There was a commotion around the table, but Chanchira raised a hand, and the others fell silent. I was definitely seeing a demonstration of who had the power on the Council.
Chanchira went on, “I, state your name—”
I decided to play along with their little ceremony, no matter how little they really wanted me to be a part of it. “I, James Black.”
“Do solemnly swear to uphold the ideals of the Vampire Council and defend the city of Charlotte and its surrounding environs—”
Environs? Who the hell talks like this? “Do solemnly swear to uphold the ideals of the Vampire Council and defend the city of Charlotte and its surrounding environs—”
“From threats both mundane and supernatural in origin.”
“From threats both mundane and supernatural in origin.”
“I swear on my blood.”
“I swear on my blood.”
The rest of the vampires around the table, in unison, said, “On my blood.” It was actually a little cool, if you could put it behind you that a couple hours ago these people all wanted me dead. I felt a little tingle, like something magical had changed within me, but there were so many bones knitting and ligaments regrowing that it could have been anything.
I turned my attention back to the screen, where Chanchira was still talking. “There shall be no further evaluation of your abilities or leadership required, and you are now sworn Guardian and Master of the City, with all the privileges and responsibilities that entails. Welcome to your new life, Master Black.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I hope that we have very little reason to interact in the future.” I said with a heartfelt sigh.
“Why is that, Mr. Black? I would think, having successfully tweaked the noses of the most powerful vampires in the world, you would be eager to attempt the feat again.”
“No, ma’am. I was taught to fight for what’s mine and what’s right, but honestly, you scare the shit out of me.” Chanchira laughed, and I swear I heard someone in the background mutter, “He’s not as stupid as he seems.”
Following the great comedians’ advice to always leave them laughing, I logged off and popped another bag of blood. I felt like I could almost stand, but it was going to take more than simply being ambulatory to get me through the night. I waved Abby and William over. They sat on the couch opposite me, and I set the tray bearing Paulson’s head on the floor.
“Okay, that’s done. Now we have to stop a citywide crime wave, find Marcus Owen and Gator, kill at least one of them to stop an all-out gang war, and figure out who’s been setting demons, vampires, and giant snake-people loose on my city. No pressure.”
Chapter 22
“WELL, I CAN HELP with some of that,” Abby said, opening up her tablet computer and tapping the screen. A map of the city flashed up on the big TV on the wall, with a bunch of black, red, and green dots scattered around the display.
“What are all the dots?” I asked.
“These are various businesses that Marcus Owen is an owner of, part owner of, or holds at least a controlling interest in around Charlotte.”
“Legal or illegal?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Both. The green dots are the completely legit businesses, the black dots are the illegal but largely harmless endeavors like an underground casino, a couple of chop shops, and several pawn shops that are really just fronts for burglary rings.”
“Those are harmless?” William asked, one eyebrow climbing toward his hairline. I wondered for a second what it revealed about me that I immediately understood how those businesses could be considered harmless.
“I thought you worked for a crime lord, Will?” I asked, giving the little man a grin.
“Mr. Tiram never expressed any concern or interest in the level of harm his endeavors may have caused, particularly to humans. It was simply beneath his notice.”
“Well, I notice,” Abby said. “And I noticed that the businesses marked in red are the most directly harmful or dangerous operations. Drug houses, whorehouses, one counterfeiting center, a couple of meth labs in this trailer park—because clichés have to come from somewhere—and this place here”—she highlighted a red dot and made it flash—“which I will be personally visiting and closing down myself.”
“What’s that place?” I asked. Abby had a look on her face that I’d never seen before. It was equal parts revulsion, anger, and something else. Fear, maybe?
“It’s a sex club. People go there and pay for the privilege of having sex with someone new and exotic.”
“That sounds pretty nasty, but I don’t know who that really hurts. . . . What’s the rest of it?” I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but this time it was obvious that there was more to the story.
“Their idea of new and exotic starts around age twelve and tops out at sixteen. By then the girl is considered used up, so they ship her off to some foreign hellhole where she’ll live out the rest of her life a whore.” Abby was shaking, she was so pissed.
“What’s the deal, Abs?” I asked. “This is terrible, yes. God-awful, even. The kind of thing you ask God ‘What kind of asshole are you?’ for letting crap like this happen in the world, but your reaction says it’s more than that.”
“Yeah, it’s more than that,” she said, and a single red tear rolled down the side of her face.
William leaned forward and patted her on the back, his hand making gentle circles between her shoulder blades. She leaned in to the small man’s shoulder for a moment, then she took a deep breath and sat up.
“This is the part where I’m supposed to break down and tell you how my football player boyfriend raped me in the back of his dad’s Mercedes after the prom, right? Or how my best friend got roofied and raped at a frat party and committed suicide because of it? Or how my creepy uncle Charlie liked to touch me ‘down there’ when I was little and he’d come over for Sunday dinner?” Abby stood up, stepped in front of my couch, and looked down at me.
“Well, sorry to disappoint. I gave it up my freshman year of college, and I was a little drunk, and he was a little drunk, and it was awkward and sweet and even kinda hot. And we dated for about three months more and even managed to get kinda good at it before we broke up.”
