I heard the switch click again and Roderick said, “It is safe, Cousin! Probably!” I looked, and the kid was running alongside the car. He wasn’t a pile of dissipating ash and flame, so he must have been a human being. He was damned fast, though, and this close I could smell something like the stench of a vampire I didn’t know. He was being fed the blood of a vampire, then. It’s what I do with my dog, sure, and we can do it to a human to make them stronger, or to heal them, but it makes them crazy. I don’t mean eventually crazy, either. I mean they go crazy in a few weeks – maybe months if they’re lucky – and they never come back down.
I started to swerve the car to try to hit the guy, but he stopped and spun and did a switchback behind us, across some yards, and as I came to a screeching halt I saw him run around the front corner of the only seedy little beach bar on the island of Sunset Beach. It was a half-assed shack with a beer sign out front and a big placard with its name: To Kill A Sunrise. Say it fast and groan at the pun.
The guy was seeking safety in numbers, of course. He went where vampires could not chase him and do him any immediate harm without drawing a lot of attention.
Roderick made a noise of frustration as I dropped out of super-speed and slowed the car to take a turn going the other direction. It was time to consider our options and we –
There was a person crossing the street in front of us.
The thoughts turning in my head tripped over their own shoelaces and tumbled into a heap as I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the gray silhouette in the road. I couldn’t imagine where they came from – there wasn’t anyone there the moment before – and I’ll be goddamned if I knew what they were thinking. We were in a speeding sports car tearing ass down a narrow street in a mostly residential neighborhood. They had to see us. They had to hear us.
But there she was, in a long gray dress, cinched at the waist, her dark hair flowing in the winter wind. She stared straight ahead as she moseyed – that’s the only word for it – across the street at a snail’s pace. At the last second she started to turn but never got to look right at us. I saw her face in three-quarter view, the gray-white of an old handkerchief, the eyes dark in the dim light of streetlights and the stars. My heavy old Firebird’s tires cried out to heaven, and the brakes sang, but we rolled right over her anyway.
There was no thud.
There was no bump.
The Firebird skidded, slightly askew, and Smiles and Dog fell halfway into the front row between us from their perches in the back. I saw Roderick’s eyes narrow as he dug his fingers into the dashboard. Tires shrieking, we came to a rest.
I hung my head out the open driver’s window to look behind us, but there was no body lying in the road. There was no dent in the front hood, no smell of blood splashed around, no nothing.
“Cousin,” Roderick said after a moment, but I put a hand on his forearm, very lightly, just the heel of my palm, to stop him there.
“No.” I pointed a finger at the road behind us. “Not right now. We have other things to think about than the possibility of a ghost wandering around.”
“I would say it is rather more than a possibility,” Roderick replied. His eyebrows were arched high and he looked a little bemused. “By all appearances, the classic ‘gray lady’ type of apparition described in so much beach lore and certainly not unique to any one tow-“
“Not right now,” I snapped. The street behind us just stayed empty no matter how I willed it to manifest a corpse. “Just… not right now.”
I drove us around the block a few times, to buy us a few minutes. I wanted the thrall we’d chased to have the chance to convince himself we were gone. I wanted him to relax, assuming he was early enough for that to be an option in the cycle of paranoia and confusion they always sooner or later develop. When prey relaxes is when prey gets sloppy. There’s a point in the crazy when a thrall just isn’t capable of relaxing anymore.
That it gave me a few minutes to come down off of driving right through a person who wasn’t there was of course mere coincidence.
