Knights of Black Swan, Books 7-9 (Knights of Black Swan Box Set Book 3)

by Victoria Danann

  Monq didn’t look up. He simply said, “Come in. Dinner will be here in a few minutes. I felt like Swedish meatballs with egg noodles. Hope that’s okay with you.”

  Glen stared at Monq for a few beats. “I’m sorry about, uh…”

  “Dinner,” the server announced as he neared the door with a rolling cart.

  Glen stepped into the room and out of the way. He watched the man prepare the table for dinner, as he had the night before.

  When the server had finished setting out dinner and opening a bottle of pinot noir, he said to Monq, “Is that satisfactory, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Monq. “Thank you. Please close the door on your way out.”

  The man nodded, pushed the cart to the other side of the door then closed it behind him.

  Monq rose and walked around his desk. “Let’s eat,” he said with a smile.

  Glen seemed confused by Monq’s nonchalant manner. He’d expected a right good railing. Instead Monq was behaving as if nothing unusual had happened earlier in the day.

  Glen sat down looking chastised even though he hadn’t been. “I was saying that I’m sorry about…”

  “That’s not necessary, Catch. It was of little consequence. Except for the eleventh century Bergere chair. Apparently Farnsworth had some trouble running one down and, when she found it, the upholstery was hideous. No matter. She got an antiques restorer to put a rush on replacement and it should be here tomorrow.

  “You do, however, owe me a story for my trouble. Let’s begin with your first assignment, shall we? Z team, I think it was.”

  Glen slumped back in his chair as Monq dived into his salad.

  Staring at his plate without making a move toward a fork, Glen said, “Z Team.” His eyes glazed over like he was having an out-of-body experience. “They sent us to Shanghai.” He raised his eyes to meet Monq’s. “You ever seen an Asian vampire?”

  Monq shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Well, it’s even more eerie because the ice pale eyes are so out of place on their faces.” Monq noticed the rapid twitching of the tablecloth hem, which meant that, out of sight under the table, Glen’s knee was juddering fast. It was an obvious indicator of stress and nerves and one that Glen would have taken care to hide if he’d realized the movement of the tablecloth hem was giving him away.

  “Go on.”

  Glen’s attention had wandered to the bookshelves, but his gaze jerked back at the sound of Monq’s voice.

  “Shanghai,” Glen said dispassionately. “It’s a wild place.”

  “Do you speak Mandarin?”

  “I do now.” He shrugged. “Limited. No Westerner who learns it as an adult is ever going to speak it well.”

  Monq nodded. “Probably not. So you were with Z Team in Shanghai and you were, what? Twenty years old?”

  “Yeah. About that. Not old enough to be taken seriously by those guys. Not that they take anyone or anything seriously but themselves.” He gave a slight headshake to the bookcase that had drawn his attention. “Anyway. Shanghai was wild and so were they. Nightsong had left the team, gotten married and had a new job that boiled down to being his wife’s bodyguard.” Glen laughed at that. “I understand that it’s a job he takes very seriously.”

  “I’ll bet. I got to know his wife a little. So who else was on the team?”

  “Torn Finngarick. Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Gunnar was still active then. And they’d gotten a new guy besides me, only he came on the usual way somebody makes Z Team. Fuckup of phenomenal magnitude. Stephrelle Bridesmore. Never did learn Chinese worth a shit.” Glen’s eyes flicked to Monq and away. “Sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing. Continue.”

  “Well, Torn and Gun had already, I guess you’d say, bonded with Bridesmore. It made sense. He was just like them. Oozing attitude. All tatted up. Belligerent to the extreme. Hostile if you rubbed him the wrong way and, believe me, that was not hard to do. He didn’t mind being called Steph, but would turn mean as a snake if somebody called him Stephie.”

  “Sounds like you found that out the hard way.”

  “Nah. It wasn’t me. Some other fool in the unit.” Glen picked up his water glass and took a drink. “The short and sweet is this. Steph belonged there. I didn’t. End of story.”

