Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  While they were trying to keep a lid on their newest reacquisition, Jennifer McCordy and I were dealing with the side effect Ross had so casually mentioned. Resurrecting one dead thing created echoes. That mystical spillover effect was more pronounced the more powerful and ancient their target. Call up a dead flunky and get one night of Pet Sematary. Call up an ancient horror of unimaginable power and you trigger a Steeplechase Event just like the ones Jennifer and I fought in our respective towns: the dead rise and start stumbling around the neighborhood until someone sufficiently brave or foolish has to stop them.

  Calling out to one spectacular example of the dead had simply rung a great big mystical dinner bell for every dead thing within the supernatural equivalent of earshot.

  A cabal of ancient vampires, faithful remnant of a world itself long thought dead and buried, had created zombies by accident, then kept their heads down while everyone else tried to clean up their mess. Upon consideration, what did they care if people suffered and died? As far as they were concerned, collateral damage and an increased air of fearful superstition were just so many sprinkles on top of their return-to-power sundae. What mattered most was to remain undetected by their own subsequent generations of vampires: the youth who overthrew them and the offspring of those rebels.

  I marveled again at the ancients’ inability to grasp the world of the living. In their arrogant certainty they had assumed humanity would be cowed by the supernatural rearing its head in their lives. They weren’t checked in enough to figure out humanity had turned the world of lurking monsters and shadow-draped old manses into a game they could play with their kids on Halloween. People were surprised to see the real thing show up on their doorstep, sure, but they were over it within a day. In their infinite capacity to adjust to new circumstances, humanity legislated around the problem and went about their blissfully ignorant business.

  If the world’s failure to cower over-long had surprised Dmitri, he’d been even more surprised by the arrival of a clue a few years later. At the end of a complex trail of breadcrumbs and half-rumors, he learned a champion of the young lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, and might make a good target if Dmitri wanted to score a few points with his superiors or thumb his nose at the rebels. Dmitri planned straight away to set up a little base and start gathering information. The demon with which he’d done dealings was only too happy to help. Ross recommended the Bull City. He was certain Dmitri would find something interesting there.

  Three things stood out to me in all of this.

  First, this – El Diablo and Dmitri and the wonder twin Duke kids, the whole shebang – was too much to be coincidence. Ross must have been behind El Diablo, too.

  Second, I wondered if this explained Roderick’s lust for destroying demons. Was he aware of the rebellion? How had he found out? Was the camaraderie and closeness enjoyed by the vampires of Seattle such that their offspring were in on the secret?

  Third, I was just as certain as could be, way down in the pit of my stomach, that I had seen Seth, my infinitely wise and patient second-in-command, among the glimpses of ancient vampires Dmitri had encountered in his time among the establishment.

  As always, the world went dark when the book of Dmitri’s life closed on the topic I had chosen and my eyes snapped open on reality. Time was still crawling as I drew out the last, panicked part of Dmitri, psychically kicking and screaming in the face of his own death. Half a dozen kids in identical gray hoodies were smashing through exploding windows at a snail’s pace all around us as Dmitri exploded into ash, the broom handle clattering to the floor, and my heft fell forward against the counter.

  I turned and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor, unwilling to consume the dregs of that monster. Like an apple washed in pesticides its whole life, I was not about to let whatever dark energy may have infested him get a chance to do the same to me. That last spatter of him slapped the floor with a wet smack and hissed away to ash and smoke with the rest of all that was left. There’s a difference between food and trash. I don’t eat the latter when I can avoid it.

  The Last Gasp usually knocks me out cold for a second after it ends so, struggling to stand upright I turned to Roderick and, shouting, slurring, managed to get out, “There’s a war. Christ in a Cadillac, there’s a war and we don’t even know. The old vampires are coming back. These kids are Dmitri’s Last Gasp. They’re what happens to the people he eats. The old guys made zombies happen in the first place.”

