“I doubt it. I mean, I’m sure you guys are great detectives—”
“We are,” Greg interrupted. I shot him a look that said shut up, doofus and gestured for Tommy to continue.
“But it’s not a mystery you can solve by detecting, And I can’t stop it,” he finished.
“Can’t stop what, exactly?” Greg reached into the top of his right boot and pulled out a blood pack. “Snack?”
“What flavor?” I asked
“O-positive. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, what with the whole kidnapping thing.” He tossed me the bag, and I ripped it open. As I brought the bag to my mouth, I noticed Tommy looking even paler than before, which was no mean feat.
“What’s wrong, kid? Haven’t you ever seen one of us eat?” I turned the bag up and started to drink. Nice. This one was fresh, no more than a couple of weeks old, and while the bag smelled faintly of Greg’s socks, being in his boot had kept the blood warm. It was smooth, obviously a young donor, without much in the way of contaminants, and the snack sped the healing of the burns the silver necklaces had made on my wrists and ankles.
“No, I haven’t seen you . . . eat,” Tommy said in a very small voice.
I finished the bag of blood and looked over at him. He looked like what he was, a very scared kid in over his head.
“Well this is a lot cleaner than the old-fashioned way, let me tell you,” Greg finished off a blood bag of his own, and I wondered for a minute what flavor his had been. Each blood type had a unique taste, and different donors had their unique qualities, too. Finding a good batch in a blood bank was as likely as stumbling on a really good bottle of Bordeaux at Sam’s Club.
Tommy looked a little sick, but he swallowed and went back to his story, careful not to look at either of us. “There’s a witch that I pissed off, and now she wants to kill me and my whole family. All I could think of was to get you to turn me into a vampire so that I could kill her before she got to my family.”
“Where did you find a witch in Charlotte, North Carolina? And what did you do to piss her off so bad she wants to kill you?” I asked. Our fair city is known for a lot of things—banking, bad basketball teams, good barbecue and car racing. But witchcraft doesn’t even make the Department of Tourism’s Top Ten list of attractions.
“And more importantly,” Greg added, “how did you find out about Jimmy and figure out enough about us to nab him?” Greg hopped off the car trunk and was beside the kid’s chair before he could even think about breathing. “Oh yeah, and we can smell it on you if you lie.”
That’s not exactly true. We can smell fear, and usually people smell a little different when they’re lying, but this guy was so terrified already that I didn’t think we could scent anything as subtle as a lie through all that fear. But he didn’t have to know that.
“Well it all started with a girl,” he began slowly.
Doesn’t it always start with a girl?
Chapter 3
“She was just this weirdo little kid, all goth and stuff—” Greg interrupted again. “Wait a minute. I thought goth went out in 1989?”
Tommy blinked before answering. “Uh . . . I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born then. I know she wore a lot of black, too much eyeliner, always had on T-shirts with weird bands on them, you know, a freak.” He didn’t notice that Greg wasn’t really listening, but was standing there shaking his head.
“I don’t know, Jimmy-boy. I just don’t know what’s worse. The fact that you got captured by a human, or the fact that you got captured by a human child.” Greg looked at me disapprovingly.
“Hey!” Tommy exclaimed. “I’m eighteen, you know. I’m no kid. After all, how old are you guys? You can’t be more than a couple years older than me.”
“None of your business—” I started, as Greg said “Thirty-five.”
“Huh?” Tommy looked back and forth between the two of us, confused.
“Remember, kid? Vampires? Creatures of the night? We don’t age, moron. We were turned when we were both twenty-two. Yeah, we’re older than we look,” Greg explained, reclaiming his perch on the trunk of the car.
“Except we’re dead.” I said, pulling over a stack of pallets and taking a seat. This kid looked like the long-winded type, and even with the blood, I wasn’t feeling my best after being bound with silver. I decided I’d rather not stand for his whole monologue. “Anyway, you were saying?”
