The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

by John G. Hartness

  “Dude, is there like some invisible monster in there?” he asked from the hall.

  “No.”

  “Then would you like to explain what’s going on?”

  “No. Read it yourself.” I pointed to the computer.

  He came in, giving me a wide berth as I stood holding the two halves of the door, shoulders heaving with the effort of not going completely nuts. He read the letter, chuckled a little, and closed the lid on the laptop. “What a douche,” he said. “Now we’re totally going to kill all these assholes, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay, then. Third floor’s clear. I got a new laptop out of this deal, so let’s go into the basement and kill a whole lot of bad guys.” He led the way out of the room, then looked back at where I still stood trying to get my temper under control.

  “Hey!” Greg yelled.

  My head snapped up, and I glared at him.

  “Hulk smash down here.” He pointed down the stairs, and I followed him to the basement and my chance to hurt a lot of vampires who were trying to eat my girlfriend.

  Chapter 19

  Except there weren’t a lot of vampires in the basement. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of anything in the basement, except for the ubiquitous red plastic cups found at every college party in the world. The basement had long since been turned from any lair-type use into a rec room, complete with a pool table, a foosball table, three plasma TVs on the walls, an old Pac-Man game in one corner and a full bar along one wall. A huge open space, it was littered with couches, chairs and futons, all covered in magazines and empty blood bags. I did spot a couple of Rolling Stone and High Times magazines amidst the porn, but those pinnacles of literacy were few. The only concession to lairdom was a thick metal door with bolts driven through the frame into the concrete foundation of the house. Once that door was locked from the inside, nobody would get in without a wrecking ball.

  Greg glanced around the room and immediately started tapping on walls, looking for hollow areas behind them. I tried the more direct approach. I walked over behind the bar and started flipping light switches on the wall. One turned on a blender, resulting in a spray of some truly nasty concoction that for all the world smelled like an O-negative margarita. Another, mundanely enough, turned off the lights, causing Greg to trip over an ottoman and swear at me. I enjoyed that so much I did it a couple more times just for fun.

  The third switch was the charm. As soon as I flipped it, servos in the door swung it shut and automatically locked the bolts. All the lights in the room went red, making it very difficult for humans to see, but no problem for those of us with undead eyes. The Pac-Man game dropped into the floor on an invisible lift, and a tunnel was revealed behind it.

  “I think we should go that way,” I said, leaning carefully on the bar to avoid getting my elbows in the grossness there.

  “Show-off,” Greg muttered, unclipping a flashlight from his utility belt.

  “You’re the one with a utility belt, but I’m the show-off?” I followed him into the tunnel.

  “If the fangs fit, pal.”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense. Sorry, I’m worried, and I’m being a dick.”

  “I’m used to it. You’re always kind of a dick. But I forgive you,” Greg said.

  I crossed into the tunnel, then froze as the wall slid shut behind me. I looked around for a few seconds, but couldn’t find a switch to open the door again.

  Greg and I exchanged a look.

  I shrugged. “Onward and downward?”

  My partner, decidedly more grumpy with our escape route cut off, nodded tersely and started down the tunnel.

  “Wait!” I hissed.

  Greg stopped cold. “What?”

  “What if there are booby traps?” I was suddenly very interested in the walls and floor of the tunnel.

  “What makes you think there are booby traps?”

  “These guys have lived up to every stereotype we’ve been able to think of so far, right?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Okay, think about it. Can you imagine having a secret lair with tunnels underneath it?”

  The look on his face told me I’d just tapped into the pleasure centers of his brain.

  “Okay, now imagine you have a lair with tunnels. Got that image?” From his little smile, his tunnels were full of Playboy Bunnies. “Now, can you imagine any scenario in which you would not booby-trap those tunnels?”

  His smile dropped like Enron stock.

  “We gotta be careful. There’s no way these tunnels aren’t booby-trapped,” he said, just as if it had been his idea. He moved forward, slower this time, playing his flashlight along the walls and floor.

  I shook my head and followed. I wasn’t a huge fan of small spaces, which was why I’d never been much for the coffin stereotype. Give me a California King bed and a vaulted ceiling any day. Skulking along an old tunnel with a ceiling just barely high enough for me to stand upright was nowhere on my list of fun things to do.

  The tunnel was dry, at least, and there weren’t any apparent spiders. I wasn’t afraid of them. I just didn’t like them. What did anything need that many legs for, anyway?

  It was dark, but Greg had a couple of those snap-and-shake glow sticks in his utility belt. He handed me one, so we each had some light. The floor was packed red clay and looked old, like it had been there a lot longer than the house. I ran my fingers along the rough brickwork and tried to figure out what the place had been before the stoners had made it into their lair.

  As if he’d read my mind, Greg whispered, “Underground Railroad.”

  It made perfect sense to me. There were abandoned cellars and passageways all through the South left over from the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, as my redneck Uncle Morris called it. Morris was one of those guys who still used racial epithets in casual conversation and had a confederate flag flying in front of his trailer. He wasn’t my favorite uncle by any stretch, but as the saying went, you could pick your nose, but you couldn’t pick your family. I was wondering what had ever happened to Uncle Morris when Greg froze in front of me, one hand up, fist closed in a “stop” gesture.

