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

by John G. Hartness

  “No deader than I was when I left,” I confirmed.

  “Are there any Bloods left?” she asked.

  “Three or four, at last count. Their new leader is Jacob. There’s one enormous vampire named Stuart, or Grizzly, depending on whether he likes you or not. And another little dude whose name I don’t remember. But he seems to be really, really high, so I think he’s just going to do what Jacob tells him.”

  “And this Jacob fellow seems reliable?” William asked. He had his laptop out, and I could only assume that he was updating some type of database of my known associates and criminal cohorts.

  “As reliable as anyone who looks to Danny Trejo as a fashion icon can be,” I said. “Jacob seems steady, and I couldn’t smell any alcohol or drugs on him, so I took that as a good sign.”

  “And Owen? I assume you killed him?” William asked.

  “No, actually. I left him in the care of two of his goons on the way to the hospital. I might have ripped off his finger when I snatched a shotgun out of his hands, but I didn’t kill him.”

  “Do you think he’s going to be a problem?” Abby asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “He’s just lost the only person he cared about in the world, and he’s come to realize that he’s not the top of the food chain, either literally or metaphorically. So I would expect him to fall in line. I don’t expect him to like it, but I don’t expect him to cause any problems.”

  “As long as he doesn’t sense any weakness, ever,” William said. “I have notes on him from Master Tiram’s files, and they all say that he will honor his agreements with equals, but will betray an underling or weaker associate in an eyeblink. As long as he considers us equals or threats, we should be safe to leave him alive. His enterprises and tributes were a solid revenue stream for Master Tiram. I see no reason why that relationship can’t continue.”

  “And all that assumes he manages to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. So there we go. It’s got the William stamp of approval, so it must be good.” I gave the little vampire a smile so he understood that I was just messing with him, then I stood up. “Now, if you two will excuse me, I’m beat. It’s been the long day to beat the shit out of long days, and I’m going to go take a quick shower and then become horizontal for a few hours.”

  “Just try not to fall asleep in the shower again. That was awkward,” Abby said. I laughed as I climbed the stairs to the third floor, with its communal bathroom and our bedrooms. There were a lot of benefits to turning an old frat house into a crime-fighting vampire lair, but privacy wasn’t really on the list. I got clean and collapsed into my bed, hoping to wake up in a world with no gigantic problems for me to deal with.

  Yeah. #fail.

  Chapter 28

  THERE’S A LOT TO be said for being a vampire. There’s the enhanced strength, superhuman speed, senses that would put Wolverine to shame, looking twenty-two forever, never gaining weight—there’s a lot of good things, honestly. The whole aversion to sunlight thing doesn’t even come up that often, but when it does, it’s a really big deal.

  For example, I knew it was still daylight out when Lieutenant McDaniel woke me up. I can sense the day, like a huge glowing ball of “kill me” hanging in the sky. I suppose it’s a vampire’s natural resistance to flash-frying, but every vamp I’ve ever known can sense the sun.

  I could also sense the lieutenant’s deodorant, shaving cream, hair product, and toothpaste as he hung over me. I lay still, feigning sleep in the vain hopes that he would go away. When he just stood there waiting, I finally opened one eye and spoke.

  “There had better be a very good reason you’re in my bedroom, Lieutenant. For one thing, no matter what you’ve heard, I’m not that kind of guy. For another, I might be the kind of vampire who really values his privacy. Both of those are reasons for you to be anywhere other than right here, right now.”

  “It’s not like I had a choice, Black. We need you,” the lieutenant said, leaning on my doorjamb.

  I stood up, pushed past him, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I took care of the most pressing matters there, then stumbled back to my room.

  “What time is it?” I asked McDaniel.

  “Ten a.m.,” he replied.

  “Good God, man, don’t you have any sense of time?” I asked.

  “That’s what I asked him, when he showed up on our doorstep an hour ago. I tried to keep him away until noon, but I couldn’t quite manage it,” William said as he shoved his way through the door beside McDaniel.

