The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  He was pudgy, but looked like he exercised a bit, maybe tennis and golf to try and keep the bulge away. He’d missed a spot while shaving that morning, and that little chink in his armor, coupled with the Wild Turkey, told me he was falling apart fast.

  And, why not? He’d had his soul ripped out and stomped on right in front of him.

  “Can I do anything to help, sir? Should I maybe call Mrs. Reynolds?” I couldn’t stop the question even though the last thing a smart vampire would do is waste time playing nursemaid and/or father confessor.

  “You could bring back my baby girl, that would help.” His dry laugh was a lot closer to a sob than any sound of mirth. “And as for Mrs. Reynolds, well, I don’t know if she’ll be any easier to find than Lauren. She said she was going to her mother’s, but I haven’t heard from her in two days.”

  “I’m sure she’s just trying to get her head on straight, sir.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it is.”

  “Look, Mr. . . . um . . . Bob, I’ve got to get going. I’ve got school tomorrow and—”

  He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t bother. I know Tommy Harris, and I know you’re not him. I suppose you’re a reporter or something?”

  “No sir, I’m a private investigator. I’ve been retained by . . .” I trailed off, trying to come up with one of the other victim’s names, but it had been a long night. I came up blank.

  “ . . . one of the other families. I’d hoped that your daughter could remember some additional facts to help my investigation.”

  “Son, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m in sales, and I can smell BS a mile away, and let me tell you, what you’re spreading will make the roses grow but it won’t help bring my little girl back. Now, I want to tell you one thing. Whatever you want to write about me, go ahead. I’m not the world’s best dad, no matter what my coffee mug says, but you write one word about my little girl and I will absolutely destroy you.” He leaned forward for emphasis and almost fell out of his chair.

  Usually I don’t react well to being threatened by anything lower than me on the food chain, but I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. I said “Yes, sir. I will keep that in mind,” and headed out the front door. I felt an unfamiliar sense of responsibility. These people’s pain was real to me now, and I had to do something. So I started walking to where it all began.

  Chapter 13

  It only took me a few minutes to walk to Lauren’s school. Going to the last place she was seen made sense. I could try to pick up any bad vibes, or smells, or even maybe a clue. Ballantyne Elementary School was a sprawling brick building with a cute little portico in front, where parents dropped their kids off when it rained.

  I poked around the campus for about half an hour, hoping a heretofore unknown special magic-detecting sense would kick in or that there’d be a huge pentagram drawn on the roof of the building. Instead I found a whole pile of nothing and was about ready to trek back to the main road to hail a cab or unsuspecting solo driver when inspiration struck.

  I whipped out the new phone Greg had given me and dialed him up. He answered after the second ring. “Hey, what are you doing, bro?”

  “Trying to hack into the police department database to get the case files. Why, what do you need?”

  “Two things. I need your super-sniffer, and I need a ride.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Ballantyne Elementary, down south.”

  “What are you doing, looking for a date?”

  “Classy. Just come get me. I’ll explain on the way home.”

  I hung up the phone and sat on the roof of the portico to wait. About twenty minutes passed before headlights turned into the drive. I stood up on the roof and started to wave when I realized that the headlights didn’t belong to Greg’s car, or to mine. I dropped flat to the roof as a police cruiser pulled into the drive and parked in front of the school.

  Great. I’d apparently picked the one school in the district with enough money for motion sensors on the roof. I lay as still as I could while the cop got out of the cruiser and did a lap around the building, shining his flashlight into the windows. I grabbed my phone and shot Greg a quick “stay away, cops are here” text before switching the phone to silent and returning it to my pocket.

  After the second lap the cop got back in his car and just sat there. He left the dome light off, but I could see him fingering a picture in his sun visor. He sat there for a long few minutes before driving off. I texted Greg an all clear, and he pulled up in front of the school a couple minutes later.

  I waved him up to the roof, and he vaulted to my side in one easy leap. I’ll give him credit, the boy is not the exact image of grace and fashion, but for a chunky nerd vampire, he’s handy to have around.

  “Give this place a sniff,” I said. We all get super-senses, but at different levels. Greg’s sniffer is better than mine, I hear better than he does. He’s stronger than me, I’m faster than him. And as far as we know, neither of us can turn into bats.

  Greg sniffed the air for a minute. “There’s something funky in the air, but I don’t recognize it. Now tell me again why I had to drive all the way out here to get your sorry butt.”

  “Because there aren’t any buses to Ballantyne at two in the morning, I don’t really have the dough for a cab, and I didn’t want to steal any more cars this week.” I jumped off the roof and walked over to Greg’s car. He followed me down and unlocked the car with the remote. Greg loved his classic hot rod, but he loved modern conveniences and gadgets more, so his GTO had keyless entry, remote start, a badass stereo and seat warmers, which are more useful than you’d think for the cold-blooded.

  He slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. “Fair enough. Hey! What do you mean steal any more cars? I thought we agreed that we were the good guys?”

  I got in on the passenger side and fastened my seat belt. “Dude, stealing a car and giving it back doesn’t make me a bad guy. And I did give it back. That means I borrow cars.” I was really hoping he would drop it. He didn’t.

  “And what about the driver? And don’t bother lying, you know you suck at it.”

  He’s right, too. I can’t lie worth a crap. Even being immortal and bloodless didn’t mean I could spin a solid lie while looking my best friend in the eye. “Fine. I left him asleep in the back seat behind a biker bar on Central Avenue. He might have felt a little out of place when he woke up, but he was safe.”

