Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  Technopagans – Lorraine said it meant they “bring their toys to the dinner table with them,” and they all thought that was kind of funny but I didn't really get it – aren't common, which makes them hard to predict. The old crone of the Book People said they were nice enough kids but I was still wary.

  Their place was a big, green, farmhouse-style thing: two stories, huge wrap-around front porch and about ten or twenty window-unit air conditioners. It must have been a monster in its day. It was a hundred years old, at least, yet another example of Durham's crazy patchwork of eras and styles. The siding had been painted a medium drab industrial green and the roof was done in tiles that were much darker. The effect was to camouflage it. In the eternally wan yellow light of sodium-vapor lamps it was almost impossible to see the house at all if you weren’t looking for it. I imagined their neighbors drove past time and again without their eyes ever being drawn to it even once. The house blended so readily into the shadows and flora around it, chameleon-like, that it occurred to me they might have, you know, made it do that. Like, maybe they had witched it up somehow to make it less noticeable.

  The roof over the front porch had a thick braid of cables running to it from the telephone pole out front. As I got closer I could see there were actually three thick braids of cables, as though they had dozens of telephone lines. There were also multiple satellite dishes attached to the edge of the roof that hung over the covered porch: five of them, bearing the logos of different satellite networks including one written in French and one in something that looked like Arabic.

  These guys were connected.

  Roderick pretended to be walking Dog and Smiles while I crept into the yard and skulked around the shadows at the corners of the house. I could see dim blue glows emanating from some of the rooms but not all of them. Contrastingly harsh white lights were on in the kitchen at the back. Houses like this always have a disproportionately tiny kitchen, usually because the original kitchen was in an outbuilding that's now gone. In that tiny, tacked-on cookery corral I could see a sleepy-eyed kid in his mid-20's, blond, cute in a scruffy nerd kind of way, waving a coffee grinder back and forth like a martini shaker as it whirred in its toil.

  Slinking back around, I listened at the front door and could hear quiet voices. They abruptly stopped. It seemed they and I were listening to one another in silence. I had to give them credit if they'd managed to hear the quiet footfalls of a vampire outside. No reason to play cat and mouse now, so I stood upright, took and released a breath and rang the bell like a good boy. Roderick and the dogs sidled on up from the sidewalk to join me.

  The doorbell chimed incongruously – something deep and bonging, like a rich lady's bell in an old movie instead of the modern electronic chirps one hears in suburbia – and there was a lot more silence punctuated by some moving around on the other side of the door. I tensed a little in case they decided to say hello with a shotgun blast.

  There were a whole series of clanks and thunks as various locks were unchained, unbolted, opened and otherwise released. The door creaked open maybe an inch – far enough that we could talk, but narrow enough so human eyes probably wouldn't have been able to detect the middle-aged Asian guy who answered it. “Whaddya want?” He tried to sound gruff and instead he sounded crabby.

  “Friends sent me: Lorraine and the rest of the Book People. I need your help. The thing that happened at the Chapel the other night? I saw the guy who did it and I think he might be, you know...” I waved a hand vaguely. “One of y'all. No offense.”

  “He's not one of us and I have no idea what you're talking about,” the guy said. He started to close the door but I had one finger pressed against its center. He couldn't budge the damned thing.

  “You don't seem t’understand,” I drawled. “I aim to talk to you. This isn't a request, and I don't have to stay polite if I don't feel like it. El Diablo set those bombs and I think he thinks I'm the Bull’s Eye, which I am not. So I need to find out who he is and who she is and get the two of them on each other’s trail and out of my hair. I'm asking nice because my mama raised me right, but I'll only ask so many times. Is that clear?” Smiles was seated next to me but he stood up, licking his chops.

  There was a lot of hesitation and confusion and fear in his eyes. Just as I decided I was going to come inside whether he liked it or not the door opened all the way and it wasn't him that did the work. Inside was an African-American woman wearing an outfit of solid black, almost all of it without labels or any other indication of where it came from, and I knew she had to be The Bull’s Eye. There was no way she could be anyone else. She glared out at me from underneath the brim of her black hat and cracked her knuckles.

  I smiled. “Well, that's more like it. I'm Withrow Surrett. I think we should talk.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” The person who spoke was not The Bull’s Eye. It was Jennifer McCordy, who stepped out from behind The Bull’s Eye with a smile on her face. “It’s been a long time, Withrow.”

  Well hell.

  11

  Eventually I nodded at Jennifer. “Well,” I said. My voice was flat. “Hello.”

  “So who or what are you?” The Bull’s Eye wasn’t letting me step inside, and I had no desire to push past.

  “Hasn’t Jennifer told you?” I smirked a little.

  “No,” Jennifer said from the sidelines. “I didn’t know you would be here and I don’t like to…” She hesitated, flipping through her mental thesaurus. “I don’t like to gossip. I promised to keep my distance and I have. This is just one of those weird coincidences.” She didn’t sound scared or worried but neither did she sound rehearsed the way a liar might. Liars always think their calm demeanor supports the lie but it doesn’t. It reveals their preparation.

