The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

by John G. Hartness

  “Man, you can’t go killing humans just because they front the bad guys. We have to be sure. What if they got suckered into working for a Big Bad?”

  “I know. I know. If I take out any humans, I promise to verify their complete and utter evilness first.” I might have grinned a little, but just a little.

  “I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant. I promise not to kill anyone that doesn’t deserve it.” I held up one hand, three middle fingers together. “Scout’s honor.”

  “You were never a scout. They wouldn’t let you in.”

  “Objection, your honor! Relevance!” That got a chuckle out of him. “I promise I won’t kill anyone who’s not a bad guy. We cool?” I started toward the stairs.

  “Yeah, yeah. Hey Jimmy?” I stopped, not turning to look at him. I knew what he was about to suggest, because I’d already thought of it. He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to think about it.

  “Do you think we should talk to Phil?”

  “Probably.” I still hadn’t looked at him. I could feel him looking at the back of my head, and it was a little itchy.

  “Then you’re going to talk to him now?”

  “Only because I have to.” I hate dealing with angels. They always make me feel so damn unclean.

  Chapter 10

  I’ve never been a fan of strip clubs, and I’m even less of a fan of angels, so putting the two together is so far out of my comfort zone it’s like dropping Huck Finn into Times Square. I walked across the parking lot into Phil’s place, shaking my head, as always, at the blue neon sign flashing “Heaven on Earth” to the passing traffic. I paid the cover, flashed my library card at the bouncer and mojo’d him into thinking it was a driver’s license. I’m not terribly photogenic, and I haven’t renewed my license since the early nineties. Putting the whammy on people is easier. I took a seat at the bar and tried to order a beer, but a pair of six-inch Lucite platform heels kept getting in the way. I finally waved the girl down to me, slid a dollar in her garter, and she jiggled on down the bar to more interested parties.

  A different night, a different case and maybe I wouldn’t have waved her off, but this wasn’t the time or the place. Especially not the place. Fiction vamps that sparkle and fixate on true love give the rest of us a bad name. I don’t sparkle, I’m no more perpetually horny than anyone (or anything) else, and I don’t use my vampire powers to get laid. I’m not even particularly angst-ridden, and don’t know any vamps that are.

  I ordered a Miller Lite and told the bartender I needed to see the boss. He waved a thirty-something woman over who bore all the signs of an ex-dancer who had moved up, or at least sideways, in the world. “I’m Lil, I’m the manager here. What can I do for you?” She slid onto a stool next to me. Dark hair cascaded down her back and she was dressed in black leather from head to toe. Her eyes hinted at some undefined ethnicity I couldn’t place.

  “I didn’t ask for the manager, Miss. I asked for the Boss.” I put a little emphasis on the last word, hoping she might pick up on the idea that I knew more than the average lap-dance customer.

  “As far as you need to know, kid, I am the Boss.” She raised me an auditory italics and returned my verbal capitalization with one of her own. When she looked me straight in the eyes, I got a little hint that there was more to her than a fading stripper with aspirations of earning a GED.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked, looking around at the gyrating bodies. It was loud, but not so loud that I wanted to risk someone overhearing me go into the supernatural aspects of life.

  “Follow me.” She slid off the stool and walked towards a dark alcove with VIP in pink neon over the doorway. I now understood how the neon industry was staying alive. Apparently it’s all being used in strip clubs. I followed her and noticed that the view of Lil from behind was, in a word, incredible. Ex-dancer or not, she still had plenty to show, and the tight black miniskirt she was wearing displayed it very well. Naturally, I thought the most covered woman in the place was hotter than any of the naked ones. I’ve always been a sucker for a little mystery.

  We walked down a black-carpeted hallway with doors on only one side. Each door had a light over it. Some were red, some green, and one was blinking yellow. Before I could ask what the caution light was for, Lil said over her shoulder, “Time’s almost up in that one.”