  “Does my privacy mean nothing to you people?” I asked, sitting on my bed in my boxers.

  “No,” they replied in unison.

  McDaniel started, “You know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. I don’t like you enough to be in your presence unless I really need you, and there’s very little I hate more than making these calls to my supernatural so-called allies.”

  “I don’t know whether to take that personally or to just keep it professional and tell you to kiss my ass,” I said, digging around the floor for a pair of jeans.

  “Here, sir,” William said, pointing at my dresser. “Jeans are in the second drawer from the bottom. T-shirts are the top three drawers. Underwear and socks in the bottom.”

  “You organized my drawers?” I asked him.

  “It’s part of my job as your assistant to make sure you can find things. Like clean underpants,” William replied.

  “Fair enough. All right, everybody out,” I declared. “I’ll meet you downstairs in fifteen minutes. I will talk to you, but I am not dealing with you”—I pointed at McDaniel—“until I have showered, acquired pants, and had at least a hint of caffeine added to my body chemistry.” They didn’t move. “OUT!” I shouted, and they snapped into motion.

  I made it down to our basement den/war room in ten minutes, with clean pants, a clean Avett Brothers T-shirt that I didn’t remember buying, and matching socks on. I don’t remember the last time my socks matched. This whole assistant thing was something I could get used to.

  I sat on one of the couches in the basement and noticed a fresh bag of blood and a can of Mountain Dew sitting on a side table.

  “Is this for me?” I asked.

  “William set it out, then went upstairs, saying something about bacon. I’m sure as hell not drinking either of those for breakfast, so it must be all you.” McDaniel said. It made sense. William knew my breakfast preferences as well as I did by this point, and he even put a coaster under the Mountain Dew. Little bastard was going to civilize me if it killed him again. I drained the bag of blood, then washed it down with half the can of soda. As the sugar and platelets hit my system and drove the last vestiges of sleep from my brain, I turned my attention to McDaniel.

  “What’s the deal, Lieutenant? How bad is it?”

  “It’s pretty damn bad, Jimmy. Last night there was a serious spike in supernatural activity all over town. An underage brothel was torn apart by something, maybe a vampire, maybe a werewolf, I don’t know. But the level of ferocity there was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  I looked around, but Abby was nowhere to be seen. I figured she was upstairs sleeping off her rampage. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” McDaniel asked. “I said—”

  I held up a hand. “Was anyone hurt who didn’t deserve to have their sex organs shoved up their ass?”

  McDaniel’s face went thoughtful, and he pulled a small tablet out of his coat pocket. “No. All the dead or wounded were real nasty bastards, the type of people that nobody’s going to shed a tear about.” He looked up at me. “But that’s not the point. The point is that we don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Until we do,” I said.

  “Did we?” McDaniel asked. “Did you, I mean?”

  I looked across my living room at the police lieutenant and took a moment before I spoke. “Do you really want to know, Lieutenant?”

  “What do you mean, Black? Of course I—”

&nb
sp; I cut him off. “Do you really want to know, Lieutenant? Take a second to think before you answer, because this is your Laurence Fishburne in a trench coat holding a red pill and a blue pill moment. If you ask me that question again, I’ll answer it. And you’ll be all in. If we go any further down this road, we can’t stay frenemies, we’re going to be allies. Real ones. We might not ever be friends, but if I start telling you to your face about the ugly things that I have to do as Master of the City, it’s going to mean that we’re in this together. I’m not going to lay a whammy on you like Tiram did; that’s not my style. I’m just going to tell you what’s going on in the world, and a lot of it is stuff that your mundane jails and guns can’t deal with, and you’ll just have to deal with that. So I ask you one more time, Lieutenant. Do you want to see behind the curtain? Do you want to know if we took out that brothel last night?”

  McDaniel looked at me for a moment, and I could almost see the adjustment of his opinion of me in his eyes. After a long silence, he looked me in the eye and asked, “Did you destroy that brothel last night?”

