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

by John G. Hartness

  “What was all that about?” I asked.

  “None of your business,” was the flat reply.

  “I think it might be, Abby. Lilith is dangerous, way more than you know.”

  “I don’t think you know anything about her, and you don’t know much more about me. So why don’t you just crawl back inside a bottle and leave me alone.” I jerked my head back like I’d been slapped. That one actually stung a little. I got in the backseat of the Escalade without saying another word, just trying to figure out what I’d done to get Abby so upset.

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS A QUIET ride back to our place, but when she pulled up in front of the house, Abby didn’t turn the engine off. “Everybody out,” she declared, putting the SUV in reverse and holding it in place with the brake.

  “Where are you going?” Greg asked.

  “Don’t worry, Greggy, I’ll be home before dawn this time. I promise. But I’ve got a couple of errands to run, so I’ll see you later, okay?” She was at least still being nice to Greg.

  I tried to let it slide, but it’s not in my nature, so of course I opened my mouth before I had any idea what I was going to say. “Errands for Lilith?”

  “Errands. If I want you to know more, I’ll tell you. Now are you getting out or do you want to ride along and watch?” I opened the back door and stepped out to stand by Greg and Sabrina. We stood in our front yard and watched Abby slam the Escalade into gear and peel out onto the highway, slinging a little gravel in my direction as she did so.

  I watched her go, feeling uncomfortably like the parent who just let his prom queen daughter go to her first rock concert unescorted. After a few seconds of brooding, I yanked my mind back to the problem at hand, namely this mysterious Goblin Market and somebody selling human jawbones there. I walked up the steps to the house, in past Greg, and headed down the stairs to the den. Sabrina was already there, leaning over the tabletop computer thingy and working her Google-fu. I grabbed a beer and gestured with it at her, but she waved me off. Silly sense of duty and propriety.

  I was just about to pop the top on my beer when Sabrina’s cell rang. I looked at my phone, saw it was after nine, and set the beer down. Greg stopped halfway down the stairs and we blatantly eavesdropped on her conversation, which consisted of a lot her saying “yes, sir” and “uh-huh.” She finished with an “I’ll be right there,” and clicked off. She looked up at us and said, “Did you two get all that?”

  I ticked off the high points on my fingers. “Missing couple. Abandoned car in mall parking lot up by the lake. Baby in the backseat. Responsible parents otherwise, so it looks like it’s one of ours.”

  “That’s the gist of it. Let’s go.”

  “Got any idea where?”

  “Yeah, we’re going back to where the bones were found. If this is a fresh kidnapping, that’s where he’s going.” She pulled her jacket back on and headed up the stairs.

  “Or it.” I added, following her.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s my line. Or it. Whatever we’re after probably isn’t human. And it probably isn’t on our side of the river, either. So you call ahead for a boat, and I’ll get some reinforcements.” I started punching numbers into my phone as we headed down the porch steps to Sabrina’s car.

  “Should I call Abby?” Greg asked.

  “No,” I said. “She wants to go off and do her own thing, we should let her. She made it abundantly frickin’ clear that she had plans for the night that didn’t include us, so we’ll fill her in when we see her again.” I slid into the passenger seat and dialed my oldest living friend, something I hadn’t done often enough lately.

  Father Mike Maloney answered on the third ring, sleep coating his voice and making him sound way older than his almost forty years. “Hello?” It sounded so un-Mike-like that I actually checked the number on the screen before I spoke again.

  “Dad? That you?”

  “James? How are you, my son?” He sounded better, at least until he pulled the phone away from his mouth to cough. There was a nasty rattle going on there, the kind you read about people having. People that are dying. I pushed those thoughts aside and forced a cheer into my voice that never made it onto my face.

  “I’m good, Dad, how are you? The drugs working okay? Sounds like you got into the medicinal weed again.”

  “I’m much better, thank you. The chemotherapy is doing wonders to shrink what’s left of the cancer cells, so they tell me. The drugs are . . . difficult, but I’m managing. They do make me very tired, though.” This was bad. This was the guy who less than a year ago had literally stood with me and Greg against a demon, and now he was tired before Leno came on? Crap and double-crap.

  Mike had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus a couple months ago, right about the time everything in our lives turned upside down. Since finding out our best friend was maybe terminally ill, Greg and I had acquired a roommate who drank more blood than both of us put together, had our house burned down, gone to Faerieland, and almost gotten killed a couple of times. I still found time in there to feel bad about not visiting Mike more.

  “Glad to hear that, old buddy.” I put a little extra teasing stress on the “old” part. Mike, Greg, and I were all the same age and had been best friends since middle school. Mike was the only one who looked his age, but if his voice was any indication, he might be looking a lot older than he really was nowadays. “Mike, we need help. If you’re not able to come out, that’s cool, but we really need you to drum up a little support, and the support we need kinda hates me.”

  “You mean Anna. What can I do?” I could hear him pulling on pants in the background.

  “I need you to get Anna to meet us out by the rafting center. I’ll text you the address. Tell her she’s gonna want pants for this one. And boots that she doesn’t mind throwing away at the end of the night.” Anna was a witch friend of Mike’s from a comparative theology quilting bee or something. She hated my guts, and suffered Greg only slightly better. But she was a real witch, with plenty of juice backing her up and a full coven, so she was useful.

