The urge to say something cruel sprang from nowhere, deep within me, and I opened my mouth to manufacture some insult she had done nothing to deserve. I felt the flesh of my face twist up even as the rest of me started processing the fact she had not, in fact, seen the same apparent physical form I was seeing whenever I looked at Ross. I wondered if being a supernatural myself gave me some ability to perceive not possessed by mortalkind.
The breath within me paused, poised as it was to say something shockingly cruel, but what passed my lips instead was this:
“I bet Charlie was a really nice guy.”
The little old lady looked to the heavens for a moment and clucked her tongue. “He was the best,” she said. “He was just the best.” She patted me on the arm once, then a second time, and her hand stayed there, her twisted fingers at my elbow for a moment longer than modern sensibilities would normally permit. I allowed it because I am not modern and neither was she. “If you find one that good, hang onto him,” she said. “And if you don’t, well, have a little fun with the ones you find.”
I smiled, we parted, I paid for everything in my cart and on the way out I called my cousin and told him all about it.
“Mm,” he said after a moment. “Well then, let’s conclude our current business as quickly as we possibly can. We need to kill the interloper and anyone in his thrall.”
I didn’t really understand why that would be his reaction, but he’d already hung up. Turning my mind towards eliminating the interloper was a welcome distraction, I had to admit. Concentrating on a necessary murder is always a good way to focus the mind.
13
The Bull’s Eye and I rode up the twins’ street, one after the other, around 10:00 the next night. We had hours before the bogeyman-interloper’s usual appearance. We were in my beat-up old '77 Firebird, black with beige vinyl interior. I've driven it since I bought it new for cash at one of those “midnight madness” inventory clearance sales. Hard to believe that was nearly forty years ago. It carried us past The House so we could park around the corner. No winding up in a foot chase against someone in a car without having our own nearby.
We took up posts on either side of the street and just watched for a little while, maybe ten minutes, but everything seemed exactly as it had been. The Bull’s Eye made a small hand gesture I figured was some sort of Delta Force sign language: some habit she'd picked up and probably lapsed into without thinking. I nodded and we both stepped out and started approaching, staying across from one another, scanning the houses on our respective sides of the street.
Here and there I could see little faces watching us: eyes wide and bodies crouched to peek over windowpanes or hide in shadowed corners. There was the occasional string of purple lights or a jack-o-lantern around and the kids’ fear blended in like just another Halloween decoration. Very seasonal, I thought to myself. So the kids in this neighborhood had seen the interloper and really had started sitting up to watch in terrified fascination. I tried not to whistle in wonderment. I hoped none of them got any ideas like The Bull’s Eye had done when she’d finally seen too much. I did not need a dozen vigilantes to deal with in ten or fifteen years.
The air was perfectly still and I could smell no sign of the stranger. I knew he’d be able to smell me, too, but that was part of the plan. I wanted him worried someone had found where he squirreled away a couple of nuts for the winter. I wanted him to rush in full of emotion. My own scent was the bait in the trap.
Every now and then I would lock eyes with one of the children tucked away in their houses. They didn’t recoil from me but I knew they could tell I was Other. Children often can. In the dark of this one little place, on this one little night, with mortal minds turning to cartoon bats and princess outfits in search of a little fantastical fun, these kids listened to the part of themselves that hadn’t yet been ground down by the world: the part which knew there was something about to go down, something important to the rest of their time in this place. They did not nod or wave or otherwise encourage me but they knew I was there to do something and somehow they knew it was important to witness.
The Bull’s Eye and I walked back past The House, double-checked that end of the block, then turned and swapped sides of the street. I stopped in front of it, strode through the gate and stepped onto the front porch without a sound. I may be a big guy, and I may stomp around a lot, but I'm still a vampire. A delicate entrance and exit are our strongest play ninety nine percent of the time.
I could feel the eyes of a dozen children staring at me: kids who knew their homes were a haven but not safe.
