The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

by John G. Hartness

  Another ogre stood just inside the door, the universal plain black T-shirt of bouncers everywhere stretched across the enormous azure landscape of his chest. He handed me a small sheet of paper.

  “House rules,” he grumbled.

  I looked at the paper. That’s exactly what was printed across the top of the page—House Rules. I read through them quickly, just to see if there was something about interrogating the other patrons on there, but they were basic strip club rules. Don’t touch the dancers, pay for the dances or have your arms broken, blood rituals limited to the Champagne Room, no dark magic in public areas—the kind of thing you see everywhere. I folded it up and put it in my back pocket.

  “Bad idea,” the ogre grumbled.

  I looked up at him, not understanding.

  “Paper’s magic. Burns up if you take it out of here. Burn your ass off. Might hurt.”

  I nodded and pulled the paper out of my pocket.

  I handed it to him. “Why not give this to the next guy, then?”

  He nodded and put the sheet back in the stack he was holding.

  I led Sabrina to the bar that ran along the far wall of the club. The bar was the least populated section of the place, unless you count the strippers taking a break and the token crazy old dude that sits at the end of every strip club bar in America.

  There was a brass rail following the curve of the bar up on the ceiling, and a slightly overweight girl was walking around the bar, shaking her shimmy in the zip code of the beat and trying to walk in her ridiculous heels. I did give her credit for her shoes, which spent a lot of time at eye level. I’d never seen stripper shoes with actual fish in them before, but she had a little tiny goldfish swimming around in each heel. She wore a frilly little miniskirt and a lacy white thong, and one garter full of dollar bills.

  I motioned for her to come over, and when she knelt in front of me, I slowly slid a five into her garter. She leaned in to give me a kiss, and I shook my head. I leaned up and whispered in her ear, “There’s five bucks. Now go away. I want to drink.”

  Her eyes went wide, then narrowed to slits, and she stood up and flounced over to the crazy old guy and started giving him all her best moves. There were two of them—moves, that is. There was a shimmy, and there was a bounce. Neither of them were terribly impressive, but I’d done my job. She was out of the way.

  The music was thankfully a little lower at the bar, so I could almost hear myself think as I leaned across the damp wood surface and ordered two Miller Lites. The bartender was ridiculously hot, as was often the case in clubs of this nature. The women you most want to see naked are not the women who take their clothes off for money. This woman was about five-three, maybe a hundred twenty pounds, with dark brown hair streaked with pink and purple falling straight halfway down her back. Her shredded Metallica T-shirt was cut low enough in the cleavage and high enough around the waist that I wondered if the cuts would meet in the middle and give me a better look at the black bra playing peekaboo with the night air.

  I slid the bartender a twenty and she gave me back eight bucks and two beers. I slid that over to her and said, “We need to see Lilith.”

  “Not for eight bucks.”

  “The eight bucks was just to get your attention.”

  “My attention costs more than eight bucks, too.” She turned away and took drink orders from a couple of guys at the other end of the bar. Sabrina elbowed me and pointed to a skinny redheaded guy at the end of the bar. The bartender said something to him too quiet for even me to hear, and he vanished down a hallway. A few minutes later she came back to me and gave me and Sabrina a long look.

  “What’s with the cop?”

  “She’s with me. We need to see Lilith.”

  “Lil’s not here.”

  “Bullshit. If she wasn’t here you wouldn’t have sent a message back to her with the skinny ginger. You would have played dumb and tried to get more money out of me. But she told you to send us back without telling you who we are, and that drives you nuts, because you’re used to knowing what’s going on, but Lilith doesn’t trust her underlings with shit. Now, you want to keep playing games, or do you want to get your head out of your ass and maybe save your job in the process?”

  The bartender turned about eight shades of pale, then flushed deep crimson. “I hate vampires. You bastards can hear a fly fart a mile away.”

  “You don’t have to be a vampire, or a detective, to see you sent Ginger back to the back, sweetie,” Sabrina said. “Now why don’t you go get Lilith like a good girl, and you and I won’t have to have a conversation about the vial of coke in your bra.”

  I followed Sabrina’s gaze and noticed a little lump in the bartender’s cleavage that I’d completely overlooked before. I was paying attention to other things. Like her eyes.

  “Lil will kick my ass if I take strangers back there—”

  I cut her off. “I know Lilith. And I’ve got a pretty good idea what she’ll do to you if she ever heard you call her Lil. So be a good girl, get me another beer, on the house, and tell me which one of those dickweeds over there is going to take us back to Lilith.”

  She reached into the cooler and handed me a brown bottle of beery goodness, then pointed to the little ginger guy.

  I walked over to him, Sabrina in tow, and said, “Let’s go see the boss lady.”

  He turned and led us through the Champagne Room, where several dancers were gyrating in g-strings on humans, ogres, a werewolf in half wolf form and a couple of creatures that I didn’t recognize. I followed the official etiquette of strip clubs and didn’t look too closely at another dude’s lap dance. I kept my eyes on our guide, who I quickly realized had hooves instead of feet, and a lot of hair poking out of the legs of his jeans.

