Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  I chuckled. “Like the way the guy at the FBI who was charged with finding Woodward & Bernstein’s informant was the informant?”

  “Exactly,” Crew Cut said.

  I shook my head. “No, he’s way freakier than that,” I said. “And I bet he knows where the elders – the local elders – went.”

  Crew Cut shrugged again. “Sad story, bro: I don’t know where he is. Herman calls meetings but nobody gets to know where he’s staying. He wants us to know as little about each other as possible. He operates the ‘historical society’ like a terror cell.”

  “Okay,” I said, putting my hand out. “Hold up. How did he get everyone on board? You don’t show up for a historical society interest meeting and find out it’s a secret blood cult and just say you’re okay with it.”

  “He’s got this crazy story about there being pirate treasure, and about there being dark forces,” Crew Cut said. “And remember what I said about no one being exactly sure where the state line is? North and South Carolina are going to draw it once and for all next year. Herman’s got everybody wrapped up in this bunk about the state line being finalized and how we need to find this pirate treasure before it’s located in South Carolina because then something bad happens. He tries to be pretty vague about it, and he seems to just convince the others to go along with it. Trust me, man, you can be pretty smart and still get coerced by enough dollar signs. Just ask Bernie Madoff.”

  I humphed. “Still seems far-fetched.”

  “Regardless, I figure that gig is up now. After what we saw tonight – well, I don’t think there’s any coming back from seeing someone get eaten from the inside out. They’ve probably scattered. Something like that speaks even louder than the promise of doubloons.”

  “I sure do wish we could put our hands on him,” I said. “I’d love to ask him where the other elders are.”

  “’Other’ elders?” Crew Cut parroted my words back to me.

  I gave him the run-on sentence summary: vampire possesses person, normal body gets taken out, possessing vampire is stuck jumping from one failing frame to another for eternity or as long as they can stand it anyway.

  “That’s crazy,” Crew Cut finally said.

  I shrugged. “That’s elders for you. They’ll do anything to survive. Including eating their own, or bringing their own back from the dead, no matter how many times their magic never gets them much of anywhere. It’s what we do: we survive.”

  We made a plan to meet up the next night. I hoped by then the technopagans would have their car situation worked out and, if we were super lucky, know where the hell the local elders went.

  When I went outside and got in my car, holding the seat forward so Smiles could climb into the back, I realized something: Smiles stared directly at Crew Cut the entire time.

  Crew Cut never once looked at my dog.

  I thought again about his origins, and how he broke free, and if when Crew Cut thought of my dog he considered Smiles to be another unwilling slave.

  I went to bed that morning a little early. I didn’t sleep, of course, because we don’t really get a choice about that. I can’t lie down for a nap. I can’t fall asleep early or wake up late. When the sun rises, my eyes close and I go away. When the sun sets, I open them and I’m back again.

  That morning I decided to settle in early and do some thinking. I had a good hour before sunrise, but I wanted to spend some time alone. Something about Deputy Crew Cut’s story was bothering me – it didn’t seem to hold together quite right – and something about him was bothering me. Sure, I had magic on my side, but he’d been too friendly too quickly when we spoke. I couldn’t help feeling like he must surely be sizing me up as his next target. It’s what I would do: use him to help me and then dispatch him at the first convenient moment.

  In fact, I already knew that was exactly what I was planning to do.

  Earlier that night we all packed up and moved, to another run-down motel just a little further up the road. It was technically closed for the off-season but the owner lived in a modest room in the back. Some hoodoo put him of a mind to open early and exclusively for us. Outside on the balcony I could hear murmuring voices. I recognized them as Roderick’s, and Dan’s, and they were having the quiet sort of talk two people have when they’re on their way to more than conversation. I could hear the words but I didn’t even process them. I knew what they were saying: Roderick was apologizing for how they grew apart, and Dan was saying he was scared of everything that was happening.

