The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 4): Paint it Black

by John G. Hartness

  But the real prize of the house was underneath the standard living space. If you moved the right book on one of the library shelves, the whole bookcase swung out, revealing a staircase. Cliché, I know, but the guy who built the place was traditional. I did have to give him props for building an honest-to-God lair at the bottom of those stairs. One of the first things we did was rig the staircase to stay open all the time. My fault, since I could never remember which book was the right one.

  The lair is a huge room, about half the size of a basketball court, and when we moved in, there was an air hockey table, pool table, a full bar, and a couple of mattresses that I didn’t want to think too much about. We burned the mattresses, moved the pool table into one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, and kept the bar and air hockey table. Vampire air hockey is about ten times faster than the regular game and has at least three times the swearing. Downside is our super-strength means we go through a lot of pucks.

  Greg spent a month outfitting the basement into a command center, adding a tabletop touch-screen computer, several huge LCD displays on the walls, comfy seating, and a killer sound system. I was pretty sure he could launch nuclear missiles from down there, but I was a little afraid to ask about it. And let’s face it, Modern Warfare on a 103-inch LCD display is pretty smokin’. Three months ago I would have just asked him where he got all the money for the toys. But lately Greg was going through a bad patch of hating my guts. I stayed away from anything that might set him off, and I never knew what that was. So, I kept my mouth shut and assumed he found some way to hack ISPs and keep his online poker empire going.

  When I got downstairs, Greg was leaning over the computer table, so I put the beer on it. That never failed to get a reaction, except this time it did. He ignored me completely, just grabbed a bag of blood and drained it without looking up. Sabrina and I shared a look, and she gave me an I-have-no-flippin’-idea shrug.

  “What’s up, bro?” I asked, leaning in to see what he was looking at. On the screen were four pictures. Two I recognized as Teresa Chapin and Kellie Inman, the owners of our jawbones. The others were a decent-looking guy with a slightly dated fashion sense and a brunette hottie who looked about twenty-five.

  “I recognize these two, but who’s the babe with the eyeliner addiction and the dude trapped in the late eighties?”

  “1991,” Greg murmured absently.

  “Huh?” I said. I say that a lot, I know. But my friends are all confusing. Sometimes I think it might even be on purpose.

  “He’s trapped in 1991. That’s Bruce Marvo, Kellie Inman’s boyfriend. He went missing the same time she did. The brunette in the more recent picture is Veronica Moore, Teresa’s co-worker that vanished with her. Given what we now know about Teresa and Kellie, I think we have to assume that Bruce and Veronica are also dead. I’ve been running over their last known activities, trying to find something that sticks out, something that says who took them, but there’s nothing.”

  “Can you define ‘nothing’?” I asked.

  “Nothing. As in nothing out of the ordinary. The reports from the more recent disappearances are more complete, but even with better files to study there’s nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary. Nobody got grabby at work recently. She’s been with the same boyfriend for eight months. They aren’t getting too serious. No trouble with anyone at work—nothing to indicate any connections.” He pulled a chair over and sat down with a sigh. I tossed him another beer, and he absently nodded his thanks at me. This felt almost normal, like maybe my best friend was going to snap out of it sometime soon and stop hating me. And himself.

  “We think this is random? Just two kidnappings twenty years apart? I don’t buy it. And something is definitely screwy with the bones. They smell way too old. I’m no bloodhound, but I know dead things, and these things were dead longer than twenty years, not to mention way longer than just a couple weeks. Both girls go missing—Hey, where’s Abby?” My train of thought jumped the tracks as I realized that I hadn’t seen our newest partner all night.

  Greg shot me a grumpy look. “Hunting. Again.”

  I swear that dude can put more disapproval into two little words than anyone who stands up to pee should be able to convey. Greg did not believe in human hunting and is the next best thing to a vegan vampire. Unless Greg is trapped in another dimension where there are no hospitals or blood banks, he’s not going to drink from a living person.