“Uh . . . yeah. Anyway, she was this weird middle-school kid or goth or whatever, and me and my buddies, well . . . we kinda gave her some crap from time to time. Nothing big, just—”
“Just making her life a living hell for the amusement of you and your idiot friends,” Greg said, a grim look on his face. My partner had been heavy all his life, and middle school was particularly rough. An unfortunate side effect of becoming a vampire is your body never changes, no matter how much you eat or work out. Being trapped in an overweight body for eternity will give you sympathy for people who are picked on for being different. His stare never left Tommy’s face as he waited for the admission of guilt.
“Um . . . yeah, I guess you could probably say that. But we were just messing with her—a couple of weeks ago—throwing her book bag around, popping her training bra and stuff, when this funky book falls out. It’s all leather-bound, and soft, like a journal or something, and has writing on the cover like I’ve never seen before.”
“I pick it up, and make to throw it to my buddy Jamie, and the girl goes nuts on me. She jumps on my back, pulling my hair and hitting me and stuff. She’s never done anything like this, so I kinda shove her a little bit, not really even that hard, and she falls right on her butt in this big mud puddle, and the book maybe falls in the mud with her, and then she looks at me, and she curses at me.”
He finally looked down, finally had the decency to look a little ashamed of his behavior, or maybe ashamed to have to own up to it to a couple of guys who were old enough to be his dad. But it wasn’t enough shame to appease Greg.
“You mean, she called you a jerk, or an asshole, or something like that?” Greg asked. “Because, if you ask me, that was pretty well deserved.”
“Nah, man, nothing like that,” Tommy replied. “She really cursed me. She looked up at me and said something like ‘By All the Dead, I Curse Thee. By All Hallow’s Eve shall thee and all thy kin die a bloody death.’ And when she said it, I could have sworn her eyes glowed, man. And I felt a chill run through me, and I knew she was for real. That’s when I knew I had to get some serious firepower.”
Tommy came to stand right in front of me and I could see the kid was way more scared of a witch in the future than two vampires in the present—and we could be pretty scary when we needed to. “Will you help me?”
“I don’t know, kid.”
Greg was less conflicted. “We don’t usually go out of our way to defend bullies and kidnappers from justice. Seems to me you might deserve everything you’re gonna get.”
“I might, man, but my kid sister doesn’t!” Tommy crossed to the Buick and grabbed Greg by the shoulders. “You’ve gotta help her, even if you don’t help me. I mean, she’s just a little kid. She doesn’t deserve anything bad happening to her. If I get punished, that’s fine. I screwed with the witch. I deserve to get turned into a frog or whatever. But Amy’s only seven. She doesn’t deserve to die because I was a jerk.”
He was almost in hysterics, and I didn’t want to see what would happen if he started crying and got snot all over Greg’s costume. Lycra is a great fabric, but it doesn’t shed mucus easily. I wish I didn’t know that on so many levels. I also wished I didn’t know where this was going.
As soon as Tommy mentioned a kid sister, he had Greg hooked. He’s a sucker for cases with little kids. It goes back to his baby sister, Emily. That’s a long story, and there’s no happy ending, either. I was in as soon as he said “witch” because I’d never met a real one before, and I’m a sucker for cases with things I’ve never seen before.
Chapter 4
The next night a few hours after the sun set we were hanging out on Tommy’s front porch waiting for him to finish dinner and lead us to the local witch’s house. Or, more to the point, we were sitting on the roof of his porch so as not to scare his parents. I had to be careful to keep my feet from dangling off, and Greg had to be careful not to stray too far from structural support members. I wasn’t sure what would have happened if he’d fallen through the roof, what with the rules about being invited in and all.
Falling into an abandoned warehouse was survivable. But an occupied personal dwelling? I didn’t know if he would have fallen in and burst into flames, which would have been bad. We decided he should keep to the more solid parts of the roof.
It was about eight when the family fun time broke up, and our client made his way outside to meet us. He muttered some unintelligible collage of “out” and “nowhere” and “nobody” in response to his mother’s queries, but eventually he stood on the sidewalk in front of his house looking around.