  Five minutes and a shared cigarette later, I heard them retire to Roderick’s room next door. Sure, the technopagans were useful as hell, and brave, and I was growing to admire them almost as much as they worried me, but Roderick was going a hell of a long way to maintain their friendship.

  It honestly never occurred to me – not before overhearing those gentle words of real fondness – that Roderick might take Dan’s hand and lead him to bed out of genuine affection, or honest lust, or even the very human need just to be held for a little while.

  So I lay in my bathtub, pillows under my head, a hellhound crunching kibble from a bowl nearby, and tried not to listen to my cousin get fucked in the room next door. I passed the time until sunrise wondering instead if he was the weirdo, or was I: him for having that sort of relationship, or me for spending decades avoiding one?

  12

  Two blinks later, it was the next night. I didn’t feel the day pass, but I could tell the time had changed.

  “I am Roderick,” I heard my cousin say from the balcony as I lay in the dark of my motel room’s bathtub. I sometimes think vampires are especially suited to picking out voices. When I ponder it, I’m likewise led to wonder where many of our powers came from. I wonder how we got our start. I wonder why we have the weaknesses we have, and why the strengths, and why not some other mix of one or the other.

  There are legends, of course, but nobody believes them. We’re supposed to live forever but none of us knows anyone who actually has. Oh sure, every now and then you hear a story about someone turning up claiming to be Cleopatra or Claudius or Sun Tzu, but they’re always fakes. Somebody else will turn up their driver’s license photo from 1972 and we all have a big laugh at their expense. That sort of thing is one of the frequent cautionary tales of the vampire world: don’t get too big for your britches, because nothing lasts forever.

  Personally, I always assume those con-artist vampires just get bored and decide to throw a Hail Mary to pass the time. Unlife can eventually become as dreary as life. We’re just as prone to fading away as anyone else aged beyond their useful years. Some people decide to spice things up while they have the chance. Even getting caught in a scam is more interesting than being forgotten.

  “I’m Deputy Rudyard,” I heard Crew Cut say outside.

  Okay, now that got my melancholy ass out of the bathtub.

  I stood, pulled on my trench coat and walked out through the little room to the dark balcony beyond. Smiles had spent the day against the door of the bathroom, standing guard over me while I slept as he always does, and now he fell into silent lockstep with me.

  Roderick looked like he’d already showered, styled himself and dressed for combat: the same white pleather pants and white plastic jacket he wore the time he and I went after a bunch of the Transylvanian’s brood in a bar in Asheville. Jennifer was by his right shoulder, arms crossed. Dog was sprawled on the bed in Roderick’s motel room, snoring to beat the band.

  “Cousin Roderick,” I called, and the three of them started subtly and turned to look at me. Crew Cut looked just slightly surprised.

  “Cousin?”

  “Cousin.” Roderick and I said it in unison. He smiled; I didn’t. I had less than zero desire for Crew Cut to know where we were. I didn’t know how he’d found us, but I was guessing either he pulled some cop strings or he used his magic map, or maybe both.

  The look on Crew Cut’s face told me he felt like he’d won a round. I wasn’t sure what game we were playing
, but it felt like cat and mouse. I was not okay with that – not at all. Mostly I wasn’t okay with it because I’m accustomed to feeling like the cat.

  “Deputy Rudyard’s been filling us in on the situation,” Jennifer said.

  I arched both eyebrows. “He has?”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said, “And I don’t like what we’re hearing.” The corners of Jennifer’s mouth tugged down. “It’s confusing, to be honest,” she said. She pulled out the tablet computer they’d been using the night before. “And I don’t like what the surveillance sigil-grid is telling us, either. I have to assume we fucked it up.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “Because according to this, there were vampires running around inside various beach houses all day.” She shrugged. “Well, all morning, at least. Then the grid shut down, like someone or something turned it off. But before then, the morning part of that is what doesn’t make sense.” She pointed at Roderick and me. “I mean, you guys just fall over at sunrise, right?”

