Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Tooth & Nail

  The Withrow Chronicles Volume II

  Michael G. Williams

  Falstaff Books

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Epilogue One

  Epilogue Two

  About the Author

  Other Works by Michael G. Williams:

  Falstaff Books

  Dedication

  To my sister Maria, whose work and life are an inspiration to all who know her.

  To the the Scourge of Nibelheim, the Heroes of Wayhaven, the Flatliners and the Tinker Trading Company, for the stories we tell together that I cherish so much.

  Part I

  1

  1951: Hardisonville, North Carolina, just south of Asheville

  I was standing outside the Hardisonville Country Club wearing a chrome-plated tuxedo, old-fashioned spats, and a look of general distaste, when my closest friend from high school dashed through the last scattered dregs of a storm to greet me. It was the night of our ten-year reunion and a late autumn rain had rolled across the mountains like a crashing wave two nights before.

  “Withrow Surrett. Well I’ll be damned.” His thin face wore lines of age before its time and his eyes looked tired. I was pleased to see they sparked with the same intelligence and urgency they’d had when he was the resident bookworm of our tiny and eminently forgettable school. His ginger hair was hiding more white than I’d have expected, and his posture was a little bent, but as the only vampire in town I was probably safe assuming no one else would ever notice these details. They were well outside the realm of mortal perception and we have a unique sensitivity to seeing signs of age in the world around us. Clyde wore a basic blue suit and a long brown raincoat and he couldn’t have looked any more the part of out-of-town cop if he’d been wearing a sandwich board sign advertising free suspicious glances.

  “You’re looking well.”

  I held out one hand and we shook for a long time, grinning at one another. Clyde was a good friend to anyone who’d be kind in return, but he and I had formed a close bond as two of the weirder people in school: he the lanky redhead tripping over tree roots because he had his nose in a book, and I the fat boy who doodled all the time and spoke only at gunpoint. It was a time when being weird was usually slapped out of a kid, but neither of us had gotten the message. He went on to a specific definition of great things, as expected, and I vanished before the ink on my diploma was dry. No one had heard from me in a decade – including Clyde – and I’d have kept it that way if I could. The dead are supposed to stay down, after all, but Agatha had a job for me and I had to take it. When the boss says jump, you jump. “That’s kind of you, Clyde, but enough about me. How’s life as a bracelet salesman?”

  “Never as good as it ought to be.” He shrugged. “And at the same time there’s always more business than one would hope.” His turn to deflect the question; this wouldn’t be easy. “I didn’t expect to see you here. What changed your mind?”

  I told Agatha I’d need a good reason to be there, that anyone who’d known me would want to know why the hell I’d show up now when I’d skipped out on every other hometown obligation, large and small. She told me to get creative. “Traveling through. I was delivering a piece to a collector in Atlanta and thought it would be a gas to time it so I got to attend.” It was plausible enough but it didn’t draw attention to any off-limits topics. It wasn’t hugely creative, but neither should any cover story be. An effective alibi is supposed to make the listener stop thinking about it, not elicit further interest.

  Clyde’s eyebrows quirked up and he gave an impressed nod. “A collector? There’s someone in Atlanta who admires your work enough to have you deliver it in person?” Clyde had the police investigator tone down pat and it worked. It was really just him giving me the business for a subtle laugh, I knew, but dealing with a cop was an extremely risky bit of tap dancing and always has been, in all times and all places. We have it knocked into us repeatedly, over and over and over again in the first years after we’re turned, to avoid cops at all costs. Agatha had made it clear that she would be staying a thousand miles away from every variety of fuzz, normally, but this was a situation in which one of her people just happened to have a cop friend from back in the day. It was a unique opportunity to soak him in the punch bowl then squeeze some information out.

  My throat caught. I chuckled, though, after a gap of less than a human heartbeat. I was supposed to be the predator here. I needed to remember that. This was the new life I’d chosen: that in every future interaction with a simple human being, they were to be the ones who ought to fear me. I cleared my throat. “I was just transporting it for a client.” Clyde looked interested so I waved it off. “I’ve been putting the art degree to good use doing a little art dealing and authentication. Before you ask, I promise this piece wasn’t stolen and anyway once I crossed state lines I was out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Okay, Signore Peruggia, I’ll put the gun down if you come out with your hands up.” Clyde laughed and I laughed and he chucked me on the shoulder. Our patter didn’t make a damned bit of sense to me but I didn’t know if that was because we were two old friends whose affection was never based on comedy routines to begin with or because we were two old friends trying to figure out if, and how badly, one of us had offended the other by disappearing in a puff of smoke without so much as a bye. Clyde’s tone changed and he said, looking me up and down, “I guess the art world pays well these days.”