“Ummm . . . guys?” We let him stand there for a minute feeling nervous, and maybe a little silly, before we jumped down off the roof to flank him. At least I did. Greg, with his typical grace, managed to land half on the sidewalk, half in dog poop.
“Awww, man!” Greg gestured at his shoe. “Do you know how hard it is to get dog crap out of Doc Martens?”
“Bro, I didn’t know they still made Doc Martens.”
“Bite me.”
“No thanks, pal. You went stale before the turn of the century.”
He flipped me off, and I ignored him. “All right, Tommy, you’re going to show us where this witch lives, and we’re going to see if we can find anything out about her. If she’s really a witch, we should be able to convince her to reverse the curse before anything bad happens to your family.”
“How are you going to do that? You never said how you’re going to convince her.” Tommy was a nice kid, but a little whiny. I didn’t need whiny clients. I had a partner for that.
“We can be pretty persuasive when we want to be.”
“Remember? Creatures of the night? All that kind of nastiness?” Greg chimed in, having caught up with us after cleaning his boots. I’d talked him out of the spandex uniform for tonight, but he still had on the boots and utility belt. I’d decided to pick my battles on that front. And besides, every once in a while he pulled something useful out of his belt, like a flashlight, or tequila. My only concession to the stereotype was my long black leather coat, but I could get away with it the week before Halloween. Besides, I looked cool.
We walked along in silence for a while. At least, Greg and I tried to walk in silence. Tommy, on the other hand, decided to use this face time with the dark denizens of the night (his words, not mine) to satisfy his curiosity about the finer points of vampirism.
Block One: “Hey guys, is it true that you can’t, you know, get it up unless you’ve fed recently? I mean, it makes sense, it is a blood flow thing.” Cue sound effect of crickets chirping. The last thing I’m gonna discuss with a teenage wannabe is my erectile function. Or otherwise.
Block Two: “Hey, um, maybe this is too personal, but are you guys like, dating? I mean, I read somewhere that vampires are all, like bisexual and stuff. And you are always together.” He finds it odd that the only two vampires in a city of a million and a half people hang out together a lot. You know, it is perfectly possible for two grown men to be roommates without there being anything out of the ordinary going on. Look at Sesame Street. No wait, that’s probably not the best example. Just because you pay the bill does not mean you get the personal answers. And, um, no.
Block Three: “Um, do vampires poop?” Okay, maybe this is the last thing I’m gonna choose to discuss with a teenage wannabe.
Thankfully, the witch only lived about four blocks from Tommy’s house. One block farther and we might have had to rip out his throat to stop the interrogation. But he stopped and said, “We’re here.”
I stared at the typical suburban two-story house—nice wraparound porch, white vinyl siding, bike in the front yard, probably four bedrooms with one converted into an “office” where the dad surfed porn on the Internet while the mom watched American Idol in the den. It didn’t look much like a haven for evil sorcery. We scouted the outside of the house for a while making sure there wasn’t a doghouse or anything else that might screw the pooch on this operation.
Dogs don’t like vampires. Cats usually just look at us funny, but they do that to humans, too. Dogs go absolutely nuts when they get near a vampire. They bark, howl, tend to pee all over the place, and depending on the size of the dog we’re talking about, either attack or run like hell. Of course it’s always the little yippy dogs that attack, and the big dogs with enough sense to run like hell. I’ve ripped apart my fair share of Chihuahuas in my day. After we made sure that the place was clear of pooches, we reconvened on the sidewalk in front of the house.
“Tommy, this is where you come in,” Greg instructed. The kid looked stunned to be called on, like he didn’t know whether to run home like he had a hellhound on his trail, or to charge in there and beat the little witch to death with a phonebook.
He took a minute to summon up his courage. “What do I have to do?”
“You’ve got to convince her to come outside with you to talk,” Greg replied.
“Why?”
