She did not see who sped past her in a blur but she did feel her throat gape open with a ragged wound. She put her hands to her neck and tried to scream but nothing would come out except a wheeze of air.
Roderick shot past Carla, felt the knife bite down and then break free and kept going. At the tree line he held out one arm and wrapped it around a tree trunk to swing around and face Carla again. Her hands had just started going up to her neck and he watched to make sure she didn’t scream.
She didn’t.
Roderick shifted his position, planted his feet against the tree trunk and then shot back through the air towards her by pure momentum so that he tackled her to the ground, tumbled head-over-heels with her for three lengths and then came up so that he was on her back and her face was buried against the ground.
“My cousin does not take kindly to such liberal definitions of territory and loyalty as were enjoyed by your many siblings and yourself,” Roderick whispered. “I apologize for what is about to happen but look at it this way: I could have been much, much crueler.”
Then Roderick sank his teeth into her throat and took his time with it.
It was amazing, as it always was: as Carla turned to dust and ash and began to drift away in the breeze, he stood and closed his eyes and felt unravel and disappear her thread in the great tapestry of reality, her place in the high school yearbook of consensual reality. He could feel people forgetting – the people who had known her least, first, but it would work on anyone who had known her well soon enough. She might be remembered long enough to be reported missing, but no longer. The police would ignore the case if one were opened. Her patients would forget she existed. The rest home would wonder how they ever covered the shifts when they were already short one nurse. Nothing would be tracked back to him or to her or to vampires in general because there would be nothing to track back. It wasn’t like Withrow’s Jedi Mind Trick, which he said could be overcome by time or effort or coincidence. It was a fundamental rewrite of the world. It took a little time but that time was enough. No one remembered; no one except Roderick, who remembered them all.
The silence around him was exquisite.
Roderick took a moment to review his plans for the rest of the evening. He had hours and hours before sunrise.
Marty Macintosh proved to be quite easy to find. Roderick drove around the apartment complex with the window down, frigid winds carrying the scent of another vampire to him. He stopped his car, got out and let his senses reach out to touch all the apartments around him. Roderick smiled a little, to himself, like a kid with a stolen candy bar in his pocket.
Marty eventually answered his door after Roderick said all the right things from outside. He gawped at Roderick standing there, leaning against the door jam, looking as casual as Saturday afternoon.
“I am the cousin of Withrow Surrett, the boss of this state,” Roderick said with absolutely zero otherwise in the way of niceties. “My name is Roderick Surrett. Withrow has allowed me the honor of assisting him in the eradication of the minions of the vampire you knew as The Transylvanian.” Roderick watched Marty’s face closely.
“You’re here to kill me.” Marty’s voice was small and terrified and resigned and, Roderick realized, a little glad.
“Heavens no,” Roderick said with a chuckle. “I’m here to ask you if you would like to be adopted and protected.”
Marty blinked his wide eyes once, then again.
“If I take you as mine, my cousin will not harm you.” Roderick smiled still, but it was growing a little brittle. He had been unaware Marty might require a visual aid to comprehension. “I am offering you that.”
“Why?”
“Because you helped my dear cousin in his quest,” Roderick purred. The smile was a little more natural now. “Because I wish to see you spared unnecessary harm. You tried to do what you could against the progenitor’s sway The Transylvanian would hold over you. You also have useful skills. My time in this city is not at an end and I will need a great deal of assistance completing the work that remains to me.”
“The maps.” Marty was no great conversationalist and Roderick was already kind of tired of this.
“Yes. I wish you to map things for me. Notice things for me. Warn me of things. Assist me in identifying targets.” Roderick licked his lips. He lacked his cousin’s hoodoo but he had something like a very light ESP: he could sometimes get just a whiff of the motivations behind another’s words. Marty was grappling with lots of competing influences but he didn’t say enough to reveal any of them. Roderick pressed his case. “Do you accept? You will only have these moments in which to consider it. If you do not accept then I will eliminate you without pain or suffering. If you do accept, you will be protected and taught how to live in vampire society. If you accept and then betray me then I will kill you in some way that causes great anguish, starting with your mind.”
“This can’t be about maps.” Marty simply said it, like the most obvious thing in the world.