  I didn’t want to think too much about what was going on inside the rooms, and I didn’t have to, because past the room with the blinking yellow light Lil opened a door with no light over it. I hadn’t even seen the door from the hallway, but when we entered, I realized it led into a spacious office complete with desk, a sofa, a full bar and a bank of monitors that covered the club, the parking lot and all the VIP rooms. She motioned me toward the chair facing the desk as she went over to the bar.

  I didn’t sit, preferring to lean against the desk and watch her make the drinks. Not only was the view better watching her than the monitors, but it kept her in my line of sight. In my business there are a few ways to get really dead really fast, and turning your back on people you don’t know in their lair is near the top of the list.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked as she poured bourbon over ice for herself.

  “No thank you.”

  “Are you sure? We have beer, wine, B-positive, holy water.”

  I went for my Glock the moment she tossed “holy water” into the list, but instinct kicked in too late. She’d already picked up a small pistol hidden on the bar and pointed it calmly at my heart.

  “Don’t get frisky, little vampire. It’s loaded with silver rounds, and you don’t want to know what that will do to you. Now sit down. I’m not going to hurt you. If I wanted to do that, you’d be dead.” I didn’t take my eyes off the gun until she walked around the desk, sat down, and put it in a drawer. Her left hand was out of sight somewhere under the desk’s surface, and I had a sneaking suspicion that the pistol was the least of my worries.

  “Okay,” I said, sitting, “you know what I am. Is that a problem?”

  “Not for me. But you wanted to see the Boss, and he’s not a huge fan of vampires. That could be a problem for you.” She sipped her bourbon, and it took all I could do not to lean over to look under the desk.

  “I’m not a huge fan of angels, but Phil and I have done business before.” I shifted in the chair so that, in an emergency, my crossed leg could block most of my center mass from anything but a shotgun blast. I really hoped she didn’t have a shotgun. It probably wouldn’t kill me, but it would be damned inconvenient. And messy. “He knows me.”

  “Indeed, I do, James,” said a polished voice from behind me. “But I still need to know why you’re here.”

  I jumped almost high enough to touch the ceiling, and when I came down I was standing facing Phil. His manager and her firearm fetish momentarily forgotten, I leaned heavily on the edge of the desk.

  “Sweet baby Jesus, Phil. If my heart still beat, I’d have had a heart attack. The whole teleporting thing is one thing, but sneaking up on people is not cool, man.”

  Phil was dapper, as always, in a black suit tailored to his lean frame. Phil and I were similarly sized, well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and thin builds, but he always looked better than me. It helped that he was a lot more muscular than me, and could afford a tailor.

  Girls think angels are dreamy for a reason. He was ridiculously good-looking even to a straight vampire. My hair is kind of mousy brown and sticks out everywhere, but Phil’s dark wavy curls always fell perfectly into place. He looked like a print ad for men’s hair product, only three-dimensional and annoyingly real.

  Phil was right in my face before I stopped babbling. “You know I don’t like that name used in my presence.” Behind the rage in his eyes I saw something deeper, some kind of regret maybe, something that moved him on a visceral level.

  In a rare moment of sanity, I decided not to push. I broke off eye contact and looked down. “Sorry about the J
-word.”

  “Apology accepted.” Phil backed off a little and I could breathe again. “Now I owe you an apology of my own for startling you. Please let me offer you a drink. One without a threat. Lilith, would you please provide our guest with a drink?”

  He and Lilith shared a look, and I could almost feel the power struggle between them. Just as I was starting to feel uncomfortable, the name hit me.

  “Holy crap!” I bounced back to my feet. They both turned to look at me, and I stammered, “Y-you-you’re Lilith? That Lilith? Like Eve before Eve, but you-wanted-to-be-on-top- and-you-got-banished Lilith?”

  She looked at me very coldly, then walked around the desk and stood right in front of me, almost as close as Phil had a moment before. She looked me up and down and said, “That is one version of the story. There are others.”

