All Knight Long

by John G. Hartness

  “I got this,” Sabrina said. I felt a hand on my left side, and I thought for a second that she was giving me a reassuring caress. Then I felt the snap on my shoulder holster release, and she pulled my pistol free. “You slice and dice. I’ll perforate.”

  “Don’t hit me in the ass,” I said. “My gun’s loaded with silver.”

  “No promises,” she replied. “It’s a nice ass. Draws my attention.”

  I pushed off from the wall, spinning Excalibur in a figure eight before me. One vamp got her arm in the way, and the arm slapped a frat-boy-looking vamp in a baseball cap and khaki shorts in the face as it flew to the side. Another vamp stepped right in front of me, then fell in two pieces and I pushed on, slicing the tall woman in half at the waist. With a little breathing room, I poured on the speed as I ran to Fitzpatrick’s side, stepping to the right at the last second and chopping a vampire’s head off at the jawline.

  Two vampires still fed on the downed detective, and he had long since stopped fighting back. There’s a soporific element to our bite, but not enough to completely render a victim unconscious. Sean was slipping away, and fast. I speared one vamp through the chest and flipped it off of its human quarry, wincing a little as the skinny black man’s head slammed into the tunnel wall with a sound like a watermelon dropped from a helicopter.

  The last vampire pulled itself away from Fitzpatrick’s neck and wiped its mouth with the back of one hand. “Why are you protecting the food? Were you saving it for later? That’s not nice. We’re hungry. We deserve to eat, too.”

  “You can’t kill people.”

  “Not people. Food. They kill animals for food. We kill them for food. Natural order.” He had floppy dark hair and skin that was pale even before he turned. I pegged him for an undergrad philosophy major.

  “Yeah, tell it to Nietzsche, asshole.” I swung Excalibur at his neck, but he ducked under my stroke and stepped forward, burying a fist in my stomach. I doubled over, momentarily stunned. I didn’t expect him to live through my first shot, much less to retaliate. But retaliate he did, slamming an elbow into my spine that dropped me to one knee. If I wasn’t holding a magical regenerating sword, I would have been in a lot of pain.

  As it was, I was pissed. I reversed my grip on Excalibur and swung it back behind my right side, slicing through the nihilist vampire’s Achilles tendon, not to mention the rest of its ankle. He went down, and I took his head when he sprawled on his back on the ground.

  The vamps down, I turned my attention to Sean, who lay on the floor twitching, blood oozing from his neck, arm, and his . . . stomach? I wrinkled my nose at the idea of drinking from a stomach wound, then shook the downed detective by the shoulder.

  “Sean, are you with me, buddy?” I could barely hear his heartbeat, faint and thready like it was down a long tunnel. He was still alive, but barely. “Sean!” I yelled right in his face.

  His eyes flickered open. “Your breath smells like dead things,” he gasped.

  “Yeah, well, there’s a good reason for that.” I sliced my palm with Excalibur and pressed it to his lips, then paused as nothing fell from the wound. I looked at my hand, and there was no wound to bleed. I shook my head at my own stupidity, sliced my hand again, and put the magical healing sword down. A narrow line of blood welled up on the heel of my hand, and I pressed it to Sean’s lips.

  “Drink this, buddy,” I said. He struggled, but he couldn’t budge me at his full strength, so there was no way he was dislodging me now. “You’re not going to vamp out, but a little bit of my blood will heal you enough to not bleed out in the subway.” He drank from me for a few seconds, and as I took my hand away from his mouth, I saw color come back to his cheeks.

  I stood up, pressing Excalibur into his hands. “Hang on to that for me, okay? If anything comes near you that’s not me or Sabrina, skewer it.”

  Then I stood up and looked to the side of the tunnel, where Sabrina was surrounded by six vampires in a semicircle. They all looked the worse for wear, with one of them crawling on the floor to get to her and several sporting bullet wounds. But there were still six of them, and Sabrina only had so many bullets. At that thought, almost like the universe was listening to me, I heard the hammer click on an empty chamber in one of the guns. She threw her pistol at a vampire’s face, but the starving newborn dodged out of the way easily.

