I arched both eyebrows at him. “What?”
“Fist bump me,” he said.
I stared blankly at his hand.
Roderick sighed. “Never mind.”
“Give me Jennifer’s number,” I said as I pulled out my phone.
“Cousin,” Roderick said, eyes narrowing. “Are you about to give your number to a mere mortal?”
I gave him a look. “Just give me the fucking number,” I said.
He did, and I started texting with painful slowness.
“Oh, for the sakes of all the gods,” Roderick said, and started texting. “It will kill me dead to stand here and watch you peck out a message.”
“Then shut your damn eyes,” I growled.
Old Shoe, I typed, but then I stopped. What was he, exactly? Gone. R and I fell behind but will meet you at base.
I sent the text. A thought occurred to me, and I sent another: This is Withrow.
Seconds passed, and then this: See you back at HQ. If they have him we need to relocate. A few more seconds passed and I got another: I am pleasantly surprised you know how to text.
I frowned deep, my face creasing like wadded up newspaper. I was about sick to death of people thinking I didn’t know how to live in the here and now, no matter how true it sometimes is. I texted back, I’ll bet none of you assholes knew I could walk on water, either, but I can do that, too.
Then I harrumphed, put the phone in the inner pocket of my big black trench coat, and turned to Roderick. “Fuck all y’all,” I said out of nowhere. His eyebrows and the corners of his mouth lifted a bit in amused surprise. I took two steps back, blurred into motion, and ran straight across one corner of the golf course with more huge chunks of turf flying up behind me, right out into the dark and silent country roads of Sunset Beach in the middle of winter, past the technopagans – moving so slow they were just a tableau as I shot by – past a trailer park as dark and silent as a Mayan ruin, past the Dollar General with a big sign that read SEASONAL HOURS, past the self-storage where a few thousand lives were boxed up for winter. I ran all the way back to the motel without ever slowing down or missing a step.
I could hear Roderick laughing at my back, a few yards behind me, the whole way. By the time we got to the motel and walked onto the second floor balcony, with Dog and Smiles just about falling all over themselves coming up the stairs behind us, I was able to laugh about it, too.
“Getting old is for the birds,” I said to Roderick. I eased down onto the cement and dangled my legs over the edge, my arms through the old painted metal bars of the handrail, sitting like a kid. “Everybody starts treating you like a child, like you’ve never been anything but very young or very old your whole damned life.”
Roderick smiled but his eyes were serious when he replied. He was easing slowly into position next to me, cross-legged, elbows on his knees. “That is why we got out when we could,” he said. “That is why we chose this, why we get up every night and feed on the living when we must: so we can stay young and strong and vital past what mortality allows. Yes?”
“But the world keeps changing,” I said. “There’s always something new to learn and even if you learn it, the parts of the world that know how old you really are – you, for instance, and Jennifer, and all y’all – all act like you never learned anything the whole time. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ll look the age I was, forever. I’ve become an old man in your minds.”
Roderick nodded once, eyes on Dog. He stroked Dog’s fur and the St. Bernard settled onto his haunches on Roderick’s other side. “Only because you work so hard to cultivate that impression, Cousin.” He smiled at me. “But, I know what you mean. It is frustrating to =escape death only to discover one must work doubly hard to keep pace with life.”
I wondered again about Roderick’s turning. No one knew who his maker was. He wouldn’t talk about it when we first met as vampires, years ago, when I found out the baby cousin saw in a single Christmas picture in 1950 was now a vampire. I burned that photo when I got it in the mail because I didn’t know how his daddy found me and I knew Agatha, my maker, would kill any relation who did. She killed my whole family after I was turned – my parents, my siblings. I barely remember them now. I didn’t want to doom an unmet, hardly even known uncle and cousin, too.