  Monq chuckled. “I have a feeling there’s much more to the story than that. These meatballs are perfection. You should give them a try.” He made a yummie sound that was barely on the manly side of silly. “And the noodles are buttery. They make them fresh in the kitchen. Did you know that?” He nodded and laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have a milk cow and churn the butter that went into these little delights. Nothing’s too good for Black Swan knights. You know what I mean?” Glen sneered at that. “And the rest of us including myself, a simple scientist, get to be the incidental beneficiaries of your good fortune.”

  Glen snorted out a derisive huff. “My good fortune? If you think it’s good fortune to be a Black Swan knight, you should try it yourself. Want to trade places for a couple of weeks?”

  Monq put his fork down and looked serious. “No. I wouldn’t. You’re not the first knight to come through my door looking the worse for wear.”

  Glen maintained eye contact with Monq for only a couple of seconds before he broke it off and pretended to be interested in looking around the room again. After a thorough sweep of the surroundings, his eyes came to rest on the plate in front of him, but still he didn’t make a move to try the meatballs.

  Undeterred, Monq continued prodding. “So you’d just arrived in Shanghai. And you were partnered with Bridesmore?”

  “Yeah. Torn and Gunnar had been together a long time. Steph’s a good guy in his way, but he never saw me as his equal. He never once called me by my name. Just Rookie. Even that was seldom. He had an adverse reaction to conversation of pretty much any kind.”

  “Quiet?”

  Glen’s responding smile was bitter. “Understatement. Severe.” Looking at his plate again, the fake smile fell away. He suddenly sat up, reached for a fork, pulled the salad plate in front of him, speared a forkful of greens and stuffed it into his mouth. “So patrolling was kind of weird,” he said absently, like he’d almost forgotten he wasn’t supposed to have an appetite or be receptive to conversation.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, like I said, the district that draws leeches because that’s where the night life is. It’s buzzing with clubs and bars and neon lights. Place is full of rich expats from all over looking for a good time and sometimes their idea of a good time is, let’s say, unusual. Sometimes it’s what you might call dark.

  “Some of the bars are so packed you can’t move around. A vampire could be sucking somebody dry right next to clueless people drinking Manhattans and screaming in each other’s ears, trying to be heard over the noise.”

  Monq raised his eyebrows causing lines to form on his forehead. “You saw that? Or you’re just saying that could happen?”

  Glen gave Monq a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Yes. I saw it happen. Vamp looked right at me while he was killing somebody. Almost like he knew what I was and that I couldn’t touch him in the middle of a crowd like that. Maybe I’m crazy, but it felt like a taunting. When he finished with the victim, he started pushing through the crowd in the other direction. We followed, or tried to, practically throwing people out of our way, but we lost him somewhere before we got to the back door. I wanted… no, I needed to talk about how frustrating that was. Steph just shrugged and walked off. If it bothered him, he did a spectacular job of covering it up. Like I said, talking wasn’t his thing.”

  “What about other people at the unit?”

  Glen set the salad plate aside and pushed the noodles around like he was deciding which would be the lucky winner. He forked three, put them in his mouth, and said, “There were some good guys. Some I might have become friends with if I’d been there long enough. A big part of t
he reason why knights are close to team members is because that’s who you spend most of your time with.”

  “Makes sense. So did you discuss it with Torn and Gunnar?”

  “I told them what happened when we met up. They just said ‘happens’. One word. End of discussion.”

  “Sounds like they’d developed some emotional calluses. How long had you been active when that incident occurred?”

  “Three days.” Glen cut a Swedish meatball in half. “Emotional calluses. Clever, doc. You should be a writer.” He took a bite. “I guess that’s right though. They’d seen and done all this stuff at that point. They were closer to the end of their career than the beginning. But it was new to me. The ugliness. When I left here I was thinking I was charging off on this noble mission. Save the world.” He mocked himself in a quixotic way, laughed and shook his head. “Stupid. Young and stupid and completely without emotional calluses, which, as it turns out, are crucial to the job. Well, except…”

  Monq thought it best to ignore the fact that a sentence was left open-ended. “You don’t think you’ve been on a noble mission to save the world.”