  This is yet another bone of contention between us. I prefer my blood fresh, but out of respect to Greg’s more delicate sensibilities and a deep-seated desire not to arouse the populace and create vigilantes clamoring to stake me in my sleep, I usually restrain myself. Abby does not. She’s a twenty-two-year-old coed with a body like a centerfold and all the entitlement baggage that came with being pretty and young and aware of what that did to men. When she was turned into a vampire a few months ago, she lost her life and her love of chocolate, but kept the entitlement. I didn’t always think it was a fair trade.

  Abby likes her blood hot and from the tap, and no amount of “discussion” with Greg has managed to change that. Somehow he blames me for her rebellion, like I’m supposed to be anyone’s role model. I own the world’s largest assortment of comic book T-shirts, and I’m pretty sure that tosses me right out of the running for role model. Role model or not, I still worried.

  “Crap. I hope she didn’t go bar hopping downtown again.”

  Greg and I exchanged looks. Ordinary, garden-variety bar fights draw the wrong kind of attention and are bad enough, but bar fights where nobody remembers how they started are worse. Bar fights that spill out into three blocks and spark five cases of spontaneous anemia are downright suspicious. I could tell Greg wasn’t happy before he opened his mouth.

  “Well, maybe if some folks weren’t running off getting hammered at the drop of a hat, she would have better examples in her life.”

  “Seriously? We’re going to have the parenting talk? Now?” My head started to throb at the very idea of having a serious talk about Abby’s behavior, so I downed the rest of my beer and cracked another. That earned me another disapproving look from my portly partner. I indicated Sabrina with a gesture and a stare meant to remind him we had other issues at hand. Didn’t work.

  “We’ve got to have it sometime, and I know you metabolize beer too fast to get drunk, so it might as well be now.”

  “I thought we were trying to solve a couple of murders, not worry about what our roommate, who happens to be a grown woman, is doing with her free time?” I could hear my voice getting loud, and I tried to bring it back under control, with little success.

  Greg stood up, running his hands through his hair in irritation. “It’s about impulse control, Jimmy. She’s got to learn to keep herself under control. And if she can’t learn that here, where is she going to learn it?”

  “If she hadn’t learned impulse control by her senior year of college, how has she not ended up on drugs, with every STD in the book, or flunked out of school long before we ever met her?”

  “That’s different, dude. The rules are different for us. You heard what Tiram said—he thinks none of civilization’s rules apply to us. Abby drank the Kool-Aid. She’s acting the same way. If we don’t get her under control, she’s going to end up like him, or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Yeah, worse. I don’t know how, but worse. I worry, man. And you’re better with her than I am. I get all tongue-tied and can’t get to the point, and then it all gets awkward and . . .” He sat back down and killed his beer. I handed him another.

  I knew the problem. Abby was pretty. Okay, Abby was absolutely smokin’ hot, and Greg never had much luck talking to pretty girls. They always treated him like a fat nerd, which he was, and that just made him more self-conscious. Even after we went vampy he didn’t suddenly turn into Lestat or one of the other fictional vampire studs. He just became a fat nerd with super-strength, speed, enhanced senses, and serious dietary restrictions. Kinda like bein
g lactose intolerant, but to everything. When you’re a guy who likes food, the vamp gig is a bitch.

  “I’ll talk to her, okay? I’ll see if I can get her to chill a little.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You two gonna hug it out now, or what?” Sabrina asked from her chair. “Because I can leave.”

  “Why would you want to do that? Stay. You can be the meat in a nerd sandwich,” I said, holding out my arms to her.

  “Not right now, nerd-boy. You smell like cheap beer, expensive whiskey, and swamp muck. And that’s just to my normal human sniffer. I don’t see how Greg stays in the same room with you.”

  “It’s not easy,” Greg replied. “You should have smelled his room when we were alive. I made it through that, I can make it through anything.”

  Except he hadn’t lived through that, and it was my fault. I spoke up quickly, more to keep myself from heading down that road than anything else. “Yeah, okay. Point taken,” I said. “A shower sounds like a great idea. We’ve got nothing new here, so I’m gonna go get cleaned up. Wanna wash my back?” I asked Sabrina as I headed for the stairs.