  “You realize you were never in the army, right?” I whispered.

  “I watched a lot of Stargate: SG-1. Now shut up and be still. There’s a trap here.”

  I looked down and didn’t see anything. I was about to say so when I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. A thin monofilament line had been stretched across the passageway, going from a hook in one wall to an eyelet mounted opposite. I couldn’t see where the line went after it passed through the eyebolt, but I was betting it wasn’t attached to anything pleasant.

  “You going to disarm that?” I asked.

  “This isn’t Dungeons & Dragons, dude. Just because I’m wearing black doesn’t mean I have the Find & Remove Traps skill.”

  “Besides, you haven’t passed a Dexterity check in this millennium.” I chuckled softly when he flipped me off. “What’s the plan?”

  “I thought we’d try to not break the trip wire. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good to me. After you.” I gestured grandly down the hall, and he took one exaggerated step over the trip wire.

  I saw the disturbed soil on the other side of the wire just a hair too late to keep him from stepping on it, then I heard a solid click from the ceiling. I felt a whoosh of air and reached forward to shove Greg to the ground. He sprawled facedown on the dirt, breaking the trip wire with his back foot. Nothing happened there, of course. He’d already triggered the trap when he stepped on the pressure plate on the other side of the dummy trip wire.

  I whirled to the left with blinding speed, but I still wasn’t fast enough to save Greg and get out of the way. Being a good friend and hero to the downtrodden, I chose to shove him to the dirt and hope that I survived the booby trap. Then the pole swung out of the ceiling and caught me square in the gut with a foot-long wooden stake.

  Chapte
r 20

  I stood for a long moment staring straight ahead at where my partner lay in the dirt. The stake had passed over his head by a hair and embedded itself about three inches below my solar plexus. I didn’t feel anything at first except the impact, but then the pain of the wound started in, and it took all the restraint in the world not to scream bloody murder. A ball of fire exploded in my stomach, and I sagged on the rod that held the stake.

  “Greg,” I croaked.

  “Yeah, what was that all about?” He rolled over angrily, but his eyes went very big when he saw the stake sticking all the way through my skinny frame.

  “Would you be a pal and pull this thing out of my stomach?”

  He nodded and reached up. The stake hung up on a rib, and he had to stand up to get enough leverage. Eventually, he put one foot on my chest and pulled, exertion making his face scrunch up and his forehead bead with pinkish sweat. With the grinding sound of wood on bone, which I felt as much as heard, he slowly pulled the stake from my midsection. After what felt like a year, but was probably only a couple of seconds, he got the booby trap out of me, and I collapsed to the tunnel floor.

  I lay in the dirt for a few minutes trying to recover as Greg examined the trap. “It’s really ingenious, you know,” he said, as he swung the pendulum that mere moments before had been embedded in my guts. “The fake trap concealing the real trap. That’s some serious Indiana Jones stuff there. And to use a stake on a stick? Genius, I tell you.”

  I wasn’t in a mood to really appreciate the brilliance of the trap that had impaled me, but as I stood, I put a hand on Greg’s shoulder, and said, “You’re welcome.”

  “What are you talking about? I saw it coming. I dove out of the way just in time. And besides, the stake got you just under the rib cage. It didn’t cause any major damage.”

  When I was finally able to stand up straight, he noticed that the hole in my shirt was level with his heart. Greg sometimes forgot that he was better than half a foot shorter than I was. He looked from my stomach to his chest, gulped deeply, and said, “Thanks,” in a very small voice.

  We continued down the tunnel, disarming a couple of other traps along the way. They were minor inconveniences, nothing really suited to taking out a vampire—a few poison darts, a couple of spears poking up out of the floor—standard adventure-movie gimmicks. After about half an hour of wandering around underground, the tunnel started to widen and light began to stream in from ahead. The tunnel ended at a high-tech-looking door set into the antique stone walls. A completely anachronistic digital keypad was set into the wall to the right of the door, and what looked like a retinal scanner was right above it.

  I tapped for a few minutes, trying out various combinations of UNC-Charlotte important dates on the keypad. Basically, that meant typing every variation of forty-nine I could come up with, since all I really knew about the college was their prospecting mascot, the 49er. I didn’t even know if it had anything to do with gold or with the fact that NC Highway 49 ran right past campus. Given the originality of my home state, I’d put my money on the latter. After watching me for a little while, Greg pulled out his cell phone and a funny cable, pushed me aside, and started his geek-fu on the keypad. He got at least as far as I did, but, five minutes later, we were still on the wrong side of the door.

  “Scoot back.” Greg’s frustration made him growl a little. I thought I even saw a hint of fang.

  “For what?” I asked, moving back into the tunnel a couple of feet.

  “For Plan B.” He grabbed the doorframe in both hands and pulled.