  “Not me personally, but yes, the existence of that place was brought to my attention, and I sanctioned the mission to close it down with extreme prejudice,” I replied.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you guilty of understatement, Black,” the policeman said.

  “I’m learning new skills to go with my new job, Lieutenant. Learning new things every single day.”

  “We also got word of a loud fracas at the Stanleyville Bloods’ clubhouse, over on Pecan.” McDaniel read from his tablet.

  “Won’t happen again. There might be a little extra traffic in and out of there the next few days, but they’ve just got a little renovating to do. Nothing to be concerned with.”

  “And Marcus Owen showed up at the Presbyterian Hospital emergency room missing a trigger finger,” McDaniel looked at me.

  I gave him my best blank stare. I don’t do “innocent” very well, but I’ve got “ignorant” down cold. “I hear he used that trigger finger a lot, Lieutenant. Maybe it just wore down after all these years. I assume he’s in custody?”

  “He is,” McDaniel confirmed. “Will I have any trouble keeping him there?”

  “I don’t expect you will,” I said. “I have it on good authority that his war with the Stanleyville Bloods is over. The remaining three Bloods have no beef with Owen.”

  “Three?” McDaniel’s eyes went wide. “There were over a dozen reported members and hangers-on of that club at our last count.”

  “Last night was a real bad night for the Bloods,” I said, holding McDaniel with a steady gaze. Twenty questions flashed across his face in a matter of seconds, and I just sat there, looking at him over the rim of my Mountain Dew can.

  “Well, that answers several of my issues, but not all,” McDaniel turned back to his tablet, and I looked around for William or Abby. We’d covered everything I knew about, so if McDaniel had more supernatural badness to share, it wasn’t mine. And that was a problem.

  Just as McDaniel opened his mouth to speak, I heard something outside. I held up a finger for McDaniel to keep quiet, and sprinted to the coat closet, where I grabbed a handy twelve-gauge and then ran back to give myself a clear line on the bottom of the stairs. McDaniel’s eyes went huge as he got a glimpse of my new speed, and I heard him draw a breath to ask a question, but I waved him silent.

  All my attention was focused on the outside, where our driveway alarm had just gone off. I listened as a car pulled into our gravel parking lot, then a pair of heavy footsteps moved across the front yard and up the steps to the porch. Our unannounced guest was moving fast, but not in a tremendous hurry.

  I recognized the tread and put the safety back on the shotgun. I leaned the twelve-gauge against the wall and turned back to the stairs as Detective Michael Nester came down into the room. He looked a lot like he’d slept in his car, with a day’s growth of dark black beard over his chiseled jaw, and his once-neat sweater and jeans were rumpled and covered in crumbs and other evidence of a stakeout.

  “Jimmy, you down here?” Nester called as he came down.

  “Yeah, come on in, Nester,” I answered, walking back to my seat on the couch. “Now, Lieutenant, where were we?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, Jimmy,” Nester said with a nod to each of us. “But I think you’re going to want to hear this.”

  I remembered where I’d sent Nester. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Lilith and the traffic at the Angel?” I asked.

  “That’s why I’m here, boss,” Nester said, then looked at McDaniel. “I mean, um . . .”

  “It’s okay, Nester,” McDaniel said. “I’m still your boss, but as long as you’re on assignment to Mr. Black here, he’s your boss, too. Don’t worry about hurt feelings, son, just tell us what’s so damned important that you abandoned your post in the middle of a stakeout.”

  Nester blushed, but squared his shoulders. “I had to, sirs, or they would have made me.”

  “They?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Nester replied. “If the werewolves didn’t catch my scent, some of those witches would have spotted me sure as the world. And I’m not even sure what all those monsters that went in right before sunrise were, but when the parking lot started filling up around me, every car loaded down with gargoyles, witches, trolls, ogres, or faeries, I decided it was time to get out while I still could and get word back to you that something big is going on at the Angel.”

  “Sounds like Lilith is calling in every supernatural creature or magic-user in the area,” I said.