  Roderick and I glanced at one another, and I looked back at Jennifer. “Yeah,” I said. “You must have a bad reading.”

  Jennifer sighed and shook her head. “Maybe they…” She trailed off. “I don’t know, maybe they have some kind of decoy signal? The thing is, when we saw it happening this morning, we set up a small version over this motel.” She gestured around us. “To test it out, you know? We know you guys should show up, so I estimated this would be a good way to validate our method using some known-good data. The thing is, it worked exactly as expected. It showed us four vampires, immobile, in this motel. Period.”

  “Thralls?” Roderick looked at the humans for a moment. “Perhaps they fed their thralls a great deal of blood for one reason or another and the thralls set off a false positive?”

  “No,” Jennifer said. “That’s another thing we tested for by doing it here: you’ve both got dogs you feed your own blood, right?”

  I shifted my weight to lean against the railing and nodded down at Smiles, sitting by my side with his back turned to the group so he could watch behind me. “Yeah. Not a lot at once, but for many years.” I shrugged a little.

  Jennifer nodded back. “Your dogs don’t show up on the map. So whatever was moving around inside a few beach houses all morning wasn’t a bunch of thralls. They were vampires, or the magic wasn’t working right.”

  This wasn’t something it sounded like we could settle once and for all right here on the spot. I shrugged. “Either way, can we use your map to find out where they went?”

  She shook her head. “No. They must have detected the surveillance magic and jammed it somehow. Maybe they figured out what Xi was doing in their airspace last night.”

  I ran a hand through my floppy, curly hair, mussed from sleeping, pushing it off my forehead. “Okay,” I said. “So how do we find them?”

  Jennifer shifted her weight. “If we had the corpse of one, or an article of clothing.” She looked at me. “Maybe they went somewhere in such a hurry they didn’t bother to pack? We could go search some of the houses on the island and look for something to use as a tracker for a sympathetic compass. Or there might still be clothing debris back at the coffee shop parking lot.”

  I scratched my goatee. “That could take a while.”

  Roderick tapped his thumbnail against his front teeth. “I have an idea,” he said. His voice was quiet, his expression neutral, but then he smiled. “Yes.” He produced his phone and dialed. I heard a woman answer, and I recognized her voice. “Hello, Beatrice,” Roderick said to her. “Yes, it is a pleasure to speak to you, as well. I wonder: would you mind answering what is perhaps a delicate question?” The other end of the line was quiet. “It would help us to deal with the problem we have so recently discussed.”

  Okay, I heard her say, even though she was anything but.

  “I need you to tell me the name of the seediest, least reputable real estate agent in the area. The one to whom I would go if, for instance, I had a meth lab I needed to relocate on short notice. The one who asks no questions and is always slightly damp to the touch.”

  Deputy Crew Cut arched one eyebrow. Jennifer chuckled. I did the same.

  Dirk, I heard Beatrice say without hesitation There was a long pause, and then: That fucker would sell crack cocaine at a Girl Scout Cookie stand.

  Roderick reached into his jacket and produced a slim pad of paper and a tiny pencil, like from a mini-golf place. He wrote the name and address. “Thank you, Beatrice,” he purred. “I will never forget this.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye.

  As she did, there was the subtle buzz of a device set to vibrate. Sheila looked down at the tablet in her hand and looked back up. “The sigil is back online, and we’ve got a signal on the island again. Way down the shore from the houses. Well over the line into South Carolina.”

  “I thought you said it didn’t work anymore,” I said to Jennifer.

  “It didn’t,” Jennifer replied.

  Marty, looking over Sheila’s shoulder, read off the GPS coordinates: a string of numbers with absolutely no meaning to me. I didn’t need to know the points they described, though. I already knew where it had to be.

  Crew Cut and I looked at each other. “The dig site,” I said.

  “Or something near it,” he replied.