I thought about asking him, right then, in that moment, on that balcony, if that was what he hoped for when he got the Big Flush: was he trying to escape death? Did he actually find it difficult to keep pace with life? He looked young, he was good looking, he was well off, and Roderick was a hippie after the age of flower power. His father died right before he was made a vampire, leaving him everything. Roderick was crazy as a batch of catfish cookies, sure, but there were plenty of people who would have traded places with him back then. The part of me that was once 19 and hated myself from head to toe sure would’ve. It seemed hard to imagine someone in his position – then or now – having trouble feeling like he was staying current. Roderick was as current as anyone I’d ever met.
It occurred to me, as I looked at my cousin, and as he looked out at the night, at the landscape of the coast, at this wind-blasted little town, that must be why he became a vampire. Roderick didn’t want to escape his life: he wanted to extend it. Most vampires, I think, become this to get away from who we were. Roderick wanted to stay who he was – who he still is: the fearless explorer, forever young and forever capable. All vampires are addicted to life in a really obvious, blood-red, thirst-quenching way. Roderick is addicted to living. Whereas most of us become scared of it over time, Roderick seemed to love living more than ever.
Roderick said, without looking at me, and as though he could hear what I thought, “Cousin, there are those who look at me and the future for which I preserved myself and think, there goes the luckiest bastard on land. They are wrong, however. It is not happy coincidence I am suited to the now. I have worked to make myself suited to it, and I have worked to make it suited to me. Do not go passively into the unknown of tomorrow. Anticipate what you can, and treat the unanticipated like a garden plot uncovered in spring: weed out what offends and cultivate what nourishes.”
I stared at him for a few seconds before I drew a breath. “Well,” I said to change the subject, “Let’s learn a lesson from that. Let’s not let the elders trick us into thinking they don’t know how to live in the now or anticipate things.” I nodded at the parking lot, at the water beyond, at the island comprising most of Sunset Beach well beyond it. “They knew enough to look up, apparently, because they took a pot shot at that model airplane Jennifer’s pretending is Xi.”
I realized we hadn’t thought to look for him – for it – when we came back. I stood, walked up and down the balcony in each direction, and looked into the stairwell at the other end from where we’d come up. There he was, sitting in a corner of the stairwell, hidden in the shadows. A tiny red light blinked every eight seconds. I wasn’t sure a human would even see it.
“Well I’ll be damned,” I said to Roderick as I carried him back.
Roderick, nodded. “Probably,” he said.
When Jennifer and her crew walked up ten minutes later, Roderick was sitting cross-legged on the balcony of the motel with Xi’s drone body resting in his lap, caressing the molded plastic frame and telling him what a good boy he was.
“Don’t pet Xi,” Jennifer said as she walked up. Her voice was hard but her eyes were amused or something very close to it. “He’s not a pet. He’s a person.”
“He is wounded,” Roderick said. “I thought about trying to fix his rotors but, let us have no polite fictions: I am neither healer nor engineer.” Roderick stood in one smooth motion, coming to his feet and lifting Xi’s frame in his hands to offer him to Dan.
“So what’s next?” Jennifer looked back and forth between Roderick and me. “I mean, other than reporting our van stolen and getting a rental.” She smirked a little.
Roderick looked towards me for a moment. “They have now seen more of our capabi
lities. We need to bring other forces to bear, ones they cannot expect or counteract. I believe the time has come for you to call in the others.”
Jennifer arched one eyebrow, just as Spock as all hell.
I sighed a little. “Not yet,” I said to Roderick, without any explanation for Jennifer. “Anyway, what’s next for me is that I’m going to talk to Deputy Crew Cut. Again.”
Now Roderick arched an eyebrow. “You wish to do so alone.” He didn’t ask it.
“I do,” I said. I looked to Jennifer. “Like you said, y’all have to do some regrouping. The last time I went to talk to this guy, I didn’t have anything other than bluster in my pocket. Now I think I might know some real shit. I’m hoping I can get him talking.”