“And yeah, I know girls who were raped, and have friends that were abused, but this isn’t about that. I’m not pissed off about this playpen for perverts operating in my city because of something terrible that happened to me. I’m pissed off about it because every two minutes in this country, somebody is sexually assaulted. I’m pissed off because one in four women in college in the U.S. are sexually assaulted at some point. I’m pissed off because only two percent of rapists ever spend a single day in jail, and I’m pissed off about it because goddammit somebody should be, and you’re obviously not.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but she held up a hand. “No. You don’t get to speak right now. You get to sit there and listen, and maybe for just one damn minute, think. We’ve all been fighting your battles with you ever since we got here. Me, Greg, Sabrina, Nester, and now Will here. But we’ve got fights that are important to us, too. And this is mine. Not because I’m a victim. Not because some son of a bitch put his hands on me, but because somebody needs to stand up to this shit and say ‘no more.’ And I’m strong enough, and fast enough, and well-armed enough to do it.”
She wiped her eyes and cleared her throat.
“So that’s why I’m going to kill every son of a bitch in that club. You got any problem with that?” Abby looked at me with a fire in her eyes, and I held up both hands in supplication.
“Not a one. Just make sure you call Social Services so they can get the children out of there and into therapy as soon as possible. And Abby?”
“Yeah?” She looked at me like she didn’t know if she could trust what I was going to say next.
I chose my words carefully, but finally settled on “I’d give you the slow clap thing, but I’m a little afraid of you right now.”
S
he shot my lopsided grin right back at me. “Just imagine what the assholes in that club are going to feel like.” I didn’t say a word as she went to the closet and pulled out a twelve-gauge Mossberg with a pistol grip, a pair of Glock 9mm pistols, and a bandolier of shotgun shells. William and I just watched as she walked up the stairs, then sat in silence as we heard the front door slam and seconds later listened to Abby’s Escalade throw gravel on her way out of the driveway.
I looked at William, then gestured to the screen. “Anybody up there you feel a particular need to kill?”
“No, sir, I’m good. I was actually hoping that my part in the manhunt would be to stay here and direct the operations from afar, like a dispatcher of sorts.” He gave me a sickly little smile, the kind somebody gives you when they really hope you don’t make them do something unpleasant.
“I’m good with that, pal. You don’t need to hold a gun to be useful,” I said, watching the relief wash over his face like a wave.
I stood up and walked to the stairs, finally feeling something like myself again after drinking nearly a whole human’s worth of blood. I made a mental note to contact Milandra, the Faerie Queen, and see about getting a donor to ship me a bag or two of fae. That stuff was potent, and if this Master of the City thing kept going this way, I might need a pint or two of the good stuff tucked away for a rainy day.
I walked over to the coat closet by the stairs and geared up. I clipped a holster onto my belt for my Glock, then looked at Excalibur leaning by the door. I touched the hilt of the sword, then decided against taking a sword to what was almost certainly going to be a gunfight. I strapped a pair of thin silver stakes to each forearm, made sure I had three spare magazines in my back pockets for the pistol, and slipped on a long black duster. I tucked a couple of silver-bladed knives into the tops of my boots, slid a couple blood bags into the pockets of my duster, and started up the steps.
“Where are you heading, sir?” William asked from his command center.
“I’m going where I always go when I don’t have any idea what to do—I’m going to church.”
Chapter 23
THE CEMETERY behind Mike’s church was all too familiar. Over there was the crypt where I hid all day after getting my ass beat by a demon possessing the body of an elementary-school girl. Over there was the headstone I’d broken with my head when Greg and I fought over whether or not to turn our best friend into a vampire. Over there was . . . well, over there was where I was headed.
There was a bottle of Macallan 18 nestled in the grass beside Mike’s headstone. Good choice, if I do say so myself. I left it there for an occasion just like this one. I sat down at the head of the grave and leaned back against the stone.
“Well, old buddy, I’ve screwed the pooch this time,” I said. “Greg’s gone—I haven’t seen him in more than a week. Sabrina won’t speak to me. I just secured my position as Master of the City by ripping a guy’s kneecap off and then decapitating him. There’s a gang war about to break out all over the city, and someone’s been summoning monsters all over town to prove that I can’t handle the job. Or maybe just to kill people. That’s always an option. Oh yeah, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Mike didn’t say anything. I didn’t expect him to. Even though I was a dead guy talking to a dead guy, I figured it would be a pretty one-sided conversation. Mike was pretty clear about the fact that when he was gone, he was staying gone and leaving us to our own problems down here while he investigated exactly what went into ambrosia and how scotch tasted in Heaven. I opened the bottle sitting on the ground beside me and took a long drink.
“I don’t know how you drank that shit, pal,” I said as the brown liquid made its way down my esophagus. “It tastes like peat moss.”
No justification from Mike. I figured he knew it tasted like peat moss; he just enjoyed peat moss.
