The Transylvanian wasn’t completely ready for me, but he’d had a long time to hone his physical skills. He sidestepped my flying tackle and swung me around by one arm so that I went face-first into one of those big film making machines, bashing my face against it. I could feel my nose crunch when he did it but I didn’t give him a moment of leeway. I bounced off the machine, pushed some blood through my veins to give me all that strength we always have on tap and pushed away with my feet to plant my skull in his abdomen and send both of us flying the opposite direction across the room. Smiles was in the air, too, on an intercept path, like a rocket made of teeth and foaming spittle. It was like playing pinball with those super-bouncy balls they sell in drugstores. The Transylvanian was slammed into the wall - I could hear his spine crunch a little - and all three hundred fifty pounds of me and another buck fifty of crazy dog sandwiched him there for a moment before he could push us away. I heard popping up and down his back as he healed - I was reknitting my nose already, myself - and he hauled back and landed a massive fist against my left temple as I tried to stand.
That sent me spinning around in a circle and rolling across the floor but I came up in a crouch as he started to charge after me. I drew a knife out of one boot and held it in both hands to get as much force behind it as I could.
We collided a moment later, and I planted both feet on the floor, pushing the knife against his neck with all my weight. He scrabbled to try to pull me away, off of him, as my momentum overcame his and started sliding him backwards. I thought for a moment that the knife had found a way through his skin, and I saw the tip disappear between folds of wrinkled flesh, but I didn’t smell any blood and pushing against him didn’t suddenly get any easier. Finally I had scrabbled him back across the floor to the machine he’d smashed my face against and I pressed his head against it then planted a boot on some other part of the machine for leverage. I kept pressing the knife just as hard as I could. Smiles was trying to bind up one of his arms but he could only get the one. With a desperate snarl, The Transylvanian tore a pipe or arm or something off that huge machine and swung it around to clock me good and hard on the right temple and send me flying.
As we both stood straight again, I reached into my coat and drew out a sawed off shotgun, then leapt back over the cutter and started firing silver pellets at The Transylvanian just in case he had that exceptionally rare weakness. Seth gave me the gun and the custom shells back in Raleigh, right after I took over, and I’ve never known quite what to think of that, but right then I could have kissed him square on the lips. The tiny beads of birdshot were sufficiently bright that I could see them cut The Transylvanian’s skin and draw blood in thin and perfectly straight lines across his face. He didn’t like that at all and the way he roared back at me made me wonder for a second whether maybe I’d hit the jackpot with silver after all. No luck: a vampire who’s vulnerable to silver goes down in a heap at the sight of the good flatware; a face full of two shells of bird shot would have reduced him to ash on the ground before the smoke cleared. All this did was piss him off even worse.
As he came at me I gritted my teeth and tossed the shotgun into the air, flipping it, and caught it by the still smoking barrel then spun in a circle and clocked The Transylvanian across the nose with the stock like I was going for the home run record. I heard bones snap and shatter in his face and let the gun go so that it flew across the room and, more importantly, out of my hands. They would knit fast enough but the burns from the still-smoking barrels hurt like you wouldn’t believe. I let the momentum of the spin carry me and on my second time around I put up one boot like a kung fu ballerina, catching The Transylvanian on the back of the head - the whack with the shotgun having spun him around - and heard bone give way to steel toes. I felt his skull crack open; something cold splashed out and hit me in the face and I could smell that it was his rank, revolting blood. There was another roar and he reached up to catch my boot in both hands and yank me off balance so that I went down in a sliding, sprawling heap as he tried to fall upon me. Smiles was leaping again, but The Transylvanian ducked and my old dog sailed right over in a clean miss like they’d practiced that move for a week.