  Glen sighed and looked at the fake fire while he ate more noodles. “I get it. You want me to open my soul so you can dig around and find a way to decommission me.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth, Sir Catch. I want to help restore your peace of mind so that you can continue serving The Order in the capacity of your choice.”

  Glen looked at Monq and held eye contact that time, assessing Monq for credulity. “That the truth?”

  “Gods’ own truth. Whatever you tell me remains between the two of us. Only the two of us and I will take it to my death. And, by the way, this office is a judgment-free zone.”

  Monq could tell that Glen was using his people-reading skills to evaluate his answer.

  “Judgment-free, huh.” Glen seemed to be considering that as he ate the last chunk of meatball.

  Monq waited, knowing that the next sentence Glen uttered would be his implied consent for treatment or a rejection that would be almost impossible to break through.

  When Glen looked up again, he said, “Okay. Here it is. Sometimes I think I’m the one that needs saving. Not the world.”

  Monq smiled. “Oh. Is that all?”

  Glen laughed. To an observer it might have seemed like a simple, ordinary everyday thing. But to Monq, it was a thrilling signal of hope. It meant that Glen, the brilliant, affable kid with a universe of potential, the one everybody loved, was still in there, waiting for someone or something to bring him back and give him a kickstart out of his stall. A reason to start living again.

  “By the way,” Monq set his napkin beside his plate, “are you in touch with family?”

  “Thought you read my file, doc. I don’t have any family to be in touch with.”

  “Your file was, ah, vague on the subject.” He waited for Glen to add something. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “Some other time then.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  When the fourth vampire specimen was delivered to the cell prepared for him, Monq called Jean Etienne. Well, he called Baka and asked that a message be relayed the next time he was in touch with the immortals.

  The delay between the initiation of that request and receipt of the message could have been days or even weeks, but the immortals were in Paris working with the Black Swan teams when Monq reached Baka. Within half an hour of hanging up the phone with the ex-vampire, Jean Etienne was standing in front of Monq’s desk.

  Jean Etienne was one of the original vampire created by the god-like brat, Heralda. He was thousands of years old, but appeared to be in his early thirties.

  Like all the immortals he was beautiful. Beauty was part of the design that assisted vampire with easy sustenance. The first step in the process of feeding was to cause the blood donor to feel drawn to the vampire and at ease with being alone with them. The second was to take a small enough amount of blood that it wouldn’t be missed. Except in rare cases of unusual brain chemistry, humans reached such a state of ecstasy that they forgot their encounters with vampire altogether. The effect was much like a petit mal seizure. By the time victims regained full control of their faculties puncture wounds were healed by the properties of immortal saliva.

  Now and then a drop or two of blood might escape and be left on clothing as evidence, but humans were good at passing such things off as little mysteries then forgetting all about it. Or explaining it away with something as reasonably logical as a minor nose bleed.

  On the rare occasions when humans remembered involuntarily nurturing a vampire, they quickly learned that their stories were fodder for ridicule or even serious concern for their sanity.

  Jean Etienne’s version of beauty presented itself as dark brown locks that fell haphazardly around his face and blue eyes that were almost as pale as humans-turned-vampire. He was medium height and build which made blood withdrawal physically convenient.

  Most of Jean Etienne’s peers, meaning those as old as he, had taken mates having found that time passing slowly is better lived with love. Some of them had reproduced, which may or may not have been part of Heralda’s plan. Jean Etienne had considered the option, but had never crossed paths with a female worthy of the ultimate in long-term commitment.

  For the past few hundred years, he’d been working as a vampire version of a nanny, babysitting adolescent males who, though hundreds of years old themselves, were as immature as human sixteen-year-olds requiring constant supervision. Although he believed the responsibility of working with the Black Swan knights had been good for them and given them a purpose beyond hedonism.