I raised my fist and rapped with my pudgy knuckles three times on the front door to The House, just as I did for the Book People. I’m from way up the mountains, where we all know Death knocks thrice.
I was surprised at how little time it took for the door to open. I did some figurative math: two nights since The Bull’s Eye had been here, right? I guessed the kid who was so into it he loaded his shorts when the vampire pulled out was the one on-call tonight and thus probably the one in a big hurry to get to the door.
The young man on the other side was tall, very thin, filthy blond, glasses-wearing, bookish and extremely hot. A part of me wanted to make him a sandwich but a part of me was busy constructing all sorts of scenarios involving two of him because that would mean twice as many of that beautiful body containing twice as much of his incredibly appetizing blood. He took a look at me and opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. His blank, emotionless expression twisted in an instant to something of hate and disgust. “Get out,” he said, voice a normal volume but his intonation a hoarse growl. It was a cry from somewhere deep instead of a high, shrill shriek.
We both blinked at it – he and I, even though he said it – and then he said it again. “GET OUT.” He started to slam the door but I have rarely let that stop me. I stuck my boot just over the threshold and the door stopped short.
“My name is Withrow,” I said, very steadily and evenly, hands in the pockets of my trench coat. “We need to talk.”
It didn’t surprise me he was hostile. What surprised me was when he tried so hard to close the door he made it split at the point where it touched the toe of my boot. He wasn't as strong as me but he was sure as hell stronger than the door.
“I said,” I said, but he produced this guttural peal of shock and maybe something not unlike fear as he bared his teeth at me. He, a human being, bared his teeth at me, a vampire. The door ripped and a chunk of it came off with the doorknob in his hand.
“GO AWAY.” His voice was loud – really loud, neighbor-waking loud – so I sighed and put my hand in the middle of his chest.
“Inside,” I said, and I shoved him bodily backwards. What I noticed when I did was that he tried to hold his ground – tried. Though he failed, he did so with more strength than I would have expected from someone with his frame or his vital signs, which is to say any at all. He was a lot stronger than a human. He looked strung out but he had something more than junkie strength.
Baring my fangs at him, I hissed as hard as I could. That tended to bring humans to heel in a hurry and I wanted to get this over with. I did not like this developing trend of mortals almost as strong as a vampire.
The Bull’s Eye slipped across the street, up the steps and through the door around us before I'd even had time to look. I kept pushing and walked the guy into his own house, then looked at the mostly-broken door and said, “Do you got any of that Wild Glue or whatever it is?”
There was a double of Angry Twin sitting much more calmly on the love seat in the living room. He sighed a little. “Yeah. Lots.” He was watching TV, legs folded up under him, a game of Solitaire abandoned on the coffee table. He hadn't even looked up at all the commotion. “Don't worry,” he said as he stood and walked into the kitchen. “He gets like that. He'll calm down.”
I stood there holding Angry Twin at arm's length while he glared at me with vaguely wild eyes and made noises of increasing comp
lexity. I could feel him struggling with something inside. He could have reached up and hit me or pushed me or something – his arms were longer than mine – but something was holding that in check. He was practically foaming at the mouth as he fought with himself.
Ah, I thought. The other vampire. He'd hoodooed them not to fight back against our kind. It was smart to do that to a repeat victim. In the old days it was said vampires would do that to the whole village or the whole town, one poor sap at a time. I imagined it was incredibly cruel, especially if he didn’t also wipe their memories of what was happening to them to warrant it in the first place. The Bull’s Eye was standing there in the front hall looking it up and down, swiveling and bobbing a little to check every corner and angle without actually moving. I was about to ask her to take Angry Twin off my hands when a cement block flew past my head and exploded on the wall behind me.
“Now, Scott!” It was the kid in the kitchen shouting. “Fight now!”
Scott's eyes rolled back and his hands came up. Even as I was flipping the internal switch that slows time, I realized this kid, too, was faster than a human being should be and his brother was stronger and they both smelled... delicious.