  “Are you a faun?” I asked when we got through the VIP lounge and he opened an unmarked door to the office area.

  He spun around and looked up at me, his face flashing red. “I am a satyr. These are deer hooves, you city-bred moron, not goat hooves. And I am not some cuddly little Narnian shithead to be swayed from my queen by an apple-cheeked human girl. Satyrs are loyal.”

  I made a quick mental note to find out if Narnia was real. If it was, Greg would be thumping around in every closet in North Carolina for the next hundred years. “Yeah, from what I hear satyrs are loyal to whoever can get them laid the most.”

  “Sounds like human loyalty, then. Come on.” The satyr turned and led me down a familiar hallway.

  The hall ran behind the real VIP rooms, where things the cops weren’t supposed to know about went on. When Phil ran the place, he kept stuff pretty above board. I didn’t expect Lilith to follow that tradition. Mr. Tumnus led us to another unmarked door and knocked.

  I looked at Sabrina and said, “Please, let me handle this.”

  Chapter 2

  Of course, her only response was to shove me and Mr. Tumnus out of the way and open the door, stepping into Lilith’s office without waiting for an invitation. I shook my head and followed, hoping I’d brought enough ammo.

  Lilith was sitting behind the desk facing a wall of video screens. From what I could tell, there wasn’t an inch of the club except the bathroom stalls that wasn’t being constantly recorded. The images flickered on and off the screens almost faster than my eye could follow. Lilith seemed to have no problem following all the action, yet another indication that she wasn’t quite human. Well, that and the fact that as Adam’s first wife, she was something like eleventy bajillion years old.

  She stood up when we stepped through the door and turned to face us. She was dressed in a porno producer’s idea of business casual, a black miniskirt that was illegal in at least seven states and three Canadian provinces, a tight white dress shirt unbuttoned to her navel over a lacy black bra that showed through with every breath, and a pair of thick black-rimmed secretary glasses. Her jet-black hair was pulled back into a tight bun with a couple of strands artfully loosened.

  Lilith came around the desk and gave me
a hug that was as much lap dance as anything going on in the Champagne Room, a full-body hug that oozed her lushness all over my body. I put my arms around her and patted her back awkwardly, trying to minimize contact with the woman who was molding herself to my every angle like spray insulation. When she decided she had me sufficiently off my game, she glided past me and wrapped her arms around Sabrina, burying her fingers in the detective’s brown curls and pulling Sabrina’s face down to hers.

  Sabrina shocked me by grabbing the immortal’s bun with one hand and bending her over backward. My brain shut down as she pressed her lips to Lilith’s and kissed her thoroughly, wrapping her free arm around the other woman’s back and pulling Lilith hard to her. They kissed for a long minute, then Sabrina straightened up, leaving Lilith panting. Sabrina turned and walked to the bar, poured herself two fingers of scotch and took a seat in one of the chairs opposite the desk.

  I collapsed into the other one, staring at her.

  She gave me a little wink and looked up at Lilith. “Nice to see you again, Lilith. How’ve you been?”

  The immortal woman straightened and glared at the ginger satyr, who

  was still standing in the open doorway. “Why are you here, idiot?” He paled and backed out of the door, pulling it closed behind him. Lilith walked slowly back to her desk chair and sat, then switched off

  the monitors with the press of one button and turned to face us. “Lovely to

  see you again, Detective Law. I’ll admit, I didn’t expect that level of welcome

  from you. But I enjoyed it.” She almost purred the last bit as she leaned

  forward on her desk and steepled her fingers.

  “Don’t get used to it, Lilith. But I knew you’d play games so I thought

  I’d better make my moves early if I was going to stand a chance.” “And what delicious moves they were, too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seems to have struck our poor Mr. Black here quite dumb.” “Nah, I’m just wondering when the pillow fight starts. Or if I should be

  somewhere making Jell-O for you girls to wrestle in.” I sipped my beer to

  hide my shaking hands, and I kept my legs crossed.

  “How quaint. I’m sorry, James. That’s not on the menu for the evening.

  But if there was something else you desire of me?” Lilith arched an eyebrow

  at me, and her hand traced her neck slowly.

  I felt my hands shake a little more, and realized that Greg was right, I

  could never drink from her again. I’d done it twice last fall, once to keep Phil

  from kicking my ass, and again to fight a demon. But something in her blood

  was more powerful than any drug I’d ever tasted. There was an old power

  there, maybe a direct line to the Creator, maybe a crazy old-school sex

  magic. I wasn’t sure which, or if it was both and something else besides, but

  it gave me a rush like the purest coke I’d ever tried and hooked me faster

  than a West Virginia high-school kid gets addicted to meth.

  Yeah, in the early years I tried every drug I could get my dead hands on.

  Coke is awesome for vampires—it makes us even faster than we already are,

  and we can go days without feeding. But the crash is god-awful, and that

  stuff’s expensive. Most addictive substances don’t have an effect on us, but

  Lilith’s blood was different. I could hear it beating in her veins, and I wanted

  it, but I knew I couldn’t ever drink from her again. If I did, I’d be lost. Sabrina cleared her throat and I snapped back to reality. She was

  watching me with concern.

