I drew a deep breath and waggled a finger at Roderick. “Cousin,” I scolded. “I took out all eight of them. What on earth have you been doing?”
“Oh, Cousin,” Roderick said, lips pursed and his head sadly shaking, his cheeks flush with what I took to be some combination of embarrassment both sincere and posed, “What can I say? I’m a delicate little thing.”
Dog and Smiles landed on their feet and, molasses slow, spun towards El Diablo.
Roderick and I both dropped out of warp speed so that the low, droning groans of the fight going on between El Diablo and Jennifer and The Bull’s Eye turned into human voices of effort and agony. El Diablo had punched Jennifer right in her wound, an opportunistic strike I might have taken myself in similar circumstances. Jennifer fell to one side as The Bull’s Eye landed a kick in El Diablo’s back. Smiles ran in and planted his teeth around El Diablo’s left wrist, a cruel mirror of the wound he’d just taken advantage of when he hit Jennifer’s arm, and Dog impacted El Diablo in the knees, making him drop to one hand and one foot.
Seeing us begin to walk forward, knuckles cracking, only a handful of rejected Duke athletes in view and all of them out of commission, El Diablo did the smart thing: he leapt to his feet and ran for it.
There was an open, oversized trap door in the floor, like a metal door over a mechanic's bay, and he tumbled neatly down it by executing a straight-up somersault and then disappearing over the edge. I heard pounding footsteps as he ran. He was wearing jogging shoes under that get-up and I figured he had finished his share of 5K's with legs like that.
I swung around to The Bull’s Eye to say I would go after him, that she should see to Jennifer, but The Bull’s Eye was already halfway in the hole. She didn’t even look at me. She took off running after him, her boots pounding on concrete in heavy mimicry of his. She was slower, but she looked determined as all hell.
I turned to Roderick. “You and the pups go after him. I need to make sure Jennifer is OK.” I looked at her: blood coming out of the wound in her arm and her eyes starting to roll back. The pain and the blood loss were starting to win out over the adrenaline. She was on the verge of passing out but gods almighty had she held her own by being in it this long.
Roderick arched an eyebrow and glanced between Jennifer and me before he shook his head. “Oh no, Cousin,” he said. “I would not dare to fight your fights for you.”
“That isn’t even my fight,” I said, waggling my head. “Go help The Bull’s Eye.”
“Not without you,” Roderick said.
I wrinkled up my face in a scowl. I knew what he really wanted. He didn’t want me alone with Jennifer and I couldn’t even begin to choose from all the reasons why: picking her brain about the conversation he and she had at the technopagans house; finding out why she had used that particular catchphrase of his, c’est la guerre, so interesting to me now I knew there was some sort of war going on; or maybe he worried I would try to turn her and screw it up. Hell, maybe he worried I’d drain her dry to silence her on all the stuff she’d seen now that she was running around with vampires, seeing us doing our thing, though the compassion angle didn’t really seem to fit. There was a lot about Roderick I’d grown to like, perhaps even admire, but random acts of kindness had yet to appear on that list.
I looked back at Jennifer. “We probably need to call her an ambulance,” I said to Roderick. “She’s losing blood and not even half conscious.”
“She will recover.” Roderick stated it as a fact rather than a supposition or an assurance.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wait. Have you fed her or something? You know what that does to people.” What it does to people is make them nuts. I did it to a bunch of people on one occasion while under extreme duress and everyone made it out alive but that was a calculated risk and I only fed each of them once. If I’d kept doing it, they’d all be insane by now. Every time I hear of someone going on a violent spree I wonder if they have any dead friends who like to mix them drinks.
Roderick laughed once, a sharp chirp. “No, Cousin,” he said. “But can you not feel the life in her?” He nodded in her direction. “Do you not sense the way her body rises to the occasion? She already works to compensate for the injury. She struggles to wake. Jennifer may be slower and weaker than we but she is immeasurably more alive.”
I furrowed my brow. “What in tarnation are you talking about?”
