The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 6): Man in Black

by John G. Hartness

  “What are you looking for, Paulson?” I started scanning the rooftops, remembering my sniper from earlier.

  “A taxi,” said the evaluator. “Your companion’s driving leaves much to be desired.”

  THE HIGH-RISE was feeling a little stuffy, so I relocated the party to our frat house turned half-baked Hall of Justice. Abby and I pulled up in her Escalade, Paulson close behind in a gold-toned King Cab. My personal NASCAR driver/chauffeur and I trooped inside and headed downstairs while Paulson argued with the cabbie over the fare. I left him there with a perverse hope that he’d lose track of time and still be standing on my porch when the sun came up.

  No such luck. Paulson joined us downstairs a few minutes later, complaining about exchange rates, smelly cab drivers, and bitching about America in general. I threw a bag of O-negative at him, and he stopped in the middle of the room to stare at me.

  “What fresh hell is this?” The Euro-vamp assclown asked.

  “It’s blood, dickhead. You’re getting bitchier than normal because you’re hungry,” I replied.

  “My hunger or lack thereof is none of your business, but were I nearing true death from starvation, I would never lower myself to drink blood from a bag.” The disdain fairly dripped from his tongue, and he threw the bag back to me.

  “Suit yourself,” I said, catching the bag.

  “I’m going out,” Paulson said, turning to go up the stairs.

  I cut him off before he got his foot off the carpet. “No hunting,” I said.

  “I know how to hunt without killing, Black.”

  “I didn’t say no killing, did I? I said no hunting. Leave the humans alone.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Black?” Paulson gave me a little push, but I stood right in his way.

  “Touch me again, and we’ll move this evaluation right to the end stages,” I said. “You can hunt all you want, but I do not give you permission to feed on any of my people. If you break my rules, I am within my rights as Master of the City to execute your ass and send your head back to the Council in a hat box.”

  “You’re serious.” The incredulous evaluator said.

  “As a heart attack,” I agreed.

  “How do you expect me to live?” Paulson asked.

  I threw the bag of blood back to him. “The same way I do.” I pushed past him, back into the basement/war room, and walked over to the large tabletop computer.

  “What do we know, Abby?” I asked.

  “There’s obviously very little on the Internet about the Stanleyville Bloods, what with the whole vampire thing and all. They seem to cluster around Seventh Street, and other than a love for loud music and louder motorcycles, I have come up with exactly nothing.”

  “They are a relatively young nest,” came William’s voice from the open hidden doorway. “May I come in, Master?”

  “How did you know we were here?” I asked. “And how did you get that door open from the other side? I was pretty sure I removed the knob and any other way Tiram could get in through my back door.”

  “You did, but once you vanquished Mr. Tiram, I took the liberty of installing a new handle and lockset. It now has an electronic keypad that opens with either your personal four-digit code, or your voiceprint. I thought that since you are now the primary resident of both the office building and this . . . domicile that you would be using the passage more frequently. Then I did some research in Mr. Tiram’s files about the Stanleyville Bloods.”

  “How did you know we were looking into the Bloods?” I asked.

  “I bugged your phone,” William answered, just like he’d said “the sky is blue.”

  “You bugged my phone?” I asked, moving to where the diminutive vampire stood. “And I suppose you bugged this place, too? That’s how you knew we were here.”

  “Of course,” William replied. “You have been reluctant to allow me to do my job, so in order to fully execute my duties as your valet and assistant, I planted listening devices in every room of this house.”

  “Every room?” Abby asked.

  “Yes, Miss Lahey, every room. Except the washrooms, of course. That would be an invasion of privacy. But I am exceptionally discreet and am well-versed in keeping the identities of paramours closely guarded.”

  “Look,” I said. “Nobody cares who Abby is sleeping with, but I do care about everything having to do with these motorcycle vamps. So enlighten me, please.”