  “Maybe next time. But I will go up and catch a few hours’ sleep. McDaniel wants me in his office at eight tomorrow . . . I mean this morning . . . before we talk to the families.” She followed me upstairs and went into the room she had claimed for her own. I ducked into my room, conveniently right across the hall, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed down the hall to the shower. I heard a wolf whistle from the crack in Sabrina’s door and flipped her off as I passed.

  I scrubbed myself all over a few times and finally got most of the smell of the night’s festivities off me. Then I just slid down in the shower and let the hot water run over my face for a while as I sat there. It felt good, like the scalding water was peeling layers off my skin. And for every layer it peeled off, some problem went away. My guilt over turning Greg, my issues with Abby, my relationship—if you could call it that—with Sabrina, these new-old dead women, all of it spiraled down the drain and out to sea as I sat there, bare butt sliding along the porcelain.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, half meditating and half sleeping, but a banging on the door jarred me back to full consciousness. “Jimmy, you still in there?” Sabrina’s voice came through the door.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Just finishing up. Sorry.” I hastily turned off the water, noticing that it had run ice-cold while I was in my daze.

  “Well, hurry up, I gotta pee, and I don’t want to go all the way downstairs.”

  “Gimme just a second.” I dried off as quickly as I could and wrapped the towel back around my waist. Sabrina stood in the hallway in my Xavier University black T-shirt and nothing else that I could see. That shirt looked a whole lot better on her than it ever had on me. I stepped into the hallway. “All yours,” I said.

  “’Bout time.”

  “Hey, that’s my T-shirt.”

  “It was in your dresser, so I guess so. You only keep clean clothes in the dresser, right? I couldn’t tell which stacks and piles on the floor were clean, so I took a chance on the dresser.”

  “Yeah, the stuff in the dresser’s clean. And the stacked stuff on the floor is clean. The piled stuff is dirty. It’s all organized, I swear.”

  “If you say so.” She slid past me and I saw just a hint of red panties as she slammed the door in my face.

  “And I want my T-shirt back! Eventually,” I said as I headed down the hall to my room. I put on a clean pair of boxers and crawled into bed, turning off all the lights as I did.

  We don’t really need to sleep regularly, but it’s preferable. We can go for a couple of days at a stretch if we need to, but eventually we crash no matter how much blood we take in. It had been a pretty hectic night, so I was perfectly content to lie down in my own bed, a nice queen-sized frame the former tenants had left. I just flipped the mattress and changed the sheets when we took it over. I wasn’t in any hurry to replace the comfy pillowtop, which is why I hadn’t run a black light anywhere near the thing. The last residents had been a vampire fraternity, after all.

  I lay there turning the night over in my head, thinking back to moping over my grave, then trying to figure out what to do about Greg, and worrying about Mike, and wondering how to handle Abby and make sure she didn’t get us all staked, and then I shifted over to much more pleasant thoughts of Sabrina in one of my favorite T-shirts and little else. I lied to her—one of the piles was stuff she’d worn that still smelled like her. I hadn’t bothered to wash that stuff. I liked having her scent in the room even if she wasn’t. And thinking like that took me down a whole different road, pondering our relationship and where we were going.

  I mean, why would she want to be with a dorky dead guy who looks a decade or so her junior? And what would I do if we did really turn into something? I was having enough trouble dealing with Mike’s mortality, and close friend or not, I’d never been in love with him. And was I falling in love with Sabrina? I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like for living people, much less corpses. A disarmingly witty corpse, but still no one that you could take home to mother.

  I spent the better part of an hour driving myself crazy thinking until my door opened. I had just enough time to see a curvy female form in the doorway before something black and soft landed on my face. It smelled faintly of lavender and my laundry detergent as I pulled it off my face. “Close your eyes and roll over, fangboy.”