I felt The Transylvanian’s teeth graze my collarbone and something about that woke up every possible emergency reserve of panic in my system. Vampires don’t operate much on our own hormones and such, what with all those glands getting shut down along with everything else, but the lizard brain is still back there doing its thing the whole time and all of a sudden I knew I had to do whatever was necessary to keep this monster from drinking my blood until I was really and permanently dead. I shot to my feet with him still wrapped around me and ran across the room and into another of these big-ass cutting machines. They were the size of a mini-van and built into the floor, with huge arms and levers and, somewhere, one assumed, blades on the same scale. I slammed The Transylvanian into it so hard that I actually drove his fangs into my shoulder - not on a vein or an artery but piercing my flesh and grinding against my clavicle which, it turned out, didn’t help so much with the panic.
An unspeakably loud boom went off right in my ear and the teeth came out of me suddenly, tearing flesh as they went. I could smell gunsmoke and saw more silver pellets drift past as time slowed down in my panic. Roderick was standing there with blood on his shirt and the shotgun in his hands.
“Sorry to take so long,” Roderick said, “But I had these giant chains to break.” Handcuffs hung from his wrists and the chains dragged behind his feet.
“Any others around?” I shouted as The Transylvanian tried to recover from a shotgun blast delivered directly to the side of his throat, writhing wildly in my arms. He was trying to kick, but Smiles had managed to get both leg cuffs of his overalls and bind him up again.
Roderick shook his head at me, eyes searching mine for a moment. I couldn’t believe the overconfidence of this vampire, to hide up here all by himself for so long, no lieutenants or offspring or agents to assist him: to go get my cousin all by himself, I guessed, and then take me on mano-a-mano. It was madly prideful, but then, that was The Transylvanian’s whole shtick.
Something about that snagged in my brain, but I didn’t have time to think.
Reaching down, I grabbed The Transylvanian around the waist by the belt loops of his overalls and lifted him up into the air. His cries echoed around the room and I could feel and smell blood spattering onto me from the damage I’d done to his nose and the back of his head. He’d be healing already, of course, and, in whatever tiny corner of me wasn’t completely and senselessly terrified, I knew I had to capitalize quickly on any advantage those wounds and my cousin’s escape gave me.
“The machine,” Roderick screeched. “Shove him into the machine!”
I slammed The Transylvanian head-first into the nest of equipment that comprised a cutter and then, praying to all the gods that might be listening that these devices lived up to their names, I started pushing so that I was driving him bodily farther and farther into it. I let go when he started kicking and caught me one in the eye and started feeling around for anything that might be a lever or a button or anything I could use to make this machine work by my own hands.
Roderick was one step ahead of me, his hands wrapped around something that seemed like a handle. He tried to jerk it back and forth but it wouldn’t move. This plant was highly automated, I could feel myself thinking from about a million miles away. They probably made it a real bitch to do exactly this. I started running around it, yanking levers, mashing buttons, kicking it, cussing it, whatever it took, until finally Smiles grabbed on with his teeth and the two of us yanked so hard on part of it I felt a hose of some sort give way in my hand. Foul, chemically sweet-smelling fluid started belching out from whatever pressure remained in the line.
That stuff was apparently fairly important because I heard the machine start to creak. It wasn’t that I had turned it on, it was that whatever nascent hydraulic pressure it had holding it still was all running o
ut around my hand. There was a long, slow groan of metal, then another creak. The Transylvanian was still in there, screaming, his feet kicking like wild. The creak of metal turned into a shriek as something big and very heavy started to win out against the pressure that had held it up. Roderick gave one fierce pull, roaring with the effort, and The Transylvanian’s shrieking shot higher, then started to sound like gurgling as the metal - what I assume was a or perhaps the blade - suddenly gave out a wet, thick sound like SHLIRK before clanging against whatever track or shield or groove it was made to rest in before being raised again.
Now legless, with mechanically clean slices where they had been, the upper majority of The Transylvanian shot out the other side of the machine and practically into my waiting arms. My fangs were out, pure instinct, and Roderick’s eyes glowed with all the dark light of a blood moon as he nodded vigorously. “Do it, cousin,” he breathed. “Do it!”