  I waved her off, then wiped the sweat off my forehead. “No thanks, Lil.

  I’ll pass on turning into your blood-junkie tonight. We just need

  information, and figured since you were now providing lap dances to most

  of the supernatural underworld, this would be a good place to start. Loathe

  what you’ve done with the place, by the way. Really ruined a crappy thing

  Phil had going.”

  Lilith’s eyes narrowed, and a line appeared between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, the only wrinkle on an otherwise flawless face. “That bastard suckered me into five centuries of servitude and then went off to play harps or some other nonsense. And he left me with a money pit of a bar that was hemorrhaging cash. Do you have any idea how hard it is to lose money in a strip club? It’s almost impossible, but that self-righteous prick

  was doing it.”

  “I think nowadays he’s a righteous prick, Lil. What with the whole

  un-fallen angel thing and all.” I took a long sip of my beer. Her hypnotic

  effect on me was lessened by her shrieking like a harpy.

  “Screw you, Black. I had to expand our clientele to keep the doors

  open. And keeping his business operations thriving was part of the bet.” “What did you bet, anyway? What do immortals wager on? The Cubs?

  Because even taking the ultimate long view, the Cubbies suck,” I said. “Nothing so petty. We wagered on body counts. I took Hussein, he

  took Pol Pot, and no matter how many sons I tried to add in to the bet, the

  little Cambodian still outshone my Iraqis by a good twenty percent. So now

  I’m Phil’s bitch for the next half eon. Then he runs off back to Daddy and

  sticks me here.” She knocked back the last of her wine and refilled the glass

  as Sabrina and I watched her.

  Lilith sipped her wine and turned to Sabrina. “So, what was it you

  wanted?”

  I could see Sabrina push aside the concept of wagering on thousands of

  deaths and try to focus on the task at hand. Finally she killed her scotch, set

  the glass on Lilith’s desk and started. “There’s been a series of beatings in the

  city. I believe something supernatural is behind the attacks. I want to know

  what you know about them.”

  “Well, that’s direct enough. Who has been attacked?”

  “Six young gay men. They were beaten and left for dead in various

  places around downtown. What’s so funny?”

  Lilith was laughing quietly, then she gestured behind her at the bank of

  video monitors. “Should I turn the floor show back on? I think that out of

  all the places in Charlotte with loud music and alcohol, this is low on the list

  of must-see venues for the city’s gay population. Really, Detective, this is a

  strip club. Men, straight men, come here to watch beautiful women take

  their clothes off. It’s the last place gay men would be caught dead. Perhaps

  you should try Scorpio. I understand that’s more the core clientele there. Or

  Chasers, if you could drag your open-minded boyfriend in there.” She

  gestured at me, and I sat up a little straighter.

  “I’m open-minded,” I protested.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Sabrina said in exactly the same tone of voice. “Really?” Lilith purred at us. “Are you open-minded enough to go to a

  gay strip club?”

  “If I have to for a case, yeah. It’s not high on my list of Friday night hot spots, but I’ll do what I have to do to catch a bad guy,” I said, finishing my

  beer.

  “Well, that’s where I would start.”

  “I wish you’d start by answering the question,” Sabrina said. “Whatever do you mean, Detective?” Lilith actually managed a

  surprised and innocent look. I guess with a billion years to practice, she took

  an acting class once or twice.

  “I didn’t ask if gay men came to your bar. I asked if you knew anything

  about monsters beating up people in my city. So let’s try this again–what do

  you know about these attacks?”

  “Would yo
u believe me if I said I knew nothing?”

  “Probably not.” Sabrina said.

  “I know nothing, Detective.” Lilith leaned back and crossed one leg

  over another in a slow, sultry motion designed to get every male eye in the

  room focused on her. It worked.

  “Why don’t I believe you?” Sabrina asked.

  “Native distrust of those more attractive than yourself?” Lilith purred. “The day I’m worried about competition from someone who watched

  the signing of the Magna Carta, I’ll let you know.” Lilith actually flinched,

  just for a second, then her calm smile returned.

  “Very good, Detective. You may be worth my attention after all.” “And you already have mine.” Sabrina gave her a little smile of her own.

  I just leaned back in my chair, trying to stay out of the line of fire. Lilith put her glass down and leaned forward, her elbows on her desk.

  “I assure you, Detective, I know nothing about the attacks you’re

  investigating. You have my word.”

  Sabrina abruptly stood up, and I followed suit, looking from her to

  Lilith and back again. “Thanks, Lilith. I appreciate the help.”

  “You owe me one, Detective.”

  “I’m not going to bring you up to my friends in Vice for all the things I

  saw in the Champagne Room that are technically illegal in North Carolina. I

  think that makes us even.”

  “You know how it is. It’s so hard to get good help nowadays. Pan will

  show you out.” She pressed a button under the edge of her desk and turned

  back to the monitors. She grabbed a remote that would send Greg into

  paroxysms of geek-joy and ignored us completely.

  I took the opportunity to raid her bar for another Miller Lite, then