  The occupation had originally relieved some of the boredom. Millennia can become monotonous, after all. But for the past fifty years or so Jean Etienne had begun to feel like he’d integrated all the personal value that particular service had to offer.

  No doubt there would be panic amongst several sets of parents when he turned in his notice. He had the sort of quiet patience that could only come from knowing that he wasn’t running out of time. He’d grown fond of the boys, of course, but they were not his children. They were his charges. And there was a difference.

  At first their antics were amusing, but too much of anything wears thin. Jean Etienne was old enough to remember when Epicurous had suggested moderation in all things during the heyday of Greek culture.

  He was skeptical about Monq’s experiment, but felt compelled by honor to agree because they were not making much headway cleaning up the mess that the vampire virus had made in Loti Dimension. He was prepared, should it become necessary, to reveal the means by which so-called immortals could be killed. He would not enable the insanity produced by the vampire virus to become a menacing madness of eternal duration.

  With vampire eyes Jean Etienne could see the aging that had changed Monq in the past seven years since they’d first met. A part of him thought it was sad that the entire life of a human would be no more than the length of a good nap. Another part of him envied them their short lives and the sense of urgency that motivated them to seek life at its fullest.

  “Oh. There you are,” said Monq. “Thank you for coming. This won’t take long.” Monq rose and gestured toward the door. “Right this way.”

  “Can I see them?” Jean Etienne spoke very good English, but with a definite French accent.

  “Who? Oh. The vampire?” Monq looked curious. “You can, of course, but why would you want to?”

  “I will need to monitor developments closely. Please don’t take offense, but there is the possibility that results could create a situation outside your ability to manage.”

  “In that case, I should be grateful that you’re offering more than just blood.”

  “Yes. Well. I’d like to see what the, um, specimens look like, act like, before the initial infusion of my blood.”

  “I like a methodical approach, myself. Follow me.”

  Jean Etienne looked over the facilities as he
walked behind Monq. He scanned every office and lab as they passed. Of course, Monq’s staff mirrored the vampire’s curiosity. Some of them had seen Jean Etienne because they’d been in residence for some years, but many had been hired or transferred in since the French vampire were a common sight around J.U.

  Last stop on the research level was the cluster of enclosures that housed vampire of the infected variety unique to Loti Dimension.

  When Jean Etienne saw Falcon, sitting on the side of a hospital bed pushed against the wall, staring at one of the cells, he silently turned to Monq for an explanation.

  “The knight on the bed is Sir Kristoph Falcon. He was friends with the vampire that is currently preoccupying his time and attention.”

  Jean Etienne followed Falcon’s gaze and said, “A female? I thought the virus infects only males.”

  “It’s a rare occurrence, but we have records of several such anomalies.”

  Looking back at Falcon, he said, “Why is he sitting there like a gargoyle?”

  “I’m right here and I can hear, you know.” To Monq, Falcon said, “Is that him?”

  Monq ignored Falcon and spoke to Jean Etienne. “Falcon was too young to have seen you when you were here years ago. He was a student then. The short of it is that he’s afraid we’ll kill her if he leaves or looks away. He’s refusing to give up his self-imposed post unless one of his close friends is watching her.”

  Jean Etienne looked from Falcon to the infected vampire.

  “Her name is Genevieve. Genevieve Bonheur,” said Falcon with the proper accent.

  “French,” said Jean Etienne.

  “Yes,” Monq confirmed. “She was transferred from the unit in Paris. Been with us for six years and had been promoted to head of Operations.”

  “I see.” With more empathy than one would expect from a vampire, Jean Etienne said, “That must have been difficult for all of you. I’ll start with this one.”

  “I’ll need to sedate her.”

  Jean Etienne looked at Monq and then laughed out loud. “Why?”

  “Well…” Monq spluttered, “so you won’t be harmed, of course.” After a second, Monq said, “I suppose that was a silly thing to say. You can’t be harmed, can you?”