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

by John G. Hartness

  I stepped over to where Abby was lying. She was still out, but she wasn’t thrashing around like before Anna took out the Dream King.

  I reached for her, but Anna caught my arm. “Leave her. She’ll come out of it on her own now, but you should let her find her own way back.” I nodded and moved to check out the rest of the tent. My super-hearing could detect more people breathing, I just needed to find them.

  I kept poking around, finding more and more vile substances in jars, books with indecipherable writing on the covers and human body parts labeled with uses I didn’t want to know. Finally, in a back corner behind a stack of boxes, I found what I was looking for.

  Chapter 22

  TUCKED AWAY IN a dusty corner, hidden by a stack of boxes labeled “Records, Do Not Disturb,” was a flap in the tent wall. I pulled it aside and saw a smaller room hidden from the main body of the tent. I ducked inside, holding breath I didn’t need against what I might find. And there, sitting on the floor and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in a whole lot of Eddie Bauer clothes, was our missing yuppie couple. The husband looked none the worse for wear, just a little dirty with a couple of bruises dotting his face. The wife was another story. Her makeup had seen better months, her hair looked like a rat had been breakdancing on her head, her clothes were torn almost to rags, and her nails were ripped off to the quick. But it was her eyes that told the story. The eyes always let you know just how bad someone has had it, and this lady had seen things that most humans think only exist in horror movies. Whatever the Dream King had been doing to people, he’d done a lot more of it to Mrs. Carmichael than to her husband. I hoped we weren’t too late to save what was left of her sanity.

  I pulled the tent flap open and motioned for Anna to come in. She started to push her way past me, but I put my hand on her shoulder. “The wife is almost gone, Anna. I probably shouldn’t be the one talking to her about safe passage home and all that jazz, what with the not breathing, pale skin, and more guns and knives than a Schwarzenegger movie.”

  “That’s remarkably sensitive of you, James. Perhaps you’re not a complete moron after all.”

  “At least not on alternate Tuesdays in Faerieland. The rest of the time I’m pretty much a moron by your standards.” I grinned and stepped aside as Anna stepped over to the woman. I slid silently back out to the main section of the tent and knelt down beside Abby’s prone form. I reached out and shook her shoulder, and she jerked awake. She woke up grumpy, and went straight for my throat with her fingernails. I caught her hands and held her fast for a long moment until her eyes cleared and she realized it was me. Then she suddenly relaxed and threw her arms around my neck, sobbing into my shoulder.

  “Oh Jimmy, thank God you woke me up! I was in the middle of the worst dreams ever! I was back in school, only I was still a vampire, so I had to deal with classes, and my sorority, and eating people, and you and Greg and Lilith and the Master of the City, and everything. It was awful! I had just about decided to walk out into the sunlight when you woke me.” She collapsed back into incoherent sobbing, and I put one arm around her and patted her head with the other one. I’m sure I looked like a parody of a guy who has no idea how to comfort a sobbing woman, but the fact is, I had no idea how to comfort a sobbing woman. I let her cry for a couple of minutes, and she finally pulled herself together.

  She sniffled, wiped eyes on her sleeve, and pulled back to look at me. “Now where’s that little dream-twisting bastard? He and I need to have a little conversation.” She punctuated “conversation” with a crack of her knuckles, and I suddenly wished that the little magician wasn’t off dead or dying in the Market so I could see just what Abby had in mind.

  “No good, kiddo. Anna took care of him. Permanently.”

  “Anna? That sweet witch that’s friends with Father Mike? What could she possible do to anyone?” I explained what Anna had done, and Abby shuddered.

  “That’s pretty scary. I guess she’s got more on the ball than I thought. And she doesn’t really like you very much, does she?”

  “Most days that’s an understatement.”

  “Doesn’t that worry you a little?”

  “Nope,” I replied honestly. “I think my irresistible charm is wearing her down. But it’s working really slowly. So the faster we can get the nice people behind the curtain moving and back to the mundane world, the better off I think I’ll be.”