  “Asleep? Or drained?” He looked down and not at me. He was really pissed.

  “Asleep. I didn’t drain him.” I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth unless he pulled it out of me with a wrecker, but I wasn’t going to lie, either.

  “But you did feed, didn’t you? Don’t even answer. I can see it in your face. You look healthier than you have in years. I know you fed on him.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I flipped down the sun visor on my side and checked myself out in the mirror. He was right. I looked good. Well, good for me, anyway. I still had an unruly shock of brown hair hanging in my eyes, and I was still too skinny, 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.

  Oh yeah, the mirror thing. It’s got more to do with silver than with mirrors and souls. Cheap, crappy mirrors like in cars work fine because they don’t use silver as a reflective element. Good mirrors sometimes do, and silver doesn’t react well to vampires, therefore we don’t show up. Same deal with film. Silver nitrate is one of the main developing chemicals, so we’ll show up on video or a digital camera, but not on real film. So I could check myself in the car mirror, but not in the mirror in my house.

  Flipping up the visor, I said, “You got me. 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.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Lilith
, and even if I did, I wasn’t sure how. He got bent out of shape about me feeding on a human, which is kinda the point of being a vampire. Telling him I’d fed on an immortal hottie would not go over well.

  “I was at Phil’s. I ate there.”

  “At Phil’s?” He had looked away again, staring long and hard at the road, which meant he was expecting the kind of answer that’d make him mad. I swear, sometimes this partnership is like being married. We fight all the time and neither one of us is getting laid.

  “Phil offered. 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. I think.”

  “You hope. So, who did you drink from this time?”

  Wow, he was going heavy with the guilt trip. He was making it sound like I went around drinking from people willy-nilly. Wrong. I quit doing that years ago, after I got a really embarrassing rash. Bad blood might not kill you, but a vampire can get all sorts of nasty things from it, and some of them take a while for even vampire metabolism to get rid of.

  That made me wonder how long the “Lilith effect” would last before I went back to my pasty self.

  “Her name was Lilith, and the light’s green.” I really wanted him paying attention to the road and not to the name of my new acquaintance. I didn’t often get what I wanted.

  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 did.

  “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 while unable to ever feel true love?”

  Clearly he’d read way more comic books than I had, because the lust stuff was news to me. I sank down as far as the car seat would let me before I answered. “I guess that would be an accurate description.”

  Greg fumed. I didn’t know fuming was audible but Greg managed to fill the car with the sound of it.

  He took a deep breath, held it for a long time, let it out very slowly, and counted to twenty. In four languages. Four languages wasn’t too bad. Greg was fluent in seven. Anything under five meant he was only moderately pissed. I thought I was maybe going to get out of this relatively unscathed.

  “Well?” he finally asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Was it good?” There was a little longing in his voice, and I hoped that he might finally 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. “What’s wrong?”

  “Listen to me, and listen very carefully.” He was scared. “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 archbishops have burned their Bibles 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 would not make 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. I trusted his opinion way more than my own.

  “Fine, fine, 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.”

  “Well was it worth it?” Greg asked quietly.

  “What? The blood? It was—”

  “No.” He cut me off sharply. “Did you get any useful information out of Phil?”

  “Kinda. Apparently there’s a Big Bad coming to town and if we don’t stop it the world might end. Or something like that.” I stared out the window, watching the billboards on I-485 roll past and thinking about Lilith. That chick scared me.

  “Isn’t that on the list of things you should start the conversation with?”

  “Gimme a break. So I buried the lead. I saw Phil, I drank from an inappropriate woman, and there’s a magic something-or-other coming that will destroy the world if we don’t stop it. And how was your night, honey?” I kept looking out the window, but all I could see was a scared little girl and a shattered father that desperately wanted to see his child again.

  “I hate you sometimes.”

  Chapter 14

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

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

  “Sure. I always think better with a little break. Did Phil give you anything we could use?”

  I started up the game and picked my team. I always pick the Carolina Panthers, no matter how they did that season. I’m a hometown fan, what can I say? And besides, as long as they have Steve Smith, they’ll always make for a fun video game. “He said that Halloween was the big day, that whatever we were up against had to be stopped by then, or not at all.”

  Greg stared at me with his mouth open while I sacked his virtual quarterback, forced a virtual fumble and sent a virtual Jon Beason to the end zone for a virtual touchdown dance. “You do realize Halloween is this weekend, right?”

  “Yeah, I have a pretty good handle on the calendar.”

  “So what the hell are we doing playing video games?” Greg tossed his control at me and headed over to the computer.

  “Really, dude? You don’t want to play Madden but you’ll go play World of Warcraft?” I was 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 waved 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. “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.

  “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 the guys are useful, too.”

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

  “Do you want the reports or not?”

  I did, so I shut up.

  There were ten files, and the girl we’d exorcised the night before was slated to have been number eleven, so we added 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 rout
es, I lost my patience.

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

  “Seven,” he mumbled, still 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 even 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.

  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.

  Today’s sleep wasn’t restful, not with visions of scared children running from sexy fallen angels dancing through my head. 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. 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. We don’t get any nutrients out of anything we drink except blood, but alcohol still works, only to a lesser degree.

  So, I guess that answers Tommy’s question about vampire poop. We don’t poop, but if we play our cards right, we 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. 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.” Greg’s voice came from right behind me, and I jumped sky-high, spilling cold OJ on my lap. That’s one of his favorite tricks, but it usually doesn’t work on me, what with super-hearing and all. I’d been so wrapped up in the case that I didn’t even hear him get up from the desk.