“Why don’t we not do that, huh? Just make my night easy for once, and we all go home. Drop the bags and any weapons you’re carrying, and nobody gets hurt.”
The tallest of the three moved to stand right in front of me. “And who in the Nine Hells are you?”
“Jimmy Black, Master Vampire, and you are?” I stuck a hand out, and the faerie just laughed at me.
“I heard that Tiram was dead, but I didn’t hear the Council had appointed a comedian to take his place. You can’t be the Master, kid. You’re probably not even a hundred years old yet! How the hell do you expect me to take you seriously?”
I sighed. This whole “too young/skinny/funny/weak to be Master” thing was getting old. “You wanna just say you respect the office, and assume that since I’ve got the title, I’m fit to hold it?” I said. “Look, I don’t care what you’ve got to tell yourselves to get through the night. What I do care about is obedience and keeping a low profile. Which you and your little band of merry faeries have most definitely not been doing.
“So you’re done, at least for now. It’s one thing to steal a little now and then. I’m only moderately opposed to that, and as long as you’re stealing from companies with good insurance, I don’t really care. But this flashy smash-and-grab stuff, that’s got to go. You’re drawing way too much attention, and eventually somebody’s going to see something they’re not supposed to, and everybody’s cover is blown. So we’re all going to leave the jewelry store, right now, without any of the little sparkly bits, and we’re going back to your lair or hideout or whatever you call it.”
“I call mine a condo,” said one of the other faeries, a blond woman of spectacular beauty and a gymnast’s body wrapped in skintight black cat burglar’s garb.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll all go back to wherever the loot from the other robberies is stashed, you’ll pay me what you owe in tribute, and we’ll all have a drink to cement our new business relationship. Then I’ll go home, and we’ll all be friends.”
“What if I don’t want to be friends?” The first faerie asked. He was, like pretty much every faerie I’d met, ridiculously good-looking and in fantastic shape. He topped out a few inches shorter than me, maybe six two, and probably two hundred pounds of chiseled muscle. He kept his blond hair plastered tight to his skull and pulled tight in a ponytail that fell to his shoulder blades, and his jaw looked carved from marble. Ice-blue eyes glared at me from above that stony jaw, and he was starting to grind his teeth as he looked up at me. I felt the situation slipping from a place of quips and conversation into a place of violence, and made one last effort to bring things around.
“Now, if you guys want me to get Queen Milandra involved, so there’s representation from the Faerie realm, I have no problem with that,” I said, and meant it. I’d done a few favors for the Queen of the Fae in the past, so I figured she owed me one.
“That insipid bitch?” Granite Jaw spat. “She may rule in Faerie, but she’s no Queen of mine. Now you should get out of here before it becomes hazardous to your health.”
I sighed. “I hoped you weren’t going to go there. I really hoped we could have a conversation about this, and you’d see the error of your ways. But now, with the threats? Well, we can’t be having that. Respect the office, remember?” I asked. I stepped in without any warning and landed a haymaker on the point of the faerie’s jaw. I heard a loud crack, and his eyes rolled back in his head. He dropped like a sack of wet cement, and his two cohorts stood there, staring at me.
“Now, about that offer of surrender,” I said, but they rushed me instead. The female came at me fast, with a leaping kick that I barely managed to duck. But doing so put me right in the path of the third faerie, who landed a right cross on my nose that broke it again and immediately teared up my vision.
I knelt down to avoid the follow-up punch and threw a quick jab out at the faerie’s groin. He danced back and snarled at me.
“Oh, it’s going to be like that, then, is it?” He spoke with the heavy brogue of a man who’s gotten lost in a peat bog once or twice.
“Aye, it’s going to be like that,” I said, sweeping my foot around to cut his legs out from under him. He jumped straight up, grabbed a section of track lighting that hung over the display cases, and swung himself out of my reach. He landed with the grace you’d expect from a faerie built like a cross between a gymnast and a pro wrestler with sweet moves, and I clambered to my feet with all the grace of a drunken giraffe with a broken nose. I set my nose back straight, swore loudly as the pain flared anew, and blew a huge glob of bloody snot onto the floor.