  “No, but all the best advice columns say to dress for success.” I shrugged it off. I’d rumbled up an hour after sunset in a gray Oldsmobile given to me last year by Agatha’s people. The tux was courtesy my maker as well, and so was the ten dollar haircut – nearly a hundred these days – I’d been given by some barber she’d had wheeled up from Atlanta by one of her boys. The suit had been purpose-made, tailored to fit my generously distributed three hundred and fifty pounds without a single wrinkle or crease. After all, I was guaranteed I’d be shaped this way for the rest of my unnatural life so I might as well look good in it, Agatha said. It was all a little over the top and I’d protested that Clyde wasn’t the type to be impressed by some fancy nest or granddad’s stompers, but I was still too low in the organization to override direct orders. I chewed the last shot of smoke in my aging cigarette then flicked it off into some shadows. “Shall we? I bet there are at least a dozen people in there who won’t remember who I am.”

  “They’ll remember,” Clyde said. “But they might have forgotten your sunny personality.”

  The country club was a rambling two-level manse wearing its aspirations of a better town on its prominent sleeves. It sat perched on a bluff’s edge overlooking the carefully manicured grave of an old wooded valley. I couldn’t help but feel it was a waste of real estate but I’d never been an athlete. For all I knew, golf was the singular apex of human experience. I doubted it, though. The sorts of persons drawn to make serious investments in it were not usually my preferred company except as the occasional meal.

  The building itself was framed in massive timbers hewn into rectangles and stained the color of last night’s coffee. Eve
rywhere that wasn’t a dead tree was a plate glass window or an unexpected angle. The silhouette’s whole effect was of a Viking ship turned upside down for winter storage. It was beautiful, actually, but I hated everything about it. Country clubs were – are – full of people who think manual labor is evidence of congenital deficiency. Getting their hands dirty was a personal failure and I despised them for that. I wasn’t exactly living off the land or even mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons but I had known already, at 24 years of life and four of death, that the predation of humans on one another could be far more casual in its brutality and vastly more cruel than anything I might do to one of my victims. Oh, I stalked prey and attacked them and drank their blood and had, on occasion, left them dead – certainly dying – but they’d seen my face and known the final moments of their own fate and I’d done it without spending years lording it over them. I hunted them, sure, but I never denigrated them for becoming my prey. That counted for something, I believed. I still do.

  Inside were a few hundred yards of expensive yellow wallpaper, ten pounds of carpet padding per square foot and a couple functionaries waiting for something interesting to happen so they could disapprove. I was overdressed and Clyde was under-styled so the maitre d’ knew what we were here for. He shuffled the deck of his facial muscles in a way one could choose to read as an obsequious smile but he clearly felt events of this sort were beneath the Club. I liked that just fine and gave him a big grin. I stretched it all across my fat face and said, “I can’t wait to get downstairs. I hear this joint has a great buffet.” The host’s features fumbled the ball and I showed him the sides of some molars in genuine enjoyment while waving him silent. “Come on, Chuckles, just get us downstairs and cut us loose.” He said something unmemorable and led us across an expanse of dining room to the downstairs banquet hall with a minimum of further interaction. Halfway down the steps I realized Clyde was trying not to laugh and doing a pretty decent job. Phase one of my assignment – reconnect with Clyde and put him at ease – was going just fine. The rest was going to go a lot easier after I’d gotten a couple of cocktails in him. Any additional rounds of insults I got to unload on bystanders would just be a few bonus pins I could knock down in the last frame.

  As casual as I could possibly ever have asked, I opened my mouth and kicked off the next gambit. “Let me buy you a drink, Clyde, while you tell me what you’ve been up to lately. I hear you’re an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation.”

  Three hours later I was crossing a clearing two steps behind Clyde, ruining my ridiculous shoes in the mud and taking care to seem to wobble a little, when he stopped and held one hand half-way up to bring me to a halt. “I don't mean to be a drag, Withrow,” he sighed, “But before I show you the site I need to remind you that this is supposed to be off limits. I shouldn't be letting you see this.”

  He had, though, because I'd made him. He didn't know that, but I'd forced him do it just as surely as if I'd put a gun to his back. I'd looked into his eyes and told him to do it and he had as though it had been his own idea. My supernatural vampire hoodoo still had the wrapping paper on, though, and he had lots of competing and counterbalanced motivations when it came to things like this. Even though I’d compelled him to do it by inserting specific directives, he resisted. I could see it in his eyes: somewhere back there his brain was turning my commands and his own instincts against one another like grist in a mill. I couldn’t take any of that away; I could just add a few new cards to the catalogue.

  “Indulge your eccentric artist friend and his dark interests,” I said, spreading my hands a little. “I have to draw inspiration from all of life. How many chances to see a real crime scene will I get?” Tone and content mattered a lot when I tried to reinforce the hoodoo conversationally like this. I wanted something that wouldn’t require a lot of thought on his part. “You know how we sensitive types are.”