“It looks like I’m going to have to kill a lot more people before this crap’s over. So if you could put in a good word with me Upstairs, I’d appreciate it. I’m sure most of the people I kill will just be total psychos and evil bastards, but I remember how you always told me every life was precious, even the ones people chose to live poorly . . .” I couldn’t say anything else. I rested my head against his tombstone and let the tears come. I sat there, in the cold wet grass of my friend’s grave, and let the tears roll down my face.
Memories played across my eyelids as I sat there. Mike, Greg, and me all walking home to Mike’s house after getting cut from the Little League baseball team, where Mike’s mom waited with lemonade and cookies. Our getting cut was a foregone conclusion—it happened three years in a row before we discovered Nintendo and hardly ever set foot outside again, but the cookies helped take the sting out of it.
Flash forward a few years to me standing along the bleachers at a school dance, Mike on one side and Greg on the other. Me and Mike played our parts, standing along the wall like good little geeks. Greg, his enthusiasm for ’80s hair metal unbridled, stood next to us throwing the goat and banging his head like Dee Snider. The only thing saving him from a swirly from the eighth graders was the fact that all three of us were together, and they were afraid we’d fight back. Eventually they realized that if we hadn’t thrown a punch in five years, we probably weren’t going to start. Then they beat the hell out of us.
The movie in my head jumped forward another five or six years to our merry trio wandering Myrtle Beach in the middle of night, three brand-new high-school diplomas and one handle of rum between us. We staggered along the sand for hours, playing in the water and telling lies about how cool we were going to be in college and all the chicks we were going to get. We walked that sandy strip all night, finally watching the sun come up from the end of a pier, with an empty liquor bottle full of dreams sitting on the sun-bleached wood beside us.
Memories crowded other images to the front, pushed whole years aside as I sat there reliving every moment I had of Mike, most of them involving Greg, including our last moments together, when Greg and I beat the hell out of each other in this very cemetery while Mike lay dying inside the church. I let the tears roll and drank most of the scotch as the movie of my life played across my memory, and after an hour or more of sitting alone, I finally spoke again.
“You just going to watch, or you gonna come down here and drink?” I asked.
“I didn’t know if you heard me,” Greg Knightwood’s voice came from behind me and above.
“I can hear a mouse fart a block away,” I said. “I think I’m gonna hear a three-hundred-pound dead guy creeping around in the middle of the night. Besides, your keys jingle.”
“Shit,” Greg said.
“Yep,” I agreed. “Want a drink?” I held up the bottle.
“Nah, I brought my own,” he said, sitting next to me with our backs against the stone. He turned up his own bottle and drained a quarter of it in one long pull.
“How you been?” I asked.
“I’m all right.”
“Where you staying?”
“Trey over at the comic shop has a spare room. He’s been letting me crash there.”
“Did you have to tell him . . .”
“Nah, he doesn’t know. I just told him that I’ve got this weird light allergy and I can’t be exposed to any UV rays or my skin blisters.”
I smiled. “Well, I suppose you could call it an allergy . . .”
Greg shared my grin. “And my skin probably does blister . . .”
“Yeah, right before you burst into flames,” I finished, and we clinked bottles together. Then we sat in silence for another minute or two.
Finally Greg spoke, not looking at me. “You were right, you know.”
“Not often, so you might have to give me a clue,” I replied.
“About Mike. Turning him would have been the worst thing I could have done to him.”
“Even worse than throwing me through a granite tombstone?” I asked.
“You got over it,” he said.
&nb
sp; “Barely,” I said with a smile. “But yeah, he wouldn’t have.”
“Gotten over being turned?” Greg asked. I nodded. “Yeah, he never would have forgiven me.”
I let the silence build for a long moment before I finally asked, “So, we cool?”
I knew the answer was “no” when he didn’t answer right away.
“Cooler,” he said. “I still don’t like the whole Master of the City thing.”
“I don’t blame you. Hell, I don’t like it much either, you know? I had to rip a dude’s kneecap off today.”
“That’s nasty. Why?”
“There’s this whole Vampire Council thing, and they sent this assclown over here—he was British—to watch me work and evaluate my fitness to be Master.”
“And I take it there was some disagreement about your fitness?”
“Yeah, I saw myself as Master, and he saw himself the same way. So I ripped his kneecap off, then decapitated him. Then I got on a video call with the rest of the High Council of Bloodsucking Arseholes and told them where they could shove their evaluator.”
“How did that go over?”
“You’da thought I suggested they drink Clamato juice with their pinkies extended.” I said. “But after a little more persuading, they decided to leave Charlotte alone.”
“Nice,” Greg said.
“So, it’s not like I’m trying to be the Master like Tiram was. I’m just . . .” I trailed off as I thought about it. I’d had this Master of the City gig for less than two weeks, and already I’d beaten a vampire into what I thought was submission because he didn’t do things the way I liked, half killed a werewolf for not paying me my cut of his illicit earnings, and put my fingers into so many illegal pies I couldn’t remember them all. Not to mention basically starting a human/vampire gang war all across my city.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I admitted. “I think I’m trying to do the right thing, but I don’t know, bro. I know it all feels screwed up, and I’ve got nobody to bounce stuff off of.”
The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 6): Man in Black Page 16