The monster that lives deep inside each of us, the animal that wants blood in endless arcing fountains, won. I drove my teeth into the fat between The Transylvanian’s jowls and tore at them until I tasted something salty and cold and wretched well up into my mouth. Smiles threw his head back and howled like a wolf, like a hound on his prey, like some animal that had never seen a man and never would. I started draining The Transylvanian as his own shriek of agony and defeat rose again and stayed up there amongst the rafters, a steady siren that never wavered until I felt that tiny spark – whatever part of him had been human once – fly out and fill me with the chilly fire of the Last Gasp.
The databanks of the life of Phineas Abraham Rochester yawned before me like a door pulled open on a blizzard of light.
There were many topics I could have explored in that moment: his life as a failed farmer in the third wave of early 19th century settlers to come to this place, spent watching crops underperform as plank roads and then boats and then railroads came and made his efforts obsolete; whatever ancient wyrm had seen fit to turn this embittered little slug of a man into one of us and why; the ways he’d passed the years since. Instead I reached out with my mind and grasped the one of most immediate interest to me: this plan of making a brood of his own to populate the mountains of Western North Carolina and then trying to set me off-balance. I already knew his intention but I wanted to know who else knew, who else was involved, and anyone whose path had intersected his plan to move against me whether they realized it or not.
I saw myself and my own actions in that context, of course, and his. I saw him making many, many vampires over the years, some of whom were so unstable he killed them himself later. I saw H’Diane Bing, saw her standing in that same field in exactly the same pose I’d seen Clyde take a million times: slightly stooped, wondering to herself what was wrong with this world that it could cast off a shard of pain and suffering in a field like that one moment and keep going along like nothing had happened the next. I saw The Transylvanian watching her from the sidelines, sometimes in person and sometimes through minions he had under orders to do nothing for now lest it attract the wrong kind of attention. I supposed he was afraid of humans after all, at least to some degree or another. I saw Clyde standing there, years before, in almost the same posture. I could feel The Transylvanian’s gloating over leaving Clyde broken – just a little bit – when the case went up in smoke. I saw Roderick arrive in Asheville, but it was many days before he’d told me he got there. He’d been spotted right away by more of The Transylvanian’s brood and they’d kept tabs on him because he clearly moved with a purpose I wouldn’t have expected. Knowledge blossomed in my mind that he had been sent there by Agatha, that she and her whole organization knew The Transylvanian was there and probably up to something, but that she knew if she was seen to assist me then I’d never truly rule this state again. A king who still needs his mother’s help is no king at all. I could see that Roderick was Agatha’s latest recruit, that she was trying to bring him into the organization, and that he’d lied to me about it – they’d both lied – even if only by omission. It was one of those flashes of information at an intersection of lives and intentions: those of Agatha and of The Transylvanian and of Roderick. I didn’t know why I knew, how things The Transylvanian himself hadn’t known could come to me this way, but it was all new to me still. I had little ability to steer the experience. I could just cling to the ride and see what I saw once I’d picked a topic to reveal.
Then I saw Jennifer McCordy out there in those woods, installing her cameras and hoping for the best or possibly for the worst, depending on one’s perspective. I could scarcely believe her determination. I’d left her feeling like she’d woken up to something, somehow: to life or to opportunity or to a new sense of self-determination. I had no idea what to think of what she’d done with it by hunting signs of any vampire but me. She’d kept her promise not to go looking for me, but surely, sooner or later, this would mean some sort of trouble.
The most shocking part of what I found as reality unfolded itself in the hands of my mind was watching as Roderick crept through the shadows of the whole topic, eliminating vampires one at a time, here and there. I assumed he had a Last Gasp power, too, or would have if I’d stopped to think about it, but I hadn’t even bothered to wonder. Just minutes before, I’d wondered to myself about The Transylvanian’s bravado in facing me by himself, but he’d had a minion who showed up at Roderick’s hotel to take him prisoner; before that he’d had several of them. I’d seen them here myself the first time I arrived. Roderick had killed them all by draining them dry and then they’d simply dropped out of existence and when I thought of them later, recalled seeing them with my own eyes, reality had corrected my “error”.