  The way she said “others” let me know the story I knew wasn’t remotely her version, and that her version probably didn’t appear in any of the books I’d ever read, or would ever read. Honestly, I didn’t think I was too interested in hearing her version. The look in her eyes promised that if she told me she’d have to kill me.

  Breaking the silence, she smoothly asked, “Now, would you like a drink?” She brushed her hair back off her neck and tilted her head to one side in preparation for me to bite her.

  Holy crap and sweet baby Jesus.

  “Ummm . . . thanks, but no thanks. I’ve already had dinner tonight.” I tried to step back, but my ass was already pressed up against the desk. I had nowhere to go.

  “Please, I insist. It is a rare honor my Lord has offered you. If you refuse you dishonor his gift and pass up an opportunity seldom given to one of your kind.” She spoke so low it was almost a whisper.

  Looking into her eyes I thought for a moment that this must be how a mundane feels when I mojo them. It was almost like my will wasn’t my own, except that I knew the choice was mine. The people I whammy don’t weigh the consequences of their choices. I did.

  I put my lips to her neck and breathed in the scent of her hair, and knew that I would drink. Her hair smelled like everything I missed about being alive, sunsets on the beach, summer afternoons in a park, fresh-cut grass, that intoxicating scent of salt, beer and cocoa butter combined that defines a weekend at the beach. I buried my face in the side of her neck and held my mouth there for a moment, feeling the pulse under my lips.

  “You don’t have to be gentle,” she murmured into my ear. Then a hot spike of pain and pleasure ran down my neck as she bit my earlobe.

  Gentle left the building. I sank my teeth into her with no concern for her well-being, because I knew that whatever she was, I certainly couldn’t kill her. She put one hand behind my head and held my mouth to her neck, while the other hand wrapped around my waist to rest on the small of my back. Feeding for me has never been a particularly sexy thing. I’ve never been much for mixing sex and dinner, but Lil was different. The taste of her exploded into my mouth, and I saw colors as my eyes rolled back in my head.

  I’ve drunk from stoners, winos, psychos, schizophrenics and club kids hopped up on everything from acid to ecstasy to the best coke to ever come out of Bolivia. Every substance you can shoot, snort, smoke and swallow makes its way into the blood. But nothing I’d tasted did justice to Lilith’s blood. I’m not sure there is a substance that could, and, if there is, I don’t think I want to know what it is. Addictions are dangerous.

  I took the smallest sip from Lilith, and I thought the top of my head was going to blow off. Every hair on my body stood on end, and spasms went through every muscle.

  I stood there with my mouth latched onto her neck twitching like a kid that just peed on an electric fence. The light show going on behind my eyelids was a Pink Floyd wet dream. I drank from her for only a couple of seconds, but I stood there draped over her, gasping and letting her hold me up for several minutes while I came back to earth. It’s a good thing Phil didn’t have any grudges against me, because if he’d wanted to stake me then and there I couldn’t have done anything to stop it. Which is why addictions are dangerous. They lead you to stupid behaviors. I try not to be stupid too often.

  After a long moment I got my breath back enough to gasp out, “You’re an asshole, Phil.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  I could hear his smirk in the tone of his voice as clearly I could hear the undertone of harp music. “Yeah, I liked it. It was incredible. The best thing I’ve ever had. And I never want to taste anything even close to that again.”

  I straightened up and walked on rubbery legs to the bar and poured myself two fingers of a very expensive scotch. The last thing I wanted to do was put anything in my mouth that would erase the taste of Lilith’s blood, but I knew that if I didn’t start forgetting that taste as fast as I possibly could, I’d keep putting off drinking anything. It wouldn’t take long for me to starve out of fear of losing that amazing taste. I slugged back the scotch and poured myself another.

  When I felt like I could look him in the eyes, I turned to face Phil. “What’s the deal? We’ve done business before without any of the games. What’s different now? Why the snack?”