Roderick looked equally confused, and then the light went on. “The Jedi mind trick,” he said, and he clapped his hands together. “This is my Jedi mind trick.” I opened my mouth to say something smart but he waved me silent again. “No,” he said, “Remember? In the bar? In Asheville? You were surprised I could not do what you call ‘the hoodoo’. I suppose now it is my turn. I can feel the life in them.” He gestured at Jennifer as but one of the many Others: them. “It sounds like a song inside my head. Their health, their weakness, their will to live? Their aliveness? No, not that: their mortality. I feel that, deep down, as though something inside me resonates with a sympathetic chord.” He looked at me again, eyes widening briefly. “My goodness. How do you hunt?”
I started to ask him about his crazy Last Gasp power, about the chords of subtle persuasion I’d heard in his voice before, about all the little things he seemed able to do but I’d never heard of in another vampire, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the time to get petty and jealous about who was more powerful than whom.
Smiles leaned down and started licking Jennifer’s face while Dog panted happily by Roderick’s side. That was just enough: Jennifer’s eyes fluttered back to normal and she sat up slowly with a low groan.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said. Rubbing her forehead with her good hand, she blinked and looked around. “They went down there, right?” She nodded at the gaping metal door into whatever had swallowed El Diablo and The Bull’s Eye. “Why are we sitting around?”
I helped her stand, but she let go of my hand as soon as she was on her own two feet. I nodded. Roderick smiled. We both waited while she had the honor of being first to climb into darkness.
17
The ladder led down into a long, dark, narrow sewer tunnel that ran right up under this building. I imagined some earlier era – perhaps the prior century – in which big machines had been trundled into the building above us. The people working with them probably drained whatever horrifying chemicals coursed through those machines directly into the city sewers: countless tons of used oil and other spent fluids coursing away into someone else’s water supply. Out of sight, out of mind. If you ever want to meet an environmentalist, meet a vampire. We’ve got to live with this stuff forever.
Roderick and I dropped down, each of us with an impossibly large dog under one arm, as soon as Jennifer had descended and moved aside. If Roderick and I were capable of super-speed, and El Diablo and his erstwhile clientele had been faster than a human could believably be, and The Bull’s Eye was merely extraordinarily gifted but sufficiently trained to compensate while moving at a normal speed, then Jennifer was dragging along like molasses in the middle of a hard freeze. She made it down the ladder and she could walk but running was out of the question. Smiles was sticking more closely to me than to her because the nature of our bond left him no choice. I could sense, however, a part of him – the part of him once a dog rather than a hellhound – wanted to stay with her and protect her. He knew the fight wasn’t over and he sensed a wounded ally in need of support.
“I don’t guess you guys pack flashlights, huh?” Jennifer said it with a little smirk.
“Of course not,” Roderick replied. “We and our servants need very little light.”
“Always the human in a party full of elves,” Jennifer sighed.
I laughed. “Another D&D joke.” She’d made one the very first time we met.
Jennifer smiled more naturally. “Oh yeah,” she said. “You played it. I forgot.”
I shrugged. “Anything to pass the decades.”
Roderick cleared his thr
oat and I nodded at him. “Jennifer,” I said as I turned back to her, “It doesn’t seem like you’re moving real fast.”
She waved it off. “Go on ahead. I’ll catch up. I just need to get my breath.”
Roderick clicked his cheeks at Dog and the two of them took up positions on either side of her: the hellhound in back and Roderick in front. “I will stay with her, Cousin,” he said to me.
I looked at him for a moment. “There’s something we need to talk about,” I said to him. “When I took down Dmitri I saw some things that made me real curious.”
Roderick waved both hands at me. “Cousin. Not now. Go.”
I grimaced. “Just tell me if you know something special about Seth I might need to hear.”
Roderick looked genuinely puzzled. “Your second in command?”
I allowed myself one tiny moment of relief and I wasn’t even sure from what. “We’ll talk more later,” I said. “But if things go totally south, start with Seth. He’s older than he lets on.” I paused. “And I think I know why you hate demons so much.”