  William stepped to the computer and tapped the screen a few times. A map of Charlotte flew up on one of the big monitors, and tapping on the screen again, William zoomed us in. “The Stanleyville Bloods are a small but extremely close-knit group of vampires operating out of the former Stanleyville neighborhood of Charlotte. They engage in some petty larceny, minor prostitution, and drug dealing, but as far as I can tell, kidnapping is a fairly major step up for them.”

  “Do you have any contact within the Bloods?” I asked William.

  “Yes, they pay tribute each quarter.”

  “Great,” I said. “Call their leader, or president, or whatever he wants to call himself, and tell him to meet me in my office tomorrow night an hour after sunset.”

  “And if he refuses to come, sire?”

  “Tell him that if I don’t see him in my office an hour after sunset, I will cut him into a few dozen pieces and everyone in his gang can wear him for earrings. Now take care of that for me. I have to go report in to Owen.”

  “Without his money,” Paulson said from the opposite wall.

  “Without his money,” I agreed.

  “And without the kidnapped girl,” Paulson said.

  “Are you just going to stand there and be Little Mary Sunshine, or are you coming with me?” I asked.

  Paulson pointed to the stairs with a grand gesture.

  As I stomped up the steps to the foyer, I swear I heard Paulson behind me whisper, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Chapter 9

  MY CONVERSATION with McDaniel and Marcus Owen went about as well as I’d expected. From the initial “what do you mean she was never there,” to the final “we’re supposed to believe in this mystery sniper,” it was, in a word, a shitstorm. I took it like a man, albeit a small, beaten man, and after half an hour or so of yelling, McDaniel and I were deposited outside Owen’s front door. Paulson went ahead of us to the car, a spring in his step and a gleam in his eye, reminding me once again how much I hated the little bastard.

  McDaniel and I walked slowly toward my car, a three-year-old Honda Accord that I liked because it looked like a million other cars on the road. It was one of the few normal, dependable, boring things in my life, plus it never looked out of place on a stakeout. Abby’s Escalade had a much shorter list of places it fit in. I reached for the door handle, then turned back to McDaniel.

  “There’s something deeper here, Lieutenant,” I said, “I don’t have any evidence yet, but this kidnapping ties into more than just Owen. I’ll keep working on it. We’ve got a solid lead on the thugs who took the ransom, and their leader should be meeting me in my office tomorrow evening. If he knows anything about the girl, I’ll find out.”

  “You’d better,” McDaniel said. I stood there, one eyebrow raised, the “or what, human?” written plainly across my knit brow. After a long pause, McDaniel dropped his eyes, then handed me a card with an address on it.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Two city maintenance workers disappeared in a sewer near this address last week. I need someone to investigate.”

  “You do know that I have a better sense of smell than humans, right?”

  “I do, and I figure that your little friend’s there will be even more developed than yours,” McDaniel pointed at Paulson.

  “You’re an evil man,” I said. “I like it.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, Paulson and I stood over a manhole on a side street just north of downtown. I looked around, thinking back just a couple weeks when Sabrina, Greg, and I were fighting a boggart in sewers v
ery near where I stood. That of course led to thoughts of the Morlocks, the renegade vampire tribe that lived in the sewers . . . until Lilith killed them and blamed it on Tiram, thus goading me into taking out her criminal opposition and sticking me with this Master of the City gig. Nothing good ever came of me playing in the sewers.

  “You might want to cover your nose,” I said to Paulson.

  “I’m sure that I will somehow survive the stench. I have visited the restroom in your house.”

  “Not even close. I hope you brought enough weapons. Some of the things I’ve run into under the city aren’t too fond of us who walk aboveground.”

  “I am weapon enough, thank you. Not everyone feels the need to walk around with hardware dangling from every appendage.” He gestured at me, with a heavy leather jacket on, a Glock 19 on my hip, a pair of silver-edged kukris crossed over my shoulders, and my sword (I still couldn’t bring myself to think of her as Excalibur) in a sheath going down the center of my back.