  “Well then get in here and talk to this guy. I’ve restored his wife to some semblance of sanity, but she’s still really freaked out, and he’s got a few questions he wants answered.” Anna’s voice came from the back room.

  “Abby, poke around out here and see if you can find anything connecting our Dream King to the mundane world. I’ve got a bad feeling that there’s at least one more player we haven’t met yet.” She threw me a half-assed salute and started poking around the tent.

  I went back into the room where our hostages were now sitting unbound, rubbing their wrists and ankles where the ropes had left red marks. I walked over to the husband and stuck out my hand. He took it and said, “David Carmichael. This is my wife Elizabeth.”

  His wife focused on me and started firing off questions faster than I could answer them. “Where are we? Where is our baby? Is Patrick okay? How did we get here? What was that thing doing to me? Why us? Where is my baby?” She collapsed in a sobbing heap in her husband’s lap.

  I looked over at Anna, who shrugged as if to say “that’s the best I can do.” At least she wasn’t zombified anymore. Her reactions seemed normal, if a little extreme.

  I sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of them and addressed the husband. “I understand you have a lot of questions. I can answer them one of two ways. I can make up answers that will fit in with the way you looked at the world before you were kidnapped, or I can tell you the truth. If I lie to you to protect your feelings, we’ll need to blindfold you to get you out of here. I can lie like nobody’s business, but some things you just can’t unsee. If I tell you the truth, you probably won’t sleep very well for a long time to come. But it’s your call.”

  “Give it to me straight, doctor. I can take it.” He gave me a lopsided half-grin, and I thought for a second about how I was about to turn this guy’s view of the world on its ear. But he asked for it, even if he didn’t really know what he was asking for.

  “Okay, here goes nothing. You remember all those faerie tale creatures you read about when you were a kid? Trolls, elves, dwarves, vampires, and witches? Well, they’re real. Pretty much all of them. You’re sitting in a tent in the Goblin Market, which is in a corner of Faerieland. You were kidnapped by an evil magician, and I rescued you with my witchy friend Anna and my protégé, Abby.”

  “Protégé? And what are you supposed to be, a mighty wizard and his apprentice?”

  I looked at him for a minute, then willed my fangs to drop. Needle-sharp fangs slid into place out of the roof of my mouth, and I smiled at him. “Not exactly,” I said.

  He skittered back a little on his butt, and I held up a hand. “But this time I’m one of the good guys. I’m working with the Charlotte PD on a group of unsolved murders and disappearances, and you guys happened to get kidnapped right in the middle of our case. So here you are, all safe and sound thanks to your friendly neighborhood vampire detectives.”

  “What did he want with us? Why did he bring us here? What was he doing to Elizabeth?” David asked, keeping a respectable distance from me. I didn’t bother letting him know I could cross the five feet between us in less time than it took him to blink. No need to terrify the poor man any more.

  “I’m not exactly sure, Mr. Carmichael. We haven’t figured—” Anna cut me off before I could sugarcoat things for the husband.

  “He was stealing her dreams,” Anna cut in. “His magic was based on dreams, and he’d lived too long to have any of his own left, so he had to steal them from others. He worked with them, spinning dreams into illusions and charms that he sold, and he traded them raw for o
ther magical components.” Her face was tight as she flipped through books on a table along the outer wall of the tent.

  “How do you steal someone’s dreams?” I asked.

  “It’s a very painful and invasive process, Jimmy. I don’t think I want to describe it right now.” She put a lot of emphasis on the last couple of words, and slid her eyes over toward where Elizabeth as staring at her.

  “Does this mean I won’t be able to dream anymore? Will I sleep? Don’t people go crazy when they can’t dream? Is that what this is, I’m going crazy? David, what’s happening?” Elizabeth’s voice rose in pitch with every question until she was almost shrieking. She collapsed in her husband’s lap, and he looked up at us with pleading eyes. Anna knelt beside them and pulled Elizabeth upright. Anna put her arms around the other woman and whispered something in her ear. Then she put her hands on both sides of Elizabeth’s head and pressed their foreheads together. Anna’s hands glowed blue again, then yellow, then a pale pink. Elizabeth stiffened, and then collapsed, unconscious, back in her husband’s lap.