  “Get her!” shouted a girl who couldn’t have been older than eighteen, with blonde pigtails and a decidedly Harley Quinn look about her clothes. I couldn’t tell if she was cosplaying or just dressed like a psychotic clown, but it didn’t matter. She wanted to hurt Sabrina, so she had to die.

  I ran across the tunnel, crashing into the mass of vampires and sending bodies scattering everywhere. I positioned myself in front of Sabrina again, then turned to face the massed newborns. “You’ve got only one chance at this. Stand the fuck down, or die right here. It’s your call. There are ten dead vamps littered around this tunnel, and six of you standing here bleeding. So do you want to see tomorrow, or do you want me to kill you true-dead?”

  “Kill him and we get to eat!” Harley vamp screeched, her voice stabbing me in the eardrums like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  “Take another step and the only thing you’re eating is a silver stake.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t have to. I was staring down six vampires, with no bullets and with my sword across the room, but I felt not an ounce of fear. I was the Master of the City, and six or sixteen, no passel of newborns was going to be a problem.

  Then I heard more shrieks from down the tunnels, and another two dozen vampires rushed into the tunnel, every one of them with the same bloodlust in their eyes. The boss vamp I chased must have had another holding facility further down in the tunnels, and he sent these starving newborns up here as reinforcements.

  Now I was worried.

  Chapter 28

  THE OTHER BABY vamps also looked to see where the shrieking came from, and that was the opening I needed. I looked over my shoulder at Sabrina. “As soon as there’s any kind of break in the action, start hauling Fitzpatrick back the way we came.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” Sabrina replied.

  “You are, or Sean is going to die. I can protect you, or I can protect him. I can’t do both, and I can’t carry both of you back to the surface. It would slow me down too much, and they’d swarm me. I can take out enough of them so you’ll be able to get away, but only if you do this my way.”

  “Yeah, like that line has ever worked on me.” I felt her grab my right ankle and unwrap the Ruger pistol strapped there. The LCP had six in the magazine and one in the chamber, with a spare magazine in the holster. “I’ve got thirteen chances to take them down. This would be a good time to tell me this thing’s loaded with those vamp-killer rounds, too.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said with a shake of my head. The LCP uses a .380 round, not the 9mm my Glock fires, and I didn’t get ammunition made in both calibers. Looking back on it, probably not my best decision. After all, my backup gun was most likely to be drawn in situations just like this—when the shit was all over the oscillator.

  “Then I just better not miss,” Sabrina said, standing up behind me. The half-dozen vamps before us looked torn between attacking us and feasting on Sean, who had moved himself all the way over to the far wall and now sat with my sword in his left hand, his pistol in his right, and his back pressed to the tunnel wall.

  “Yeah, better not,” I said. “Let’s go kill some shit.” I snatched the stake from the left side of my belt, drew my KA-BAR from its sheath on my right hip, and sprang into action.

  Newborn vampires are a lot like baby horses, or teenaged humans. They have these new bodies, and they don’t really know how they fit together. So they’re a little clumsy. Even with six of them, I didn’t feel outnumbered. Especially with the backup I had. I ran straight at two vampires on the far r
ight end of their clump, and one was down with a hole in his chest before it even registered what was happening. He died looking like the guest of honor at a surprise party. Surprise! You’re dead.

  The other one saw what was coming, but she wasn’t coordinated enough to stop me. I stabbed low at her gut, but she blocked that. Which was exactly what I planned. While her hands were wrapped around my right wrist, I jerked the stake free of the vamp’s chest to her left and jabbed it into her temple.

  I heard the flat crack of the Ruger and turned to see a female vampire drop to her knees in front of Sabrina, a third eye opening up in the center of her forehead. Sabrina fired twice more, dropping a college-age male vamp to her right, then she pulled a silver stake of her own out of her jacket and put it through the eye of each vamp in turn.