  “Dick,” I muttered. Partners. It’s one thing to have a partner you can count on when the crap hits the fan, even if he does wrap himself in budget Batman costumes and carry an honest-to-God utility belt. It’s another thing entirely to trust your blind side to a cocky Euro-vamp fashion plate who’d just as soon stake you as look at you and thinks he’s too good to carry a gun into an unfamiliar situation, counting on his vamp-powers to get him through. It wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to call Greg and tell him to get his head out of his ass and get down here and watch my back, but I was too busy looking at the inside of my own rectum to see the phone. Oh well, if you can’t be with the partner you trust, better not trust the one you’re with.

  I lifted the manhole cover and descended the metal ladder into the darkness. My boots hit water just an inch or so deep, and the smell washed over me like a wave of funk. I moved out of the way and clicked on my flashlight as Paulson followed me down.

  “You should probably—” I tried to say “move to the side” before he got to the bottom, but he waved me off and dropped off the ladder right into a deeper puddle of water. I watched the revulsion roll across his features as the water crested the top of his beautiful brown loafers and soaked his delicate argyle socks.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” I said. “There are some deep spots.” I turned so he couldn’t see my smile, then pulled out my phone. I opened up my maps application and started down a tunnel heading toward the address McDaniel gave me. Paulson followed along silently, moving through the water with barely a ripple and generally making me look like a bull in a china shop. We walked through the sewers for several blocks until we came to a wide junction near the address where the city workers vanished. I put the phone away and started working the “room” from right to left. I went over the area inch by inch, examining the walls and even the ceiling down to the bricks and the mortar.

  Watching my detective ex-girlfriend work crime scenes gave me a little experience with how things should be done, and if I’d not spent hours ogling Sabrina’s figure while she looked for clues, I probably would have missed the scrap of orange coverall wedged into a crack in the wall. I pulled the fabric out of the wall and sniffed it.

  “What is it?” Paulson asked.

  “You want to help?” I turned to him, surprised.

  “Not at all. I am, however, bored watching you scramble around the brick walls like some kind of demented spider.”

  “There’s blood on it. Blood and some kind of green-black ichor. Looking at the way the fabric tore at the edges, I’d say that this was ripped from the larger piece by a tooth or something like that. There’s a distinct smell on the fabric, too, something reptilian. I can’t recognize it. It’s nothing I’ve ever smelled before, but I can use it to track whatever was here.”

  “What about this?” Paulson asked, holding out a cracked hard hat he’d just pulled out of the water.

  “That’s nasty,” I said.

  “Everything down here is nasty, but if it doesn’t offend my sensibilities, I’m sure that a barbarian like you won’t be bothered by it.”

  I took the hard hat from him and reached inside, pulling out a mass of hair, scalp, and bone. I held it up to his face and said, “I stand corrected. This is nasty.”

  Paulson recoiled and stepped back several steps, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance. I dropped the hat and caught the front of Paulson’s shirt, keeping him upright.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I don’t want you sitting in my car after swimming through sewer water.” I said. “Now grab that hard hat while I get full contact gross with what’s left of this guy.” I pulled out my flashlight and examined the mass in my hand. I turned the clump of hair over in my hands and saw something white gleaming. I reached into the clump and wiggled it back and forth until a tooth came loose in my fingers. I put the hair and skull fragments back inside the hard hat and set them down on a shelf where someone could come back for the remains later, then turned my attention to the fang in my hand. The tooth was roughly six or seven inches long, and as I held it, the thing looked like a dagger in my fist.

  “What the hell has a tooth like that?” Paulson asked.

  “You mean to tell me that you don’t recognize it instantly? I thought you were supposed to know everything.”

  “I have no idea what that is, and I’ve lived many decades and fought many battles.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m pretty sure this is an alligator tooth.”

  “How big is that alligator?”

  “I believe that’s going to be the problem,” I said. “If a normal alligator tooth is a couple inches long, our gator must be a good twenty feet long.”

  “Are alligators in the sewers a normal thing over here? I mean, I’ve heard rumors of them in New York City, but I thought that was just an urban legend.”