  David lay his wife gently down on the floor of the tent, and as Anna gave him directions, stretched her out into a comfortable position. Anna pressed her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead. She reached the other hand out to me. “Jimmy, give me your hand.”

  I didn’t budge. “Why?” It’s not that I don’t trust Anna, or witches in particular. I don’t trust anybody. Too many movies about people poking folks like me with sharp pointy things, makes a fella a wee bit paranoid. And, with Anna, my paranoia was justified. The first time we met she’d tried to trap me in a magic circle with a dozen angry spirits.

  “I’ve given her some of my dreams, now I’m going to give her some of yours.”

  “Why does she need my dreams? Won’t she make her very own dreams whenever she sleeps?” I asked.

  “I know what science says about dreams, but they’re all wrong. Dreams are the psychic manifestations of ourselves—our hopes, our fears, our ambitions—everything that makes up who we are is contained in dreams. Dreams are what happens when our minds touch the magic of the universe and we see what can be when we stop overthinking everything. The Dream King didn’t just take her dreams, he took pieces of herself, and there isn’t enough left of her to rebuild itself. She needs some of our dreams to build on. If I take a few from each of us you won’t miss them. I won’t take any of the ones where you’re having sex.”

  “That doesn’t leave many,” I warned, but I let her take my hand. That pale pink light tingled as it crawled up my arm, then swarmed over my face, then I gasped as I watched half-remembered snatches of dreams flash past my eyes and into nothingness. It seemed to go on for hours, but the awake part of me told the rest of me that it lasted just a matter of seconds, then I slumped sideways to the ground, trying to get my eyes to refocus.

  Anna repeated the process with David, explaining that Elizabeth needed dreams, and that hers were stolen. This whole process was just to patch enough of the holes in her subconscious for her to begin to build new dreams of her own. Taking just a pinch of the dream energy from all three of us was enough to help Elizabeth, but not enough to cause any lasting harm to any of us. There might be a few sleepless nights in our future, but that prospect worried me less than most folks. The look in David’s eyes said he might be lying awake a few nights regardless of anything we did.

  After getting our dreams deposited in her head, Elizabeth seemed to be resting comfortably. Anna went back to poking around in the Dream King’s books, and I started opening boxes and flipping through papers. There had to be a clue to the King’s partner. Someone had to deliver the fresh meat. The King had been an obvious recluse, with no contact with the mundane world. I couldn’t see him procuring his subjects himself.

  “Nothing out here, boss,” Abby said, coming in from the main tent. “A couple of customers came by, and they weren’t real happy when I told them the dream shop was closed permanently. You find anything?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got books and books of his records, but there’s so much here I can’t tell what’s useful and what’s not.”

  “What are you looking for?” Anna asked.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure our mighty midget Dream King didn’t hop over into the real world to kidnap these folks, and no one at the shopping center reported seeing anything out of the ordinary, so I’m wondering who did take them.”

  “And why? I understand what the Dream King got out of the deal, but why would anyone from our world join forces with someone so vile as this bastard?” Anna asked.

  “Same reason people do nasty things every day, Anna. Cash. And here’s that missing piece we were looking for.” I pointed to a ledger I’d just opened on the table. “This shows a list of transactions, with money coming in for dreams, and money paid out for what he called ‘raw resources.’ The last resource purchase was three days ago, the same time that the Carmichaels were abducted. It looks like he bought ‘resources’ every four or five days, so we’ve got maybe two days before another couple is kidnapped. That’s not a lot of time.”

  “Why the rush?” Abby asked. “Why not just wait here for the guy and take him out when he tries to make the next delivery?”

  I thought about it for a minute, but then shook my head. “No. We haven’t been exactly subtle in our search, and if our Igor gets here with a couple of people in tow and no place to sell them, there’s no telling what he might do. Let’s get this guy taken care of on our schedule, back in our world.”