  I turned to the pair still standing between us and said, “You want fast, or slow?”

  One of them, a young woman in the black pants and white shirt of every mid-class restaurant ever, sprang at me with her hands outstretched. “Fast it is, then,” I said, holding my stake up for her to run onto. She obliged, and I shoved her corpse off to land with a thud on the dusty floor.

  The other vampire, this one even younger in death, looked like a grubby teenager turned into an even grubbier vampire. Her long hair was matted, maybe blonde, what I could see of it under the hoodie she wore. She reminded me of Rabbit, and remembering his death, I got pissed all over again. She took one look at the girl on the ground in front of me, then turned to sprint in the opposite direction, deeper into the tunnels.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “Worry about her later,” Sabrina said. “We have other problems.” She wasn’t kidding, either. Sean had three vamps down across the station, but they were surrounding him, feinting in at him from all directions. He had maybe ten seconds before one got past his guard. Then one of the vamps would strip Excalibur away from him, and he’d be toast.

  Good thing I didn’t need ten seconds to do what I had to do. I ran half the distance to him, then dove the last half. I crashed into the mass of newborn vampires with knife and stake flashing. I took a good eight of them to the ground with my first charge, then sprang to my feet to start the scrap in earnest. I wasn’t trying to kill them, just get enough breathing room for Sabrina and Sean to get away. I could kill the vamps later.

  Well, I needed to kill some of them. So I did. I gave myself over to the fury that coursed through me when I looked into the eyes of these kids. And some of them were kids. Out of the twenty or more baby vamps in front of me, at least a dozen were high-school age. Most of them were girls, the kind of kids who should have been worrying about football games, boys, or crap like that, not trying to drink human blood in an abandoned subway project. But here they were, the majority of them sporting the mismatched clothes and tattered shoes that marked them as living on the street or bouncing from shelter to shelter, and every one of them red-eyed and starved for blood.

  My knife and stake flashed silver in the low light, and wherever my arms swung, vampires fell. I cut through them like a scythe, my arms and mind fused into a dark dance of true-death. This was different from when I called on the Soul of the City to strengthen me in a fight; this was the Master’s Strength and Speed infusing my limbs, making me more powerful than I’d ever dreamed and capable of meting out justice in the blink of an eye.

  I hated every second of it. I felt every chest puncture beneath the tip of my stake, felt every spine part at the slash of the heavy silvered blade in my right hand, felt the muscle pulling at my weapons as I withdrew them through now-dead flesh. I heard the thuds as bodies landed around and behind me, but I didn’t slow down. I couldn’t. If I hesitated, Sean was dead. If I stopped even for a second, either Fitzpatrick or Sabrina would fall victim to the hunger surrounding them, and I couldn’t let that happen.

  So I didn’t. I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t slow down, I just kept on stabbing and cutting and killing until the floor under my feet was slick with blood and the stench of copper was so thick in the air you could taste it. I fought until there was nothing in front of me to kill, and when I stopped, I stood alone in a circle of dead vampires that resembled nothing so much as a terrorist attack at a high-school dance.

  I looked back at Fitzpatrick, who sat staring at me with wide eyes. Streaks of blood covered his face and chest, some of it his but mostly spatter cast off from my blade on the backswing. “You okay?” I asked, my voice sounding raspy and harsh to my own ears.

  “Y-yeah. I think I’m almost all healed up.” He stood up and held out Excalibur to me. “Thanks. For the sword, and the save.”

  “Comes with the gig. Things like this can’t happen. When they do, someone has to put them down. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m the Master of the City.” As I said it, something fell into place inside my head. This was what I was supposed to do. Not the whole mafia don bullshit that I picked up from Tiram. Not dealing with petty criminals and helping them escape prosecution. That was what this job had turned into, but not what it was meant to be. This, dealing with threats to the city, both the supernatural and the mundane citizens, this was why I was here.

  I wiped my KA-BAR and my stake on my ruined jeans and tucked them into my belt. Then I took Excalibur from Sean and slid the legendary blade into its sheath. I felt its healing energy course through me, mending the dozens of tiny cuts and bruises I picked up in the fight. I looked over at Sabrina, who was methodically staking any vampires that remained intact.

