the only reason I’m willing to agree to this at all. Thank you.”

  Roderick blinked. “Of course, cousin,” he said. “I’ll always be straight with you.” He paused. “You’re not the first vampire I’ve heard of who has your power, by the way.”

  I raised both my eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Yes.” He nodded eagerly, as though we were kids sharing a secret. Perhaps we were: cousins, on our own, heads bowed in whispered conversation in a country graveyard at midnight. Talking about this stuff – the mechanics of our state, the things we do and how we do them – is all seen as a kind of dirty talk by the more respectable of our kind. “The others - the old ones, the ones who’ve seen lots of powers manifest in their time - they call it ‘hindsight’.”

  I nodded at that and thanked him for the tidbit of information. Now was the time to ask about his Last Gasp again or forever give up. “And what is yours called?”

  Roderick physically receded a little, shrinking back and shying away from answering, but he didn’t force me to order him to tell me. I opened my mouth but he put up both hands and sighed. “It doesn’t have a name, at least not one I know. No one ever even whispers about it for obvious reasons. I suspect lots of us have it, though, or at least more than just myself.”

  I set that aside for a moment. “How does it work?”

  Roderick took his time answering. When he did, he started out in left field. “Do you ever see posters for missing persons on the Internet?”

  I wrinkled up my brow. “I don’t follow.”

  He smiled. “I look at social media sites sometimes and I see these digital missing-persons posters: a teen who has disappeared, a father who never came home from work, a child gone missing from the park. They usually have a photo and a physical description and the clothes they were wearing the last time they were seen.”

  I nodded. “Like on a milk carton.” Roderick didn’t eat food so he didn’t grocery shop - hell, he had a butler, he wouldn’t have been shopping anyway - so he shrugged that off.

  “The online handbill gets seen, yes, but is the subject ever actually found because of it? No. A tiny fraction of the world sees the flyer and forgets it immediately; then they remember it when they see it re-posted a few days later. When they see it a third time, days after that, they wonder why their friend thinks it’s worth the effort. Slowly the importance - the value - of that person fades from a world that cares less and less about her. In a few dozens of hours a missing child is worth less than the moment it takes to scroll past her picture in a web browser: just that quick!” He snapped one finger very lightly, as soft as a heart breaking. “Her family remembers and they weep for her in front of cameras. This makes good television if she’s rich and white and pretty, but eventually the cameras go away because there is a new child who’s disappeared and new rich, pretty, white parents shedding new tears. New photos are being posted to different social media sites. New circles of friends are wondering why they’re being spammed with an image at which they’ve already heedlessly glanced. One day, one bright spring day, even her family forgets to think of her. At that point, it doesn’t matter if she is alive somewhere or has been dead since the moment she was taken. The question is moot. The child is gone from the world, forever, and anyone who once truly cared for her and sees her photo will forget it again out of guilt - but not just guilt: perhaps also a little gratitude. Time sweeps her from the stream of life, dear cousin, and those who remain find their burden just slightly lightened. She is just one thread in a tapestry and time unravels her from it.”

  “Your power is like that?” I could barely speak.

  “Yes. That person is removed from reality – I can feel it take place – and forgotten. It would happen anyway, eventually. I simply help the world at large arrive at that inevitable conclusion and no one has to endure experiencing it.”

  I left the next night. Roderick saw me off from the house. He was staying there while he looked for a place of his own. He knew a fixer from Seattle who could take care of his property there and his dog and all the arrangements with a moving company. His butler was going to take care of a lot of the daytime shit. In the meantime, he was reading real estate ads. If I knew him at all, he would wind up with one of those water-guzzling, overpriced mega-mcmansion things I hated so much. That’s just how he is: no sense of tradition.

  I’ve thought, ever since then, that maybe I should have told Roderick about H’Diane and the bracelet and the necklace, but I still haven’t told him. I’ve never even hinted at it. I’m not sure why that is, but I guess it comes down to feeling like I’ve still got a card face-down on the table. I sincerely hope that they never run into one another and freak one another out, but I am not quite ready to leave my cousin alone in Asheville with absolutely nothing there to serve as a counterweight.

  On my drive back, I stopped in Greensboro to pay a social call on Sarah. She wasn’t thrilled at the idea that someone would have Asheville and all its surroundings all to themselves, but I got her to stop focusing on that and start focusing on The Transylvanian. She’d keep her eye out, she said. She wrinkled up her brow in a funny way when I told her what he’d said, the way he kept talking about before territories and allegiances. I didn’t press the issue but I could practically see by the way she went blank every now and again after I mentioned that, standing perfectly still and her eyes flicking around, that some part of her was erasing any mention of those before times every time I brought them up.

  I made a mental note to call Agatha and ask her when I got home but I never did. I just sort of forgot about it until now. I should call her tonight. On the other hand, writing all this down has kind of taken it out of me. Maybe a day of sleep would be good, clear my head, make me better able to focus on it all.

  I guess we’ll see.

  Epilogue One

  Roderick crept around the perimeter of the Shady Spot Assisted Living Estate. Despite the name, there were no trees immediately surrounding the small building - small for a hospital or rest home, anyway. It had room enough for a couple dozen tiny rooms and a miniscule “living” room for the “guests” and a microscopic kitchen where prepackaged meals could be reheated. Roderick smelled and saw all of this from the line of older trees that ran around the outside of the property. The building was probably thirty or forty years old. It had been built by cutting down all the trees around it, then bulldozing it flat, then putting down grass seed and a building and leaving again. It was wretched and weak and it smelled terrible. Roderick would have gagged
when he was human, but he wasn’t so he didn’t. He smiled at that terrible smell. He was going to help this place get better. It would have to, wouldn’t it? When he was done?

  Carla Van Buren didn’t keep him waiting for very long. She would be a bad nurse, he had thought to himself. She would be lax in her duties. She would hate these people, these mere mortal insects on whom she waited hand and foot while plotting for them to die and make her rich. Why she didn’t simply kill them, well, Roderick couldn’t fathom that. It simply made no sense. He had pondered this for a few minutes, maybe twenty, from inside the trees, when Carla came outside and lit her cigarette and started puffing on it.

  Roderick had been very careful to stay downwind of the back yard of the building. Carla should not smell him; she did pull the cigarette from her lips and sniff the air a couple of times but no, she did not smell him.

  She would already be running away or towards him if she did.

  Roderick smiled at this. He liked knowing things that were happening and how they should happen and being able to compare the two. It was remarkably more... He stumbled for a moment, in his mind, looking for a word.

  Together, he thought. Yes, that was a good word for it.

  He would need to make sure that Carla Van Buren did not cry out or attract attention, so the butcher knife would need to be held at just the right height and position to disable her voice without cutting her head off.

  Carla Van Buren was standing there, smoking her cigarette, worried that she hadn’t heard from Blaine or any of the others at the meeting in over a week. She skipped the meeting because Mr. Wilson was in a bad way. She had to watch him very carefully these days to keep him alive. She could always have put him in better health but she liked walking that fine line, the balancing act between breath and the grave. Besides, when she used her gift it felt... wrong. It felt like something was coming out of her that shouldn’t, like she shouldn’t be able to do something “good” like that. Of course, she’d given up on things like right and wrong, good or bad a long --