  That wasn't all his blood had held, though. Coursing through it like a different shade of stone in a block of marble or like copper wire through the wall of a home, electric and invisible and powerful beyond belief, there was this thing. I knew it had to be whatever El Diablo had been shooting the kids with. It was like fire. It was like lava moving through the earth. I felt so alive. I felt power like I had never known before: I don’t mean an expansion of the strength I knew, but rather a different quality of power. This was color and light and ambition. It was everything it means to be alive and vibrant and to have hopes and dreams. It was everything it means to be a human being: want, desire, need, lust, energy, restlessness, exhaustion, warmth and hate. No wonder Dmitri had farmed these twin super-kids. The pairing of his endless thirst for the end of others’ ambition and the deep well of ambitious life they offered him was too perfect to be coincidence.

  Rather than black out with the end of the Last Gasp, I bounced onto my feet. I was alert and awake and more capable of energetic violence than I’d ever been in my entire life. Roderick eyed me up and down as the kids in hoodies made it another half-inch through the windows and the shattering front door – The Bull’s Eye and Jennifer were moving just as slowly, only now starting to react – but it wasn’t enough to me just to fight them and win and be done. Roderick smirked at something he saw in my expression and said, “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. It’ll be more fun.”

  We both shut off our super-speed at once. Shattering glass sprayed through the air all around us as Adam and Scott’s voices dropped from low brass to high-pitched wailing. The kids in the hoodies roared in horrible unison. The Bull’s Eye and Jennifer and Roderick and I set to work, the former two hesitating for a moment while Roderick and I dove into the fight with abandon.

  The kids – no, the revenants – were more skilled combatants than teens and tweens should have been, sure, but they were still kids. On their own they would have been no match for someone who knew what they were doing. Their strength was the way they fought in unison. They had us surrounded and, mouths gaping, voices keening one long, unbroken minor chord, hands up and clenched like claws, they scampered into position and began a dreadfully slow advance. The four of us stood back to back. I heard Roderick crack all the knuckles in his hands and it spread around the other three of us like a social disease.

  “Are we really about to fight a bunch of kids?” Jennifer’s voice didn’t shake, but she was bothered. This was not the sort of fight she’d had in mind. Her wrist was still torn open from Dmitri’s bite. She was holding it high, pressed against her opposite shoulder, but she had a lamp in her good hand to swing like a club.

  “No, we’re going to put them back in their graves.” I growled it out between my fangs, which descended by reflex.

  The Bull’s Eye and Roderick were both totally silent as we and the kids turned in opposed circles, sizing each other up.

  “Zombies?” That was apparently all Jennifer’s mind needed to register. Lightning fast, she lunged with the lamp, the kids in front of her dove forward and the rest of us set on anything that moved.

  I put my fist through the forehead of one walking dead in front of me while another latched onto the sleeve of my jacket with its teeth. I twisted, putting one foot in its gut and punting it so it smashed through the ceiling. Roderick grabbed one by the belt loops, spun it and brought it down to drive its head through the floorboards, or maybe to drive the floorboards through its head. Jennifer put the light bulb of the lamp through the chest of one, snapp
ed the stem with a twist and stabbed another through the neck.

  That left one, whom The Bull’s Eye had not (re-)killed. Instead, she was holding it in a headlock. She had it off the ground, its throat caught in her elbow. Its leaden eyes were unblinking as its jaw worked and it hissed what would probably have been a scream if she hadn’t already crushed its windpipe. It wasn’t destroyed, though, and neither could it kick her hard enough to make her let go. She stood there, panting, having spun it and disabled it with the muscle memory of years of training, and her own eyes were in a far away place: somewhere I’d never go because I’d never been there once already.

  I thought of that look in Jennifer’s eyes when the “zombies” happened on Thanksgiving night, when she waded into a vast melee with nothing but an aluminum bat and a bad case of shell shock.

  Roderick tossed aside the corpse of his opponent and straightened his jacket, dusting it off. Jennifer, breathing hard, hefted the lamp back to take a stab at the one in The Bull’s Eye’s hands.