  “Seems legit,” Abby said. “Besides, these folks are gonna need to see a shrink, and pronto.”

  “Exactly. So let’s get to detecting.” I turned to the man sitting on the floor stroking his wife’s hair. “David, how long do you think you’ve been here?”

  “I’d guess a day, day and a half, maybe.”

  “Were you taken somewhere else before you were brought here? You’ve been missing three days,” I said.

  “Yeah, the guy who grabbed us kept us in his garage for the rest of the afternoon and moved us at night. I guess I lost track of the time we were in the garage if you say it’s been three days.”

  “Don’t sweat that,” I said. “Time gets funky when you cross dimensions, and he probably kept you pretty well knocked out while he was working on your wife.” I felt for the guy. Here he was, just trying to go through his day, get a little shopping done, and then he finds himself trapped in something beyond his worst nightmare. There were certain parallels between his situation and my own. I’d woken up one day to find my world changed into my worst nightmare, but hopefully his walk on the wild side would be over in a couple of hours.

  Chapter 23

  WE DUG UP WHAT information we could from the Dream King’s tent, and Anna whisked us all back to Milandra’s palace. She’d brought a trunk full of books with her, and when I asked about it, she just said some things shouldn’t be left lying about. I didn’t ask any more questions, because she still scared me. Not because she hated me, but because she treated me like a bug she could squash if it became worth the bother. I couldn’t wait until we got back to our world where I was at the top of the food chain again.

  Greg looked a lot better when we got back. Sabrina, Stephen, and Milandra all had that hint of red in their cheeks and eyes that hinted at a tearful reconciliation, probably followed by copious amounts of booze if my past experience with fae hospitality was any guide. Yep, Sabrina was a little unsteady on her feet when she ran over to me and threw her arms around my neck. I caught her before she ended up on her butt.

  “Detective, I don’t know if your lieutenant would consider you fit for duty right now, but I’m not complaining.” I enjoyed the way all her curves were pressed up against me, but I might catch some serious ribbing from Greg and Abby about it later.

  “I can think of a few things I’m fit for, big boy.” Sabrina purred into my ear, then reached around and grabbed a handful of butt cheek with one hand. “Is that a Glock in your pocket or are you just happy to see m
e?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely happy to see you, Sabrina.” I leaned down and kissed her hard enough to leave me short of breath, then broke free to look her in the eyes. “But this is going to have to wait.”

  “I’ve never met a man so insistent on keeping me at arm’s length. What’s wrong, Jimmy? Don’t you like me?” She gave me a little pout and batted her eyelashes at me. When she let a curl of brown hair fall down over her eye, I almost melted right there, but duty called.

  “Boy howdy, I like you, but we’ve got another kidnapped couple. Or we will soon. And I’m afraid that when the kidnapper realizes he doesn’t have anyone to deliver the goods to, he’ll freak out and kill his latest victims to avoid getting caught with them.”

  I saw understanding flicker deep in Sabrina’s wine-soaked eyes, and she heaved a deep sigh. She hopped up on tiptoes to give me another quick kiss on the lips, then turned to Tivernius. “Well, that will have to wait for another time, I suppose. Magic me sober, oh Grand Scaly One.”

  The dragon chuckled and waved a hand in the air. “You’d better catch her, Jimmy. This is going to hurt.”

  A greenish glow flickered over Sabrina, and she staggered against me. Her free hand flew to her head, and she buried her face in my shirt for a long ten seconds. I felt her shoulders heave once, twice, then settle down as the urge to puke all over me passed. I heaved my own sigh of relief at that, then barely stifled my laughter as Sabrina stood bolt upright and hurriedly removed her hand from my ass, tucking it into a pocket.

  The newly sober and obviously brutally hungover Detective Law straightened her clothes and waved a servant over for a request. The faerie dashed off and returned a few seconds later with a pitcher of what smelled like grape juice. I put my hand on the handle before Sabrina poured her glass, and she stared up at me with pained eyes.