Jennifer let out a long breath through her nose: not quite a sigh, not quite an endorsement. “If this guy is a human, maybe a human should talk to him. You said he’s a magic user, right? Maybe we could approach him as peers.”
I shook my head. “I considered that earlier, but now I think this is something I need to do. I feel it in my gut. I was the one who saw what he saw. I was the one who felt what he felt. We’ve got some trauma in common, and that can be powerful. Let me try one more time.”
I walked down the steps and pulled out my phone, standing beside my car. I needed to make a call as I drove.
I didn’t want to say so, but Roderick was right: I needed the others.
Beth and Marty walked with the technopagans, and in the silence before I unlocked my Firebird’s driver door we all looked up at the sound of rushing air. Hundreds of birds began landing all around us, alighting on the asphalt, all staring in silence at Beth.
“Ding,” she said. Her voice was high and light. “Soup’s done.”
Two perched together a moment in her outstretched hands, the GPS transmitter held in their beaks, and dropped it. She turned and offered it to Jennifer like this happened every day.
Hell, I thought, maybe it does.
I could feel something snap in the air, like a rubber band twanging, and the birds all looked around in confusion. Half of them didn’t even get along with each other in the wild but here they were all bunched up in one place that didn’t look much like home. With a cacophony of wings and squawks, they burst back into the air as individuals again, winging it this way and that before they got their bearings and headed off more or less for the waterway.
Sheila took the transmitter from Jennifer and started doing stuff with that tablet of hers. After maybe 30 seconds she looked back and forth at a couple of different apps, flipping between them, then sighed. “They’re gone,” she said.
“Gone?” I can’t even count how many of us said it at once.
Sheila nodded. “The data is as clear as can be. They’re performing a mass exodus of the island.”
“To where?” This time it was Jennifer, Roderick, and me, speaking in unison.
“I don’t know,” Sheila said. “We were mapping the island for supernatural factors. Now there aren’t any.” She hunched over the tablet again. “Actually… let me monitor this for a bit. It may just need some fine tuning.”
I waved it off. Magic and technology were frustrating enough individually. Combining them seemed to make them get worse, not better. “I’ll be back,” I said. “Then we relocate. Y’all do what you do.”
They stood in the parking lot, and on the balcony, and watched me go.
11
“I am an invisible man,” I said, which is the first line of the novel you might guess it would be, and also what Lorraine insisted I should say were I ever to need to call on her explicitly for help. I’ve dropped in now and again on the rituals of the Book People, which is how those witches refer to themselves, off and on for years now. For lack of a better description, I’ll just say they use books to create magic, and I didn’t used to think it was real magic but I know better now. I’m not quite sure what they think of me, and neither do they seem to be. It’s easier when a mortal is afraid of me. It keeps things simple. The Book People are decidedly not afraid of me, but they don’t quite seem comfortable, either, and that makes me uncomfortable, too, and I suspect that’s how they prefer it. I think at this point I can say with confidence a witch prefers uncertainty in many circumstances because that gap between perception and knowledge is exactly where the magic lies.
Lorraine let out a long breath. “Wow,” she said. “You actually used it.”
“It’s a bad time, isn’t it?” I drew a breath. “You’re in the middle of something.” I tried not to sound too hopeful. I didn’t like having to play this card.
“No,” Lorraine said, hurriedly. “What do you need from us?”
“It’s complicated. It involves a road trip, and a lot of danger, and I’m not yet totally sure what I need.” I had no idea how I was going to get Jennifer’s buy-in on this. I knew the technopagans and the Book People knew each other somehow, and the latter didn’t think tremendously highly of the former, or saw them as immature, or something. There seemed to be a rivalry there, but the nature of it was opaque to me.
“Where?”
“An hour north of Myrtle Beach,” I said. “Little town on the coast.”