Roderick arched one eyebrow. “So noted,” he said with a look of dark significance.
I turned and took off pounding down the tunnel, boots stamping the old concrete and dry dust underneath me as Smiles ran alongside.
I could hear both of them – El Diablo and The Bull’s Eye – running in the distance. The former could go insanely faster than the latter if there were light around, sure, but down in the dark of the sewers he was constrained to the same speeds as anybody else who didn’t fancy smacking into a wall. Creatures of the night don’t have that problem. It was pitch dark except for the occasional storm grate and whatever starlight the sky saw fit to sprinkle through but I could see just fine.
Smiles and I surged ahead with only a couple of false turns along the way: the sound of running footsteps echoed wildly around us but his hearing and my eyes let us stay on the right path more often than not. Before long I saw The Bull’s Eye disappear around a corner in her pursuit of El Diablo. I saw her flinch as a brick flew past her and exploded against the wall to one side. She was lucky it hadn’t hit her, lucky he couldn’t see well enough to take proper aim.
As I got closer I started calling out navigation, shouting when it sounded like he’d taken a turn or when I saw some obstacle in her path. There were rats running like crazy away from all this commotion, way up ahead, and I wondered if El Diablo would stumble on them. No such luck. He flew helter-skelter through one potential disaster after another: empty drums and crates here, a pile of equipment there. The Bull’s Eye dodged much more expertly, hurdling over sawhorses and spinning in a tight three-sixty to avoid a stack of shovels leaned against the wall. Eventually we came out into a much larger tunnel on a long, straight path. An easy forty or fifty yards ahead, he took a sharp turn in a direction that, on my mental map, had him headed somewhere towards the center of downtown: the very area I’d prowled the first time I smelled Dmitri. Barely pausing to crouch, El Diablo leapt and shot through a manhole, blowing the cover off when he hit it. I could hear him running across pavement in the open air.
“Up,” I called, and though I took a few extra long strides to catch up to her so I could hoist The Bull’s Eye myself if she needed it, she was already gone, up the ladder, faster than I could have imagined a normal human being could go. I wondered how many combatants in places with funny names had been caught off-guard when she burst in on them like that.
Smiles jumped so I could catch him and haul myself up with just one yank on the ladder using my free hand. We popped out on Chapel Hill Street, running down the middle of the abandoned late-night pavement. El Diablo dogged left, down Duke Street, towards Brightleaf Square. He vaulted a wrought iron fence to land on top of a car – alarm immediately blaring – and took off running across all of them in that row, not touching the ground but instead leaping from hood to hood. Every single car started blaring and lights started flashing. It was damned unsubtle, but I knew that was a part of his game: throw us both off the chase – whichever of us was actually The Bull’s Eye – by getting the cops’ attention.
Jumping the fence at the other end of the row, El Diablo landed on his feet and pounded asphalt right down the middle of Duke Street towards Main, where a bag lady had just stepped into the crosswalk. He shot through, shoving her out of his way. At the same moment, a ridiculously huge sport utility vehicle with a big blue DUKE UNIVERSITY sticker on the back shot through the intersection between us and them.
When it was gone, the old woman lay dazed on the pavement and El Diablo was racing up the sidewalk towards the cluster of disused tobacco factory buildings past which I'd walked a couple of weeks before. The SUV would have killed that homeless old lady, I realized. El Diablo had saved someone's life by accident. I smiled as I ran: the best hunts are all about little moments of the unexpected.
El Diablo turned and sprinted across the street again, zigzagging with the rest of us in hot pursuit. He was able to put a little pepper on it now he could see where he was going but he was running crazy, hither and yon, with no particular plan. The Bull’s Eye worked efficiently at catching up to him. She was able to cut corners, draw direct lines of approach and otherwise do the complex calculus of chasing down someone who didn't seem to know where he was going other than away. Smiles and I simply followed her lead. My dog and I were no strangers to hunting frightened prey, of course, but El Diablo was faster than the average truck stop crank fiend.