  I did as she asked, and I felt the bed shift as Sabrina slid into bed behind me. She wrapped her arms around me and nuzzled up against my neck. I could feel every inch of her pressed against my back, from the smooth muscles of her thighs to the soft swells of her breasts. I froze for a minute, not really knowing how to react. This was something new for us, but I liked it a lot. She kissed me softly on the side of the neck and whispered, “It’s okay to breathe, I won’t run away.”

  “I don’t have to breathe,” I replied, and felt her stiffen behind me. Sometimes Sabrina forgets the finer points of dating a vampire. Like the whole part about me being dead. I rolled over and took her in my arms, pulling her face to my chest and kissing her forehead. “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “For what?”

  “Reminding me what it feels like to be alive.” I kissed her forehead again and held her as we drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 5

  I DON’T KNOW how long we were asleep, but I was snatched out of a pleasant dream involving a pier at Myrtle Beach that I vaguely remember from my teens by the sound of tires squealing into our driveway. I jumped out of bed, startling Sabrina awake, and I was already out the door before she could have realized I’d moved. I ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time and, at the door, almost bowled right into Greg, who had come up the stairs from the basement almost as fast.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked, jerking open the door to the coat closet and reaching inside for my twelve-gauge.

  Greg didn’t stop as he ran past me into the kitchen. He yanked the dishwasher open and ducked his head inside. I cocked my head to one side as he came back with a pair of 9mm Glock 17s.

  “What?” he asked. “We don’t eat off dishes. We drink blood out of bags and beer from the bottle. Might as well use the thing for a gun rack.”

  I had no time and no argument, so I just took up a position in the hallway facing the door. The sun was up, but I was far enough back that direct rays wouldn’t hit me. All I had to worry about was a little discomfort from the brightness. Greg stationed himself to one side of the door where he’d be out of my field of fire but have a clean line on anything that could survive the double-ought buckshot loaded in my Mossberg. The first round was a beanbag round, just in case. But everything after that was a custom mix of silver and iron shot, designed to cut bad guys, dead or alive, in half at close range. I heard a third pistol cock and looked up to see a long expanse of leg stretching down the stairs. I followed the leg up to where Sabrina had her service weapon, a forty-caliber Smith & We
sson semiautomatic, at the ready.

  Whoever was outside cleared the front porch steps in a single bound and threw open the door, bursting inside with inhuman speed. All we could see was a black-clad form, but it was an instantly recognizable form.

  “Abby!” I yelped. “What the hell are you doing? The sun’s up! Are you friggin’ nuts?” I pushed past our new arrival to slam the door closed and drew the heavy curtain back over the window as Abby Lahey jumped from one foot to the other in the small foyer.

  “OwowowowowowOOOOWWWWW!” Abby yelled, plucking at her clothes like she was burning, which she probably was. She was clad head-to-toe in a clingy black material, like spandex, complete with a tight black ski mask and dark ski goggles. She started shedding clothes like mad, flinging fabric right and left until suddenly there was a gorgeous twenty-something blonde vampiress in our foyer wearing nothing but panties, a bra, and what looked like first-degree burns over the rest of her very curvy body.

  “Shit that hurts!” Abby swore, pulling at her bra and underpants.

  “Jimmy, give her your T-shirt,” Sabrina shouted down to me, and I obeyed without thinking. My T-shirt would hang down almost to Abby’s knees, but I peeled it off and threw it on over her head. Then Abby performed that magical contortionist’s trick that women do where they take their bra off without taking off their shirt. She skinned out of her panties, and sighed, her discomfort obviously reduced by having less clothing touching her body.

  Greg scampered into the kitchen to put his pistols away, and came back with two bags of blood from the fridge. “Here, this will help with the burns,” he said, handing the blood to Abby. She greedily drank one of them down in an instant, then took almost a whole five seconds to drink the other one. She let out another deep sigh and started to relax. As the new blood hit her system, we could almost watch it supercharge her healing. The lobster skin tone she was sporting faded to a pale pink within a couple of minutes, then almost all the way to her natural color in a few more.