I turned to the faeries and said, “I’ll give you one more chance to surrender. Nobody else needs to get hurt. Just take your friend, leave the gems, and we can even settle up the tribute tomorrow night.”
“Are you absolutely stupid?” The dark-haired Scottish faerie asked me. He was shorter than his friend, with a thicker build and a look on his face of sheer contempt. I sighed a little, realizing there was no way these guys were ever going to respect me. I was just going to have to beat the hell out of them. This shit is starting to get really old.
The guy on the floor started to stir, so I reached down and bashed his head against the floor a couple of times ’til he stopped moving. Faeries are like vampires—really hard to kill—so I knew he’d be okay, even if his egg was a little scrambled. Scotty came charging at me again, and this time I jumped up, but instead of playing Tarzan with the lighting, I just dove straight over him into a forward roll, coming up just a couple of feet from the faerie woman. She pulled a silver stake out of her boot and lashed out at me, so I drew Excalibur and parried. The blade’s reach was more of a hindrance than a help in the store full of jewelry cases, but it was better than nothing.
We went back and forth for a few seconds before I heard a squeak of a shoe on the floor behind me. I dropped to one knee and let Scotty’s punch whizz harmlessly over my head, then I stabbed upward with Excalibur, shoving the blade in between a couple of ribs and standing up as it came out the faerie’s back. His cohort stood motionless, uncertain. Scotty’s eyes went wide, and both hands flew to the hilt of the sword, trying to push himself off the sword. I stopped him by pushing him down to his knees, then shoving backward with one foot while I pulled the sword from his chest.
“I know you think you’re probably going to be fine, that hole in your gut is going to heal up any second now. Problem is, Excalibur is made of cold iron, and it does real damage to you guys. So you’re going to need to go back to Faerie to heal, or you’re going to die in the middle of a strip-mall jewelry store robbery. That’s no way for one of the Fair Folk to go out, is it?”
He just lay there, shaking his head.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so, either. So I’ll tell you what—I’m going to take everything in your bags from tonight as tribute. Then you can go to Faerie, heal up, and decide never to set foot in North Carolina again. Or I can kill all three of you and send you back to Milandra in sandwich baggies? What’s it going to be?”
“We’ll leave,” the faerie croaked from his knees.
“And?” I asked, making a “come on” motion with my free hand.
“And we swear on our wings never to set foot in North Carolina without permission of the Vampire Council’s duly appointed representative again, whoever that may be.” A nice subtle way for him to say he doesn’t think there’s a snowball’s chance of me living out the month, but I let it slide.
“Fine,” I said. “Now get the hell out of here before I decide not to be so generous.” The female waved her hands, and a portal opened in midair, big enough for them to go through three abreast, since Scotty could only walk by putting one arm over each of the other faerie’s shoulders. That was a little more magic than I expected them to be packing, since I thought only Milandra or one of her upper-echelon types could travel between the worlds. Another example of just how little I understand about Faerie.
I looked at the blood-spattered jewelry store
and sighed, pulling out my phone yet again to text William to send in the cleaners. I didn’t even know who “the cleaners” were, just that William assured me they were trustworthy and diligent. I turned and saw Paulson leaning against a wall, arms crossed and standard disapproving look on his face.
“What?” I asked. “I got rid of the faeries, and I even stole something. Isn’t that criminal mastermind enough for you?”
“You haven’t stolen anything yet, and it actually looks as though you were planning to leave without the gems.”
“I am leaving without these gems. But I’m going to go get the other gems, because while I was scrapping with Scotty and the Fae Friends, I lifted his wallet.” I held up the brown leather bifold, and took out a driver’s license. “With this, we can go to his place and help ourselves to everything else these three have stolen, while leaving no evidence or witnesses behind here.”