There had been thirty-odd vampires here when I rolled into town, thirty of them The Transylvanian’s spawn, but James the Neo-Nazi told us with absolute honesty that there were seventeen. The Transylvanian himself hadn’t noticed the discrepancy. There were vampires missing and no one even knew. More of my favorite topic: the missing missing. It occurred to me that was probably Agatha’s plan B for Roderick: whether I succeeded in facing The Transylvanian and asserting my authority or not, Roderick was to eliminate his brood in his own special, invisible fashion. My cousin must be the backup me in Agatha’s plan. If I had failed utterly, at least Agatha would finally, after patiently passing the decades, be rid of the arrogant and old-fashioned vampire who had thought he could just up and claim some territory and overpopulate it for no reason other than to prove he could. I wondered how different that really was from how I’d taken on Bob Three and claimed his mantle once he was dead, but then, that was to Agatha’s advantage, wasn’t it? She’s one of the bosses of Atlanta and by extension the state of Georgia. Having her own offspring rule a contiguous state was both a feather in her cap and a promise of having backup muscle close at hand.
Every vampire to whom I’d spoken in my time here, other than Roderick, was one of The Transylvanian’s brood. I would have to find and kill all of them. After that, Asheville would be essentially empty of vampires, another Charlotte, a city to which no one would move for reasons no one could quite express. I didn’t want that, not in my state, but I couldn’t immediately imagine an alternative in that space between motes of time when all of this flooded into my brain.
In all of this, a phrase kept bobbing to the surface but the machinery of the Last Gasp didn’t choose in its ridiculous whimsy to reveal it to me: the last war. That was something I simply had to take in along with everything else and hope to revisit later in some better, more sober, more rational moment.
Reality snapped back and just before I swooned and hit the floor I looked at Roderick with blood all over my face. “You make the world forget,” I burbled. “When you kill someone. You make us all forget they even existed, don’t you?”
Roderick didn’t immediately answer, or if he did then it was while I blacked out for a few seconds. I came back around or just blinked, I don’t know which. In the darkness I could hear a new sound with my renewed hyper-active
senses: the sound of dust - ash, even - sifting down through an old machine and settling in piles on the floor, like sand running over the metal of the equipment. Smiles was licking my face and whimpering in concern.
I coughed a little as I drew a breath - I was sufficiently freaked out from having The Transylvanian’s teeth touch my flesh that I was panting a little even though I don’t have to breathe anymore - and sucked some of the swirling dust of The Transylvanian into my lungs. Roderick moved in silence to reclaim my gun and hand it to me. Then he pried an ancient dust rag from a worktable off to one side and started wiping down all the places the dust had been disturbed by a handprint or a boot or the outline of a face.
“Answer me,” I said. “Or don’t. I already know. Goddamn it, you should have told me.”
“No, cousin,” Withrow said, offering me a hand to help me stand. He knew I didn’t need the help, but the gesture mattered. “You would have thrown me out of town immediately and I was here to help. I couldn’t allow that. I came here to help you because you came to me in Seattle and gave me a part of my family back.” He shrugged. “And because it sounded fun.”
The smile he gave me was one of the cruelest expressions I’ve ever seen a vampire wear.
Two nights later, Roderick and I stood in a nameless little graveyard off Kills River Road. It backed up against dark woods draped over a sloping hillside and had a narrow, poorly-paved lane wrapped around it like the icon of a moat. Clyde’s grave was here, buried hurriedly by the county once they realized there was no family to whom they could hand over the corpse. He’d had an insurance policy for this stuff and a gravestone he’d picked out and paid for a lot of years ago. It was big and silver-gray and had his wife’s name on the other half. I held a single lily in my hands, a restrained memento to the dead that I thought Clyde might appreciate. Smiles was wandering the graveyard on his own, investigating all the other dogs brought here by mournful inheritors in recent days, or ones from the general neighborhood, or ones who’d gone wild and lived in those ever-present woods just a tree line away.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 22