Roderick spent that time expounding on his observations of the elders we were chasing and the strategy he felt we should follow. “So far they have created one circumstance after another and forced us to react. They murdered your friend Clyde to put you off-balance. That your reaction was other than they expected was a happy fact of your character. They sent an expendable thug to Durham to test your defenses and you responded by eliminating that vampire and everything he influenced while there. They killed one of Jennifer’s friends to restrict the options available to her and she immediately behaved as they hoped, at least thus far. In each example, they have been the ones to create the crisis and they have done so on their own timetable. We must create circumstances of our own. We must think of what we wish they would do and then create circumstances to force their hands for once. And at the same time,” and here he pointed one finger, not directly at me but at the world at large, at our situation in general, “We must create in them the impression we are doing something else. We must let them think they are still playing their game, and playing it well, while we draw a slow circle around the options available to them so those options are more favorable to us than they know.”
“Roderick,” I sighed, “Can you give me the short version?”
“We must fool them.” He smiled a little. “We must make them think they are in control and we must use that to hang them.”
“Do you have any suggestions on how to do so?”
“Yes,” Roderick said. “I believe so. But you will not like them.”
I furrowed my brow with undisguised prejudice. “Go on.”
“We are going to need help,” Roderick said. “We will need all the vampires of Raleigh, except for one. No, two. We must engage the enemy in a battle of wits. In modern parlance, what I propose we do is labeled ‘social engineering’. This will also require the technopagans’ participation.”
I put up a hand to pause him and looked sidelong. “OK, so what’s the story on you dating one of the technopagans?”
Roderick rolled his eyes. “Dan? I would hardly call what we did ‘dating’, but OK. We had some fun. We went out a couple of times. Nothing serious.” He shot me a look of something like disappointment from under the stringy blond hair flopped over his face. I noticed – not for the first time, but it was easy to forget – how old his eyes looked. Roderick was turned when he was nineteen years old, underfed, sunken-chested, strung out. He still looked that way. Just walking down the street, he looked like the misspent youth of any of a number of decades. In his eyes, though, were all those decades. “You do not think I am turning into some sentimental fool, do you? The technopagans are useful. I want to maintain relations with them. Just befriending Jennifer is not enough to guarantee that. Dan has been a member for much longer. He wanted more than I did, and so I have tried to maintain a friendship. I believe in the long run it will be advantageous to have… associated with him.”
“Associated,” I parroted. “And you got to have some fun, as you say.”
“And there is nothing wrong with that, Cousin. That we were born in a less permissive age does not mean we live there still. I signed up for this life in order to see the future, not to remain in the past.” Roderick clucked his tongue at me. “Now, do you want to hear my plan or not?”
I didn’t ask how long he had been cooking up this idea he so readily wanted to give the appearance had just come into being, spontaneously, as though from nowhere. I was tired of waiting. I was ready to make a thing happen. “Okay, Cousin,” I said with a little smile. “Tell me your clever plan.”
He did. As Roderick told me his plan – and it was clever – one thing became clear to me above all: if the Bull’s Eye would have been a dangerous vampire, and Jennifer would have been even more so, Roderick was the trickiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met, and then some, and he was already over the wall and on my side of immortality. I had to wonder just whose idea that had been, and why.
3
We ended up circling back to Cacciatore. The lights were still on, the front door still hanging wide open, and there were no cops or fire trucks despite the smell of burnt plastic and wood that wafted nearby. Maybe nobody much was around, so nobody had called the cops or the fire department. Sure, maybe. On the other hand, maybe it meant the cops and the fire department knew better than to respond. If the elders had started feeding their blood to the locals, why spend it on piss-ant townies? If you want to take over a place, you take over.
Roderick texted Jennifer to let her know there didn’t seem to be any activity around – no obvious motorcade chasing after her or prowling in the dark.
A couple of minutes later she responded: Don’t seem to have been followed, either. I wonder where they are?
“You were right,” I said to Roderick. “They must be moving the Rhinemaiden, or doing something with her, and we don’t have any idea what or where. They were just getting us out of the way.”
“We have but one lead, Cousin. We should pursue it.”