  “You’re about as sensitive as a severed limb,” Clyde growled. He was annoyed, but not particularly with me. I didn’t know all the details of my assignment but Agatha had me briefed on the minimum amount of necessary information: a murder, thus far unsolved, that we needed to make sure the authorities didn’t link to anyone with exceptional canines. Clyde had taken it over from the local species of citation wavers. If he was still as tenacious when it came to professional pursuits as he had been with his academics ten years before, it was driving him crazy not to have an answer.

  “Okay,” I laughed, “But I am an artist nonetheless. I might want to memorialize these poor bastards.” This mind-shaping business was new to me and it felt like juggling hot bowling balls. I decided to give it a little supernatural extra after all. My eyes met his and I commanded him. “Trust me,” I said.

  Clyde watched my face for a minute and then nodded. “Sorry. I do trust you. It's just... well. Just don't tell anybody I did this, OK?”

  “Cross my heart,” I said with a faint smile. I flicked the dog-end of my cigarette off into the shadows that draped everything but the single, stretched circle made by Clyde's cheap flashlight. Lights back then were nothing, just a bulb in a silvered dome we could point at things. Clyde couldn't see a damned thing by that light but I could see just fine. I'd aimed the coffin nail for a puddle eight feet away and bulls-eyed it. I sniffed the air once as the breeze shifted slightly and something turned over in my guts. It was weak, mostly washed away by the two days of rain, but I could smell it: blood, buckets of it, along with other smells of flesh and entrails and rot and, very faintly, the smell of a predator, a beast of the shadows. The rain had come at just the wrong time; it had encouraged everything terrible that hangs out in a body waiting for it to die. “We're close now, aren't we?”

  Clyde narrowed his eyes for a moment and then nodded his head jerkily to one side. “Ten yards that way. We can go look at it in the flashlight but I can't let you stomp around. There are going to be five eggheads out here with protractors and slide-rules and a few local coon hounds for the next week trying to count every footstep for half a mile.”

  “That's fine,” I said, though it wasn't really. I wanted to turn all my senses against the place where those people had been murdered, but that would be impossible.

  We walked that direction and about five yards away Clyde pointed the flashlight at two matted spots on the ground. “The kid and the granny,” he sighed. “Looks like there was a fight from all the knocked down weeds a little ways over there.” He bobbed the flashlight off into the dark in such a way it might have indicated a spot twenty feet or two hundred from where we stood. “Don't know who got them, but we've got stories about an outsider hanging around with them for a few days. Real reclusive guy, secretive. Supposedly he was a song chaser, the academic types who crawl around the woods trying to find someone knowledgeable in old hillbilly music and asking to record them. Word is he is - or was - some professor from up North, but what if he wasn't? Neighbors say the kid had been shut up in that house with him for at least two weeks. Lots of late night drives, lots of sleeping in all day.”

  I grunted and rubbed my chin; I was too busy flaring my nostrils and taking deep, quiet breaths to say much. I could still smell a predator, still faint, but it was a little stronger here and it was unquestionably real. None of my kind would have smelled that and failed to recognize it. On the other hand, no human could possibly detect it. To have something to say, though, after a few moments I turned back to Clyde and kept his topic going. “The granny?”

  “Nobody saw her around the place.” Clyde reached up to rub one eye with the palm of his free hand, then gummed a cigarette out of a pack in his jacket. His tie was out of place, his hair oil slipping, bags under his eyes. He hadn't slept much in the couple of days since the SBI had moved in on the case. The locals had messed it up beyond repair, Clyde had told me. The mud was mostly from kids coming out in the sedan to do slow doughnuts around the place and pretend they'd seen something grizzly or funny or new. “She lived out in the middle of nowhere, towards Pisgah Forest. N
o neighbors close enough to know anything useful. No power, no radio, just an old Victrola and some brittle records.”

  I clicked my cheeks against my teeth. “What's your gut tell you?”

  Clyde thought for a long time, watching the tip of his cigarette burn. Without the flashlight I could have seen well enough by that tiny red glow to find the crushed plants where the bodies had lain for days; with only the sliver of waning moon still rising I could have read a book. The experience wasn’t completely new to me at that point, but I hadn’t spent a lot of time around people - you know, regular humans - since the Big Bite and I kept finding it startling to realize how weak Clyde was compared to me: how limited he was in abilities and how terribly vulnerable he was to factors as inevitable as night. “I don't know,” he finally said. “They say eventually you get a knack for that kind of thing, but I don't guess it's bitten me yet.”

  “You must think something...” I tried not to sound too eager.

  “Truth? Conventional wisdom says it's the outsider. Natural choice, isn't he? Shows up, hides from everybody, probably drains a small fortune out of the kid by one con or another, then dumps the body out here and leaves town. He and the kid left the house together three nights ago, never came back. The kid was rich. Inherited everything when he was too young to know anything about what to do with it.”