  We blew through town with Sabrina’s dash light going, making it up to the crime scene in half the normal time. A familiar dark sedan pulled up a few minutes later, and Sabrina waved them through the police tape.

  I stomped over to Mike’s car. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re too sick.”

  “That’s what I told him. But for some reason he’s very loyal to you two abominations,” Anna said, stepping out into the mud. Anna was dressed in jeans with fishing boots on, a good choice by my best guess.

  Mike got out of the car in his priest uniform, except he’d added a set of ridiculous-looking but very practical hip waders. That wasn’t the problem; it was everything else about how Mike looked. To put it bluntly, he looked like crap. His hair was gone, and Mike was not a guy who could pull off a bald look.

  Worse than the hair was the way his skin hung off his face. Mike had been pudgy all through school and adulthood, and the scholarly life of a priest had blown pudgy up a little, to say the least. Now his usually round face was stretched, with jowls and deep wrinkles around his eyes. His skin had a peculiar yellow cast to it, too, like jaundice but not quite. But it was the smell that brought tears to my eyes and made me quickly turn my head to look out over the river. I could hear from the sharp intake of breath beside me that Greg was right behind me and smelled it too. I gave Mike a hug and held on tightly for a minute, then felt Greg’s pudgy arms reach around both of us in a kind of group hug that would have normally made me a little uncomfortable, but right then felt like the only thing we could do. I felt the hitch in Greg’s breathing as he hugged me, and I pushed them away. If he broke down right now there was no way I was going to hold myself together.

  I pulled back, keeping one hand on Mike’s shoulder, and repeated, “You shouldn’t be here. This could get serious, and you’re sick.”

  “Yeah, you look terrible, Mike. What do the doctors say?” Greg asked f
rom beside me.

  Mike looked at me for a long minute before answering, and we both knew the score. “I’m doing as well as can be expected, Gregory. Now what’s going on out here that you’ve got to drag me away from American Idol to consort with heathens like this fine young lass.” He always leaned a little heavier on his hint of a brogue when Anna was around. I thought, not for the first time, that she might be the one to make him regret his vows.

  “Well, since you’re here . . . We’ve got a problem, Dad. Anna, thanks for coming. We really need some help on this one.” I reached out a hand, and she shook it limply. Anna made no secret of the fact that she wished I would take a long walk into a beautiful sunrise, but I needed her expertise, so I didn’t bite her. It didn’t stop me from wondering if witch tasted like other humans, or if it was true what they say, that witch tastes like chicken.

  “Always happy to help the police, Black.” I noticed that she never said she was happy to help me, but I let it slide.

  “Fine, whatever. There were some remains discovered near here, and we have reason to believe that the murders took place on that island over there.” I pointed across the river to a small wooded island formed when the river split for about a quarter mile. It was maybe the size of a football field, but no more.

  “And what are we supposed to do about that?” Anna asked. She stood with her arms crossed and her chin out. I knew from past experience that nothing about dealing with her was going to be easy, so I took a deep breath and spit it out.

  “What do you know about something called the Goblin Market?” I jerked a thumb back over my shoulder.

  Anna went white. And I’m not talking just a little blanch, I’m talking she was suddenly paler than me, and I haven’t seen the sun in this millennium.

  Slowly, I continued, “Because we think the Market is over there, and we think it’s the reason at least two women are dead and another couple is missing.”

  She looked around like the bogeyman himself was going to jump out at her from the tree line, and she skittered back from the water’s edge so fast she lost a boot and went tumbling backward. Lucky for her, I was paying attention, because I vamped out and caught her before she did herself any permanent harm. She didn’t even get her foot muddy, because I had her standing upright again before anyone else noticed what had happened.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. She looked up at me with big eyes and nodded. I stepped back slowly, keeping an eye on her to make sure she wasn’t going to do anything else crazy, like try to move. “What’s wrong?”

  “The Goblin Market is over there?” she whispered. She took an involuntary step back and almost lost her balance. She caught herself and stood stock-still, staring across the water like she was expecting Jason, Freddy, and the Loch Ness Monster to come out of the darkness and eat us all.

  I nodded. “That’s our best guess, anyway. A pair of human jawbones were found out here, and the guy who bought them told us he got them at the Goblin Market. That seems like the most likely place.”

  “Then we have to get the hell out of here, now!” Anna hissed. She kept looking around like the ground was going to boil over with rats, spiders, and snakes at any moment. I’d seen Anna exorcise spirits from a dozen zombies in one night, but I’d never seen her spooked like this.

  “We can’t leave until we get into the Market and rescue the missing couple,” Sabrina said from behind me. I nodded and crossed my arms.

  Anna shook her head again. “Maybe you can’t leave, but I’m out of here. I’m just a witch, I can’t deal with the kind of things that go to a Goblin Market.”