“Except for the store’s security tape,” the smug vampire pointed to the cameras in the ceiling.
“Which I have also covered,” I said, stepping behind the counter and ripping loose a small hard drive from a cluster of wires. I started for the door, but stopped when I noticed Paulson wasn’t following me.
“Now what?” I asked.
“You still should have killed them. You’re never going to assert your dominance over the lesser species if you keep coddling them like this.”
“See, Paulson, that’s the basic difference in our—I don’t know what you want to call it, I guess management styles is as good a term as anything. I’m not looking for fear; I’m looking for cooperation. I want to work with people who want to work with me. I don’t want people to do stuff for me because they’re afraid of me. I’ll take fear if it’s all I can get, but I’d really rather have respect.”
“An interesting concept,” Paulson mused. “I think it’s fundamentally stupid, but interesting.”
“Then I guess I’ll take interesting for now.”
Chapter 17
“SO WILLIAM, WHO are the cleaners?” I asked the next night a little after sunset. With no casework demanding my attention, Abby, William, and I were clustered around my desk atop 1 Vampire Plaza, as I’d taken to calling my office building. William was explaining more of the details of Tiram’s, now my, business ventures, both above and below board. Paulson was sitting on a sofa, tapping away at his iPad. One of these days I wanted to get a crack at that thing just to see what he was doing when he pretended to be taking notes. My money was on Angry Birds.
“There are actually several groups we use, depending on the type and location of the problem to be eliminated, but they all work for one man.”
“A human?” I leaned back in my chair with an eyebrow raised. There were a lot of humans that were thralls, or plants inside organizations, like McDaniel and Nester, but very few chose this life and embraced it. My curiosity was definitely spiked.
“Yes, sir. He is a gentleman of middling years, in his forties I believe, and he has ties throughout the supernatural community. He has always been known as a disposal specialist, but over the years his focus shifted from disposing of living problems to cleaning up the debris of others in his former line of work.”
“So he was an assassin?” Abby asked.
“Oh, yes,” William said. “One of the finest I’ve ever seen, human or otherwise. He could track better than a werewolf and had reflexes nearly fast enough to get the drop on one of us. Mr. Tiram even sent him to dispatch a pack of unruly vampires once. He took out five vampires on his own, and the only injury he incurred was a bloody nose.”
“After more than a decade of serving Mr. Tiram and others as the most lethal human we had ever met, he simply retired. He stopped accepting assignments, bought a fleet of four white panel vans, hired a crew with an eye for detail and an almost religious devotion to secrecy, and opened up Cleaners, Inc. He contacted a few former business associates for bookings, and quickly became the only game in town for evidence erasure.”
“And there’s never been a time when he tried to use some of this evidence for blackmail or anything else underhanded?” Abby asked.
“Not even a whisper of such a thing,” William replied.
“You said he has several crews?” I asked.
“Yes. He has humans for the more mundane tasks, and various supernatural beings for the more elaborate disposals. His team of ghouls is second to none, I believe.”
“What does he use the ghouls for?” I asked before considering the most important question when dealing with monsters, which is always “Do you really want to know?” I didn’t.
“Ghouls eat flesh, and all types, so they dispose of the bodies. Because they can consume all the viscera and bone matter as well, they are highly sought after.”
“Of course they are,” I replied, very sorry I asked. I looked up at Abby, who usually has a much stronger stomach. Even she looked a little green.
We turned back to the expense reports and other financial paperwork, but it was all gibberish to me. I was about to sweep it all onto the floor in a grand gesture when the elevators dinged open. A big guy in jeans and a black T-shirt barreled off the elevator with my lobby security guard in tow.
“Where’s this new so-called Master?” the new arrival bellowed, shrugging off my human security guard like he was a gnat.