  I stopped and made a fist, ready to finish it off for her.

  The Bull’s Eye didn’t look at us – not at me, certainly not at Roderick and, though she hesitated, not at Jennifer. Instead, she closed her eyes, staring at a landscape from long ago. “Is there any way to save it,” she said. She phrased it as a question but her voice was flat: she already knew the answer.

  Dmitri’s last pet zombie continued to struggle. Adam and Scott had stopped screaming, their voices finally exhausted. Silence fell all around us except for the clack of a dead child’s teeth banging against one another as it tried, furiously, to find something it could grind between them.

  “You never fought a Steeplechase, did you?” I tried to ask it gently, but I was still humming with the last of Dmitri’s blood, drenched as it was in super-serum. I sounded excited and impatient.

  “I’ve seen – “ but there The Bull’s Eye interrupted herself. “No,” she said, answering the question. “No, I have not.”

  “But you have seen children die,” Roderick purred. He said it in a low, almost hypnotic voice. My vampire ears could detect harmonies in his tone I wouldn’t have expected of him: something deep and stirring and soothing all at once. “You have fought in wars both official and not. You have seen enough screaming innocents shot in pursuit of one or another kind of silence: literal, political, social. You do not want to become that person. You do not want to kill what you do not have to kill. You want to solve the problems of the world, not silence them.”

  The Bull’s Eye’s grip slacked just a little bit but I was staring at Roderick. I had watched him fail to use the hoodoo on people; hell, he didn’t even know what it was. This wasn’t exactly that power to compel a mortal to act or to misremember, though. This was something I hadn’t seen: persuasion rather than command. For all he struck me as kind of being a murderous robot wearing the skin of someone I pretended to know, this power he was exhibiting was surprisingly effective. I could feel it working on me, just a little bit, and I saw Jennifer’s dilated eyes start to relax just a little as she returned to the here and the now.

  “There is so much death,” The Bull’s Eye said. It came out slow and deep, sagging, like a murdered ideal slipping from the chair in which it died. “Can’t there be a little life?”

  “Give it to me,” Roderick said. His voice was soft and sweet and I would have done anything he asked, had he.

  The Bull’s Eye handed over the struggling little death-child like a poorly wrapped package. Roderick carried it out of the room, into the kitchen. I heard the tearing of flesh, the dropping of a fifty-pound burden on the old linoleum floor and the clap of two hands dusting each other off.

  Adam and Scott, having just witnessed up close the horror of Roderick’s efficient work, started screaming again. That only lasted a couple of seconds before they stopped all at once. Roderick backed out of the kitchen, into the living room, with one finger pressed to his lips. Winking at them, he turned back to us.

  “There,” he said. “All done.”

  I stepped up so I could see in, suddenly afraid Roderick had simply snapped their necks, but they were both unconscious. I figure now, with a little time to reflect, that when the last of Dmitri’s super-zombies died it was also the last of his power leaving the world. All sorts of ways he influenced reality must have come tumbling down at once, including the stuff he’d done to screw with the brothers’ heads. For all I knew, they’d be asleep through next week but they were breathing.

  I sagged against the counter, abruptly overwhelmed by everything: by the fight, by the abrupt departure from my system of the last of the super-serum I’d picked up, by learning there was a war going on and my maker hadn’t told me, of seeing Seth there from its beginnings and on the wrong side. I slipped on the greasy ash that had been Dmitri and slid down the cabinets to sit in a heap on the floor, utterly dumbfounded.

  “Are you okay?” The Bull’s Eye was just ignoring the previous thirty seconds.