Roderick sighed softly. “I’m also offering this because I need to sandwich myself somewhere between burdensome and helpful. I am soon going to be making a request of my cousin. It will help me if he sees me as more responsible. If he finds out about you then I can play you as the puppy for whom I’ve successfully cared all this time.”
“Mr. Surrett,” Marty finally said, “You’re lying. You’re not going to tell him about me one way or the other, are you?”
Roderick shrugged and tried not to look too incapable of something like guilt.
Marty blinked again, more rapidly. “I accept, Mr. Surrett.”
Roderick held out a hand to shake. “I’m so glad to have you on board, Marty. Please, call me Roderick.”
Epilogue Two
H’Diane and Lavonde were sitting at home watching a DVD of a show they’d both missed when it aired a few years before. H’Diane wasn’t that into it but LaVonde was and H’Diane didn’t want to be the downer. During a break between episodes, she got up and went into the bathroom and stopped halfway to the toilet when all of a sudden the pendant around her neck ached.
It hadn’t done that in a year, since the night Cliff had been found dead.
The night The Caller had talked to her.
She stopped, turned around, walked into the bedroom and grabbed her gun and her badge from the nightstand. Quietly, she walked back up the hall, crouched and peeked into the living room.
A swarthy guy of thirty-five or forty had LaVonde by both arms and had his mouth open, grotesquely long canines dripping with saliva, ready to bite the neck of the woman H’Diane loved.
Without thinking, without a moment’s hesitation, she stood and pointed the gun and shot him in the mouth so that his jaw shattered and blood and gore splattered the wall behind him. He made a noise, a horrible noise sort of like a strangled growl, and tossed LaVonde aside to come straight for H’Diane. All she could do was throw her arms up over her face at the last second.
The guy touched her arm, touched the bracelet, and screamed bloody murder, flinging himself backwards, away from H’Diane, away from LaVonde, towards the front door. H’Diane stared for a second as he scrabbled with smoking hands at the door knob, trying to get away, then raised the gun again and shouted that he was under arrest.
He didn’t comply, and he was clearly dangerous, so she pulled the trigger.
One shot, two shots, both directly in the abdominal region, precisely as her training dictated, but they didn’t seem to stop him the way they should. The front door flew open, banging him in the face, and a third woman was standing there. H’Diane knew her but couldn’t remember from where. The woman grabbed the top of the doorframe, kicked the guy in his shattered jaw so that he landed on his back, then drew out a wooden stake – there didn’t seem to be a better word for it – and a hammer. H’Diane barely had time to shout something meaningless before the woman had driven it into the guy’s chest with three savage blows. With a fourth swing of her arms, she yanked some sort of
sharp tool on a short wooden handle out of a sling on her back and brought it down across the guy’s neck.
Four seconds later there was a pile of ash settling on the floor and the bits of bone and flesh that had sprayed around were simply gone in little puffs of dust.
The women dropped her weapons and threw her hands into the air. “Jennifer McCordy! North Carolina Para-Science! We met in the field last year!” Her eyes were squeezed shut. H’Diane’s hands were shaking. Somehow she managed not to fire the gun. The woman was clearly waiting for that to happen, and when it didn’t, when the silence filled the room, LaVonde finally relaxed enough to scream.
Days later, H’Diane and LaVonde and Jennifer met at a hotel bar out by the airport and had a very long conversation about monsters in the night and the things that might work against them.
About the Author
Michael G. Williams is a native of the mountains of western North Carolina. He is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi and believes strongly in the power of found families. Michael lives in Durham with his partner, two cats and more and better friends than he probably deserves.
Michael earned a BA in Performance Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and works as an engineer. He has been a successful participant in National Novel Writing Month for many years and encourages anyone interested in writing to jump headlong into the deep end of insanity for thirty days. More information can be found at www.nanowrimo.org.
For more information on this work and others by Michael G. Williams, visit www.michaelgwilliams-author.com. For information on Michael’s open-source marketing, visit The Perishables Project at www.theperishablesproject.com.
Other Works by Michael G. Williams:
Perishables
“COMPLICATIONS”
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Copyright 2017 by Michael G. Williams
Published by Falstaff Books
All rights reserved.
Cover Design - Natania Barron
Print Book Design - Susan H. Roddey www.shroddey.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is merely a coincidence. But you’re so vain, you probably think this story is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?
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Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 24