I nodded. It had been twenty minutes or so since we chased Captain Crew Cut through the dark streets of Sunset Beach. That was plenty of time for him to decide we weren’t brave enough to barge into To Kill A Sunrise looking for him. It was getting late by mortal standards – nearly 11:00 at night, anyway – but last call wouldn’t happen for hours. It was the off-season, so the place probably wasn’t very busy, either. Roderick wanted to play the elders’ game, put them in crisis mode for once, and I was all for that notion. We drove right up to the bar, parked on the street outside, and walked up to the front door.
It was hard not to notice the two cruisers with SHERIFF down the side. Fun times: this place probably got to stay open as late as it wanted as long as it kept serving the cops.
The bar was in a run down little brick building – correction, faux-brick paper siding – between an ice cream shop and Island Market, the mini-mart that passes for a grocery store on the island proper. The ice cream joint stayed boarded up until the first week of May, so that night it was shut tight. Island Market had locked up hours earlier. To Kill A Sunrise was tucked between them, narrow but long, with maybe more room inside than one might imagine driving past. Lots of people would drive past it, too: it was just across the street from the city lot and the only public pier. That night, the only thing in the city lot was a beat-up red pickup truck someone had parked there. By day, however, hundreds of people a day would drive right by this boozy little shotgun barrel with its horribly punny sign. They’d pay two bucks to park as long as they wanted and go watch the kids make sand castles while they drank a warm beer. Sunset Beach doesn’t have a lot in the way of a commercial district. Almost all shops on the island itself are clustered together in easy flip-flopping distance for the benefit of beachgoers’ wallets.
The bar’s door was shut, but I could hear what sounded like honky-tonk music coming from inside.
“Rednecks,” Roderick murmured. “How delightful.”
“Aw, Cousin,” I chided. “Rednecks are some of the most delightfully direct people I’ve ever met.”
Roderick raised both eyebrows and gestured. “Then lead the way, Cousin.”
I grinned and opened the green metal door. Light spilled out and behind it came a wave of Hank Williams – Junior, the shitty one. “Ugh,” I said aloud. “Fuck that.”
“How delightfully direct of you.” I could hear Roderick smiling as he said it.
“Get inside,” I growled.
The interior of To Kill A Sunrise was every bit as run down as the outside: a bare wood floor that badly needed a new finish, an old wooden bar top that stank of lemon-scented spray-polish and watery beer, ancient Formica tables with mismatched plastic chairs, and green cement block walls like the waiting room of a hospital where people only ever go to die. There was a jukebox playing and a few old coots holding hands of cards at a table to one side. The bar ran down the long side of the room, towards the back, and there was a barkeep staring into her phone behind the long handled beer taps. Neon signs advertised brands of beer I wasn’t sure still existed. Do beer brands go out of business? You wouldn’t think so, but not a single one of the logos looked familiar to me. I guess maybe it’s been a while since I spent serious time on the beer aisle at the grocery store.
The card players looked up to glance at us, then back down to their cards, then back up. We were strangers, and this wasn’t the sort of place strangers went. Not in the off-season, anyway. Not now, when most of the houses were empty.
“Liminal states,” Roderick said aloud. He was looking at the card players, who were looking at us. He was dressed in a pink tee shirt that had a superhero logo on it with a big JD, the superhero identity Roderick worked out for himself, what he was hollering about when the curtain went up at Cacciatore: Just Dandy. He was otherwise dressed in black tight-fitting vinyl trousers and the go-go boots with a little bit of a lift to them.
“What?” I blinked at him.
“That is what I would name a bar,” Roderick said, still looking at the card players, who were now openly staring at him. He smiled. “’Liminal States.’”
“What does that even mean?”
“It is from anthropology,” Roderick said. He was still holding the card players’ gaze, and now the barkeep – young, bored looking, maybe in her late 20’s, very dark skin and frizzy hair – had looked over, too. “It is the moment in a ritual when initiates stand on the threshold between two distinct and recognized states of being. They are not initiated and yet they have advanced beyond the wholly unaffiliated. Imagine a child being presented her Girl Scouts badge for Science & Technology. She is, say, a Chemistry enthusiast and has earned said recognition for it. The moment she stands before the troop to be given the badge, but before she has been given it: that is the liminal stage of that ritual. Another would be, for instance, if she were in the process of taking her driving test.” He raised his eyebrows. “Or if she became a vampire.”