“William, look into some species of were or vampire security guards for the night shift,” I said, standing up from the table and walking over to meet my grumpy visitor. He looked like a gym rat, only without the oil and body waxing. This was a hairy dude, with muscles on top of his muscles and a full beard. His mane of shaggy brown hair, hairy arms, and powerful build all combined with his yellowish eyes screamed “werewolf,” and that was before the slight scent of wet dog hit my super-sensitive nose.
“Jimmy Black, Master Vampire,” I said, holding out my hand. “What can I do for you?” The werewolf looked startled, like he didn’t expect to be treated so politely, or like he didn’t expect the Master Vampire to be a skinny dude who looked to be in his mid-twenties with a pointy nose, spiky hair that refused to be tamed, and a Saga T-shirt.
He stopped cold, stared at me for a second, then shook my hand. “I’m Devon Stone.” Jeez, even his name sounded like it had muscles. “I’m the Alpha of the Charlotte Pack, and we’re tired of paying tribute.”
“Yeah, well, I’m tired of only seeing a sunrise on cable and never having another bite of filet mignon, but we all have our crosses to bear,” I said.
“I don’t think you get it,” he said, his voice a low rumble in his throat. “We’re done paying tribute. I just came over here to give you the courtesy of telling you, instead of mailing your minion’s head back in a box when you send him to collect at the end of the month.” He turned as if to go, but I was in front of him again before he could blink.
“Devon,” I said, smiling, trying to keep things light. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, if anything. Maybe you just heard there was a new Master, and decided to push your boundaries a little, kinda like a toddler exploring his environment. Maybe you heard that I’m a lot younger than Tiram, and people don’t really understand how I took him out. Maybe you heard that I don’t like to kill people, so you thought you could just come in here, into my house, and make demands.” By this time I was very close to the wolf, pushing all his personal-space buttons.
“But let me make one thing clear,” I poked him in the chest with my forefinger. “I will not”—poke—“be played with”—poke—“in my house”—poke. “So if you want to beard the lion in his den, then you have picked the wrong lion. You will pay tribute, following to the letter your agreement with Tiram, or you will no longer be the Alpha of your pack.”
“You can’t replace me, jackass. That’s not how were society works.”
“I’m pretty sure if I kill every werewolf within fifty miles of here, the one I leave breathing will be Alpha. That pretty much sum it up?”
I didn’t see his fist. I didn’t ha
ve to. I saw his eyes squint a little and saw his right shoulder twitch. That’s all I needed to throw my left wrist up to block, and then it was on. I slammed my forehead into his nose, determined to begin a fight with someone else having the broken nose for a change. Then I grabbed his wrist and spun it back behind his back in a hammerlock, releasing with my left arm to wrap that around his neck for a choke.
He shifted his weight and dropped to one knee, then stood up quickly, dumping me over his shoulder onto my back. I still had hold of his arm, so that kept him close, and I kicked up at him, grazing his still-painful nose, and landed a solid kick on one shoulder. He yanked free and backed away to get some separation, and I rolled to my feet.
“Back down now and nothing changes,” I said. “We shake hands and part amicably. Keep the fight clean, and when I beat your ass I only take another five percent of your gross. Try anything shady, and I’ll beat you almost to death, wax your whole body, and send you back to your pack butt-naked furless, with fifty percent of your take going into my pockets. What’s it going to be?”
“I vote Option D, I rip your head off, shit down your throat, and become Master of the City my damn self.”
“Like the man says, you want some, come get some.” I extended both middle fingers in the universal symbol of respect and friendship, and he lowered his head in a charge. My whole survival hinged on pissing him off so bad he couldn’t see straight, because if he got his hands on me, I was screwed. Werewolves are strong, stronger than vampires even in their human form. So speed and a smart mouth were my keys to living through this fight.
The furious wolf ran at me, blinded by rage, so half my plan was working out beautifully. I spun to the left, planning to drop a couple of punches to his kidneys, but his kidneys weren’t where they were supposed to be. He stopped on a dime and turned, nailing me with a right cross that spun me almost completely around and left me trying to focus my eyes.
The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 6): Man in Black Page 12