Just like El Diablo, of course.
The fight itself didn't take long but to me it took forever.
Scott – Angry Twin, the one I'd pushed back inside – put his hands on my face and was trying to find my eyes by feel since his own eyes seemed to have rolled back into his head. One of his knees came up to go for my groin. I dodged him easily enough and put my hands on his wrists, from underneath, to push him up and away. I had to exert effort to do it, though, whereas most humans are basically rag dolls compared to a vampire. You have to do your share of fighting to find that out, of course. Most vampires spend a long time unaware of how strong they really are.
I'd learned it decades ago.
I was surprised at how much I had to work to get his hands away from me but once I did I pulled him in close by one forearm, swiveled my torso and jabbed the other elbow directly into the middle of the kid’s chest. As he started to fall backwards I kept my grip, lifted a foot and put one of my black poseur motorcycle boots in the middle of his stomach in a kick. Usually that would knock his feet out from under him, maybe pop one shoulder out of joint, but this time all it did was make us look like we were doing the stupidest dance ever invented.
I dropped my foot, let go of his arm and delivered a wound-up punch I had plenty of time to aim at his jaw.
One second.
That snapped his head back and spun him halfway around but he responded by following the momentum and twisting a full three sixty around to kick me in the side of the head. He was fast, too, so fast that I didn't see it coming. Either I had turned off the slow-mo or he had turned his on. Not okay. Not okay at all.
Just like that, we had dropped the choreographed bullshit and were on each other in a brawl. I bear-hugged him around the waist and lifted him off the ground, over one shoulder. I was trying to drop him on his head behind me; he was trying to beat me to death by pummeling my back and spine. His fists were landing like bowling balls made out of something way down the periodic table. It actually hurt, and I cried out in shock and frustration.
From under his right armpit I could see the other guy and The Bull’s Eye launching themselves at each other at glacial speeds.
Scott finally hit me so hard I heard something snap and I buckled a bit but that turned out to be okay – when I dropped to one knee he pitched forward and banged his own forehead on the floor. I knit my broken bone or tendon, whatever it was, as I rolled out from under him and leapt like a cat to land on his back.
My instinct was to drop my fangs and go to town right there. I wanted to drain him dry and see how his brother might taste. The Bull’s Eye was in the room, though, and that made feeding not an option. Sometimes I think that's all civilization boils down to: the persistent presence of others we’d rather not have watch as we express our most basic whims.
Instead, I grabbed Scott’s arms and twisted them back behind him, got my knees on him with my three hundred fifty pounds behind them for emphasis, and I donkey punched him once at the base of the skull. I tried to pull my punch so I wouldn't just pulverize his head but I would have been just fine with a mild concussion. He took the blow and buckled, but he fought getting knocked out. He struggled and strained even as he started to go limp, so I did it again. That kind of thing is extremely risky – the brain is a marvel of delicacy and you can very easily fuck someone up for good that way – but it was what I had. This kid was as almost as strong as me and almost as fast, and he knew what he was doing in a fight. I had to get him neutralized in a hurry.
Two seconds had passed.
When his face smacked the hardwood floor – cheap, worn by time, in bad need of refinishing – I noticed blood shoot in either direction and I let time drop back to normal. Behind me, The Bull’s Eye and the other guy, Adam, the other twin, finally got to each other. I guessed they had seen a kind of blur and screeching and then it was over, but they were just getting started.
I confess I did not act as quickly as I could have because I wanted to see what The Bull’s Eye was capable of. It turned out she was capable of plenty. When the United States Army trains someone for Delta Force they train that person in everything. They are probably the most highly trained, most capable human individuals on the planet. The kid that came at her was strong and fast and extremely agile, more agile than his brother, more agile than almost any human being I could imagine, but all that did was help him try to close the gap between his raw abilities and her finely-honed skills. She blocked every attack, bounced on her feet, stayed in motion and dodged several wild swings, then delivered a precision punch to the middle of his chest that had the kid on the floor and gasping for breath in the next second. She hopped backwards, ready to keep going if he stood back up, but he stayed down.