  I held out both hands to her. “And we don’t want you to. We don’t want you to deal with anything. I wouldn’t ask you to fight our battles for us, Anna.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “We just need you to open the door for us,” I said, trying to use my best “everything’s okay” voice on the terrified witch. I was starting to think that maybe this shopping trip was going to take the top spot on my list of Really Bad Ideas.

  Chapter 10

  “NO WAY.” ANNA had regained her balance by now and was standing firm. “No way in heaven, hell, or any other dimension am I opening up a portal to Faerie for you to use to go to the Goblin Market.”

  “Is it that dangerous?” Mike asked.

  “Michael, the Goblin Market is the most wondrous and deadly place you could ever imagine. It’s the beautiful snake that has venom that could kill you ten times in a second. It’s the lovely orchid that gives off a scent that makes people drop dead from just one whiff. It’s . . .”

  “We get it.” Sabrina cut her off. Anna opened her mouth to protest, but Sabrina held up a hand. “We get it, Anna. And we don’t care. We have to go. Lives may be at stake.”

  “Oh, they are, Detective. What you don’t understand is that the lives at stake are yours.” Anna was as scared as I’d ever seen her, but her pale face took on a greenish cast as Sabrina whipped out her cell phone and held it in front of the witch.

  Sabrina opened the photo app and slid her finger across the screen as she spoke. “This is the car that David and Elizabeth Carmichael were snatched out of this afternoon. This is Andrew, their eight-month-old son who was left in the backseat. This baby had his parents snatched out of his life right in front of him and was left in a parking garage for hours without food, water, or changing. And his parents might still be alive somewhere on that island. You are the only person we know that can get us there and get this baby’s parents back alive. Now suck it up, witch, and open the goddamn portal!” I looked at Sabrina, shocked. There were tears standing in her eyes. I resolved to push a little further on this subject later. Much later. When she was unarmed.

  Anna took a deep breath and nodded. I said, “Does that mean you’ll do it?”

  “Yes, I’ll do it. I hate it, but I’ll do it.”

  I thought about saying something stupid to lessen the tension, but decided that Anna would probably just turn me into a frog. “Now, what’s the plan? Do we need candles, because I’m all out. And a little skittish around fire. You know, the whole combustible vampire thing and all.”

  “Shut up, Black,” Anna said with a laugh. “You’re a moron, but at least you’re amusing. First we need to get to the island.”

  “I have a boat,” Sabrina said, waving a uniformed officer over. He spoke into a radio and a few minutes later a pontoon boat pulled up just offshore. “We’ll have to get a little wet.”

  I looked at Anna and Mike in their hip waders and wished, not for the first time, that I could have been born smart instead of just pretty. They trudged through the mud and the shallow water and clambered up the aluminum ladder off the side of the boat. Sabrina looked down at her hiking boots and wrinkled her nose. “Look at it this way,” I offered. “Now you have an excuse to go shoe shopping. And you’re a chick. That’s like an excuse to breathe to you, right?”

  “Contrary to popular belief, Jimmy, not every woman loves shopping for shoes. Although I’ve never met one that doesn’t. And I could use a new pair of boots.” I laughed and scooped her up into my arms, then took two running steps and leapt out over the water onto the deck of the boat. Sabrina looked up at me and gasped.

  “I’m impressed,” she said when I set her down.

  “So am I. I usually miss the boat on the first try.” I reached out to help Greg over the railing as he fell just a couple of feet short on his long jump attempt and ended up crumpling the rail and almost going backward into the water. I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him the rest of the way over, then got out of the way as the uniform climbed up the ladder and moved to the cockpit. I looked under cushions and in the fish well, but came up empty.

  “I don’t think you’ll need a life vest, Jimmy. It’s a pretty short trip,” Sabrina teased.

  “I don’t need a life vest because I’ve been dead since you were in middle school. I’m looking for the beer,” I shot back.

  “Why would ther
e be beer on a police boat?” Mike asked.

  “Look at this thing, Dad. It’s not a police boat, it’s a friggin’ party barge! There’s gotta be a six-pack on here somewhere.” I got the laugh I wanted out of Anna and Mike, then went to sit next to the witch. She didn’t stand up and move to the other side of the boat immediately, so I knew she was more nervous about what was to come than she was dedicated to pointing out how little use she had for me.

  “Come on, Anna. It can’t be that bad. I’ve dealt with dangerous stuff before. I mean, can it be worse than going into a dragon’s lair and the dragon sneaking up on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Worse than getting shot in the heart by an evil faerie and then getting put into a cage fight with trolls?”

  “By a mile.”

  “Worse than fighting an archdemon who wants to bring about Hell on earth?”

  “No, I’ll give you that one. But you had an angel for backup that time.”

  “And this time I’ve got you. I know you’re scared, but it’ll be okay. I promise.” I reached out and patted her on the knee.

  She grabbed my hand like it was something dead, which technically it was, and smelly, which it was not, and moved it off her leg. “That would be great if I had any faith in you, Jimmy. But you’re an idiot. Just try not to get Mike killed. It would really mess up my karma if I had to curse you.” I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about turning me into a toad or anything nearly that gentle, so I got up and walked to the other side of the boat myself.

  “That went well,” Greg said as I leaned on the railing next to him and Sabrina.

  “Bite me.”