  I could hear Roderick smiling as he replied from down by my right shoulder. “I believe they’re called ‘synchronicities’: two or more events unlikely to be only casually related and thus granted a semi-mystical importance.”

  Unlikely to be only casually related, indeed. I considered how likely Jennifer was to lie. It sounded like the truth when she said it, and Jennifer had not tried to bullshit me before. When we met she was still very much the victim of previous traumas and she didn’t hide that from me. She just didn’t volunteer too much too early. Screw it, I thought, I’m ready to make a thing happen.

  “I'm the person a bunch of people think is you. I’m also the local boss for a certain subset of creatures of the night. I’ve somehow wound up with what ought to be your problem and I want to help you solve it.” The Bull’s Eye didn't like the sound of any part of that so I went on, not sure what to do other than to keep running off at the mouth. “Look, I'm a vampire, but the nice kind.” I paused and put up a finger. “Not the annoying, self-loathing kind, though, and it’s all totally different from how it works in the movies no matter which movies you think I mean.”

  “I’ve already met a vampire,” she said. The Bull’s Eye’s voice was even in a way that suggested she was trained to keep it steady in moments of stress. “There is no nice kind. There can’t be, based on what I saw.”

  I arched both eyebrows. “Okay. Interesting.” I cleared my throat. “How about, I’m the less terrible kind?” I couldn’t just leave that minor revelation on the table, though. “When did you have occasion to meet one of us?”

  “A few nights ago, in a neighborhood across town. Long story.” The more I listened to her clipped tones and steady voice, and the more she peeked out at me from around the brim of that hat, the more I realized she was a warrior: literally, she was trained for war, for combat. She wouldn’t let me see where she was looking and she wouldn’t let me draw her into conversation. She was trained to see people as foes to be defeated.

  I spread my hands a little to either side. “As the boss, if someone’s acting out it’s my job to put a stop to it. We don’t like trouble. This sounds like something I need to fix. I think it isn’t so much I’ve got your problem after all. I think maybe we’ve w
ound up with each other’s problems. Let’s trade and go about our respective lives.”

  The Bull’s Eye considered that. “You knocked on the door here and asked to speak to someone like you knew your manners.” She paused. “Sort of.” She turned her head just a couple of degrees. “Jennifer, do you trust him?”

  Jennifer didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” I was a little surprised, to be honest.

  The Bull’s Eye considered things from under that brim. “For now I'm willing to be civil.” That settled that, and without further discussion she stepped back.

  Roderick put a hand on my arm to stop me from walking inside. “An invitation would be appreciated,” he said to the humans. He folded his hands behind his back. Dog sat patiently beside him but Smiles just went ahead and walked inside. He isn’t picky about such things. Roderick went on, “There are ways these things are done.”

  The Bull’s Eye harrumphed. “They have to be invited,” she said.

  “Come in?” Jennifer sounded uncertain.

  Roderick smiled and stepped over the threshold. In a voice so low only I would hear him, he murmured, “Decorum, Cousin. A little misinformation never hurt.”

  Walking through the old farm house, The Bull’s Eye introduced me around: Sheila, Ramon and Chang, the guys she met at Durham Tech; Xi, a Taiwanese-American kid with no trace of an accent getting his doctorate at North Carolina State in Raleigh, a campus I know well; Dan, a queeny guy with an exaggerated affectation and hyper-nelly voice at UNC over in Chapel Hill; Bob, a handsome and athletic little stud attending Duke itself. I asked why they mostly went elsewhere but lived next to Duke.

  “They've got an effectively wide-open wireless network,” Xi said in his perfectly Midwestern American English. “They never know what's happening on their network.”

  “Wide open what now?” asked Dan, eyebrows waggling all over the place, but he and Roderick were the only ones who laughed.

  Five minutes later, The Bull’s Eye and I were parked on a weird little balcony hanging uncertainly from the back bedroom on the second floor. It felt tacked on and insubstantial but it didn’t give way beneath us. We had our choice of cheap folding chairs but neither of us sat. Jennifer and Roderick had faded into another room to let The Bull’s Eye and me have a conversation of our own. The Bull’s Eye leaned against the railing, like maybe she'd be ready to go over the side and hit the ground running if she needed to, and in all fairness I could respect that kind of thinking a lot more than easy trust. I put my back against a wall.

  “So tell me about this vampire you met in your neighborhood.” I pulled a little tin of mints out of the inner pocket of my trench coat and offered it to her. She didn’t bite.

  “No,” The Bull’s Eye said. “You tell me about El Diablo and why he thinks you're me. Maybe I'll like what I hear. If so, we talk about what I saw.” Her arms were folded, body language plain as day. She had no interest in being out here with me but she had to be if she were going to learn anything about her real problem: this vampire she claimed she'd seen. Easy money said it was my interloper from the night of the ballet, of course, and they'd been in a scrap. Bully for her, going to toe-to-toe with a vampire and living.