I left my fangs out to keep their attention and said, low, “Now, tell me what the hell is going on with you and your favorite bloodsucker.”
Adam looked at me, at my teeth, and started crying big, heaving, sincerity-soaked sobs. I could have said a bless-his-heart right then and there. The Bull’s Eye shut what was left of the door. Now the brothers would talk. We both knew it, and we were both glad to have gotten them to that point without having to kill one of them to prove we meant business. Neither of us said anything, but the way we were avoiding looking at one another said it plainly enough: violence is a kind of nudity for the worst, most brutal parts of a soul. To have another see that can be shaming. The part of me that was once a man and not a monster – and the part of me who chooses to manage others like myself – thinks that is exactly how it still should be.
I pulled out my phone and texted the all clear to Roderick and Jennifer. Time for phases two and three.
Scott slept it off in a back room. I mentioned to his brother – Adam – that there was a risk of a concussion but he gave me a derisive snort. I couldn't tell whether he didn't care or whether he thought that wasn't possible for one of them to suffer from that.
The three of us sat down in the living room to talk like civilized people because that's what you do when you're done fighting someone half to death: you treat them like a person to try to get them on your side. The Bull’s Eye sat at the other end of their couch from Adam. It had a worn old plaid print on a synthetic fiber of some sort. It looked like it came from the dumpster behind a secondhand store, and maybe it did. I sat in a wingback chair upholstered in orange vinyl. Neither of us were physically restraining or threatening him, but Adam couldn't have gone anywhere without going past one of us to get there.
“It started three months ago,” he said. He was staring at the floor, not at us, and his eyes were focused on something much farther away than anything in the room. “It started when we were being worked on by a doctor.” He paused. “Well, by this guy who called himself a doctor? He wasn't, I guess, but he said he was. We figured he was
a medical student or a resident or something at the hospital. He had a Duke ID, he had a facility on campus and he had equipment with Duke University property tags on them. It all seemed more or less legit.” He smiled a little. “And we knew it wasn't.”
“How so?” I leaned forward a little in the chair. “What were you doing?”
“Scott answered an ad he saw online. It was asking for volunteer subjects in a study of the effect of vitamin injections on muscle mass. Scott and I are almost identical, physically, but he's always been the smarter one and I've always had better coordination. I played soccer in high school. He played chess. I think he's always been jealous that he and I could have effectively identical bodies but I beat him in sports. I never cared about him beating me at trivia. It's just, you know, the way things are. Every game has a loser.” He didn't look up, but he paused.
“You were the one winning the games that were socially acceptable and encouraged,” I said. “You were the popular one.”
“We were both popular. Twins are viewed as a unit. We were seen as the perfect man with two bodies.” He smiled very faintly, like he'd just recalled a fond memory of a dead relation. “Sometimes that's more popular than you might expect.”
Neither The Bull’s Eye nor I looked surprised or scandalized. He was right, shit happens and people get into weird stuff. That wasn't the weirdest thing I'd heard that week. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d done that week.
The Bull’s Eye tried to bring him back on track. “Tell us about the study.”
“They weren't injecting us with vitamins.” He said it almost completely flatly, as though we hadn't figured that part out yet. “They were something else. They affected our metabolism. Our appetites shot through the roof and kept going. At first, with just a couple of injections, we were eating a fourth meal, maybe a fifth, or we were eating really big at the normal three. We were never breakfast people but we found ourselves waking up earlier and earlier to make full breakfasts. Then we started eating bigger breakfasts, then snacks, then two lunches, on and on, and we weren't gaining anything. I assumed he was giving us steroids or human growth hormone or something but we didn’t change shape. We stayed the same dimensions rather than bulking up. We just kept getting stronger and faster. We started...”
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 19