  “You okay?” I called to her.

  “I’m good. Is it okay if you never do that again?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You hulked out, babe.” She shrugged. “I don’t have any other good way to describe it, but your eyes went full black, and I’d swear that you grew claws. You looked, I don’t know, bigger somehow . . .”

  “And nothing could get near you. Those vampires didn’t stand a chance. If they got within arms reach, they were dead. Even the ones that tried to turn and run, most of them were toast,” Sean agreed.

  “What do you mean, most of them?” I asked. “Did some of them get away?”

  “Yeah,” Sabrina replied. “Probably seven or eight total.”

  I let out a long sigh. “Son of a bitch. Did they go deeper into the tunnels, or back toward the surface?”

  “Toward the surface,” Sean said.

  Another sigh. Someday I’d catch a break. Apparently this would not be that day. “Of course. What time is it? Can I dare hope that they’ll just run out into the sunlight and burst into flames?”

  “Six-thirty,” Sabrina said, walking over to us.

  “So almost full dark, given the time of year. Naturally. All right, let’s go.” I said. I held out a hand to Sabrina. “Give me back my gun and help Sean walk. We need to get him to the hospital for a transfusion.”

  “I’m good,” Fitzpatrick protested.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, and I’m not letting you just carry around my magical sword to keep you on your feet. You’re going to the hospital if I have to mojo you into it.”

  He started to protest again, but wobbled on his feet and gave up. Sabrina retrieved her service weapon from where she’d thrown it, handed me back my pistol, and we started the trek back to the surface. I took point, since I didn’t need a light, but we made it back to Rabbit’s body without incident.

  I knelt by the small Morlock once more. “Sorry I wasn’t faster, buddy. I promise, I’ll avenge you, and I’ll make sure somebody takes care of your people. You were a good leader. Shitty nickname, but a good leader.”

  I stood up and we started back to the surface. We’d barely gotten back into the normal sewer section of the tunnels when my phone vibrated. I froze, pulling the black rectangle out of my pocket and swiping a finger across the screen.

  “Shit,”
I said as I read the text from Greg.

  “You just get a really bad text?” Sabrina asked, and I turned to see her face illuminated in the glow of her phone.

  “Yeah, you?”

  “Yep.” She held the phone up and I stepped back to where she and Fitzpatrick stood. The message on her screen came from Lieutenant McDaniel, but it matched the information Greg sent me.

  “Vampire attack at the baseball stadium. Dozens injured. Panic downtown. Need help NOW,” said the screen.

  I looked at Sabrina and Sean, covered in blood and beaten half to death. “Well,” I said, “I guess we know where to find the runaways.”

  Chapter 29

  I CALLED WILLIAM the second we got to street level. We came up near Central Piedmont Community College, barely a mile from the baseball stadium, but half the city away from our house, and our cars. With the attacks at the stadium, all the ambulances were tied up, so our best plan for getting Sean to the hospital was either calling an Uber or having one of my people pick us up. Well, the best plan would be me carrying Fitzpatrick to the hospital and leaving Sabrina behind, but that wasn’t going to happen. I’d pretty much decided I didn’t hate Sean anymore, but I was a long way from liking him enough to leave my girlfriend standing at a bus stop in the middle of a vampire attack for him.

  William must have been sitting in the car circling the city, because less than ten minutes later he pulled up in a black Suburban. He jumped out of the driver’s seat, Abby hopped out of the passenger side, and I loaded Sean into the back cargo area. Sabrina slid behind the wheel and I gave her a quick kiss. “He just needs a transfusion. But he needs a really big one. And probably an MRI to see if there’s anything going on inside Excalibur didn’t fix. And a shitload of antibiotics. That place was nasty, and he got bitten a lot. Honestly, you probably need about three pounds of penicillin yourself. Yeah, tell the—” She put a hand over my mouth, smiling.