“Jesus, kid. Not everything you’ve read is true, but not all of it is wrong, either. We can’t go in without being invited. And if she’s got any kind of power at all, she’ll sense that we’re not exactly mailmen. There’s no way in hell she’ll invite us in. Now, go. Get to convincing.” Greg put one hand on Tommy’s shoulder and spun him toward the house. He put the other hand in the small of his back and propelled him toward the front door. I hopped up onto the roof of the porch to get a closer sniff of what this chick was and if she was anything out of the ordinary.
Tommy rang the doorbell, and a girl answered right away. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her clear as a bell. “I knew you’d be coming. You may not enter, and your friends may not enter, either. Your pitiful life is over, Thomas Harris, and nothing you say to me will change that.”
Her voice didn’t sound right, like there was something bigger speaking behind her, and I could smell something that definitely wasn’t teenage girl floating around. I felt a surge of power and hopped down off the roof just in time to see her try to slam the door in Tommy’s face. That’s when the kid did something I never figured he’d have the guts to do—he grabbed her. He reached inside and dragged her out onto the porch, slamming the door behind her.
Once she was outside, I figured this would be simple—we’d haul her back to our cemetery, scare the crap out of her, and she’d be begging please-Mr.-Vampire-don’t-eat-me-I’m-still-a-virgin quicker than you can say garlic mashed potatoes. But as soon as I stepped up onto the porch I realized I was wrong. Again.
Chapter 5
I got to the porch a little before Greg, and we both stopped cold. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen and a hundred pounds soaking wet, had Tommy on his knees. His left arm was hanging loosely down by his side, obviously broken. He wasn’t screaming, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The silence had more to do with the fact that she had moved on from his arm and was busy crushing his throat with one hand.
I ran at her. She flicked out her other fist almost faster than I could see, and certainly faster than I could dodge. She caught me square in the solar plexus and doubled me up with one ridiculous punch. Lucky for Tommy she only had two hands, because Greg came at her the same time I did and landed enough of a punch to knock her a step backward, making her let go of Tommy’s throat before she could finish strangling him.
“You should not interfere, vampire. There are forces at work beyond your understanding.” Again, she used that creepy voice. This chick would have irritated me if I hadn’t been scared shitless.
“Well,” Greg said in his best placatin
g tone, “we have interfered. Now let’s talk about this like rational beings, shall we?”
Greg’s always trying to talk his way out of fights. I think it goes back to being the fat kid in school. He couldn’t fight, so he tried to talk or joke his way out of getting his ass kicked. I don’t know that it’s ever worked in all the decades I’ve known him. Didn’t look like it was going to work now either.
The girl looked at him disdainfully, laughed and lunged at him with more of that crazy speed. She started throwing kicks and punches that made Jackie Chan look like a rank amateur, and it took everything Greg had to dodge enough of them to avoid being crushed.
I picked Tommy up over my shoulders and jumped him onto a neighboring roof. “Stay here, and stay quiet. I don’t need to explain how you got here to the fire department. I’ll come get you after we kick her ass.” I made to jump into the scrap, but he grabbed my leg.
“What if you can’t beat her?” he asked through a mouthful of blood. I missed the part where she busted his mouth up, but I guessed it could have happened when she switched from breaking his arm to choking him half to death.
“Then you don’t have to worry about paying our bill.” I jumped off the roof, cleared the front yard in one hop, and joined the rumble, which had moved out into the street. I didn’t like the number of porch lights that were flickering on, so I stopped throwing punches long enough to say, “If you want to keep your presence here under the radar for more than the next five minutes, we might want to move this party somewhere more private.”
“Or I could just kill you quickly,” the girl said, nailing me with an uppercut that sent me flying into the path of an oncoming minivan.
“Or that,” I said as the van crashed into my back (or I crashed into its front, whichever way you want to look at it). Greg took a kick to the head that spun him completely around, and she grabbed his head like she was going to twist it completely off his body. That’s one of the only surefire ways to kill us, and when I saw what she had in mind, I reached deep down and did the only thing I could think of to save my partner’s life.
The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition) Page 2