  Greg was really strong, like drop-a-bus-on-your-head strong, but even so, it was all he could manage to pull that door out of the frame. After healing my stake wound, it was all I could manage to stand upright, so I just stood back and watched as the veins popped out in his neck and he turned a couple of really odd shades of red. He got a little movement in the frame, let go, bent his knees to get a lower grip, and wrenched the door out of the wall and over one shoulder. The door turned out to be about eight inches thick and solid metal. It was the wall around it that finally gave way, not the door, and two-hundred-year-old bricks fell in all around us as the tunnel shook from Greg’s efforts. He dropped the door off to one side, and I was almost bounced off my feet from the concussion.

  “Color me impressed,” I said, peering past him into the room beyond the doorway.

  “Color me herniated,” he gasped, both hands on his knees. “If you see something round on the floor, it’s my O-ring. I want that back.”

  “You’re disgusting. Give me your flashlight.” The doorway led into a chilly room dimly lit by wall sconces, but the dust from the door’s destruction made it hard to see. After a few minutes, I stepped into the room to get a better look. The room was big, with high ceilings. Shelves lined every wall and made aisles all through the room. Every shelf was full of bottles, and when I pulled one from a rack, I realized where we were.

  “Greg?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “We’re in a wine cellar.” Then I took a better look at the bottle in my hand. Instead of a vineyard logo and a year, the label had a name and a photograph of a college-aged girl taped to it. Apparently, I held a bottle of Stephanie, 1963. I took out the cork and sniffed. Sure enough, we were in what had to be Professor Wideham’s blood cellar. The blood smelled pretty good, especially for a vintage from the Kennedy era, so I tipped the bottle and took a swig.

  It was blood, but it was blood cut with red wine to make it last. Apparently, Wideham had figured out how to mix fermented grape spirits with fresh human spirits to make a pretty tasty treat. It wasn’t something I thought would catch on at the local supermarket, but it had a nice bouquet. I drank about half the bottle, then passed it to Greg.

  “Top off the tank,” I said. He took the bottle and sipped cautiously. “What?” I asked. “I drank it and thought it was fine.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, “but you drink Miller Lite by choice.” He finally turned up the bottle and drained it dry, licking his lips afterward.

  “Not bad, huh?” I asked.

  “Not bad at all. Maybe we’ll ask this Professor Wideham, or whatever his name is, how he makes it.”

  “Before we cut off his head?”

  “I think we’ve got a better shot at an answer if we do it before.”

  “Good point. So let’s find him, get his secret recipe and cut off his head.” I started moving through the stacks of bottled blood wine toward a staircase. Greg followed close behind, and we took the stairs up, pausing at the door atop the staircase.

  “What if he’s not up there?” Greg whispered.

  “Then I eat whoever is up there and make them tell me where to find Wideham.”

  “Not necessarily in that order,” Greg corrected.

  “Good point. I get the info, then I eat them. Plan?”

  He looked like he wanted to pick apart the finer points of my plan, like the eating people part, but finally just sighed and said, “Plan.”

  With his approval, I turned the knob and stepped out into a very busy restaurant kitchen, surprising two dishwashers and three cooks and making one poor waitress faint dead away.

  Greg and I stood stock-still for just a moment, then he pushed past me, pulling his long coat closed over his utility belt and holding his wallet in the air and shouting the one word guaranteed to empty most restaurant kitchens: “Inmigración! Inmigración!” He walked through the kitchen masquerading as an ICE agent, and the employees scurried like vampires at a tanning bed convention. In about thirteen seconds, we were alone with the unconscious waitress and one very angry head chef.

  The chef picked up a big knife and looked like he was about to part Greg’s hair with it. I tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled around, looked into my eyes and froze as I mojo’d him into pliability. “Sleep,” I said, and he collapsed like a balding sack of potatoes.

  “I think we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, doc,” Greg said in his best Bugs Bu
nny voice.

  “Yeah, me too. And we need to get out of here before whoever owns this restaurant shows up. Because if they knew about that little wine cellar, they’re tied to Wideham. And they might be more than we can handle on our own. This isn’t a new setup, and it hasn’t happened without some people with some juice knowing about it.”

  “Yeah, and the last time we tangled with anybody packing that kinda juice, I got thrown off a building.”

  I turned to look for an exit. “Then it’s fortunate for both of you that this restaurant is on the ground floor,” the Master of the City said from right behind me.

  Chapter 21

  “Really?” I said to the air. “This is really happening?”

  “What is really happening, Mr. Black?” Tiram asked, obviously not

  happy to see me in his kitchen.

  The Master Vampire was impeccably turned out again in a suit that cost

  more than my car, complete with Italian leather shoes and a pocket square. I

  didn’t even know they still made suits with pocket squares. Of course, he

  might have had that suit for a generation or two.

  “What is happening is that in fifteen years of living here and being what

  I am, I had no idea you existed. Now I’ve run into you twice in thirty-six

  hours, and I’m not happy about it.”

  Greg slunk around behind me, putting as much distance between

  himself and Tiram as possible. I didn’t blame him. It might not have been

  Tiram who tossed him off a roof, but he certainly had the power to do us

  serious harm, and I wasn’t convinced that Greg had completely healed. “Somehow, I believe that I may even be less thrilled with our recent

  level of contact than you are, Mr. Black. Now, why are you here? What were

  you doing in my wine cellar?” He motioned to the door behind me. “We were looking for a vampire calling himself Professor Wideham.