  “Ten seconds ago I could’ve walked through a wall of diamond. I could’ve sliced air in two with my pinky finger.” I drew a ragged breath and felt my chest. My heart may not beat anymore unless I tell it to, but the body language largely stays the same. Even though the strength had left me – the bouncing urgency – I could feel something still there, some ethereal connection. The phrase that came to mind was the connection between all living things. I had never been much of one for religion or spirituality or mysticism or whatever but I felt like I could almost hear everything else in the world having tuned into some frequency no longer available to me. No wonder Dmitri had loved this stuff. No wonder El Diablo had smelled so incredible to me whenever we met.

  I sat there, silent, for thirty seconds. I could count them in the quiet heartbeat tick of every bird and bug and stray cat and howling dog for blocks. I could time myself in the rustle of the dying leaves landing atop discouraged autumn grass.

  “We have to kill El Diablo,” I said, gasping for breath. “We can't let this exist. We can't let...” I waved vaguely at the kids. “There can't be people running around with this in their veins. We'd all go crazy. I would go crazy. Every vampire in the world would go mad.”

  “Tell me what's happening.” Jennifer crouched, eight or ten feet away, and I swiveled mad eyes around to look at her. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s this stuff the kids were shooting up. It isn’t just a drug. It’s life.” I tried to explain it to her, but it came out like metaphor salad, like a word jumble for English majors. “Imagine everyone in the world were methadone addicts and someone invented heroin. Imagine everyone were alcoholics in a world that only knew beer and someone invented moonshine; a starving world that invents filet mignon; a fish that invents water.” I clutched my arms across my chest to hold in the last its of the fading sensation. “I feel so good I think it's making me sick.”

  The Bull’s Eye slowly nodded. She'd seen the world. She had witnessed the chaos people created in pursuit of all-consuming and irresistible hunger or avarice or need. “I think we should capture El Diablo and turn him over to the police,” she said, very evenly.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. “I like the sound of that.”

  Roderick was silent for a long moment, then said, “This is my cousin’s territory. I accept his decision.”

  “We have to kill him,” I gasped. “But we can fight about this later. Give me five minutes, I think I'm going to pass out.”

  Then I did.

  I came back around after ten minutes, not five. The twins were in their room, not talking but sitting beside one another. The Bull’s Eye was watching out the shadowed, blood-soaked windows, prowling the walls to peek through narrow gaps. I was still in the middle of the kitchen floor, covered in Dmitri's ashy remains. Roderick and Jennifer were wondering why the police had never arrived but The Bull’s Eye shrugged it off. “Nobody in this neighborhood is calling the cops about this house,” she said. “If we set it on fire no one would call 911 until it coul
d be seen from a mile away. They fear this place. They’ve all been holding their breath for years waiting for something like this to happen.”

  I stood up without a word and walked into the twins' room. They both snapped their heads up. They were scared. Good things had never happened to them when a vampire was in their house. That's true for most folks, I suppose.

  “I need to know where you go to get your injections,” I said. “You are not coming with us. You're done with all this. You'll never go back for another shot.” Scott opened his mouth but I held out a finger and pointed it at him like an angry parent. “Do not make me break your mind open like a cherry cordial, kid. You're done with that shit. I don't know if what you've already got in you will wear off, but if it doesn't, stay away from me. Stay away from anyone who seems too pretty or too handsome. Stay away from anyone who ever says anything about immortality. All dates are lunch dates from now on. I will not be watching you, but she will.” I hitched a thumb over my shoulder because The Bull’s Eye and Jennifer had walked into the entryway at the front of the house. I didn’t distinguish between them because I wanted Scott and Adam to assume I meant whichever one scared them most. “You will never, ever let a vampire feed from you. If one does, kill them. The how doesn’t have to be complicated. Cutting off their head will do nicely, as with most things. Is that clear?”

  They sat in silence. The Bull’s Eye answered from behind me. “Yes. They've got it, or at least they will soon enough.” She cleared her throat. “Now, boys, like he said: where did you go for the injections?”

  After long seconds staring at each other, they gave us a street address. I didn't know it, but The Bull’s Eye wrinkled her brow. “I didn't even know there was anything down that street.”

  “Nobody does,” Adam said. “That's probably the point.”