  Phil took a seat behind his desk and gestured toward the chair I’d vacated when he popped in. I sat, and he slid a coaster across to me. I should have known I wouldn’t be allowed to do anything so coarse as to put a glass on his desk. He waited for me to arrange my drink, then said, “Things have changed, James. The balance of power in our fair city is in flux, and it is not in my best interest to align myself too closely with either side.”

  “I don’t get it.” I figured there was no point in trying to play mind games with an angel, fallen or not. Regardless of our respective brain sizes, I was giving up a few thousand years experience to Zepheril (or Phil when I was being obnoxious, which was always). I went with honest ignorance, which has served me well so far.

  “There is a new player in town, James. A player with the potential to shift things significantly to one side or the other. And until I see which way the wind is blowing, I have decided that it would be unwise to make any specific alliances.”

  “Who? Lilith’s new in town, but she’s working for you. Who is it?” There was obviously something going on between them, but she looked way too much like she was the slave to his master, at least this week.

  I decided I had read that situation right when he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Oh no, James. Lilith is my servant, at least for the moment. She is here as a result of a wager. A wager that she lost.” Lilith didn’t look very happy about that. Phil waved her over and gestured imperiously, and Lil sat on his lap like a very sexy and very dangerous kid with Santa at the mall. Only this Santa was a fallen angel, and this kid was older than Eve herself and had more issues than Reader’s Digest. “I speak of a tectonic shift in the balance of power, a change that may not only herald change for the city of Charlotte, but for the world as a whole.”

  That didn’t sound like anything I was going to like. Still, I had to ask. “Does this power have anything to do with my having to fight a possessed little girl last night and the missing kids all over town?”

  “As usual, you have managed to find yourself in the middle of it all. In parlance you might understand—you’ve brought a knife to a gun fight.”

  I hate being right.

  Chapter 11

  I took a minute to digest what Phil had said, and then decided this was going to warrant another drink. I poured my third scotch and returned to my seat. “What kind of power are we talking about, Phil?”

  “I don’t really know, James. I only know that since the children have begun to disappear I have sensed a power growing in our fair city, and I have watched it with no small interest.”

  Phil reads too much. I mean, seriously, who talks like that? It irritated me, and that didn’t bode well for the rest of my evening. “So you don’t know anything that could help me find it, fight it or kill it. Or if you do, you’re not going to tell me because you th
ink it’s stronger than me, and if I go after it all I’ll do is piss it off, and you’re afraid if I poke the big scary bear that you’ll be facing off with something that you don’t want to take on.”

  “That is a fair summation of the facts, yes.” Phil’s voice went a little cold, and there was a warning in his eyes that told me not to push this.

  I don’t like being told what to do. It makes me itchy, and when I get itchy, my mouth runs away from my brain. I knew better than to poke Phil too much, so I turned to Lilith. “What about you, Little Miss Sunshine? Do you know anything about the Big Bad? Or do you think we should sit on our asses and eat popcorn while Rome burns, too?”

  Lilith looked at me through half-lidded eyes from her perch on Phil’s lap, and I actually blushed. I didn’t even know I could blush anymore. I’d assumed vampires didn’t have the blood flow to spare. I assumed wrong.

  “Little vampire, tread lightly. There are forces at work here that you cannot even imagine. I suggest you go back to your little hole and play your video games. You do not want to be involved in this.”

  “No, I don’t. I definitely don’t want to be involved. I’m no hero. I’m just a guy trying to make a living, buy a few video games, and maybe find a nice fresh neck to gnaw on now and then. But like it or not, I am involved. There’s a scared kid out there who I promised to help, and as stupid as it sounds, I try to keep my promises.” I looked at both of them with as much humility as I could. “Please, tell me what you know, and I’ll get out of here and back to trying to save the world without getting my ass kicked too bad.”

  Lilith chuckled, an earthy laugh that made parts of me tingle that didn’t tingle very often since I had become a bloodsucking fiend. I was starting to get a pretty good idea where her powers lay, and I gotta admit, they were impressive.