Hard Day's Knight

by Hartness, John G.

  He was right; I looked good. Well, good for me, anyway. I still had an unruly shock of brown hair hanging in my eyes, which were a little too close together and split by a pointy nose that had freckles spread all along its not-inconsiderable length. But I was a lot less pale than I had been when I woke up that night, and my eyes no longer had the pale, lifeless look that I’d come to equate with my reflection. And yes, I have a reflection. The mirror thing is as ridiculous as the garlic thing, and makes no sense to me at all.

  “Okay, look, I did feed on the guy, but I didn’t drain him, and I didn’t really even drink that much. But that’s not why I look like this. That was at Phil’s.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Lilith, and even if I did, I wasn’t sure how. I mean, he got bent out of shape about me feeding on a human, which is kinda the point of being a vampire. I figured he’d really flip out if I told him I’d fed on an immortal hottie.

  “What happened at Phil’s?” He still wasn’t looking at me, which meant I was still in trouble. I swear, sometimes this partnership is like being married. We fight all the time and neither one of us is getting laid.

  “There was someone there that Phil offered for me to feed from. He made it clear that it would be viewed as a serious breach of protocol for me to decline.”

  “Since when do we care about demonic protocol?”

  “Technically, Phil’s a fallen angel, which is different from a demon somehow. I think.”

  “Whatever. So who did you drink from this time?” Wow, he was going heavy with the guilt trip. He was making it sound like I just went around drinking from people willy-nilly all the time. And I quit doing that years ago after I got a really embarrassing rash. You can get all sorts of things from bad blood, and some of them take a while for even vampire metabolism to get rid of.

  “Her name was Lilith. The light’s green.” I really wanted him paying attention to the road and not to the name of my new acquaintance. After all, we’ve read the same comic books, so if I knew Lilith, I was pretty sure he would. And judging by the fact that he pulled into a Burger King parking lot and shut off the car, he recognized the name right off the bat.

  “Lilith? Like Adam’s first wife Lilith? Like the original feminist Lilith? Lilith who was condemned to walk the earth forever spreading lust through the souls of all she touches but unable to ever feel true love?” Okay, maybe he’d read way more comic books than I had, because all that lust stuff was new to me.

  “I guess.” I kinda sank down as far as the car seat would let me while Greg fumed. For all we’re the same age, he has a knack for making me feel like a stupid teenager all over again.

  “Well?” He asked after he took a few deep breaths and counted to twenty. In four languages.

  “Well what?” I thought I was maybe going to get out of this relatively unscathed. Four languages wasn’t too bad. Greg was fluent in seven, so anything under five meant he was only moderately pissed.

  “Was it good?” There was a little longing in his voice, and I had hope that he might just admit that he missed the taste of live blood.

  “Dude, you have no idea. It made me tingle in places I’d forgotten I had places. I saw colors that I don’t even have names for. I felt like I could run a marathon at noon in Arizona and not get the least bit crispy. It was amazing!” I could have gone on describing the feeling of feeding on Lilith, but the look on Greg’s face stopped me. He was scared. “What’s wrong?”

  “Listen to me, and listen very carefully. You can never feed from her again. No matter what, no matter who it insults. Legend has it that her kiss, her very touch is so addictive that priests have burned their Bibles just for a drop of her sweat. You have to stay away from her, or she could take you over completely. And a vampire under the control of a creature like Lilith is not a pretty picture.”

  He was right. I didn’t use much of my vamp powers in everynight life, but if Lilith was bad juju like Greg thought then she could wreak some serious havoc if I fell under her control. And Greg was by far the better judge of character between the two of us, so I trusted his opinion. “Alright, I’ll stay clear of her. You know how I hate going to Phil’s anyway. Let’s get out of here before some cop rolls up and decides we’re making out in the BK parking lot.” We didn’t say much on the way home, but Greg kept tossing me worried glances when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  Chapter 14

  “So, what’s the plan?” Greg asked when we got back into our apartment.

  “I’m still working on that.” I admitted, flopping down onto the couch and grabbing the Xbox controller. “Madden?” I asked as I tossed him the other controller.

  “Sure. I always think better with a little break now and then.” So I proceeded to kick his virtual butt in the football video game for an hour or so while I let my mind percolate on everything I’d found out over the past couple of nights. After the third straight flogging, Greg didn’t want to play anymore, so he headed over to the computer.

  “Really, dude? I thought we cancelled World of Warcraft.” I was just giving him a hard time, but sometimes I did it just because it was easy.

  “Bite me. I’m checking email.”

  “No thanks, I’ve had my fill of supernatural Scooby Snacks tonight.” He flipped me off, then started to wave me over to the desk.

  “Come here, dude. You gotta see this!” He was actually bouncing up and down in his chair. I thought we’d broken him of that habit in high school, but obviously not. I leaned over the back of his chair, as much to rescue the furniture from the shock load as anything else.