  “I did too,” I said, then motioned Paulson to silence. A noise came down the tunnel to me, a raspy sound that echoed off the tunnel walls and dispersed itself throughout the sewers.

  “What was that?” Paulson asked.

  “I think it’s a big damn lizard that’s missing a tooth,” I replied.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  “I thought about knocking you unconscious and dropping you in front of the creature so I could just kill it while it fed, but then I thought that’s the kind of thing your bosses would really like, so I can’t do that. So I think I’ll just go chop its head off and make the sewers safe for sewer-worker guys again. How’s that sound?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. He wasn’t going to help, so he didn’t get to help make the plan. That’s just a basic rule of ass-kicking. That, and don’t run headlong into a giant open space without first checking your surroundings. So instead of charging down the tunnel where I heard the sound, I crept through the water and gunk to the edge of the brightening tunnel, then pressed myself flat to the wall. I heard the rasping, louder now as if a pile of sandpaper was having sex with another pile of sandpaper. There was also a smell like old books—dry and brown smelling, heavy enough to almost taste.

  And then memory flashed an image I’d rather not still have rattling around my brain. I realized where I was—outside the Morlocks’ main thoroughfare. When Lilith murdered the Morlocks less than two weeks ago, this place had been an abattoir. There’d been blood everywhere, painting the walls, dripping from the ceiling, thick enough on the floor to make puddles. I’m still pretty sure Lilith didn’t care who survived her plan to pit me against the former Master of the City. She was working some kind of angle and wanted either me or Tiram dead. She probably didn’t care which one, as long as she had one rival fewer when we were done with each other.

  As all these thoughts flickered past my memory, Paulson pressed himself to the wall next to me. I looked over at him, one eyebrow up. “You’re going to help? I figured me dying down here would be just a minor inconvenience for you.”

  “Not even that,” the well-groomed little asshole replied.
“But how often does one have the opportunity that lies before us? How many men or vampires can say that they battled a giant alligator and lived?”

  “Great,” I muttered. I wouldn’t mind so much that the guy the Council wanted to replace me with is suicidal, but this idiot was liable to take me with him. I turned to Paulson. “Fine, but we do this my way.”

  “What is your way?”

  “We cheat,” I said, pulling a cylinder out of my pocket. “Cover your eyes and ears,” I said to Paulson. Then I pulled the ring out of the flash-bang and threw it around the corner. I slapped my hands over my ears and turned my face into the brick, counted to three and heard a muffled BOOM! I stepped sideways around the corner, drawing my Glock and one kukri as I stepped into the mouth of the tunnel.

  And froze.

  Paulson swung around the corner, pistol in both hands in a classic Weaver stance, and almost collided with my frozen form. He gaped at me, then turned to follow my gaze.

  “Oh, bugger,” the smaller vampire said.

  “Damn straight,” I agreed, staring at the mess in front of us.

  There was no twenty-foot alligator anywhere to be seen. And as my brain processed the “no alligator” memo, it started to work on the “what else had six-inch fangs?” question. The answer, of course, is eight-foot-tall snake-men. But since I had no idea that snake-men existed before that second, their presence in the sewers of Charlotte never crossed my mind.

  “What the ever-loving hell are those?” I asked.

  “Naga,” Paulson replied without even a beat.

  I turned to him. “You know these things?”

  “I know of them,” he corrected, then went on. “They are snake-men, originally from India. Very intelligent, very protective of their territory, very poisonous. Their venom is like acid to us, so be careful not to be bitten.”

  “Their fangs are a freakin’ foot long! You’re damn skippy I’m going to try not to get bitten,” I said, then proceeded to start with the trying. There were at least a dozen snake-men in the room, most of them writhing on the floor from the flash-bang. I stepped up to the nearest one and pressed my Glock to its head. I pulled the trigger three times, and it stopped moving. I brought my pistol up and dropped another naga that was sufficiently recovered to move toward me. Then more of the naga recovered enough to move, and the numbers game started to add up.