  I played patty-cake. I told her about running into El Diablo the two times I'd seen him – the theft of the mascot uniform and then seeing him again in the Duke Gardens the night of the explosions. I told her about all the kids with cameras and told her I’d simply run away rather than try to stop them. At no point did I mention Ross.

  “I like your respect for the civilians.” The Bull’s Eye nodded when she said that. I didn’t bother telling her I’d only let them live because murdering them would be too inconvenient. “Homeland Security and the FBI are all over Duke's campus now,” she said. “It's in all the papers, on the news. If he wants to do something to Duke, well, he's kind of screwed himself.”

  “Not if he's smart,” I said, “And he's smart. Took out all that stained glass like it was yesterday's trash and managed to collapse the Divinity School on itself with one bomb. He's got a beef with the school and he thinks if he tarnishes the image of the mascot he harms the institution itself via some mystical association.” I shook my head. “A bunch of Deputy Dawgs with federal badges aren’t going to catch him.”

  The Bull’s Eye waved that away. “Some of them are pretty thick, sure, but there are some ace investigators. I wouldn’t write them off.”

  I tried not to snort. “The didn’t warn you we’re out there, did they?”

  She ignored that and went on. “El Diablo didn't say the link was mystical. He said there were 'causal relationships.' He also said, 'Like may affect like after all.' Similar, but not the same.” She waved a finger, as though addressing a class or something, then tapped the finger against her bottom lip while she thought. “I'm no scientist, but he also said 'quantum,' right? We're talking about a physicist here. There are certainly physicists who take note of the mysterious correspondences in life and wonder if they’re connected.”

  “Synchronicities,” I said.

  She went on. “He might be, I don't know, way off the deep end of that line of thinking and believe if he hurts people or himself while wearing the old mascot uniform he'll harm the University through some quantum connection.”

  “Still sounds mystical to me,” I said. “I don’t see the distinction.”

  She wobbled a hand in the air. “It goes back to Clarke’s third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  I sighed and fluttered my lips. “I’m too old for this. I don’t need the world to get more complicated just as I was getting a handle on things.” I shrugged it off. “The people who sent me here said he was probably a technopagan but so far I haven’t seen anyone who looks like him. Have I met everybody?”

  The Bull’s Eye nodded.

  “Maybe he’s just a scientist who got there on his own,” I said. “What are the odds these chuckleheads are being honest when they say they really have no idea who he could be? Maybe they’ve run across him somewhere, even if he isn’t one of them.”

  “The ones I’ve met are above board,” she said. “There's something about them.” The Bull’s Eye hesitated. “It's hard to describe. There's some kind of naïve darkness about them. It's like they think the good guys are more badass than the bad guys or something. They know they're weird and they like it. It’s empowering for them.” She smiled a little.

  So did I. “That’s something we’re all familiar with,” I said. “Jennifer found herself in the thick of a life-threatening problem – more than once – and was able to think her way out of it. You dress in black and walk around your neighborhood at night looking for trouble to unmake. Being smart and showing initiative are both weird these days but we’re all proud of ourselves for it.”

  “And you dress in black and walk around... doing what, exactly?”

  “Counting angels on the heads of pins.” Why bother being subtly evasive when I could be obviously so? I went on. “So, what are you going to do about El Diablo?”

  The Bull’s Eye smirked. “I need more intelligence,” she said. “You found him twice by happenstance – you say – but I’ve had no such luck. It sounds like you’re closer to cracking that nut than I am.”

  I waved it off. “I don’t want that on my plate. It isn’t my situation to resolve. We need to swap problems here.”

  “You fight the battle you can with the resources you have,” she said to me. “We don’t get to pick and choose. I’m fighting that vampire. You’re fighting El Diablo. Roll out.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then stopped and took a different tack entirely. “I'm going to guess you would have been career military but it got cut short due to some unforeseen circumstance.” I said it out of the blue, as it occurred to me.

  “We're not here to talk about that,” she said.

  Ah: an exposed nerve. I filed it away. “If you say so.” I shrugged. “If we can’t swap problems then let’s work
together. I don’t want to fight El Diablo. I want to go after the vampire you saw. If the ticket to that is helping you put away El Diablo, working as a team, so be it.” I sighed. “Your turn to sing. What happened when you met the other vampire?”

  “There isn’t much to tell,” she said.

  “I doubt that very much. All indications are there’s more than enough to tell.”

  “We are not discussing it.” She tensed all over in defense.

  I caught her eye for just a second and the force of my own will balled itself up in a fist by reflex. If she had been anyone else I would have lashed out with the hoodoo and simply taken the story from her.

  This one time, I did not.

  She stared me right in the eye and we both knew something had passed between us: an opportunity missed, a risk redeemed, I didn’t know exactly what. I held her gaze but she looked away a moment later. I would have paid a fortune to know what she was thinking but for reasons I could not comprehend I had failed to find out the easy way.