  “What is it, bro?”

  “I emailed the guys about the kidnappings to see what they knew, and they’ve got all the police reports!”

  Oh. Crap. “Really? You emailed the Dork Brigade about this case?”

  “Man, don’t call them that. They’re good guys. And Jason hacked into the police database and got us the police reports. So they’re useful, too.”

  “And how many free comic books did you get for letting them help?” When he wouldn’t look at me, I knew I’d hit home. My partner – the closet Spider-Man junkie.

  “The guys” were a trio of losers that worked in the biggest comic shop in town. They were understandably all over Greg for information on his “ongoing cases” whenever he went in to grab his subscriptions. Every once in a while we used them for daytime legwork or computer help when it was something we couldn’t get Dad to do or if the computing was out of Greg’s league. They were occasionally useful, but I always had a hard time balancing their annoying tics against the value of their assistance.

  “Do you want the reports or not?” I did, of course, so we spent the next twenty minutes printing a buttload of reports and then the rest of the night reading them. People think being a private detective is all fast cars and loose women, but it’s mostly divorce photos (not even the hot ones) and paperwork. Of course, people think being a vampire is all seductive glances and string quartets, and they never think about blood-in-a-bag and SPF ten million.

  There were ten files, and the girl we’d exorcised the night was slated to be number eleven, so we added our notes on her and Tommy into the mix and tried to see what patterns emerged. After three hours of taking apart class schedules, church attendance, club memberships and even school bus routes, I was losing my patience.

  “There’s nothing here!” I lay on my back in the floor of the apartment, surrounded by paper. It looked like I’d been mugged by a shedding yeti, and we had no more ideas than when we started. “What time is it?” I asked Greg.

  “Seven.” He mumbled, going over attendance records for the fifth victim.

  “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long night.” I stretched as I stood up and my thighs threatened to revolt. Vampire or not, you sit cross-legged on the floor for a few hours and your butt falls asleep. I staggered off to my bedroom and crashed for a few hours while Greg kept going. He’s always been better at homework than me, anyway.
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br />   It wasn’t a very restful sleep, with visions of scared children running from sexy fallen angels dancing through my head while I tried to grab a few hours’ rest. We do sleep, and we dream, and we don’t “die” every morning at sunrise. We can sense the sunrise, it’s kinda like our bodies’ way of warning us not to go outside for fear of becoming a pile of ash, but I’ve been known to pull an all-nighter (or in my case an all-dayer, I guess) when I needed to. I got about six hours of fitful sleep and staggered out to the den to find Greg facedown in the scattered mass of case files.

  I stepped over him as quietly as I could, opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of orange juice. Since my roomie was asleep I didn’t bother getting a glass, just sat on the couch in my boxers and drank straight from the plastic jug. We can drink, too, anything we want. No food, though. The digestive system stops working except for a liquid diet right after we wake up. So I guess that answers Tommy’s question about vampire poop. We don’t get any nutrients out of anything we drink except blood, but alcohol still works, only to a lesser degree. And if you play your cards right, you can pee in some spectacular colors, because what comes in, goes right back out again. You don’t want to know how we found this out, but let it suffice to say that we were young and learning about our new abilities, and leave it at that.

  “I don’t care if we’re dead, that’s still gross.” I jumped, spilling cold OJ in my lap. Greg hadn’t moved, but I could see his shoulders shaking as he laughed at my frosty crotch.

  “I might be gross, but you’re a dick.” I said, looking around for something to dry off with. I gave up on the idea of finding anything lying around the den when I remembered that Greg had been home alone all night yesterday, which always led to an almost neurotic level of cleaning. I went into my room and got some fresh boxers and the rest of my clothes.

  Greg was sitting up on the floor when I made it back to the den, a look of smug superiority on his face. “What?” I asked.

  “What, what?” He kept grinning at me like a hillbilly with a winning Powerball ticket.

  “What has you sitting there grinning like the AV club president who just bugged the girls’ dressing room?”

  “I am the AV club president who bugged the girls’ dressing room,” he reminded me without a hint of embarrassment.

  “I remember, you perv. And you had that same stupid grin on your face then.”

  “Well I think I may have found our link. Career Day.” He waved a piece of paper over his head like it was a checkered flag and he was an off-duty Daytona stripper. I snatched the paper from him and looked at it. There was a column of initials, a column of dates and a column of school names. The school names I recognized, and it didn’t take long to figure out that the initials and dates matched up with missing kids.

  “Greg, there are only seven names here.” I pointed to the paper.

  “Yeah?”

  “There were eleven victims, dude.”

  “Yeah, but seven of these schools had a Career Day the week before the kidnappings occurred. There’s no way that’s not statistically significant.”

  He had a point. “I could see that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. We need to look into it further.” Greg looked so happy that I wasn’t dismissing his idea out of hand that you’d have thought I gave him an ice cream cone, or a puppy. Or a puppy with ice cream on it.