  “Okay,” I announced to the others. “We need to go check this out – all of us, loaded for bear - sorry, Cousin, but we don’t have time for your idea with this shady real estate guy. We need to get out there on the beach and put a stop to all of this, right now.”

  Beth and Marty stood a little straighter. They were ready to get this over with, whatever it was, and go home.

  Jennifer looked around. Her people were nervous, I could smell it, but they had all survived their last encounter and they were with her. She nodded at me. “Okay,” she said. “But we have to know this is a trap, right? They want us to see that signal.”

  I shrugged. “It’s all we’ve got without a lot of work and wasted time.”

  Roderick zipped up the front of his jacket. “What of the Rhinemaiden?” He looked between Jennifer and me. “What do we do to end her?”

  I shrugged. “We can’t do anything about her until we have more info, and that vampire – whoever they are – is the only shot we’ve got at more info right now. Once we know where she is…” I waved a hand around. “We’ll ask the magic people to deal with that.” I nodded at Jennifer. “Or we’ll figure out a way to do it ourselves.”

  “Why not just walk away from that?” Jennifer sounded sincere. “Sure, let’s throw down with these elders again, fine, but the Rhinemaiden? She isn’t physical. If you prevent them from restoring her, she stays a spirit. I mean, so the town is haunted? So what?”

  I shook my head at her. “It’s not as simple as a story kids might use to scare each other. This town is haunted by something so freaky it will raise curiosity. It will cause people to look into the supernatural. Ghost hunter TV shows will come here and catch something on tape. People will start believing in the supernatural again. That’s the best case scenario and I can’t afford that. I like it when people think about things using modern materialism. The worst case is she does in fact turn solid again, for good, and then this town has an ancient vampire in it more powerful than anything we’ve seen before.”

  “Also, because vampires made it happen and Withrow feels we are his responsibility.” Roderick smiled when he said it, then he looked back at the rest of us. “Let us away,” he murmured. A set of keys with a great big Cadillac logo on them dangled from his tiny hand. “I’ll drive,” he said. “I can seat at least five more. Six if you’re friendly.”

  I drove in front, with Roderick behind me in his gigantic early ‘70s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It looks about fifty feet long and is painted gold with sparkles. It’s the opposite of camouflage. It’s a car that says, “Notice me, motherfucker, or else.”

  All the technopagans and Dog packed into Roderick’s Caddie,
with Beth, Marty, and Crew Cut taking up the three extra seats in my Pontiac. Crew Cut and Marty tried to squeeze Smiles between them, but in the end he kind of wound up on top of them and halfway on top of Beth in the front, too.

  There was a car abandoned in the other lane of the great big bridge into town. Its emergency flashers were going, but they were dim and blinked languidly, like the car disapproved of being awakened.

  We drove past To Kill A Sunrise. The neon lights were off, though it was time for the place to be open, and the front door was hanging ajar. It was a deep and inky dark inside.

  I parked the Firebird at the end of one of the long streets running the length of the residential portion of Sunset Beach. There were a bunch of signs with NO PARKING all over the place but considering every house was dark and every streetlight around us was off, I didn’t figure we were too likely to get towed. There was a paved pathway from there to the far southern end of the beach for regular people. Beyond that was the half mile of sand to the dig site and then, after that, the place where the Intercoastal Waterway reconnected to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Once we were out of the cars and standing under starlight I asked if anyone needed flashlights to see. Jennifer shook her head.

  “We come prepared,” she said as she opened a backpack she’d brought with her and passed around sunglasses to all the mortals. They each put on a pair, then Jennifer said aloud, “Lux.” I could feel something hum in the air, and the others all looked around for a second and nodded at her.

  “You made night vision sunglasses?” Crew Cut seemed impressed. “You’ve got to tell me how.”

  “Sorry,” Dan said with something sharp in his voice. “Proprietary information.”

  Jennifer shrugged at him.