  “And more than a few from outside,” Nester said. He pulled out his phone. “I’ve got photos of license plates from as far away as Pennsylvania.”

  “Any idea what she’s planning?” McDaniel asked me.

  “I have no clue, but everything points to her being the brains behind every crappy thing that’s happened since I took over as Master. The snake-men, the demon summoning, even the Bloods picking a fight with Owen. Every one of the boss bad guys I’ve killed has been possessed by a sluagh, an evil spirit. And every sluagh I’ve ever encountered ties back to Lilith. I think a lot of these attacks were designed to make me look bad with the Vampire Council.”

  “Thus provoking a fight with Paulson,” McDaniel agreed.

  “And probably getting me killed,” I added.

  McDaniel and Nester studiously didn’t look me in the eye. “I didn’t know if I could take him, either. But I’m the Master of the City, and that comes with certain perks and privileges. I might be a young vampire anywhere else, but my home-field advantage is pretty serious, which Paulson learned at his peril.”

  “But what’s her endgame?” A sleepy voice came from the stairs, and all conversation halted as Abby clumped into the room, walking over to the fridge in a ratty tank top and a pair of cutoff sweatpants that were smaller than some bikinis I’d seen. McDaniel, Nester, and I all watched as the young vampire bent over and grabbed a bag of blood from the minifridge, then slowly reached behind herself to extend her middle finger in our general direction.

  “Grow up, assholes,” she grumbled and made her way into the laundry room. A couple minutes later she walked back out in a pair of jeans and a faded Star Wars T-shirt. She curled up on the couch and tucked her bare feet under her, looking like nothing more than a gorgeous twenty-something college coed, except for the bag of blood she was sucking dry.

  “You guys make enough noise to wake the dead,” she grumbled. “So what’s the drama?”

  “Lilith has been raising an army of nasty critters, and we can’t figure out why,” I said. “And obviously we did wake the dead, because here you are,” I gave her my brightest smile and was rewarded with another view of her middle finger.

  “So ladylike,” I said.

  “Bite me,” Abby replied.

  “Done and done,” I said. “Now, any ideas why Lilith is gathering her troops?”

  Abby closed her eyes in thought, then ope
ned them wide. “What’s the date?”

  “The twenty-second,” McDaniel replied. “Why?”

  “Shit! It’s tonight.” Abby said.

  “What’s tonight?” I asked.

  “The winter solstice. It’s one of the old holy days from way back, like from when Lilith was young. If she’s planning on anything big, it’ll go down tonight.” Abby said.

  So there’s an apocalypse-level number of bad guys descending on my city on one of the most magical nights of the year, making it a prime time for Lilith to try to destroy the world. And arrayed against an army of witches, weres, and whatever with the fate of the known universe in the balance? Three vampires, two human cops, and any friends I might still have in this city.

  Yup, my life is nothing but a string of grand friggin’ adventures.

  Chapter 29

  “WELL, NOW WE’VE got the when covered, but not the what or the where,” I said.

  “I can help with the where,” William said from the stairs. Unlike the rest of us, who generally looked like five miles of bad road, William bore no resemblance to an undead monster operating on less than four hours of sleep. He wore a dress shirt and khakis with a crease I’m sure I could shave with, if I still grew facial hair, and honest-to-God penny loafers, with pennies in them. I could see the copper shine from five yards away. His hair was combed, his clothes were perfect, and he generally looked like he was ready to report for work in an executive office. I kinda wanted to punch him a little, until I remembered that he was the one who left the soda and blood out for me, and that made up for him looking more presentable than me.

  “Hit it, oh technical whiz kid and general right-hand man,” I said with a wave to the sixty-inch LCD screen hanging on the wall. I barely knew how to play movies and Xbox on the thing, but Abby and William could interface everything from the big tabletop computer to their cell phones and even wristwatches with the thing. I gave up wearing watches after we started Black Knight Investigations. I had a bad habit of putting my fist through things that did damage to watches, like walls, cars, ogres, and the like.