  “Cool. So now what?” He asked. He headed to the coat closet and started gearing up – putting on his utility belt, boots, and other combat equipment. I stopped him before he got the cape completely fastened.

  “Now we chill for a while. Wanna play Halo?” I put my feet up on the coffee table and watched his face bounce off his toenails.

  “What? We gotta go! We’ve got a lead! A real one! And we need to be out there chasing it down, man!” He started fumbling with his cape again and I took a little pity on him. I went to the closet and led him back to the sofa.

  We both sat down and I looked over at him. “You’re right. We do need to chase it down. But not at the risk of bursting into flames. I think that would get in the way of our progress.”

  “Huh?” I love it when someone else sounds like the moron. It’s usually my shtick, and I’m good at it, but I don’t mind passing the baton from time to time.

  “Dude. It’s like, noon. We go out there now and we’re flash-fried. So you wanna play Halo?” I turned on the Xbox and started killing aliens while Greg started to get out of his uniform. “And what the hell do you carry in that utility belt? Twinkies?”

  “Shut up. If we can’t go thwart evil, I’m gonna take a nap.” My grumpy roommate then tromped off to his room for some shuteye while I valiantly tried to save the world. Again.

  Chapter 15

  I finished off Season 2 of Dexter on Netflix before Greg woke up, not long after sunset. I heard the shower shut off and a few minutes later, my goofy partner emerged. He was dressed in all black, again, with his combat boots laced tight and his utility belt snug around his ballooning waist. I feel for Greg sometimes. I mean, who knew that turning into vampires wouldn’t change our bodies into perfect examples of studliness and we’d be trapped forever as the dorks we were on the last night of our lives?

  “Really, man. Do you have to wear the utility belt?” I laced up my sneakers and grabbed my shoulder holster by the door. I hid the firepower under a leather jacket as we went up the steps and out into the cemetery. We opened a tool shed that was really a two-car garage and hopped in Greg’s car, a 1967 GTO convertible, black of course. I always gave Greg a load of crap about his less-than-inconspicuous ride, but he’d had a man-crush on that car since we were alive, so no amount of teasing was going to get him to drive anything else.

  “Where are we headed?” Greg asked as I got into the car. I pulled out the file folder with all his Career Day notes in it and started to flip through it. It had been easy to find when he went to bed, because he’d written “CARREER DAY CLUES” on the outside of the folder in purple Sharpie. Sometimes I really thought my partner was secretly an illiterate twelve-year-old girl. I wouldn’t have been too surprised to find his notes in a Trapper Keeper covered in unicorn stickers.

  “I looked through the Career Day files at each school, and there were three companies that had a table at every event: AmeriBank, Joe’s World of Tires and the Police Department. AmeriBank makes sense, since their corporate headquarters is here, the owner of Joe’s World of Tires is on the school board, and I think the cops were just looking for middle-school weed. But we should check them all out regardless.”

  “Sounds good, but why do we need to check out the cops? They’re investigating the crimes, you don’t think a cop could have done it, do you?” My partner has a simple view of the world – police and firemen are good, and bad guys wear black hats. It’s charming, really.

  “I don’t think it’s what happened, but it’s possible. Cops are people, so they’re suspects. We’ve got to look at everybody, bro.”

  “Alright, but I don’t think it’s the cops.” I didn’t either, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t think we were going to find our kidnapper anywhere in this list of companies. It just didn’t feel right, if you know what I mean.

  “So where to first?” Greg asked, gingerly backing the car out of the garage. It’s always amazed me how he can be so careful with his car but such a spaz on two feet.

  “I think we start with the path of least resistance – Joe Arthur, owner of Joe’s World of Tires and school board member. We should be able to play the P.I. card and find out who was representing the World of Tires at the Career Days straight from the source.” I gave him the address and we headed out to meet the tire king. I looked out the window and watched the city roll by, thinking a lot more than I wanted to about ten missing children and the fact that we only had a couple of nights left to stop something from coming to town that even a fallen angel was scared of.

&nbs
p; It took us about half an hour to get to Joe Arthur’s house, a modest ranch in one of the better, but not ridiculous, parts of town. I noted the bicycle laying beside the driveway, and guessed the owner to be no more than eight or nine years old. “Looks like Joe’s got a kid right in the target age range,” I whispered as we walked up to the front door.

  “Yep. How do you want to play this? Good cop/bad cop? Two bad cops? Fangs out? Subtle?” He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and shadowboxing his way up to the door. I grabbed the back of his utility belt and dragged him down the steps back to where I stood.

  “I thought we’d ask him very nicely to invite us in, then see what he knows about the disappearances.” I spoke very low and very slowly, and held one hand on Greg’s shoulder to steady him while I tried to reign in his excitement. When you pair his enthusiasm with the fact that we haven’t aged in fifteen years, it’s pretty easy to forget that he remembers the Carter administration.