There was silence on the other end, Lorraine holding her breath as she calculated what this would cost in the currency of witches. The Book People didn’t take money for their favors. Their legal tender was reciprocal favors or, sometimes, information: ungodly expensive to those of us who live behind secrets. The technopagans accepted cash on the barrel but the Book People insisted on barter. They seemed to think less of anyone who put a monetary price on their work, too. As an artist I can respect both sides of that argument, but I’d a lot rather pay someone in money than secrets.
“Two questions,” Lorraine said.
“Go for it.”
There was a smile in her tone. “I don’t mean I have two questions for you about this… situation. I mean our price is two questions, put to you, which you must honestly answer without obfuscation, deception or misdirection, and at sufficient length to satisfy our curiosity.”
An answer caught in my throat. Two questions, put together by people for whom words were magic? Hanging out with the Book People always raised the hair on the back of my neck because I could tell they were dangerous, as dangerous as I am and maybe more so. I could put my fist through a brick wall, sure, but the Book People could talk it apart with a few well-chosen lines from a novel they read thirty years ago. The book people don’t just read between the lines. They look into the space between words, the hesitation between syllables, the whitespace at the end of a verse, like an astronomer searching the dark between distant stars, and they see power there. Answering a question they had time to work on? Answering two? It was a hell of a price.
“Two from the whole group or two from each individual member?”
Another smile in her voice as Lorraine replied. “Two from the group, but…” She chuckled. “You should be glad you clarified it. Give me an address.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “I can’t do two questions. That’s too much. One question, sure.”
“For that, we help but we stay here.” Lorraine was all business. “Those are the terms. Take it or leave it, and no hard feelings either way.”
I made a growling noise as I turned a corner and pulled into the parking lot of Crew Cut’s motel. “Okay,” I said. “Remote support it is.”
“What do you need?”
“I need to convince someone to get on my side in a fight, and to trust me with information. And he’s another magic user.” I gave her the run down on the guy’s motel room.
“Incredibly crude,” Lorraine said when I finished describing the cages of living animals – if you could call that “living” – and the map covered in algae. I went on at length about the general stench of the place. I could hear the disgust, the disapproval of one craftsperson assessing another’s work and finding it lacking. “Undoubtedly effective, but he’s using the energy of other creatures. He o
ught to be able to raise the energy himself.”
“Well, he’s scared,” I said. “He’s got plenty of good reason for it, too. He’s all alone out here and he’s up against things far more powerful than he is.”
Lorraine let out a long breath through her nose. “OK. How much time do we have?”
I looked up at the front of the motel as I parked. “About a minute?”
“Jesus, you don’t exactly plan ahead, do you?”
“Sorry,” I said, “Next time I’ll make an appointment. Listen, I’m in a situation here.”
Lorraine sighed. “I’ll make some calls. Give us… five minutes. When the time comes, when you want him to say yes, use the phrase…” I could hear her breathing as she did something. “A man cannot handle pitch and escape defilement.”
I blinked, pulled the phone away from my head, glared at it, put it back to my ear. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. I’m supposed to just drop that in? Where’d you get that? Some Bible passage?”
“Mark Twain,” Lorraine said. “But he was quoting when he said it.”
“And, what, now it’s magic?”
“It will be.” She sounded a little exasperated with me. (I suppose she had every right to be, but in the long view, this was probably the least reason I’ve ever given them to regret knowing me.) Then, like any mechanic talking shop to a client who doesn’t really understand, she went on. “Part of the power in it, of course, is that he was such a powerful persuasive speaker, and when he wrote that he was being a little ironic considering his own speech patterns. Of course pitch is an historic product of North Carolina, where we are, so there’s a connection to the environment there and anyway, give us five minutes and you should be good to go. I will call on you at another time when we have formulated our question.”
“It’s going to be – for reasons – a little hard to spin that particular phrase to my advantage in this upcoming conversation.”
“Not my problem,” she said. “You’re a smart guy. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” It struck me suddenly that she sounded just like a mother telling her child they have to clean up their own mess even if she did bring them the dustpan and broom.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 19