El Diablo shot through a door that had been, up to that moment, chained and padlocked shut with a big DO NOT ENTER sign taped to its front. He disappeared into darkness but I could hear the sound of footsteps rapidly ascending a staircase. El Diablo didn’t hesitate to plunge in after him, so neither did Smiles nor I. The steps were covered in broken tiles and old wood that had started to crumble and it all smelled like old paint. The place was covered in dust and decaying plaster. El Diablo was taking the stairs two at a time, as was The Bull’s Eye. I had to turn on the super-speed a little bit just to keep up.
The stairs ended after four floors. El Diablo hit the doors at the top and they fell apart at a touch. We all exited the stairs onto a mostly open, refuse-strewn cement floor where cigarettes were once hustled along on their way to ancient storefronts. The industrial ambience bothered me for a moment: my final confrontation with the Transylvanian had taken place in an abandoned manufacturing setting just like this. It was disorienting in its proximity to déjà vu. I skidded to a halt, Smiles in front of me. El Diablo, facing us, crouched and beckoned to The Bull’s Eye with one hand. He wore a mad smile.
Without a single word, they fell on one another and were fighting. He was trying to punch her but he didn't know his own enhanced abilities as well as she practiced her long-trained skills. The Bull’s Eye knew exactly how to take down a bigger, stronger opponent. She was bobbing and weaving and staying just out of range or just an inch to the right, almost dancing in and out of the brawl. It looked to me like she was waiting on him to wear himself out or make a mistake so she could take the opportunity that would afford her.
The Bull’s Eye had fought men three times her weight in caves in Afghanistan and jungles in Central America. She had killed two bodyguards of a fleeing Asian drug lord who skipped bail on US soil. She had dropped out of trees to garrote her targets, punched their tracheas closed and kicked people so hard in the kneecap that their legs had nearly snapped off. She was a swift, targeted combatant and while he swung wildly she slowly – very slowly, maddeningly slowly – was filing him down. She punched him in the upper arm to weaken his swings or kicked him in the shin to hobble his sense of balance. They were flying at and around each other like two angry lions. Not unlike the performance of Dracula, this was in its way beautiful and I took a moment to appreciate it.
I realized, as I did so, that Smiles had started growling and switching his view from side to side. We weren't alone. There was another way in, I guessed, because there were a handful of squatters blinkin
g at this ridiculous melee from the perimeter of the room. The space we were in had a few grime-encrusted windows and a set of gaping bay doors hanging open four floors over some gods-forsaken half-decayed alleyway forgotten by time. Between them, plenty of light got in for a few old drunkards to watch what was going on.
I nearly let that stop me from trying to help, but in the end who’s going to believe a wino? Anybody with sense would write off anything they said as being brought on by the shakes, right? I cracked my knuckles and stepped forward but The Bull’s Eye sternly warned me off.
“No! Call 911,” she panted at me. “I can keep him busy until then.”
I knew that tone. I’d used it before. Leave this to me, it said. This is my fight. On the one hand, I was surprised. She hadn’t spared him a thought until two nights before. On the other hand, here was the guy at the root of the biggest, baddest problem she had found in all those long, dark “meditation walks” she’d turned into patrols. She dealt with purse snatchers and carjackers and guys busting up convenience stores because they kept her busy and kept her mind off the past. It scratched an itch for justice – no, for fairness – she’d started feeling the first time she was ordered to take down someone she wasn’t sure had been targeted on entirely fair terms. It was a sense of unfairness in general that climaxed in the unfair, unfixable death of the love of her life. Solving the problems unsolvable by residents of the neighborhoods she patrolled had been meaningful because it solved a lot of problems of her own: who am I, what do I do now and for whom do I do it? Then, just as soon as she felt settled into that routine, along came a problem she couldn’t crack: the bogeyman of the suburbs. He’d nearly done her in – her, after all those cold winds and fierce fights and mountain passes – and in the end she hadn’t been strong enough to take him down. She’d needed the help of others despite swearing off all others a long time ago.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 25