I blinked at him. Where in the hell did stuff like that come from? “Which are things that do not exist,” I said aloud for the rest of the bar’s benefit, because I’m smooth like that. “And you would name a bar that?”
“Of course,” Roderick said. “A place where persons become intoxicated…”
“But aren’t yet passed out,” I said, finishing the thought. “That’s… not bad.”
I looked around the room again and confirmed what seemed to be the case upon first entering: there were people in here, sure, but none of them was Crew Cut, which was what I’d started calling the guy in my head. So where had he gone?
“If you ever open it,” the bartender said, having now officially seen and heard it all, “Let me know if you’re hiring. Anyway, you fellas want something to drink or are you here for the meeting?”
I looked back at her and met her eyes. “Meeting?”
“The historical society thing,” she said. With her thumb she indicated farther along the shotgun building, where there was a door. “Back in the Celebration Lounge.” The way her lips crinkled when she said it made it clear just how celebratory she thought the lounge to be.
“Oh, y’all rent out a room in the back for events?”
“Yep. Best rates in town.” She looked back at her phone. “Only rates in town. Anyway, it’s back there.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I put a hand on Roderick’s elbow. “C’mon, Cousin.”
He and the card players were still staring at one another and now I noticed his smile was affixed as firmly as possible, unmoving, with closed lips, but his eyes were very focused. He wasn’t just looking at the card players. He was examining them.
For their parts, all three had gone slack jawed. I saw a little bubble of saliva in the corner of one’s lips and their eyelids were heavy. They looked like they might be about to fall asleep.
Roderick licked his lower lip, very slowly.
I squeezed his elbow. “Cousin,” I said. “Let’s go.” I tugged o
n his arm, and he blinked, very slowly, so slowly it made me realize he hadn’t yet blinked since he started staring at them.
When he did, so did they, and as he turned to look at me they all seemed to awaken from a slightly somnambulistic state. They didn’t do it all at once. Instead, they swam to the surface of the here and now from far below, with Roderick in the lead but not by much. “Cousin?” He asked it as though he were surprised to see me there.
“Liminal states,” I said. I guess I said it to myself as much as I did to him.
“That would be a good name for a bar,” Roderick murmured. “I should endeavor to remember that.” He smiled a little but his eyes had lost most of their focus.
“Let’s go in back,” I murmured. “I think Crew Cut must have gone that way.”
The bartender had wandered over, looking back and forth between Roderick and the old white guys playing cards. I guess she heard me, because she said, “You mean Bobby? Yeah, he’s back there.”
Roderick’s eyes snapped into focus. “Bobby,” he breathed, and looked over at the bartender. “Thank you. Yes. Celebration Lounge.” He looked back at me, sharp as a knife. “Yes. For what are we waiting?”
I rolled my eyes and let out a long, lip-fluttering breath as I turned towards the back.
The Celebration Lounge was a meeting room and event space with cheap carpet over a cement floor and no windows. I made note of that, because a vampire is always hyper-alert for places where you don’t run much risk of sunburn, but it also occurred to me it was probably because they wouldn’t have looked out on anything other than the unadorned backs and sides of the ice cream shop and the convenience store.
The carpet was that kind that’s brown and green and beige and white and black, but all in flecks piled on top of swirling, random patterns. A million toddlers could puke their heads off in a room like this and the carpet would never look stained because it was already ruined the day it was made. The walls were beige-painted cinder blocks with a couple of fake potted trees leaned against them to draw the eye. Twinkling white Christmas lights were draped over the fake trees to try to cheer them up a little. The fluorescent lights were way too bright and I’d have bet a nickel one of them blinked at random intervals between seven seconds and a minute and a half.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 4